The Last Jews in Berlin Read online

  Then Marushka became pregnant, and everything changed. Luzie Hirschel was overjoyed at the prospect of the family line continuing, and she relinquished her assumption that Hans would go with her if she was deported. Hans insisted that he should be the dutiful son and accompany his mother, but now Luzie wouldn’t hear of it. “A man belongs to a wife and child,” she told him.

  The two women became very close. Because Hans could not visit his mother lest her neighbors see him, Marushka volunteered to go each day in his stead to make certain Luzie was all right. One day in the spring of 1942 she entered Luzie’s apartment to find Luzie pale and shaken: a Gestapo agent had reported her for covering her yellow star with her fur boa.

  The deportation notice came a few days later. As risky as it was for Hans to appear at his mother’s flat, he was determined to say goodbye, and when he arrived at 9:00 o’clock the evening of her departure, Marushka opened the door. He walked past her to his mother, whom he had not seen in six weeks. They put their arms around each other. Neither spoke. When they separated he saw that she had dressed in black, in one of her most expensive frocks. As they began to talk he noticed a small suitcase by the door with a coat next to it. Earlier that day Marushka and two of her nieces had sewn inside the lining of the coat several pieces of jewelry which Luzie hoped she would be able to use to secure favored treatment for herself.

  They talked for half an hour, mostly about her wish that Hans would survive, only briefly about her own deportation to Theresienstadt. Hanging over them all was a horrible, palpable truth—that in 1938, only four years before, Luzie might have emigrated to England, where others in her family had already settled. She had elected to remain rather than leave Hans, who had failed to secure the work permit that would have enabled him to accompany her.

  It was past 9:30; Hans could not risk a further wait. They rose to say goodbye. Frau Hirschel’s eyes were dry. “My life started so wonderfully,” she said. “The end was pretty bitter.”

  Her use of the past tense undid Hans; he fought back tears. Without another word he kissed his mother and was gone.

  Luzie listened to his footsteps, and when she could no longer hear them, she returned to Marushka. “How will it end?” she asked softly.

  The women embraced. A few moments later Marushka left.

  The next day Marushka returned to the apartment with only the faintest hope that Luzie might still be there. But a neighbor confirmed her departure, which, she said, had been so dignified that even the Gestapo had treated her with respect.

  Then the neighbor, a German officer’s wife, said, “Look, I’d never give you away. Hans is with you, isn’t he? Is he all right?”

  “Hans is dead,” Marushka said.

  In the following weeks Marushka could almost feel the accumulation of Hans’s sorrow. She both prayed for and feared the inevitable explosion of his emotion. Late one evening, as she was returning from a working day that had begun at five that morning, she heard the sound of boisterous singing, and realized with horror that the noise was coming from her flat. She rushed inside to find Hans and another illegal Jew, an actor friend named Willy Buschoff, singing as loudly as they could, “Sh’ma Yisroel adonoy elohenu, adonoy echod.”

  Days later, when they were calmer, he would translate the words of this most famous Hebrew prayer: “Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One.”

  3

  RUTH THOMAS was an extremely pretty, trim woman in her late twenties who mingled easily in the most acceptable circles, which in Nazi Germany meant that she did not have “Jewish looks.” She wore stylish suits with narrow skirts—her own design—which, measured against the stolid, drab, almost institutional products of Germany’s clothing manufacturers, seemed like French haute couture. If her own creativity enhanced her appearance, it also bespoke a fresh disposition that made hers an especially attractive presence. Ruth was a person other people liked because she always seemed able to lift their spirits. The tiny lines next to her brown eyes, engraved by a permanent smile, promised the sort of merriment that would never be associated with a hunted woman. She had an enormous capacity for gaiety and an infectious laugh.

  The further the Nazi persecutions distanced Ruth from the vibrant and comfortable life for which she had seemed destined by virtue of background and talent, the more determined she became not to be dismayed. What most strengthened her psychological armor in this period of peril was her capacity to see the world not as it was but as she wished it to be. The war had frustrated her attempts at emigration and imprisoned her in Germany, so the only way she could deal with the unacceptable reality that confronted her was to pretend it didn’t exist. “If I can’t agree with something,” she often said, “I act as if it isn’t there.” She avoided newspapers and news broadcasts and even conversations with friends to make certain that she didn’t know what was happening. If her approach to life was clearly impractical, it nevertheless reinforced her unquenchable will to survive and her conviction that she would despite the increasing odds against her. “I not only hope that Hitler will lose the war,” she repeated over and over, “I am sure he will. We are an old family. We’ve been here one hundred and fifty years. Hitler is a parvenu. I shall survive him.”

  The talk was meant to buoy her own spirits, but it was supported by her temperament and the fiercely independent streak she had inherited from her mother. Anna Rosenthal was that rarity in pre-World War II Germany, an emancipated woman, well schooled and with a hard mind. She was considered by her brothers and sisters to be the strongest member of the family, for she had determined at an early age, after the death of her mother, that she preferred to make her own way financially. When she married, in her early thirties—her spouse was a distant cousin whose name was also Rosenthal—Anna was already an established businesswoman, a buyer and seller of textiles. Her husband’s early death during a flu epidemic only confirmed the wisdom of her course.

  Like her mother, Ruth was strong and self-assured. In 1939, when the Gestapo charged her with hoarding stockings and ordered her to accompany investigators to Gestapo headquarters, she responded, “Why should I? What’s the charge? You’ve found no stockings.”

  “You’re Jewish. How come you’re so insolent?” one of the Gestapo men demanded.

  “There’s no charge,” Ruth insisted. “You have to have a charge. You’ve searched the house and found nothing.”

  At last Ruth was taken to the Gestapo headquarters on the Burgstrasse, but there she remained just as adamant in her indignation at being accused without evidence. As she was being released, a man named Draeger, who had a reputation among Jews for being helpful and who had observed her with guarded sympathy, said softly to her, “If everyone had been as courageous as you, a lot of things would not have worked for the Gestapo.”

  Three years had passed since that incident; relatives and friends had been deported, but Ruth, her husband, Kurt Thomas, and her mother, Anna, had all survived thanks to Ruth’s talent. Her designer clothes and patterns were not only well regarded in the garment industry but earned for the Third Reich badly needed foreign currency from sales abroad. The German companies that bought her designs had received special permits to employ her, and Anna and Kurt, listed as her assistants, had been sheltered under the umbrella of her work permit.

  On November 9, 1942, Ruth awakened with the first symptoms of flu and decided not to go to work. She lay in bed in the Wilmersdorf apartment building she shared with numbers of other Jews, feeling so dreadful that when she heard a knock on the door late in the afternoon, she could not bring herself to respond. When she finally rose an hour later, she found a note that had been pushed under the door. It was from the Gestapo, ordering Ruth and Anna to report the next day to the same Burgstrasse headquarters where Ruth had once defended herself.

  Why? The only possibility was that someone had inadvertently brought them to the Gestapo’s attention. Who? The only person who had their address as well as the capacity to incriminate them was a woman who de
livered black market food. Whatever the reason, Ruth knew that the time for defiance had passed. Too much had happened by this time for her to deny reality. A number of the Jews with whom they shared this apartment had already been deported. Others, unable to bear the overcrowded conditions they’d been forced to endure since the Nazis had crammed them into Jewish houses, had committed suicide. Even Ruth had been shaken by her eviction from her own apartment and the almost public life in this Jewish house, without a radio or even a telephone. Theoretically she was still safe because of her special work permit, and her mother and Kurt were protected too. But she knew the Nazis could revoke her permit at any time; in that event they would soon be on the trains, bound for the camps. God knew what awaited them in the camps. At a minimum, heavy physical work, a punishment in itself.

  That evening, when Anna and Kurt returned to the apartment, Ruth announced her decision: It was time to go underground.

  “You don’t think it would be better if you went to the Gestapo?” Kurt said.

  Ruth shook her head emphatically. Now that she had acknowledged reality, she was prepared to deal with it. “Once we go, we’ll never return.”

  That night they tore the Jewish stars from their clothes. Carrying money and parcels of valuables they had hidden against just such an eventuality, they set out for separate hiding places: Anna to a brother, Max Rosenthal, who, married to a Christian woman, qualified as a “privileged” Jew; Kurt to the apartment of Lea Thomas, his former wife, also a Christian; and Ruth to the apartment of a Christian woman named Lisa Krauss, who worked as a secretary for a firm that operated a chain of popular pastry shops. Until the persecutions the firm had been owned by friends of Ruth’s family, three brothers named Dubrin. They had told Ruth that Lisa could be trusted and had themselves entrusted many of their valuables to her before their deportation.

  But Ruth and Lisa got on each other’s nerves. Lisa well knew that the penalty for hiding a Jew could mean concentration camp for herself. As for Ruth, the sight of all those valuable possessions of her Jewish friends being used to advantage by this woman deeply offended her. Before she’d been with Lisa a week she decided to leave.

  Kurt Thomas had suggested another possible source of help, a friend named Barsch, who was pro-Communist and against the regime. When Ruth arrived at the Barsches’ Charlottenburg apartment she discovered an unimaginable complication. Although the Barsches were sympathetic and more than willing to hide her, their daughter, Hilde Hohn, was married to an S.S. man. Hohn was serving as the administrative officer of a work camp in Poland, but Hilde, who was spending the weekend at her in-laws’ farm near the Elbe River, some fifty miles west of Berlin, would return on Monday, and the Barsches stressed that Ruth would have to be gone by then. Hilde knew her parents helped Jews, and she despaired about it because of the awkward position it put her in.

  The following Monday Ruth closed the door of the Barsches’ apartment behind her and for the first time felt overwhelmed by the realization that she was homeless. Her psychological armor, which had protected her for so long, was now riven by reality.

  As she walked slowly from the building a taxicab stopped at the entrance. Out stepped a young woman, a few years older than Ruth, but so strikingly similar in looks that she might have passed for her sister. Her features were somewhat more pronounced, but her coloring was the same, and she was also small and trim. She paid the driver, gathered up her packages, turned and saw Ruth.

  Many times thereafter Ruth would wonder what had gone through Hilde’s mind in that first moment of recognition. Was she, with her frank and admiring appraisal, offering that acknowledgment one attractive woman gives to another? Did she intuitively recognize in Ruth aspects of herself? Whatever Hilde was thinking, Ruth felt herself swept up by her own wave of intuition. This woman, she knew, was her only hope for the moment; she would gamble everything with one question. “Are you Frau Doctor Hohn?” she asked.

  Hilde smiled slightly before she spoke. “You must be one of father’s people,” she said then. Seconds passed. Hilde sighed. “Come along,” she said at last. “Help me carry these packages.”

  4

  WILHELM GLASER shrugged his shoulders at life in the manner of a sleepy-eyed Chaplin. “I’m not outstandingly intelligent,” he would propose. Others would say he was much too modest, but Glaser, an average-size man, believed that he had been born to mediocrity. His saving grace was that he didn’t mind. He savored what he was able to do with the talents he could employ. If he had one technique with which to enrich his life it was that he could gain a sense of importance through proximity to importance.

  Wilhelm Glaser was an avid and discerning spectator of the performing arts, and in Berlin in the 1920s there were hundreds of plays and concerts to choose from, ranging from the classics to the extreme avant-garde. After the performances there were cafes where lovers of the arts could congregate to review what they had seen and heard.

  Willy Glaser’s knowledge of theater was encyclopedic, but it was opera, especially, that transported him. One of his greatest treasures was a collection of photographs autographed by the great singers of his day. After one opera—he was twelve at the time—he cried.

  “Why are you crying?” an usher asked him.

  “Because it’s over,” Willy replied.

  It was his parents who had taught him a love of the arts. A good report card won him a ticket to an opera or a concert. And yet, in spite of such incentives, he did not do well in school. His lack of ambition was surely a factor in his scholastic failure, and that lack was the result of Glaser’s harsh appraisal of reality. “We were a generation that couldn’t become outstanding,” he would explain years later. “There was the First World War, then the inflation—which meant that you had to learn something fast in order to survive—then Hitler. It was a time when only people with outstanding brains could accomplish something, and I couldn’t include myself in that group.”

  He never had far-reaching plans. Had he possessed the talent, he would have preferred a career in music. Had the world been a different place, he would have liked to open a travel agency, not for the money but for the opportunity to travel. There was one period of intense excitement for him, in the years after World War I, when Marxists were preaching revolution and change was in the air. “We worked six days a week,” he would recall, “even Saturdays, from eight to six. All of a sudden people were proposing that we work an eight-hour day, a five-day week. The boss had been second to God. All of a sudden people were proposing that we make committees and decide our own fate.”

  It was a time of intense advocacy and democracy under the protection of the Weimar Republic, established after World War I, but it was a time enjoyed only by those with a taste for change and not by the great mass of Germans. They perceived the Republic as the bastard child of the victorious allies. They recoiled from the artistic and moral experiments that seemed to be carried on in accord with an adventuresome political spirit that ruled the day. They yearned for the authoritarianism that had characterized German life for as long as they could remember, and they looked upon those who had taken command of the government and the culture as an alien minority. That some of the ruling politicians and proponents of the fervid bohemian culture were Jews only served to persuade the majority of Germans of the correctness of biases against Jews that were as much a part of the Teutonic legacy as the music of Richard Wagner—himself a fanatical anti-Semite.

  Nor did economic conditions ultimately help the cause of democracy under the Weimar Republic. In the early twenties ruinous inflation had destroyed the German mark and, with it, all forms of savings. The late twenties witnessed something of a recovery; Germany actually increased production in key sectors over prewar figures, and by 1930 was in the top rank of exporting countries. Increasing employment and gains by labor, many forced on industrialists by the government, had muted the cries of the Marxists, but the shocks felt in Germany from the Wall Street crash of 1929 gave a certain credence to their argume
nts that Germany was controlled by cartels and vulnerable to their problems. As the twenties ended, Germany slid into a depression so bad that one-third of the nation was dependent, either partly or wholly, on some form of public support.

  By the time of elections in September 1930, government, industry, agriculture and labor were all at loggerheads, and German voters responded to this disorder by increasing the representation of the Nazi party in the Reichstag from 12 deputies to 107. In the process the government lost its majority—and its power to regulate industry. Production and wages plummeted and unemployment surged. The worse economic conditions became, the greater the Nazis’ gains. By the end of 1932 the Weimar Republic and its democratic principles had lost all prospects, and by 1933, when Hitler came to power, Willy Glaser had lost all faith in the egalitarian dreams that had sustained him through the twenties.

  His friends told Willy not to worry: bad management would quickly ruin Hitler; he would last a few months at most. Willy didn’t believe them, but not wanting to draw attention to himself, he didn’t argue. Later he got no satisfaction from the knowledge that he had been right. Under the Nazis the country experienced a dramatic economic resurgence, much of it a consequence of rearmament, paid for by taxes and “voluntary” contributions. The rearmament was in violation of the Treaty of Versailles that ended World War I but that did not bother the average German a bit. Unemployment shrank—from six million in 1933 to one million in 1938. Workers’ conditions improved dramatically, almost entirely as a consequence of the paternalism of the state; for a pittance they could now take vacations at lakes and spas and winter resorts. None of this helped Willy, of course. Every rise in the fortunes of “good Germans” seemed to be accompanied by added misfortunes for Jews. Jewish professors lost their positions, Jewish lawyers and doctors their practices. Jewish pupils were expelled from schools and universities. Jews were forbidden to commingle with “Aryans.” Jews were commanded to sell their businesses at a fraction of their value, to register their valuables and later to give them up. They were required to change their first names—the men to Israel, the women to Sarah. Their passports were stamped with a large red J.