The Last Jews in Berlin Read online

  When Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, Willy Glaser greeted the news with foreboding but also with relief. “This will take a bloody end,” he told himself, “because Hitler is insane. He is saying that the Jews started the war, and he is insane enough to believe it.”

  Any hope that the German people, in whom he had once believed, would recoil from Germany’s involvement in a new world war was quickly removed from Willy’s mind. True, he saw no excitement or commitment to the war as he walked the streets of Berlin; if anything, he could have interpreted the look on Berliners’ faces as a reluctance to be involved bordering on apprehension. But the only sign of the war, other than the many uniforms on the streets, was the constant news of its excellent progress. Berlin itself remained untouched. Its residents had no feeling for the war and felt no deprivation; to the contrary, their relative prosperity seemed supported by a sense of national purpose.

  Willy could only reflect with bitterness on the increased wellbeing and sense of contentment that filled men with whom he’d once worked. He would have preferred to have remained a worker and not become an entrepreneur; only with the greatest reluctance had he started a small textile business in the mid-1980s, after the firm that had employed him was squeezed dry by the Nazis and he couldn’t find other work. In 1941 even that small enterprise had to be abandoned when, at the age of forty-one, he was impressed into forced labor as a factory worker.

  As Willy’s conditions became worse and worse, a mood of increasing fatalism permeated his life. Replaying the past only deepened his conviction that his life had been charted onto some tragic course. His two brothers had emigrated in the mid-1930s, one to Israel, the other to Shanghai and then to the United States. He hadn’t even tried to emigrate, because he doubted that he could interest any country in his case. What country would care to receive a middle-aged Jew with neither money nor talent? Moreover, one of the sons had to remain behind to look after their mother, who, now in her seventies, had decided to remain in Germany. He knew in his heart that he also wanted to stay, and so he had assigned himself the responsibility.

  And then one morning in December 1942 Willy went to his mother’s home and found her door was sealed. Whenever the Nazis emptied a house of its inhabitants prior to sending them to the east, they sealed the doors so that the furniture and other possessions could be confiscated in the name of the state and then sold at auction.

  Willy’s mother had been taken to a building on the Grosse Hamburger Strasse that had once been a home for elderly Jews but served now as a collecting station for those Jews about to be deported. Willy went immediately to find her, knowing he was risking his own deportation and believing that deportation meant liquidation in one form or another.

  He saw his mother only briefly, the two of them speaking softly, holding hands but fighting back their tears. Neither wished to make it more difficult for the other. And then she was gone.

  There comes a point when life is so unredeemed that great risks seem of no consequence. It was at this point that Wilhelm Glaser began his own small war against fate. His first act was to remove his star on his way to and from work. From his apartment house in Lichtenberg to his work in Weissensee was a distance of 6.5 kilometers. Jews were allowed to use public transportation only if the distance between home and work was at least 7.5 kilometers. His work hours were 6:00 A.M. to 6:00 P.M.; that meant he had to leave for work at 4:30 A.M., and would not return until 7:30 P.M. The practical effect was that he had no time to shop for food and other necessities. And so Willy removed his star and rode the streetcars, knowing that discovery meant his own deportation. When he got off the streetcar he would duck into a doorway near his place of work—Warnecke and Boehm, a producer of paints, lacquers and oils—and pin the star back on. At the end of the day he would remove the star again for the journey home. Even the discovery of a star that was pinned on rather than sewn on meant deportation, he knew. He had seen S.S. plainclothesmen inspecting the stars of Jews on the Alexanderplatz and arresting those who failed to pass inspection. To Willy that was just one further essential risk.

  Willy’s home at the time was a furnished room in the first-floor apartment of a Jewish house. There was a small spy hole in the door, with a rag pinned behind it in lieu of glass. At night he would poke a pencil through the hole, push away the rag and peer inside. If no coats were hanging on the rack near the door, he would know that the people he had been living with had been picked up, and he would have to disappear.

  On the night of January 31 Willy forgot to put his pencil through the peephole. He unlocked the door, stepped inside, and found himself before two big, hefty men in plain clothes.

  “Is your name Glaser?” the older one said.

  “Yes.”

  “Pack your things and come along.”

  When he had finished packing they took him to an apartment on the fourth floor. The apartment’s occupants were no longer there. Willy surmised that they had already been picked up, but that one of them, like himself, had been late returning from work.

  They waited through the night, but no one came. By 6:00 A.M. the Gestapo men were ready to give up. “Let’s go,” the older man said.

  As they stepped outside the apartment Willy said to himself, “If God is on my side, something has to happen now. Once I’m in the car, I have no chance.”

  The younger man turned to seal the door. Willy shoved the older man and bolted down the stairs. The older man raced after him, but Willy threw his suitcase at his legs. The man fell over the suitcase, bounced down the steps, banged into a wall and lay still. Panic struck Willy as he remembered that the entrance to the building might be locked, as it was from eight each evening until six the following morning. But he pulled at the door and it opened. God is with me, he thought. He raced into the street, a free man for as long as his legs could keep him ahead of his pursuers.

  5

  FEBRUARY 27, 1943, had not been randomly chosen by the Nazis for the Fabrik Aktion, in which all of the Jews still involved in war production in Berlin were to be seized at their jobs and, together with their families, deported to the east. That year February 27 fell on a Saturday, and the Nazis conjectured—correctly—that the workers’ families would be in their homes in greater numbers on Saturday morning than on any other day.

  Past deportations had normally been accomplished with the formality of a ritual. Lists of those to be deported were made up in advance by the Reichsvereinigung, the association of the Jews of the Reich, a government-mandated organization with which all Jews were required to be registered, and which was compelled by the Nazis to administer all anti-Jewish decrees, deportation included. Those to be deported were almost always notified in advance, then ordered to report or be taken by the Gestapo to the former old people’s home on the Grosse Hamburger Strasse or other collecting points. Once the prescribed allotment of Jews had been assembled—one thousand at the outset, less as time went on and the number of Jews in the city diminished—they were taken by trucks to railroad yards, where they were crammed into freight cars for the journey to the east.

  This time there were no lists, no indication of a major action other than a notice to Jewish officials of the Reichsvereinigung on February 26 to organize half a dozen processing offices and as many first-aid stations. That night, troops of Heinrich Himmler’s crack Praetorian Guard, the Leibstandarte of Adolf Hitler, surrounded the factories that employed Jews. Shortly after seven o’clock the next morning S.S. trucks rolled up to the factories. Troops rushed inside and grabbed every Jew they saw. The Jews were then taken to the trucks without being able to change from their working clothes or claim their winter coats. The breakfasts most of them had brought to work were also left behind.

  In the meanwhile other troops had been dispatched to the apartment buildings in which Jewish families were congregated. Old persons and children were yanked from their dwellings without time to dress or pack the one suitcase the Nazis had traditionally let deportees take along, or even in
form their relatives. Many children were taken without their parents. Elderly persons who were not able to climb fast enough were literally thrown onto the trucks. Many of the elderly suffered fractures.

  By mid-morning thousands of Jews had been taken. A score had been brought in dead, having jumped from windows, thrown themselves under the wheels of their captors’ trucks or taken potassium cyanide or overdoses of Veronal hoarded for just this dreaded moment.

  Throughout the day Gestapo agents raced through the city trying to arrest the Jews before reports from the Mundfunk, the Jewish “mouthcast,” or warnings from friends would cause them to flee.

  It would have been difficult that day for any Berliner not to notice the strange, almost frenzied tempo of official traffic through the city’s streets. For a Jewish woman who had trained herself for a decade to pick up menacing signs it would have been next to impossible. Hella Riede had gone to the Kurfürstendamm that morning with a friend, as much to get away from the crowded Kaiserstrasse apartment in which she had been living as to persuade herself that she was part of the busy Saturday morning commercial life bustling all about her. Hiding her yellow star with her purse, she strolled the broad sidewalks of the tree-lined boulevard, window-shopping, then flirting with the idea of going into one of the beauty shops to get her hair done. But for her star, it was the kind of adventure she could easily get away with. She had the first line of defense in any kind of deception—an appearance that made others feel comfortable. Not only was she agreeable to look at, she seemed, with her golden hair and light skin, the prototypical “Aryan” woman. Her second line of defense was at least as formidable. She kept a lock on her emotions and could will her fears into somnolence.

  But as the cars and trucks sped by and the pedestrians turned to watch and then speculate among themselves as to what the commotion was about, Hella made her own shrewd guess and immediately set out on foot for her apartment, several miles to the east, possessed by a single frantic thought: Had Kurt, her husband, already been taken?

  At last she reached the Kaiserstrasse, where, to her immense relief, no Gestapo cars or S.S. trucks were parked. And inside the apartment, to her joy, was Kurt, who had come home to look for her after news of the roundup reached him. He confirmed for Hella that the factory workers had been taken from their jobs. He had been overlooked because he was the only Jew working in a wholesale leather outlet. How long before that oversight would be corrected he could only guess.

  Kurt, a lean man of twenty-nine, was five years older than Hella. What had attracted Hella to him initially was his warmth and openness and his efforts to help others, but ten years of jousting with the Nazis, of having to live constantly on the defensive had slowly turned him inward. Added to that was a severe case of myopia, which made him feel physically vulnerable.

  Once in 1938, during a wave of arrests of Jews, the Gestapo had come looking for Kurt, and he and Hella had had to flee. Now, they both knew, they would have to take flight again. There was only one person who might help them, a greengrocer in their neighborhood who had been unaccountably helpful. He had smiled at Hella one afternoon and said, “How come you always shop so late in the day when the good produce is gone?”

  Hella, who had been covering her star with her purse, blushed. “Because I’m Jewish,” she said.

  “Come in the morning. Hide your star,” he said softly.

  So she would shop early in the morning, covering the star, until one day a clerk who had seen her walking in the neighborhood when she wasn’t covering the star said to her, “You are not allowed to shop at this time.” Everyone turned to stare at Hella. She fled.

  A few days later there was a knock on their apartment door. It was the greengrocer. He had brought some vegetables. “From now on, come when the store closes. I’ll save you some things,” he said. Even after Hella resumed her visits to the store, the greengrocer, whose name was Robert Jerneitzig, continued to bring food to their apartment and often refused to charge for it. He never explained his motives.

  The Riedes didn’t know it at the time, but Robert Jerneitzig’s wife, to whom he was devoted, was half-Jewish. Had she not been, he might still have responded to the Riedes’ plight, but he would never have voiced his feelings. Jerneitzig, a squat and stocky man, displayed a shopkeeper’s disposition: he was friendly but not open. He kept both his thoughts and affairs to himself, expressing himself through his deeds. Nothing of his manner or circumstances indicated that he was well off, yet he had quietly saved enough money to buy a small house in Wittenau, an outlying district of Berlin. It was to this house that his thoughts turned once the Riedes informed him of their dire new predicament.

  Jerneitzig told the Riedes that they could spend the night in his apartment, which was attached to his store. Then he telephoned Joseph Wirkus, the man who had been renting the house in Wittenau since the fall of 1941. Jerneitzig spoke with deliberate calm, telling Wirkus that he wanted to talk to him confidentially about some matters, and that they had to meet that day.

  Wirkus, just past thirty, was a civilian employee of the Oberkommando des Heeres, the Army High Command. He was the chief of correspondence of one of the divisions in a center for the design of instruments of war that would later be produced by the factories. A slim, blond man of medium height, he had been rejected for military service because of a deformed elbow. (He had broken his arm in a childhood game and it had been poorly set, allowing him only partial mobility.) He liked his job—first, because he worked with a group of engineers most of whom weren’t political, and second, because it carried a draft-exempt status. Whenever the military tried to grab him he had the double protection of his injury and his job. He had no taste whatever for the army or the war.

  Because Wirkus was in charge of his section, he could come and go as he pleased. After receiving Jerneitzig’s call he took the S-Bahn to the center of the city, then walked to the grocery on the Kaiserstrasse. Jerneitzig led him to the apartment in the back. He did not waste time. “There’s a young Jewish couple I know. They need a place to stay for a few days while they find a new apartment. They can’t stay in their own place any longer. You understand?”

  “I understand.”

  “Can they stay with you?”

  Wirkus had always liked Jerneitzig because of the greengrocer’s friendly ways. Moreover, they were from the same farming region, and Jerneitzig bought produce from the Wirkus family farm from time to time. But until this moment Wirkus had never trusted Jerneitzig completely. He said he would talk to his wife, but he thought he already knew the answer. They were Catholics, against the Nazis from the beginning because of the party’s stand against the church. Joseph was often so openly critical of the party that had anyone denounced him he would have been arrested. Moreover, both of them took seriously their commitment to helping those in need.

  But not even this charitable predisposition could keep the Wirkuses from being surprised when, returning from Mass in Wittenau the next morning, they saw Jerneitzig walking toward them, accompanied by a young couple. They were sure it was the Jewish couple—but they had not yet consented to help.

  Frau Wirkus was a tender, emotional woman who easily established strong personal relationships. Her reactions to strangers were instantaneous and usually positive. Whatever ambivalence she might have felt toward the Riedes because of the potential danger was dispelled when she saw the mixture of strain and hope in their faces. Her heart went out to Hella, whom she recognized as a woman she had seen shopping in Jerneitzig’s store when the Wirkuses themselves were living in an apartment over the store.

  Jerneitzig had not known how much convincing he would have to do to place the Riedes. As it turned out, the four young people took to one another at once. The women were physical opposites—Frau Wirkus tall, with dark hair, Hella short and blond—but the men, they all quickly recognized, bore an amazing likeness to each other, to the point where they decided immediately to identify Kurt Riede as Joseph Wirkus’ brother, who had come to Wittenau be
cause his home in Hamburg had been bombed out. Once that decision was made, they agreed the stay would be for a week, or two weeks at most. After that the Riedes would either be able to move back to their old flat or they would have found another apartment. There was also a chance for emigration, as Kurt had been trying to arrange a bribe for a government official in exchange for emigration papers.

  As the conversation swirled about him Joseph Wirkus nodded agreeably, smiling from time to time as a token of reassurance. But there were long intervals when he did not listen to the others’ words. Wirkus, a man of precision by temperament and training, knew the law, and he could calibrate the dangers. Any German caught helping Jews faced automatic imprisonment, but because of his sensitive job, Wirkus knew that the penalty for him and possibly for his wife, Kadi, would be death. Life was especially precious for them at this moment; five months before, Kadi had given birth to their first child, Wilfried, an event that brought indescribable feelings of joy. Wilfried’s existence raised the stakes to a level beyond life or death, for the law of the Third Reich provided that where a child was being raised in a manner inimical to the State, the child could, by court order, be removed permanently to an acceptable home. Failure to enroll one’s child in the Hitler Youth was one offense that could provoke such an order. Friendship with Jews was another.

  So as he voiced his own reassurances, Joseph Wirkus felt doubt. And yet with this small deed he could demonstrate, if only for himself, his aversion to the Nazis. Besides, he reminded himself, the masquerade was only for one or two weeks. When he expressed that thought to Kadi, she said she felt the same.