The Last Jews in Berlin Page 6

  Had they known how long the masquerade would go on, or the danger in which it would place them, they might have been less willing to offer the Riedes a refuge.

  6

  HANS ROSENTHAL had large brown eyes and a disarming smile; his presence, even to strangers, bespoke friendliness and warmth. Was it some remnant of this basic disposition that had catapulted him into his strange new adventure? Or was it that he was a good worker? All he knew for certain was that on this day in the late fall of 1942 he was in an automobile beside his employer, a bulky, taciturn, bespectacled Nazi, hurtling down a highway away from Berlin and toward Pomerania. What would happen to him when he got there he hadn’t the faintest idea, but for the moment this bizarre passage was putting distance between him and his nightmares.

  Although he was almost eighteen he looked less than sixteen years old. This was partly due to an aura of ingenuousness and innocence about him and partly to the years of undernourishment that had stunted his frame. As a child he had had a compact body and the gift of speed, which had made him a splendid soccer player. He was a better athlete than student. He had tried hard to make good grades while his father lived, but after his father died (at the age of thirty-seven) Hans seemed to abandon all scholastic ambitions. And by that time grades no longer mattered for a Jewish schoolboy in Germany.

  His father, Kurt Rosenthal, was the oldest of three sons of a Jewish father and a Christian mother who had converted to Judaism when Kurt was twelve. Kurt had been a warm and fun-loving man whose special pleasure was playing piano in a dance band on weekends. During the week he had worked for the Deutsche Bank, the same bank that had hired him out of high school. In 1937, after twenty-one years of employment, the bank had dismissed him because he was Jewish. Prior to his dismissal Kurt had suffered a kidney ailment, which quickly worsened, and he soon died.

  Four years later Hans’s mother was dead of cancer, and Hans and his brother Gert, seven years his junior, were orphans. At the time of their mother’s death Hans and Gert were living apart; Gert, then nine, was in an orphanage, and Hans was in Fürstenwalde, a training camp for Zionist Jews planning to emigrate to Palestine.*

  The atmosphere in which Hans Rosenthal grew up had not been especially Jewish, let alone Zionist. He and his parents and his brother had lived with his father’s parents, the most religious of whom was his Grandmother Agnes, the convert to Judaism. Although Hans had been bar-mitzvahed at thirteen, there was always a tree at Christmas, so that he and Gert would not feel different from their Gentile friends. When Hans first embraced Zionism, it was not out of any desire to settle in Palestine but solely to escape Germany. Only later, after working in Fürstenwalde, did he become excited and committed. But his mother’s death intervened, and Hans knew then that he couldn’t emigrate. Even though he was only sixteen, he was now responsible for Gert.

  A few days after his mother’s death Hans was given permission to leave Fürstenwalde and return to Berlin to live with Gert in the orphanage. Three weeks later all of the Jews at Fürstenwalde were sent to Auschwitz. For Hans it was the first of many narrow escapes.

  In April 1942 Hans turned seventeen. The director of the orphanage told him that he was now too old to remain there, and in August, Hans was transferred to a home for young Jewish men on the Rosenstrasse. Two months later everyone at the orphanage—Gert included—was deported.

  Hans was so upset over Gert’s deportation that his own second instance of good fortune scarcely registered. All that spring he had looked in vain for someone to hide his little brother. Even his Grandmother Agnes had refused. “It’s impossible to hide a ten-year-old,” she had said. “He can’t remain quiet.”

  Hans soon found a job working in a Berlin factory that manufactured small containers of canned heat used by soldiers in the field to warm their meals. The factory would receive huge shipments of old cans, recondition them, fill them with flammable hydrocarbon jelly and seal them. It was good business; the owner, Alfred Hanne, bought the used cans for thirty marks a carload, then sold each unit for twenty pfennigs. Hanne behaved correctly to his mostly Jewish workers but without the slightest sentiment. Several of the Jewish employees had once been wealthy—one had owned a department store, another a shop on the Kurfürstendamm—but the past had long since ceased to be of consequence. A worker’s salary was based solely on performance: for every 1,000 tins manufactured above 4,000 a day Hanne paid a bonus of five marks.

  Hans was soon making 9,000 tins a day. He could not allow himself to consider that his earnestness was in behalf of his enemy. Life had been reduced to an exquisitely simple precept: make yourself invaluable to someone and you’ll survive.

  What better proof of that than this journey with Hanne? A week before, the owner had approached him and said, “I’m opening a new factory in Pomerania. If you want to come with me, you can.”

  “I have a star,” Hans reminded him. “How can I go?”

  “You’ll go. You’ll take the star off and you’ll go.”

  When they arrived in Torgelow, the Pomeranian town where Hanne’s new factory was located, Hans discovered he was the only Jew. He did not put his star back on. Hanne quartered him in a bunk room in a building adjoining the factory hall, where he lived much better than the other workers, a few of them Belgians, most of them captured Russians who spent their nights shivering in a nearby camp.

  A few days after Hans arrived in Torgelow the Gestapo raided the Jewish youth home where he had been living before he left Berlin and sent all of its inhabitants to Auschwitz. His third close call. Had Hanne known? Hans could only wonder.

  Weeks passed. Hanne’s manner seemed to soften. He no longer shouted so much at the workers. He ordered extra portions of potatoes and turnips for them. The Belgian prisoners told Hans they thought the change in Hanne’s manner was related to the German defeat at Stalingrad. Perhaps he had concluded that the tide of battle had turned against the Germans and the war would soon be over, in which case prisoners of war and Jews who vouched for his decent treatment would be extremely helpful.

  Whatever the workers’ conjecture or Hanne’s actual motive, the war had definitely taken a turn against the Germans and in favor of the Allies. The turnaround had begun in Egypt in the fall of 1942, where the British Eighth Army, replenished with fresh troops and armaments—many of its new tanks and planes made in the United States—had not only fought the forces of the “Desert Fox,” Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, to a standstill but then put them to rout. Stalingrad was an even more significant defeat, from both a strategic and a symbolic point of view. The city, which lay astride the Volga River, was the gateway to the oil fields of the Caucasus. Hitler’s dream was to take those fields and then drive through Iran to the Persian Gulf, eventually joining forces with the Japanese in the Indian Ocean. Had he not paused at Stalingrad, dream might have become fact. But he did, not because he needed the city—German troops had reached the Volga and gained control of its traffic—but because the conquest of Stalingrad had become an obsession. And so he attacked the city.

  Russian troops fought the German Sixth Army for every block and rubble pile, and then, on November 19, 1942, under cover of a blizzard, the Russians began a two-pronged counteroffensive to the west of Stalingrad, designed to cut off the Sixth Army from other Axis forces. By year’s end that effort had succeeded. Hundreds of thousands of German troops had either been killed or captured, and an even larger group of survivors had been left to wonder bitterly over a leadership so fanatical that it would not permit its troops to give up any conquered ground regardless of the cost in lives and human suffering. The defeat was equally devastating on the home front. Germany’s civilians found their faith in their country’s ultimate victory shaken.

  Hans Rosenthal had no time to speculate about Germany’s ultimate fate. He was too preoccupied with the task of remaining alive. After Hanne informed him about the roundup of Jewish workers in the Berlin factories on February 27, his own among them, Hans counted up his escapes. First, Fürstenw
alde. Next, the orphanage. Then the Jewish youth home. Now the factories. Four times fate had put him a step ahead of the Gestapo. How long would it be before the Gestapo discovered that Hans had not been among the Jews taken on February 27, and trace him to Torgelow?

  Then came an episode that made the question all but rhetorical. One day Hanne told Hans to build a storage bin for an extra load of potatoes he had ordered. When the potatoes arrived, Hans loaded the bin and then gave the Russian workers their allotment before they returned to their camp for the night. They were so emaciated that he couldn’t stand the sight. He told them that he would forget to remove the key from the storage-bin lock, so that they could come in the night and take more potatoes. They came, and were caught. The next morning two policemen accosted Hans at his workplace. “You don’t give potatoes to the lower race,” one of them told him. Then they beat him and threatened to shoot him.

  Hanne suddenly appeared at Hans’s side and led the policemen off.

  Instinct told Hans that it was time for Escape Number Five. Two days later he walked out of the factory, his knapsack on his back, and headed for the railroad station, determined to hazard a trip to Berlin, two hundred kilometers away. He knew he could hide in Berlin, whereas a strange boy in a small town wouldn’t have a chance.

  Half an hour after the journey began, the police control came into his car.

  “Your papers please?”

  “I have none. I’m sixteen years old. I have dirty clothes in my pack that I’m taking home to be washed. I work at Torgelow. You can call them.”

  The policemen exchanged looks, nodded, and passed on. But at Prenzlau they came into the car again and looked at him. He could hardly keep his teeth from chattering, but he managed to muster the disarming smile that had become his automatic response to any stranger’s stare.

  “He looks nervous,” one of the policemen said. “We’d better check with control.” Then they walked over to him. “Please come outside,” the same policeman said.

  Now it’s over, Hans thought. He followed them into the railway station. Then the second policeman said to his partner, “Look, I’m hungry as hell. If we do this checking we won’t have lunch. He’s just a kid. Let’s let him go.”

  Badly shaken, Hans went to his grandparents’ home as soon as he arrived in Berlin. Grandmother Agnes opened the door. Her somber face registered no surprise; nothing surprised her any longer. In addition to her eldest son, Hans’s father, she had lost her two other sons. Ernst, a half-Jew like his brothers, and married to a Christian, had been deported to Buchenwald for refusing to wear a Jewish star; three weeks later he died of an illness, according to a letter from camp authorities. Heinz, the youngest, had lived with a German woman in defiance of the Nuremberg Laws, and had been captured by the Nazis after trying to escape across rooftops. Two weeks of torture in the Gestapo’s prison on the Alexanderplatz had so destroyed him that he died at home shortly after his release. So Grandmother Agnes was without illusions. She was happy that Hans was alive but not happy that a new problem had arisen. What showed on her face now was a question: What will we do with him?

  * Every German has his “decent Jew,” Heinrich Himmler remarked to his fellow S.S. officers in 1943 in lamenting why it had often been so difficult to pry many Jews in Germany from their sanctuaries and send them to the extermination camps. In the 1930s, before the mass exterminations had begun, even the Nazis had their favorite Jews: the Zionists. Although their motives could not have been more different, the Nazis—Adolf Eichmann among them—and the Zionists were united in their desire to see the Jews leave Germany for Palestine.

  II

  HUNTED

  7

  IN THEIR HASTE to snare all of Berlin’s remaining Jews during their February 27 Fabrik Aktion, the Nazis seized many Jewish men who were theoretically under the protection of the Third Reich’s peculiar racial laws. These laws conveyed a special status on Jews of mixed origin—Mischlinge—as well as on Jews married to German Gentiles. Such Jews were subjected to discrimination but usually exempted from deportation because of the hardships and anguish this might cause their mates or relatives. Most Gentiles who had married Jews before 1935, when the Nazis outlawed such behavior, were severely pressured by the party to divorce them, but few did, and while there was no regulation specifically prohibiting the deportation of the Jewish member of a mixed marriage, in practice that person was safe so long as his or her partner opposed it.

  Once the Jewish factory workers and their families had been collected at the various concentration points throughout the cities, the “privileged” Jews, as they were known, were segregated from the larger bodies and reassembled at a detention center on the Rosenstrasse, not far from Gestapo headquarters in the center of the city. But they were not released—a strong indication that despite previous custom the Gestapo had every intention of deporting them, along with the other Jews taken in the raid, to the death camps in the east.

  And there they might have gone, save for the intervention of the Gentile wives of the Jewish workers. By early the following morning these women finally learned where their husbands had been taken. First tens, then hundreds of the wives assembled on the Rosenstrasse, outside the building in which their husbands were being held. They were soon joined by a crowd of sympathetic bystanders. Attempts to scatter them were unavailing. The women pressed forward, shouting demands that their husbands be released. Each morning for several days the demonstration continued. “We want our men!” the women chorused. Their cries could be heard many blocks away. Finally the Gestapo relented and set the husbands free.

  It was not the Tightness of their demands so much as the shock of their demonstration that acted in the women’s favor. Since 1933, when the Nazis took power, there had never been a mass demonstration against the government or party, at least not in anyone’s memory, and none had ever been recorded. Certainly there had never been a public protest of any kind with regard to the Nazis’ treatment of the Jews.

  Privately, many Germans had helped Jews from the time the persecutions began. Survivors’ reports are filled with stories of Germans slipping food or ration stamps into their pockets under cover of a crowd. For every report of a merchant who refused to serve Jews, there is another of a merchant who befriended them. None of the Jews who went underground in Berlin or elsewhere in Germany could have survived without the help of at least one Gentile benefactor. And yet the indifference of the overwhelming number of Germans to the fate of the Jews was as much a danger to those Jews who had gone underground as were the S.S. patrols sent to find them. If their identity became known, they could expect absolutely no help from strangers; to the contrary, strangers were much more likely to report them to the authorities on the grounds that the underground Jews were in violation of the law.

  Anti-Semitism aside, the most formidable problem faced by the renegade Jews was the slavish penchant for obedience to authority that seemed to exist within the mind of every German. In Berlin Diary, his eyewitness account of Nazi Germany between 1934 and 1941, William L. Shirer writes of “the highest state of being the Germanic man knows; the shedding of their individual souls and minds—with the personal responsibilities and doubts and problems—until under the mystic lights and at the sound of the magic words of the Austrian they were merged completely in the Germanic herd.” To compound matters, Shirer points out, the Germans’ sense of judgment derived from narrow provincial concerns. Their preoccupation with their own point of view to the exclusion of others’ interests was at the very heart of Hitler’s appeal. He told them that Germans, by virtue of their superiority over other Europeans, were entitled to more Lebensraum, or living space. He did not need to convince them. They believed that they had proved their superiority by virtue of their courage and their enterprise.

  Hitler’s attacks against the Jews fitted neatly into the Germans’ propensity for self-absorption. Had there been a plebiscite on what to do with the Jews, Germans would have overwhelmingly opposed genocide, but the
y condoned and even accepted the visible anti-Semitic policies of the Third Reich. Most Germans agreed, if only tacitly, that Jews had played too great a part in national life. While Hitler’s allegations about Jewish dominance were wildly overstated, Jews had been prominent in commerce, dominated a number of banks, owned important newspapers, and played a disproportionate role in Berlin’s spectacular cultural explosion of the late 1920s. So the Germans were not displeased that the so-called “Jewish influence” was being removed. For some Germans there were practical gains as well. They could default on their debts to Jews, buy Jewish businesses and possessions at distressed prices, secure dominant positions in markets where Jews had once been their competitors, profit from what, in effect, was slave labor, and take over dwellings once owned or occupied by Jews. Finally, as Richard Grunberger points out in The Twelve-Year Reich, the Jew served a necessary psychological function. “Just as primitive man’s concept of God supposed the existence of the Devil, so the German’s progressive self-deification during the Third Reich depended upon the demonization of the Jew. The white outline of the Germans’ image of themselves—in terms of character no less than of color—acquired definition only via the moral and physical darkness of its Jewish anti-type. Metaphysically as well as materially, the roots of the German heaven were deeply embedded in the Jewish hell.”

  An even more sinister enemy for the Jewish fugitives than the loyal Germans were the turncoats in their midst, fellow Jews embarked on a tragic enterprise. “Catchers” they were called—men and women either without conviction even in normal times or normally moral persons frightened out of their wits by the threat of deportation. They worked directly for the Gestapo, operating out of a so-called “Jewish Bureau of Investigation” located on the Iranische Strasse. Their pay was their freedom; as long as they could find and present “illegal” Jews to the Gestapo for deportation, they could avoid deportation themselves.