The Last Jews in Berlin (34 page)

Since March of 1943, except for brief visits to Sweden, he had been separated from his family, living in a city in which the fearful sounds and shattering impacts of the Allied bombs were a more certain part of daily life than meals or sleep. Even the few hours of each night in which he forced himself to rest were troubled; in his mind were the faces and names and addresses of the Jews he had sequestered in houses around the city. He no longer knew how many Jews, exactly, were being hidden, but he was certain the number was in the hundreds. He knew too that all of them were in ever increasing danger, if only because a few of their number had been caught. No Jew knew where another Jew was living, so exposure of one Jew by another was impossible. But all of the Jews knew that the source of their benefaction had been the Swedish church, and what if that fact were tortured out of one of them?

The Swedish legation had warned the pastor repeatedly that it could be of no help to him if he was caught, but what worried him even more than his own potential jeopardy was what would happen to the Jews, and the Germans who had hidden them, if a member of the church's staff broke down and gave the Gestapo the single clue it needed to uncover the entire network. Would the clue lead to Reuter, the church's inscrutable caretaker, who had found so many of the safe houses? Would Reuter be able to remain silent when tortured, if it came to that? And how would he himself stand up under torture, Perwe wondered.

In a clandestine operation such as he had supervised for more than two years there were now too many ifs. The time had come to reduce them.

In mid-November, Perwe informed the church's staff that he would fly to Sweden within a few weeks for a short visit. His announced purpose was to raise money for Christmas distributions among the needy in Berlin. Vide Ohmann, the church's indefatigable social worker, guessed that his real purpose was to prepare for the reception in Sweden of Jews he would soon be smuggling from Germany. But she did not try to pin him down. He never told you things he didn't need to, and she was used to that by now.

Vide worshipped Perwe. She believed him to be the most astounding man she had ever known. Driving him to the airport early on the morning of November 29 was a precious time for her. He was relaxed, glad to be going home, if only for a spell. He had been scheduled to make the trip early in December, but the head of the Swedish legation in Berlin, Arvid Richert, had offered him his own seat on an earlier flight.

The plane took off at 9:00
A.M.
Watching it depart, a nervous mother who had just put her daughter on board said to Vide, “I do hope the flight will go all right.”

“Oh, it will,” Vide replied, “the Reverence is with the plane.”

An hour and twenty-five minutes later the plane, a German passenger craft, was either shot down or blew up over the southernmost tip of Sweden, crashing outside Falsterbo. There were no survivors.

Martha Perwe, who had returned to Sweden with the children the year before, after the church was hit by a bomb, was sitting with them at 1:00
P.M.
when she heard the news of the crash on the radio. “How wonderful father wasn't on that plane,” she said with relief. “He isn't coming until next Monday.” An hour later a messenger from Arvid Richert brought her the truth.

Among the Swedes and Germans who knew of Perwe's efforts there was speculation that the craft had been sabotaged in order to stop him. As carefully as Perwe had worked, his cumulative effort could not escape notice; it was assumed by his friends and colleagues that he knew of the existence of several hundred illegals in Berlin and was planning to “export” as many of them as he could. So real did this assumption become that a number was soon attached to it: Perwe, it was said, was flying to Sweden to arrange for the resettlement of twenty-four Jews within the next few weeks. Supposedly he had data and photographs of these Jews in his briefcase. Among the many prayers expressed in those first hours after the crash was that Perwe's briefcase and its contents had been destroyed.

An assassination that cost the lives of a crew and the loss of a plane did not make any sense, but reason fared poorly in the aftermath of Perwe's death. The news numbed the staff of the church, but their grief was as nothing compared to that of the Jews who had put their lives in his hands. As the story spread by
Mundfimk
, they came to the church, singly and in pairs, asking for confirmation. When it was given, they walked slowly off into corners of the basement to endure their pain alone.

Their grief fell on the shoulders of a young Swedish priest scarcely prepared to bear it. Erik Myrgren would have preferred to be a botanist. So passionate was he about the subject that he had learned the Latin names of 900 different plants. With his slick black hair and handsome heavy face he looked neither Swedish nor priestly, nor had he freely chosen the religious life; his parents, deeply devout farmers from northern Sweden, had prevailed upon him to do so. What they had not been able to repress was the streak of joyousness in him. Erik, ordained in 1942, would still rather play the lute and sing folk songs than preach a sermon. He had gone to Germany in 1943 as pastor for the Swedish seamen who regularly put into the port of Lübeck, across the Baltic Sea from Sweden. On August 17, 1944, the Swedish church in Lübeck was destroyed by a bomb during a raid that took many lives, and Myrgren was called back to Sweden. But then, in November, he returned to Germany to substitute for Perwe during his absence. Until this moment Myrgren had had no contact with Germans, nor was he prepared for the human destruction and demoralization he was now to encounter daily.

One of his first visitors was Herbert Frankenfeld, a gaunt, stooped and visibly frightened man whom Myrgren took to be sixty-five. He was actually in his early forties. Frankenfeld, an attorney before the Nazis came to power, was married to a Gentile woman, who had refused to divorce him despite incessant pressure from the Nazis. He had lived for several years on her ration cards. Perwe had promised to get him to Sweden, he told Myrgren. If that had become impossible, he wanted to take refuge in the church.

“We have no place,” Myrgren told him. “Besides, they are not after your wife. You are safest with her.”

“I beg you, let me stay,” Frankenfeld said.

To mollify him Myrgren told Frankenfeld that he could spend two hours with him that day and the next. Once granted that privilege, Frankenfeld persisted; day after day he would come and sit by Myrgren's side. Finally Myrgren called a halt. The next day he received a call from a man who identified himself as a doctor. He said that he had a sick patient—he would use no names—that the patient had told him about the pastor, and that accepting the patient into the church was a matter of life and death. “I urge you to let him come to you,” the doctor said.

“Let him come,” Myrgren said.

The “patient” arrived. It was Frankenfeld.

“I must confess,” Myrgren said. “I recognized your voice on the phone.”

The attorney fell to his knees and crept on the floor to where Myrgren sat. “I beg you! I beg you! Let me stay!”

The sight was so painful that Myrgren had to look away. An old man on his knees, cringing before a youth. In that moment he began to hate the Nazi system.

Frankenfeld remained in the church, joining ten other semipermanent residents. When he first saw them Myrgren had thought that they were friends of Perwe's who had been bombed out of their residences. Only later did he learn that they were Jews. He responded particularly to the Weissenbergs, Martin and Margot, because they tried hard to be cheerful in spite of the danger and difficulties.

Now the Jews began to appear in large numbers. Their stories were the same: Perwe had promised to smuggle them out of Germany. So were their questions: Could Myrgren fulfill Perwe's promise?

Two years out of divinity school, still in his twenties, Erik Myrgren had become the official in charge of a system that, by its choices, conferred life and death. Each night, whenever he could, the young pastor played his lute and sang his folk songs in order to calm his nerves.

37

W
HETHER THE VOLUME
of the bombings had increased or whether the anxiety produced by the constant pounding had intensified his perception of the raids, Beppo couldn't tell. All he knew was that by November of 1944 they had become terrifying. At work, he would descend to a subcellar three floors underground when a raid began, listen to the broadcasts telling where the bombs were falling and wonder if the house in Wittenau would still be standing when he got home. Already the bombs had destroyed part of the roof and broken a number of windows. Even if he and Kadi and the baby were spared by their absence at the time of a direct hit, there would be questions about the bodies uncovered in the ruins, which would mean their own death in the end.

Day after day, without reprieve, the Allies attacked their area because of its several important factories. In the house, Kadi tracked the approach of the bombers with the help of an army map. She would listen to the military broadcasts locating the planes on the grids. As soon as it was clear that the planes were coming their way she would grab the boy and run for the shelter. The shelter was near a factory that produced track wheels for tanks—a prime target for the bombers—so Kadi had to be certain that she left in plenty of time to arrive before the bombers did. One day, as she followed the route of the bombers, she noted that they had bypassed Berlin. But just as she was about to return to her household work, the next coordinates indicated that the bombers had suddenly turned back for a surprise attack on the city. “Oh, my God!” Kadi cried. She called out for Wilfried, scooped him up and raced from the house. The first bombs fell before she reached the shelter. They were pelted with flying dirt. Kadi fell, and the boy with her. She tried to get up, but she couldn't move. A man ran over to her and tried to help her, but she was paralyzed with fear and her legs would not respond. Finally he lifted her to a standing position and half dragged her to the shelter, where they cowered in the crowd of people, all of whom were as panicked as she was. At last she looked down at Wilfried. His eyes were wet. He wore a bewildered look that seemed to ask why all this was going on. “I haven't been bad,” he said.

When the bombers had gone, Kadi would return from the shelter, and Beppo from the office, and, together with the Riedes, they would marvel that they had survived another day. Beppo was still struck by the contrast between Kurt and Hella—Kurt anxious and depressed, Hella calm, almost serene in her conviction that they would not be hit. Her courage amazed Beppo. After each heavy bombing she would find out which areas had been destroyed, then go to those areas and stand in line for the emergency ration cards being handed out.

But one day Beppo's affection and admiration for Hella received its most severe test. He returned home from work at five o'clock to discover her parents standing in the kitchen. He recognized them at once, because he had once visited them in Brandenburg. Beppo liked the Papendicks—Robert, a bald, broad-shouldered, fat-bellied man with laugh lines in his face, who had converted to Judaism for the sake of his wife, and who, for that long-ago act, had been compelled to do forced labor, although he did not have to wear a star; and Figa, a bosomy woman, with short, dark hair and a round face and spectacles perched on her nose. But no one had told Beppo that the Papendicks were coming to live with them, which, he was certain, was the only explanation for their presence. He was right. Robert Papendick had been ordered to join a work group that was building barracks and digging foxholes. As a born Christian, his safety was not in question, but they feared that Figa would be picked up and deported while he was gone.

But Beppo's irritation about being taken for granted, which he tried with only limited success to disguise, was as nothing compared to what he felt on learning that the Papendicks had shipped their belongings to the Wirkuses' address. It was a monumental piece of stupidity, and he had all he could do to refrain from telling them so. He stood, breathing deeply through his nostrils to calm his nerves, knowing that everyone was waiting for his answer. What could he do? He had said
A
. He must now say
B
.

“Where you can hide two people, you can hide four,” Beppo said aloud.

Besides, Ursula was gone, transferred to another factory outside Berlin, which meant they would not have to make up a story. And food would not be a problem, thanks to what they had been able to bring from the two family farms. Then too there was the constant supply of eggs produced by the hens. As to lodging, the room Ursula had occupied wasn't large enough for two people, so there was only one solution. The Papendicks would use the little room that Kurt and Hella had been using, and Kurt and Hella would share the larger bedroom with the Wirkuses. In the context of their circumstances, the solution did not seem at all improper; in fact, it gave them all a badly needed laugh.

There remained the matter of the shipped suitcases and the risk that they entailed. But when a week passed and they hadn't arrived, Beppo concluded that someone who knew of the Papendicks' predicament had taken the suitcases, aware that there would be no inquiry. He put the matter out of his mind.

The Papendicks proved to be agreeable guests. They were quiet people, and they took care of themselves. They paid for their share of the food. Because she observed the Jewish dietary laws, Frau Papendick prepared her own meals for the most part, using the Riedes' parboiled potatoes but cooking her portion in chicken rather than pork fat. When the bombs fell, it was immediately evident from whom Hella had inherited her disposition. If anything, Frau Papendick was calmer than her daughter. Faith was her resource. Her words—so reminiscent of Hella's—were like a benediction: “In a house where so much good is done God will not permit something bad to happen.”