Underground in Berlin (14 page)

Benno Heller had been to see her, and was about to leave the room when I arrived. With the utmost care, he put an expensive velours hat on his head, checking his appearance in the mirror above the washbasin. It was obvious that he was merely introducing himself by putting on that hat. What a vain show-off, I thought.

Heller had an Aryan wife, and for the time being his marriage shielded him from deportation. He practised in Braunauer Strasse
*
in Neukölln, as what was now called someone who ‘treated the sick’.

So that was where I went. Abortions were strictly forbidden. I couldn’t possibly ask him for one without gaining his confidence first. I reminded him of our meeting beside Toni Kirschstein’s sickbed, but he couldn’t remember it at all. He did say, ‘You could hardly make up something like that,’ but he was still suspicious; I could have been an informer. Rumour said that before 1933 he had already served a prison sentence for carrying out an illegal abortion. He was Jewish, and politically left-wing, so his situation was precarious. However, he wanted to help.

Finally he asked me to recite the Shema, the Jewish confession of faith.

‘
Sh’ma Yisroel Adaunoi elauheinu Adaunoi echod
^†
– hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one,’ I recited.

‘All right, only a Jew knows that,’ decided Heller. He told me he would give me something to induce a miscarriage, but I must go through it on my own. No curettage would be necessary: ‘You’ll feel labour pains, and the whole thing will be expelled. You must throw it away, and that will be the end of it.’ He used the informal
du
pronoun to me, as he did with all his women patients.

So I set off on the long walk back to Lychener Strasse. When the pains began a few hours later, Frau Schulz gave me the key to a summerhouse that belonged to acquaintances of hers in Nordend, and told me just how to get there.

I went to the colony of summerhouses all on my own, unlocked the gate to the small property, found an old bucket somewhere in the garden and sat on it. After all that I had already experienced, now came this. But it was over quite quickly.

I hadn’t noticed that there was someone else in the garden, an old man who had shut himself in there because he was on his own. After the first shock he was very nice to me, said he saw what was happening and asked if he could help. Then he brought me some water to drink, and I asked him for newspaper so that I could wrap up the contents of the bucket and take them away. I went to Heller and asked him what I should do next.

‘Are you crazy, bringing that here?’ he asked, horrified. ‘Get rid of it where no one will find it.’ Frau Koch stepped in and helped me. I gave her the packet of newspaper, and she buried it under a plum tree.

I had no moral scruples. I wanted to live, so there was no option. But I was sad. It had clearly been a boy, the only descendant that the Wolff family would ever have had.

I did not even think, incidentally, of offering Benno Heller money, and he did not ask for any. He examined me briefly and said, ‘You’re all right. Off you go; your uterus has come to no harm.’

Mitko – the diminutive of Dimitr – knew about this unedifying episode and thought nothing of it. He was still planning to take a long holiday and go to his native country with me. I was still enthusiastic about the idea, and even persuaded Frau Koch to buy me a teach-yourself Bulgarian manual to study. I learned the language at top speed.

Soon I took to walking round Berlin again. If I wasn’t going to spend all day in the wicker chair, I left the apartment at the same time as my landlady, six or seven in the morning, and walked round all day. I had to do something. I came home, footsore, late in the evening. At that time I often thought to myself: if one could earn a home by walking the length and breadth of it, then I had earned the city of Berlin as my home.

Before leaving for Bulgaria, I had meant to say goodbye to several people whom I would probably never see again. Among them was Leo Davidsohn, a cousin of my mother’s. We had often spent Seder evenings at Aunt Grete’s with him and his family, but otherwise we did not have much contact with them. I remembered him from my childhood as a short, stout man who was always cracking feeble jokes.

As a young man Leo was said to have been very lively, a young fellow who always wore his boater tipped sideways on his head. But after some time his amusing little adventures came to an end. He was engaged to Gertrud Cohn, the ugly daughter of a very rich private banker. Shortly before the wedding, her father went bankrupt after an incident involving sharp practice, and shot himself through the head. Gertrud was going to give him his ring back, but Leo refused. ‘A human being is a human being as far as I’m concerned,’ he apparently said, ‘and you have suffered misfortune. I am a Jew and I don’t push other people into the abyss.’ The couple married, and so he had not a rich but a very sharp-witted wife at his side. She did all she could to build up a wholesale business in velvet fabrics, and it made their fortunes.

Leo was now a widower. His daughter was in Paris, and he was living with his two sisters from East Prussia, who kept house for him. This was the first time I had been to the enormous, grand apartment in Lietzenburger Strasse.

A housemaid asked me to wait for him in the wonderful hall. I looked carefully at everything: small rooms were divided off from it to left and right by velvet portières. I began pacing out that wonderfully comfortable room to measure it. If I survive, I decided, I’ll build myself a big villa with a hall that looks just like this. Then Uncle Leo appeared.

‘Are you going around without a star?’ was the first thing he asked, without even greeting me properly. He was visibly indignant.

‘Yes, I’m trying to survive. I came to say goodbye. I’m going on to see Recha Frankenstein,’ I replied. She was my mother’s favourite cousin, and had also been her closest friend.

‘You needn’t bother. She was taken away last week,’ he said bitterly. The pince-nez on his nose quivered. Leo was furious with me for coming to see him without my Jewish star. ‘You’re in the way,’ he said brusquely. ‘We don’t have time. My sisters are busy making preparations for the transport we expect at any moment.’

‘Sorry. I won’t keep you long. I only wanted to say goodbye.’

‘What on earth are you thinking of, just not going when you’re told to?’

‘I’d like to survive.’

‘But if they catch you – do you know what they’ll do to you?’

‘What?’

‘They’ll deport you straight to the East.’

‘That’s what I want to avoid.’

At that moment he realised that he was going round in intellectual circles. He said, slightly mollified, out of sheer embarrassment, ‘I’ll be celebrating my seventieth birthday God knows where in Poland.’ There was a long pause, as he tried to find words. ‘No, celebrating isn’t right. I’ll be spending my birthday there.’ Then he quoted from the
Pirkei Owaus
– the
Sayings of the Fathers
. ‘Do not cut yourself off from the community.’ A moral sermon was the last thing I needed now.

‘Give my love to my aunts, and I hope you will manage as well as possible,’ I said. ‘Goodbye.’ I was glad when I could close the door of the apartment behind me.

And then an idea leaped up at me like a stray mongrel dog. Uncle Leo was very well off; he couldn’t take his fortune to the grave with him. Whereas a hundred marks would have been a real help to me. But I was much too proud to ask him for money.

As I was going down the steps, the door of the apartment opened again up above. Leo called in a loud, carrying voice – he had been whispering to me in the hall of the house earlier – ‘Hello! I have something else to say to you, come back.’ I quickly ran up the few steps again.

‘Perhaps you’re doing the right thing after all,’ he said when I was facing him. ‘If you survive, and see my daughter Hilde again, then give her my love. I want her to know that my last thought will be of her. I will die with the Shema on my lips, and think of her.’ With that he slammed the door for the last time.

The mood was very different when I went to see Helene Gutherz the doctor. She lived in Augsburger Strasse with her husband David, a lawyer from Austria. When I told them that I had escaped arrest they both rejoiced. ‘Marie, make tea, the good tea that we keep for special occasions. This is a very happy one,’ Helene Gutherz shouted to the maid in the kitchen. She and her husband hardly knew how to express their delight. Finally they decided to give me a picture that a friend of theirs had painted; green horses in a meadow. I didn’t think it was particularly good. ‘I don’t have a roof over my head – where could I put it?’ I objected. Thereupon they tried to give me their dining-room furniture. It was grotesque. ‘We spent more than we could afford on it, we didn’t have much money,’ said Helene Gutherz. Her husband opened the doors of the sideboard and knocked them. ‘Hear what good, solid wood that is?’ I admired the first-class quality, but had the greatest difficulty in getting them to realise that I could do nothing with the furniture. Where on earth was I supposed to keep it?

After fervent embraces, blessings and wishes for good luck, we finally parted. I felt not a trace of hatred, envy or aggression in either of them, but I was relieved when I was outside. It had been such a pointless battle against being given the contents of a dining room.

Then I still had many hours to kill, and I sat in the shelter of a tram stop to rest. While I was there an idea occurred to me, and it shook me badly: something had just come to an end. These had been my last visits to Jewish friends and relations. They were going one way, I was turning in a very different direction.

My last meeting with Ernst Wolff in August 1942 was terrible. His family, too, had ‘the lists’ ready. These lists had to be drawn up a few days before your planned deportation, and summed up all your worldly goods. I was sick of the sound of the word: everyone was making ‘lists’. I couldn’t bear the fear of the crime that threatened them all, and the strange sense of industry that it induced in them.

There was something of the military man in Ernst, and he told me that he had had the huge dining table where the Seder feasts were normally held extended. The rucksacks for his parents, his aunt and his sister Thea were packed on it, and he had his elderly relations doing exercises. ‘Pick up rucksack!’ ‘Put down rucksack!’ and so on. He used a terrible word when he told me about it; he spoke of the ‘journey’ that they would all be taking. A journey, he called it.

At this last meeting, the atmosphere between us was very tense. I walked down Memhardstrasse and Münzstrasse with him, in mortal fear. He was wearing the Jewish star and I, of course, was not. It was torment.

‘Which of us is going the better way we must wait and see; who will live and who will not,’ he said. I refrained from running through my arguments again. However, raising his forefinger, he gave me some moral precepts to take with me: I was of a good Jewish family and must not forget myself. I had had enough; I didn’t want to hear any more.

We were on the way to see his cousin Herbert Koebner. The former director of a dental clinic, Koebner had now specialised in forging documents. Ernst Wolff wanted us to meet.

Ernst and I said goodbye to each other in Koebner’s apartment in Kaiser-Wilhelm-Strasse, hoping we might meet again. It was a banal farewell – how could it have been anything else?

My aunt Sylvia Asarch had once lived on the estate of Boldera near Riga, and so she had a Soviet passport, which for the time being protected her from deportation. In the summer of 1942, she was the only member of my mother’s family with whom I was still in touch. All the rest had fled from Germany, had been deported or were already dead.

We often sat drinking tea together. Of course I told Sylvia about Mitko and my plans to go away with him.

‘What?’ she asked, horrified. ‘A working man without any education? You should marry a rich man so that you can live in the right style for your station in life!’

Of course, this was grotesque. Sylvia herself knew how upset the family had been when she took a non-Jewish lover who was also from the working class. Otto Starke was in fact an extremely nice man. Long after they had separated, well into the war, he was still regularly sending Sylvia parcels.

Sylvia had fled from the Russian revolution in 1917 without her children, arriving in Berlin with a single piece of luggage, a box containing several very expensive Parisian hats. From then on the family had regarded her as an uncaring mother who had sacrificed her children to save her hats. Only now did she tell me the real story. The Bolsheviks had stormed in at the front of the manor house, while she slipped out of the back of it at the last moment, disguised as a peasant woman. If she had shown that she was mistress of this estate, she had reasoned, they would all be killed; they’d be regarded as kulaks and shot. However, she thought that if she left her children behind the Soviets would spare their lives and send them to an orphanage, where they would get enough to eat, be brought up as communists, and would then have to make their own way in the world. Her great secret was that she still had a photograph of her four adolescent children, Tassja, Bruno, Ruth and Fila. She once showed it to me.

Sylvia was rather small and plump, with a large behind. She considered herself beautiful and a person of great consequence. Indeed, every step she took proclaimed: important, important, important. A salient feature of her face was her large nose with its wide pores. She loved to use heavy make-up, painting her lips bright cherry red, and covering her whole face with shimmering powder in a slightly lilac tone.

Her craving to stand out contrasted oddly with the fact that only help from the family enabled her to live in Berlin for so many years. Once, when Aunt Mia bought herself an expensive tailored suit and showed it off, twirling in front of us, we all admired it except for Sylvia, who said, ‘Well, not bad, but the best tailor in St Petersburg would have done it better.’

She herself once bought a length of silk that had been used to decorate the display window of a furniture store. She had this badly faded but expensive fabric dyed dark purple and made into a very extravagant set of matching garments: a dress and jacket, a cape and a scarf. People turned to look at her in the street when she wore it, because of her striking appearance.