Underground in Berlin (26 page)

I saw Gerda Janicke making a face. I had obviously laid it on too thick. She sensed that I was not being honest, because she knew that I did not particularly like Jörg, the Little Teuton.

I was already in bed when I heard steps making their way along the corridor, and then a quiet tap on my door. ‘Are you still awake?’ asked Gerda Janicke.

‘Yes.’ I sat up, expecting an explosion.

‘Stay where you are,’ she said, standing in the doorway. ‘I just want to ask you something. You see, I was fascinated by your story. I didn’t believe a word of it, but at the same time I was thinking: how can anyone can lie like that? Every detail sounds right, but as a whole it doesn’t. Will you tell me the real truth now?’

‘All right,’ I said. ‘I took a photograph that hadn’t been retouched, every detail of it true to life. But I removed it from its frame and put it in another one. I told you all about the life and character of my aunt Grete, but transferred to someone else.’

‘And what really happened?’ she asked.

‘I’d rather not talk about it. Something happened today that’s weighing terribly on my mind.’

She accepted that. She came even closer and sat down on the side of the sofa. ‘Hanni, I must say you’re a genius.’

‘Goodness no, Frau Janicke! There are far cleverer people than me about,’ I said, dismissing the idea.

‘But you are! The doctor said so himself the other day, and his wife nodded, so she agreed. He told me how fond of you he is. He may make fun of your school-leaving certificate, but only because he wants you to learn practical things.’

That nocturnal conversation was a comfort, and it reconciled me with the Hellers. I didn’t yet know that I would never see them again.

A few days later, Gerda Janicke went back to the gynaecologist’s practice. Eva looked after the toddler while she was out. She thought he was sweet, and the Little Teuton loved her like a second mother. He felt just as clearly that I didn’t like him, and he was afraid of me. It’s true that I sometimes felt like pinching him or calling him names. I felt unspeakably sad to think how many Jewish children had been murdered, and then I could hardly bear the sight of that crowing lump of flesh who loved his food so passionately, but was late learning to talk.

‘I’m worried,’ said Eva that afternoon. ‘Gerda’s been out for so long. Something must have happened.’ When Frau Janicke finally came home she was white as a sheet, in floods of tears and hardly able to speak. At last she told us, sobbing, that Heller had been arrested. Two officers had taken him away from his apartment. As usual, there had been several people there illegally, but the police hadn’t taken any further notice of them.

We were shattered, all three of us, and we sat together for a long time, shedding tears. Then Gerda Janicke stood up, went to a calendar hanging on the wall and marked the date, 23 February, with a small line. ‘From now on we fight against all injustice.’ This was no time now for romantic effusions. ‘If you agree, Eva,’ she went on, ‘Hanni will eat with us now. I know that you’re paying a high price and a difficult one for your ration cards, but after this we’ll share everything.’

‘I’ve wanted it to be like that for a long time,’ Eva agreed at once. I thanked her with real feeling, and apologised for not always behaving well to her. And to mark this as a special day, we all had a cup of real coffee.

But once we were sitting at the supper table, there was an air-raid warning. Gerda Janicke had asked Eva to light the bathroom stove because she and Eva wanted to have a bath, but now they had to go down to the air-raid shelter in the cellar. I didn’t go with them, because officially I wasn’t here at all. Eva was explained away as a friend who sometimes stayed the night.

‘Hanni, you have a bath,’ said Gerda Janicke. ‘Otherwise the bathroom stove will overheat.’ I jumped at the chance, got into the bath and made waves with both hands, playing around in the water. ‘I’m tipsy on coffee, tipsy on coffee,’ I chanted, and indeed the unaccustomed caffeine had left me slightly intoxicated.

When the all clear had been given the other two came upstairs again. ‘You’re sitting pretty,’ said Frau Janicke reproachfully. ‘There were we, freezing down in the air-raid shelter, while you were wallowing in a nice warm tub.’

That reminds me of a Soviet joke that I heard years later: crowds are standing outside a butcher’s shop, but no delivery of meat arrives. First the Jews in the crowd are sent away, then people who don’t live in the area, and after several hours more those who are not Party members. Finally the butcher comes out and says, ‘I’m sorry, I’ve just had a phone call and I’m afraid I must send you all home. There won’t be any meat delivered today.’ The crowd disperses, grumbling, ‘As usual, the Jews get first preference.’

Gerda Janicke kept her word. She cared devotedly for Frau Heller, who had suffered a severe heart attack when her husband was arrested. Gerda went with her to her lawyer’s and to remand prison. Irmgard Heller also told her where all of us who had gone underground were staying – Cohn with Müller, Levy with Meyer, and so on. Frau Janicke went to see them all, told them what had happened, and found out what they knew. That was how we discovered why Heller had been arrested.

A Jewish woman about thirty-five years old, and entirely non-political, had been persuaded to go to ground by the gynaecologist. He had sent her to stay with a grateful patient of his in Neukölln for two weeks. But once those two weeks were over, she didn’t want to leave. Her hostess told her she couldn’t possibly stay any longer. There were Nazis living all round her place. She had been telling people that her cousin from the country was visiting, but neighbours had already been telling her she ought to register her guest with the police.

So the Jewish ‘non-swimmer’ had nowhere to go. She wandered around for several days and nights, hungry and freezing, with nowhere to wash or go to the toilet. She went back to the woman she had been staying with and asked, ‘Can you take me in again?’

But her hostess refused. ‘I’m afraid it simply can’t be done,’ she said.

‘Then I’ll tell you something: what I’ve been through in these last few days was so terrible that it can’t be worse in a concentration camp. I’m sure there are no creature comforts and the food isn’t restaurant standard, but at least I’d get thin soup and a straw mattress under the shelter of a roof. That doctor is a criminal, driving people into misfortune.’ And the woman did indeed go to the Gestapo, gave herself up of her own accord and denounced Heller. However, she never told them the name of the woman who had taken her in for those first two weeks.

A little later Irmgard Heller went to live with her sister in Leipzig. She died there a few months later, in September 1943. She was suffering severely from heart trouble, and she had to assume that her husband was dead; the police had told her that on the way from the remand prison to Sachsenhausen, Benno Heller had been shot for resistance to the authority of the state. In fact, he was still alive early in 1945.
*

After Heller’s arrest, Jews who had gone to ground went on living in his apartment. Irmgard Heller had paid the rent for months in advance before leaving Berlin. They were supplied with food that Gerda Janicke begged from former patients of Heller’s, taking them to Braunauer Strasse in a small suitcase. This resistance struggle of hers became a full-time job, while Eva Deutschkron looked after her little boy.

As so often, I was singing to myself in my mind as I carried my suitcase from Schierker Strasse to Schönleinstrasse. It was a day late in February 1943. I wondered whether it was wicked to sing when Heller was possibly being tortured to death at this very minute. Then I adapted a little more of the ‘Hänschen klein’ nursery rhyme to suit my own situation.

Anyway, I thought, what harm does it do anyone if I feel cheerful and optimistic? After all, something wonderful and extraordinary lay ahead: my meeting with the woman who had said she would be responsible for keeping me safe until the day of liberation came.

Trude was at home and gave me a warm welcome. ‘Every day that passes is a day gained, and a day closer to our liberation,’ she declared. I felt at ease with that family at once. The living room where I slept on the sofa contained oddly assorted old pieces of furniture, but it looked very tasteful, because Trude had a brilliant sense of colour and avoided anything kitschy. The room also contained a small library of belles lettres and a desk.

For the time being I was to spend about a week there. At first Trude wouldn’t let me help with the housework, but my fingers simply itched when I saw dishes waiting to be dried, so in the end she let me have my way. As she saw it, Camilla Fiochi was a mean-minded, despicable capitalist exploiter. When we talked about the villa in Zeuthen, she would swing her clenched fist belligerently through the air. ‘After the war, when it’s all over and there are trade unions again, you must go to them and complain that you weren’t paid a proper wage!’ she announced. I thought that was absolutely absurd. ‘So what do you think of Camilla risking her neck for me, taking me in at such short notice, and feeding me even though I had no ration cards?’ I asked. Trude was magnanimous enough to listen to such arguments, and then to say, ‘Now that I think about it, I can see that you’re quite right.’

The name of her neighbour on the same floor was Steinbeck. ‘That woman is stupidity incarnate, and a passionate Nazi,’ Trude told me. ‘And to make matters worse, she’s bosom friends with the most unpleasant female Nazi in the whole district.’ All the same, she wanted to introduce me to her neighbour as soon as possible; she didn’t want the woman to think she had something to hide. She openly took me shopping with her, and we made a lot of noise climbing the steps on the way back. The door to the neighbouring apartment promptly opened, and Frau Steinbeck looked out. ‘Someone else from Magdeburg,’ said Trude cheerfully, indicating me, ‘my cousin who’s come to spend a few days in Berlin.’

‘You have a never-ending number of relations,’ said Frau Steinbeck in amazement.

‘Yes, hundreds,’ joked Trude, and after a friendly handshake we went into the Neukes’ apartment. No sooner had Trude closed the door of the corridor than she put a finger to her lips. She knew that Frau Steinbeck was standing next door, listening. Only when we had closed the door into the hall and the door into the kitchen could we talk.

I called the neighbour ‘that receding lady’, and Trude laughed herself silly. Frau Steinbeck had a receding forehead and a receding chin in front, and her hair and her bottom stuck out behind. She plucked at her hair to make it fly out behind even more, and she hollowed her back, emphasising her behind. She really was a comical figure.

One of Trude’s sisters who lived at the back of a building on the Planufer in the Kreuzberg district took me in for a weekend. I had to cross several courtyards before I came to that part of the building in the shabby apartment block where Trude’s sister, Anne Adam, had what was called a kitchen room. The water pipes for these apartments lay down a long corridor, and there was a cupboard for each apartment.

The room itself wasn’t as bad as I had feared. Everything in it was polished to a high gloss and spotlessly clean. A large cooking stove that also served to heat the room stood against one wall. The opposite wall was equipped as a kind of living room, with a bed and some seating in a corner. The picture of a child stood beside a lamp. It was Anne Adam’s great grief that she had lost her only child, a little girl, to diphtheria. After that her marriage had broken up.

In the Aernecke family, to which both she and Trude belonged, political conviction was like a religion. Accordingly, Anne Adam was a communist too. She shared her food supply for that weekend with me, and was very friendly in other ways as well. During the day she worked in a canteen. She had coarse features and a skin with large pores; she amused herself as best she could and was a rather vulgar woman, or at least nothing like as intellectual as her big sister.

I very soon developed a warmer relationship with Trude Neuke, but it was never really close. Well as we understood each other, we met not as individuals but as symbolic figures. To me, Trude personified the resistance of a communist woman, and to her I was the typical figure of a persecuted Jewish girl whom she must help as a matter of principle.

My hostess was also constantly tormented by her inner uneasiness. She often unloaded her anger on her husband Jule. Then she would scold him soundly, and he usually took it without protest. She often wanted her husband and her son Wolfgang to rearrange the furniture of the apartment. ‘This is ridiculous!’ she would shout. ‘The kitchen table is standing lengthwise, and it would be much better across the room!’ The two of them had to move the table and other pieces of furniture back and forth, until in the end everything was in its original place again.

Jule Neuke was a thoroughly decent human being. Trude was always running him down for apparently doing something wrong. There was constant trouble with Trude’s children Inge and Wolfgang, and it was a disadvantage for him that he was only their stepfather.

Once, when he and I were talking on our own, he told me that he had met Trude’s first husband through their work for the Party and greatly respected him. He himself had been out of work at the time, and in a wretched situation. He had married Rudolf Hubbe’s widow soon after Hubbe’s violent death to help everyone concerned. He was tactful enough not to let a word slip suggesting that he was unhappy, but it was obvious.

Trude and Jule had had a child of their own, thus fulfilling an ardent wish of his. ‘I’ve never usually had my way,’ he said, ‘but I did in this case.’ They had called the child by a name that I thought particularly beautiful: Rosemarie. But after a short while the little girl died.

However, there were less depressing aspects of Neuke’s life. As a native of Magdeburg, Trude was a confirmed local patriot where that city was concerned, and she had an old friend who had been at school with her and had made a career as a singer under the name of Lisa Letko. When she appeared on stage in premières at the Metropol Theatre in Berlin, Trude regularly received complimentary tickets, and these visits to the theatre were the elixir of life to her. At such times she generously overlooked the fact that her friend’s parents were members of the hated plutocratic class, and Nazis into the bargain.