Underground in Berlin (27 page)

Jule was extremely musical, and had a beautiful singing voice. He had belonged to a male voice choir for many years. Trude herself sometimes sang a song aloud in her clear voice.

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Just before I left for Magdeburg, Trude had a special request to make. ‘You’ll have realised that I belong to a communist resistance group,’ she said. ‘Would you be prepared to help us by taking some leaflets to Magdeburg?’

I enthusiastically said yes. I dreamed of being able to do something at last, and would have liked it to be a great, heroic deed. But then I realised that Trude wasn’t entirely happy about my enthusiasm. Calmly, in a very matter-of-fact tone and with a touch of irony she asked, ‘Are you really sure that would be sensible?’

After that she went away and gave me time to think about it. I imagined myself sitting in the station with a case full of leaflets, perhaps being asked to open the case to have it checked in case I had been hoarding something. If that happened, all my earlier struggles to survive – and all that other people had risked for me – would have served no purpose. It wasn’t worth it, that much was obvious.

Then I wondered how I could get rid of the leaflets, unnoticed, before my train journey. I would have to ask Hannchen Koch to come to the station and give her the package in the toilet. She would have to take a day off specially, and try to destroy the leaflets without attracting attention.

When Trude came back, I asked, ‘Can I see one of the leaflets?’ I was rather disappointed by the contents. ‘End the war!’ they proclaimed, and Trude asked me, in a sharply ironic tone, ‘Any idea how to do that? A prescription for ending the war?’

‘No,’ I admitted. I admired the way that on the one hand Trude was a real heroine of the Resistance, but on the other thought critically about everything she did.

‘Then why do you do something so dangerous if you’re not really entirely convinced of it?’ I asked Trude.

‘You don’t have to do anything like that,’ she replied. ‘You don’t have to take leaflets to Magdeburg. There are murderers after you. But I can only go on living with myself if I try to frustrate those murderers. Otherwise I have no right to life.’

She told me that she was going to give me potatoes to take for her sister Erna’s household, not leaflets, and the potatoes had been donated by Red Aid ‘for this Soviet girl parachutist’. The last words just slipped out of her.

Trude, it seemed, had told the group that she was helping a Jewish girl. And the group were not happy with that idea – not out of anti-Semitism, but for reasons of Party discipline and on account of ‘the great tasks’ that they all had to perform. This had made her so furious and left her talking so chaotically about it that I could hardly follow her. ‘They can lick my arse, crossways and spirally at that!’ she shouted. ‘What good does it do anyone for us to meet in secret, whisper passwords to each other and clench our fists in our pockets? Saving human life is all that matters!’

Trude had solved the problem in her own way. At their next meeting she had told her comrades that she had seen the light, and was now rendering aid to a Soviet girl parachutist.

The journey in the slow train to Magdeburg took several hours. I sat in the cheapest class and observed my fellow-travellers. A young woman holding a small child on her lap whispered audibly to the man sitting next to her that it would be nice if he asked the little girl her age. He obliged. The child flung her arms in the air and announced, ‘I’m three and I’m not married yet.’ Everyone roared with laughter.

When it was a little quieter in our compartment, I leaned back and conjured up my memories. I had decided that on this journey I would concentrate on the domestic staff who used to work for us.

For instance, I remembered Erna Neigenfind. We had met her when my mother went to stay at a spa resort in the Riesengebirge for the good of her health. I was seven years old at the time, and my father and I visited her there for a couple of days. We slept in a boarding house in Krummhübel,
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where Erna was a waitress. I thought she was lovely, with her thick braids of fair hair pinned up so that they covered her ears and a large part of the back of her head. I kept looking at her the whole time. In my eyes Erna was beautiful, although she was very short-sighted and wore metal-framed glasses that cut deeply into the bridge of her nose.

The boarding-house proprietors, whose daughter she was, didn’t treat her well and were always snapping at her. I begged my parents to bring her to Berlin. And indeed, Erna Neigenfind came to us, proved to be pleasant and a good worker, and stayed for quite a long time. She taught me a Silesian folksong about picking blueberries, with a refrain that ran, ‘And when our cans are full of fruit, we’ll go back home again.’

After her came Vera Sobanyak, a farmer’s daughter from the Brandenburg Mark. We were once invited to eat at her parents’ home, and they were bent on serving us a good dish of meat. Huge platters of roast chicken legs and escalopes were brought in, and naturally we all helped ourselves, for it was my family’s principle to adjust to the customs of their hosts. When I was out I sometimes even ate Viennese sausages. We lived in the city of Berlin, not in some Polish ghetto.

At home, however, as I remembered now, we ourselves, also naturally, ran a kosher household. I was horrified to learn that my parents had not followed a kosher diet for some time before I was born, because they found the Jewish dietary rules inconvenient, and an unimportant outward sign of our religion. However, when I was born they had decided to go back to kosher food. ‘If one stone comes loose, the whole building may fall,’ as a Talmudic saying goes. My parents wanted to pass the Jewish tradition on to me, even if it wasn’t always easy. Kosher meat was very expensive.

When I was nine, we had another household help, a young woman called Gretel Stiewert. After she had been with us for a while, she told me, ‘Here’s six months gone, and I haven’t had sex for all that time. It’s more than a person can bear!’ I had no idea what she was talking about.

Gretel Stiewert was a pretty, delicately built creature, blonde and hard-working. She had been orphaned young and was then engaged to a young man who died after a motorbike accident. For a while she went on visiting his parents every other weekend. These people, whose name was Tschoepe, rang one day to tell us something about Gretel that was not, in fact, news to my mother: the young woman had forgotten all about her late fiancé and walked the streets in the evenings. She earned well, and was often very elegantly dressed; she had a white pleated skirt made of the finest wool, which she wore with a royal blue jacket, and a cap that looked like whipped cream piped on top of her head. I thought the outfit beautiful, and wished I could dress as well as that some day. I don’t find her profession so bad. To be honest, it can feel much more degrading to do dull, stupid work for other people. Unfortunately, she soon stopped working for us and took up street-walking full time.

Soon after the Nazis came to power, we visited Herr and Frau Tschoepe in their apartment in Taborstrasse to discuss what they called the Gretel tragedy. Two old people, broader than they were tall, led us in felt slippers through a front room full of any number of kitschy knick-knacks. Then we sat in a large and beautiful conservatory. Herr Tschoepe, who like his wife was a member of some kind of sect, spoke poorly of the Nazis, although with restraint. Where deeply religious subjects are concerned, one does not speak in Berlin dialect, which often replaces the letter G with J, but Herr Tschoepe overdid it a bit, using G even where it should have been J – ‘in the name of the Lord Gesus’ – and then, on becoming excited, he lapsed into full-blown dialect again. I could hardly keep from laughing at the contrast.

On the way home we saw small pieces of paper, obviously produced with the aid of a child’s printing set, hanging from a tram stop. ‘Goebbels says Guns Before Butter’ they read. My parents immediately linked arms with me to right and left, and strode on at an unaccustomed tempo, positively dragging me on with them. Similar notes were hanging from the next tram stop. We did not linger, but turned the next couple of corners at a smart pace and then took the U-Bahn home. My parents were terribly afraid someone might suspect we had put up those notes. As soon as we were out of the danger zone, however, they calmed down and were cheerful again. In fact they were glad to see that free speech like that was still possible.

By now Martha Sill was working for us, a slow-moving, apathetic girl who lethargically pushed the vacuum cleaner over our carpets. One day she turned up unannounced in our dining room with her fiancé, a man in an SA uniform. He said ‘Heil Hitler’ politely, put out his hand and said he had come to collect the wages that had been withheld from her. ‘Do by all means come into my study and look at my accounts,’ said my father obligingly. ‘I’ll show you everything.’ My father then, at his leisure, proved to the SA man that no wages had ever been withheld. All the man said was, ‘That’s all in order, then.’

After this incident my parents were very cool to our household help. ‘Martha,’ they said, ‘we are giving you notice as from the first of the month, but you can leave at once. We will pay you your full wages at the end of the month. Do you know where you can go? Do you have family here?’ Martha slouched away without saying goodbye, while the SA man shook hands warmly, said goodbye to us, and even added his thanks.

Afterwards, my father explained to me, ‘That was a rather stupid but good-natured young man. One of his SA friends had told him that the fiancé of a maidservant who works for Jews must blackmail them. But his instructions obviously went no further, and when I showed him that everything was in order he did as he has been brought up to do and gave us a civil bow.’

Martha Sill was our last non-Jewish maid. After the Nuremberg Laws came into force in 1935, no Aryan woman under the age of forty-five was allowed to live in the same household as a Jewish man.

The square outside Magdeburg Station looked exactly as Trude had described it to me. I turned to a very old woman to ask which tram I should take. Instead of telling me, she stared at me suspiciously. ‘Where are you from, then?’ she remarked. ‘You don’t come from these parts!’ I felt that her face was uncomfortably close to mine, quickly shook her off, and asked a middle-aged man, who immediately gave me the information I wanted.

This little encounter was helpful: I had never attracted attention in Berlin. My voice, my appearance and my behaviour all made it obvious that I was a local woman. I could mingle proudly and freely with all the other inhabitants of the city. As soon as I arrived in Magdeburg, however, I stood out as a stranger. I drew an important conclusion for future reference: if I wanted to live underground without hiding all the time, I could do so only in Berlin.

From one stop to the next, the tram steadily emptied. As agreed, a youngish woman was waiting for me at the terminus. Trude’s sister Erna let go of the little boy whose hand she was holding, to welcome me with outspread arms and a warm smile.

She had a round face, rather bad teeth and small, blue button eyes. Her hair was dyed blonde, as many women wore it in those days. In her case, however, there had been a minor accident: small patches of green mingled with the fair hair. As a result her face looked rather doughy.

When she took my suitcase from me to put it on the handcart she had brought, she was surprised. Contrary to her expectations, it did not weigh very much. All my possessions in it amounted to a single spare set of underwear. The few kilos of potatoes that I was bringing had fallen out of their paper bag and were rolling about loose in the suitcase. However, she had been told that I was bringing leaflets with me. Now, in her rather hoarse voice, she said, ‘I suppose that’s the leaflets rumbling in there.’

She lived in a light, clean ground-floor apartment in a new building near the South-East Magdeburg Sugar Factory. She was putting me up in a room just off the kitchen. Her husband was not at home, but at the front.

On the first morning I heard a light tap on my door, and then Erna’s hoarse voice whispering, ‘Shall I help to lace you up?’

‘What?’ I asked, intrigued. The misunderstanding was soon cleared up. Cautiously, and without making her feel silly, I had to let her know that I didn’t come from the last century. Erna had worked for a time as a maid for a Jewish family in Magdeburg, and in the morning she had helped to lace up the corset worn by the old mistress of the house. Ever since, she had thought wearing a corset was a Jewish custom.

Trude had told me how hard the whole family had worked to instil the basic elements of education into Erna. Trude herself, incidentally, was the undoubted head of the Aernecke family. To her little sisters, what she said was law, and she had ordained that I was to be treated like a patient in a sanatorium while I was in Magdeburg. I fought in vain to be allowed to dry the dishes, and instead sat in a wicker chair as if nailed to it. It had been brought into the kitchen especially for me. Because I had mentioned in passing to Trude that I liked knitting, I had been provided with material for that handicraft: a knitted top of very thin machine-knitted yarn to be unravelled. The threads kept breaking, and had to be knotted together again. I made up my mind to use this yarn to knit a scarf. Knot upon knot adorned the back of my work. If anyone had tugged at it, the whole thing would have come apart again.

I would have liked to make friends with Erna’s little boy. I wanted to tell the five-year-old stories and play with him. With fair-haired Rolf, I would have liked to do what I couldn’t for fair-haired Jörg, the Little Teuton. But the child did not react to me at all. He simply went on pushing his wooden railway carriages or cars about the floor, imitating the noises they made.

Even when his goldfish was seen one morning drifting upside down in its bowl of water, little Rolf did not seem much moved. While I was still wondering how to comfort him, he instantly realised that the fish was dead, and asked, ‘Mutti, fry it for me.’

That revived a memory. I too had once had a goldfish, and found out one morning that it was dead. I had been five myself at the time, and I had screamed blue murder. My parents did not like screeching, crying and bawling at all. So my father took me for a walk, and we discussed the problem of death. That was the first time I heard of Socrates and the Book of Ecclesiastes. On the way back we turned to everyday subjects again, and went into a chocolatier’s, where I was told I could choose a chocolate animal. I chose a lion. When we were at home my father unwrapped the lion, broke its head off and gave me the head to eat. I began crying my eyes out again. For a second or so my father’s face was flushed with anger, but then he said, ‘Well, that’s enough crying for today. A chocolate lion isn’t a living creature, so now eat it up!’