Underground in Berlin (43 page)

Second, I had decided that I would spit. I had been obliged to spend the last three years in places where many people spat in the street, and finally I had adopted that disgusting habit myself. Society had spat me out, so I spat back, but always with the proviso that I would stop it if I survived the war.

I was going to spit for the last time on the border between Kaulsdorf-Süd and Biesdorf-Süd. Only I didn’t know exactly where that was. So I spoke to a man who was weeding his garden: could he tell me just where Kaulsdorf ended and Biesdorf began?

‘What do you want to know for?’ he asked suspiciously.

At that moment I said to myself: stop! I don’t need to run away now, I don’t need to duck, I have genuine papers in my bag, no one can do anything to me. A civil human being answers a question instead of responding with another question.

‘Do you know or don’t you?’ I asked the man brusquely. He admitted that he didn’t know for certain. After I had gone a little further, someone else was able to tell me that yes, I was right on the border. So I gathered all my saliva in my mouth and spat lavishly on the road. After that I felt better. I was out of what the people here called ‘our colony’ at last.

Point number three on my programme was that I would make a mental list of everything I wasn’t going to do any more. I wasn’t going to spit, because that was uncivilised. I was never going to sit in a wicker chair again. I was never going to marry a man who wasn’t Jewish. I’d rather be on my own than with a partner who didn’t have any higher education. I would be honest, as my parents and my other forebears had always been honest. I wasn’t going to be on familiar terms with any Tom, Dick or Harry, as you usually were in bars. I was never going to be rude about the Germans again without differentiating between them. I was never going to be unjust and ungrateful to people like the Kochs, who had helped me. And so on. My list was a long one.

Between Lichtenberg and Weissensee I noticed a young woman ahead of me, looking very elated as she walked along. She was wearing a pale blue dress, and holding a huge enamel basin on top of her head. As I found out later, it contained a tiny piece of margarine that she had acquired somewhere.

When the girl turned round I recognised Ursel Ehrlich, a friend of Irene Scherhey’s. She too had gone underground during the Nazi period and had survived. We greeted each other warmly, stopped to rest for a while and told each other how we had managed.

Ursel had found a source of spare pieces of leather somewhere, had used them to make bookmarks and other small items, and then went round selling them – in garden cafés in summer, in bars in winter. ‘My best customers were in Altermann’s bar,’ she told me.

‘Altermann in Mühlenstrasse! To think we never met there!’ I said in surprise. Then I admired her dress. ‘You’re so elegant!’

‘You have to do what you can,’ she said. She had dyed a sheet blue, made herself a dress out of it, and applied the pattern at the hem by a batik method. It suited her very well.

She looked at my feet. ‘You can go about barefoot in the country, but there’s rubbish and splinters of glass everywhere in the city. Don’t you have any shoes?’ she asked.

‘I do have a pair of sandals, but they don’t fit, so I can’t really walk in them.’

Of course we were speaking in Berlin dialect. I had learned to love it in the last three years: it was the language of helpful people. Correct High German, on the other hand, had not proved its worth; it was the cultured and educated upper middle class that had failed the test.

About an hour and a half later I opened the door to my apartment in Pankow. I had laboriously dragged the handcart containing all my household goods up to the third floor. I couldn’t risk leaving anything out in the street; it would have been stolen at once.

My feet were hot and sore. I put two chairs side by side in front of the sink so that I could sit there comfortably. There was no gas or electricity on, but there was running water. ‘Hello, dear water-tap,’ I said cheerfully, but much moved at the same time. ‘I’m all alone here, but I’m not really alone. I have you. And I have the great good luck that no landlord or landlady, no one else at all can disapprove of me sitting comfortably here on two chairs, running cold water over my feet.’

And that was what I did.

Afterwards I lay down on the floor, stretched out full length, and immediately fell into a deep sleep.

‘Do you seriously think I would not be intellectually capable of writing down the story of my life if I wanted to?’

My mother, then aged about seventy, shouted this question down the phone in a stentorian voice, as if she were standing in front of her students in the lecture room.

At the other end of the line, the recipient of her forcefully phrased inquiry was a journalist who wanted to publish interviews with survivors of the Nazi period. ‘That’s the last thing I want,’ added my mother, turning to me – I happened to be visiting my parents, and was thus by chance a witness of this phone call.

Much as I understood her, I thought it a great shame that her story might never be written. I was more or less familiar with it, but I was far from knowing all the details.

Before 1997, my mother had never really told the dramatic history of her survival. Now and then she had mentioned something in the family circle, but never as a consecutive narrative, and always out of the blue. You could hardly ever tell what set such reminiscences off.

One of my childhood memories is of a family friend who repeatedly tried to persuade her to write or, better still, dictate her story. ‘Yes, yes,’ my mother would tell her, only to add at once that this, that or the other was more important and must be dealt with first.

Once – I was still at elementary school – my class teacher asked my mother to talk to my fellow pupils about her life in the years just after 1933. She agreed to that request. The lesson set aside for the talk passed quickly, and she still hadn’t really said much, apart from describing relatively minor incidents in the years when she had been in hiding, although she certainly made them sound exciting.

As she grew older, however, she became increasingly willing to talk about the details of her life. For instance, I managed to persuade her to tell the historian Carola Sachse about her experiences doing forced labour for Siemens, and she gave her an interview, under the pseudonym of ‘Gerda B.’, on 22 April 1993. She was very anxious that her real name should not appear in Sachse’s book.
*

At the same time she went along with my wish for her to give an interview to the Berlin historian Raymond Wolff, who was working on the history of the Neukölln doctor Benno Heller, and then to answer his questions at length. However, as she had emphasised to me, she didn’t want to tell him all she knew about Heller, even though it was her opinion that ‘all omissions do considerable damage to the truth’. Again, she does not identify herself in that interview, but calls herself ‘Frau Eissler’. In the case of a woman who had given her shelter when she was on the run, she was also anxious not to identify her by her real name, or to tell Wolff what it was; he did not learn from her that ‘Frau Rademann’ was really a woman called Gerda Janicke, who plays a not inconsiderable part in my mother’s memories.
^†

In June 1993 she also said she was prepared to give a lecture at a conference in Eisenstadt, at the invitation of the University of Vienna, on the subject of ‘The U-Boats – Individual cases of resistance’ (U-Boats being a name that those who had gone underground in the Nazi period gave themselves). Significantly, this lecture was not published because – and I am sure of this – my mother didn’t want it to appear in print. She had given away a good deal of herself in it, probably more than she had intended. This was the first and last time that she spoke in public on the subject.

In the lecture she confined herself to ‘Survival in Berlin’, adding, for the benefit of her audience: ‘This has … the advantage of my being able to draw on my own experience, and where I quote others I can also criticise the sources from an insider’s point of view.’

She devoted a good deal of space in her lecture to Dr Benno Heller and his wife Irmgard, and will have been directly influenced by the interview mentioned above, which she had given only a little while earlier.

I would not admit, being a historian myself, that I couldn’t get my own mother to talk about her life, and so on 26 December 1997, without any warning, I put a tape recorder on the table in my parents’ apartment and said, ‘You’ve always been meaning to tell your story – go ahead.’

Rather taken aback, but also excitedly, my mother began recording her memories up to May 1945 on seventy-seven tapes in chronological order. The recordings followed strict rules; they were continuous, and I did not interrupt her narrative with questions. The clarity of structure was remarkable. My mother could pick up the thread of her story precisely, going on from the end of a previous session that had lasted sixty or often even ninety minutes. In parallel, I did my own research to check her facts. I always told her about it, especially when I came upon several people of the same name, and sorting them out was difficult. She found this extremely interesting, and was particularly glad when my research confirmed what she herself had said.

Our sessions, although interrupted again and again by time that she spent in hospital, went on until 4 September. Some of the recordings were even done in hospital; the last was only a few days before her death. Marie Simon died on 16 September 1998.

It is particularly obvious in the last recordings that her powers were waning, and one can sense the effort it cost her to dictate her memories.

Next the tapes had to be typed out, and then the transcript – some 900 pages – lay fallow for some time, because the copy had to be compared with the sound recordings, and I could not face that directly after my mother’s death.

The writer and journalist Irene Stratenwerth, with whom I have worked for many years on various projects for exhibitions, finally, and with sensitive feeling for the original, turned the long transcript into a self-contained text, the manuscript of this book by Marie Jalowicz Simon. I can hear my mother’s voice in every line of the present work.

Preparing the manuscript entailed not only identifying the most important of the astonishing wealth of details and characters that my mother had remembered, and finding the narrative thread that was always present in my mother’s mind, however far she sometimes deviated from it. The events that she described also had to be exactly reconstructed. Now and then, for instance, she either did not know a precise date or had forgotten it.

The places, names and characters that featured in her memories were to be found in old address books, or the files of a number of different authorities. Many people helped to search various archives. Often it was only through this work of reconstruction that we understood ‘the whole story’ she was telling – and at the same time we kept acknowledging, in retrospect, that Marie Simon was right, and really had said all that was necessary on a given subject.

In the fifteen years since her death my own researches into hundreds of names, addresses and lives have shown that my mother remembered almost every detail correctly. I concluded my research work just before writing this afterword; only a part of what I found is included in the index of names. Describing the course of my research would make a book in itself, including, for instance, the account of how I found the descendants of Hans Goll, who helped my mother in Bulgaria, and those of ‘the Dutchman’.

I would have liked to know more, and in more detail, about the time immediately after the liberation, and also about my mother’s life in the 1950s, but she was not prepared to talk about those periods. That time in her life was not so easily recalled as the preceding years, and by the time she reached it in her account, her strength was failing her.