The Last Jews in Berlin (23 page)

“Resistance” was the word they used, but it did not adequately convey the activity that went on. There was almost no resistance in the accepted sense of the term—saboteurs, assassins, provocateurs. Rather, almost all of the work was defensive, attempts to save the lives of endangered persons—Jews for the most part, but also political dissidents as well as those who were trying to help the oppressed. Much of this help came from individuals, who might offer nothing more than money or a hiding place for a fugitive to stay overnight. But most of the help came from several church groups, one German, the others Scandinavian. It was with one of the latter, the Church of Sweden, that Marushka became involved.

It had begun innocuously enough in a chance meeting with a Protestant priest named Sivkowicz at a 1939 birthday party for a mutual friend. In the course of their conversation Marushka suggested that the most valuable service persons like themselves could perform was to help people get away. Sivkowicz made no comment. A few moments later he drifted away. In the next half hour he did a lot of checking up on Marushka. As they parted he said, “About that thought you had. You might want to get in touch with the pastor at the Swedish church.”

A few days later Marushka called on the pastor, Birger Forell. He acted as though he didn't quite understand what she was talking about. He said simply, “We'll be in touch.”

Whatever it was that these Swedes were attempting, they couldn't succeed without the help of Germans. An offer from a well placed countess with impeccable references was not to be taken lightly. Several weeks after her first contact with the church Marushka received a call from Forell. “There's a man we know who needs a place to stay for a few days,” he said. “Do you suppose you could find him something?”

She passed that test, and several like it in the next few years, until finally, in 1942, she met Eric Wesslen. He was a young, almost cherubic-looking Swede, with atypically dark straight hair, who had originally come to Berlin earlier that year ostensibly to study landscape architecture. He had an informal relationship with the church as a sort of parish worker. Wesslen's real work was to free certain people from the S.S.—to “buy them back,” as he would say—then hide them and eventually export them. Many were Jews, but some were political people. He never explained his priorities. His contact was supposedly a high official of the S.S. He never told Marushka the man's name, and she never asked him for it. He would simply say, “Tonight I'm getting some people back. Can you get them under a roof and find them some food?” She never asked who the people were. She had her one segment of the operation to perform, and that was it.

But gradually, as his respect for Marushka deepened, Wesslen came to rely on her more and more. Often it was Marushka who would propose whom to buy back. She would hear from her neighborhood sources—apartment managers, housewives, merchants, sometimes even the police—when a special person had been taken, and she would then tell Wesslen.

It was a dangerous game he was playing. He knew that if he was caught he could expect no help from the Swedish legation. He did not even like to contemplate the consequences. He simply kept to his task in as straightforward a manner as he could. “You have so-and-so,” he would say. “How much?”

“A kilo of coffee, a kilo of sugar, two cartons of cigarettes, and he's yours,” would come the typical reply. Once the payment was made, the captive would be released.

Inevitably the work got to him. Marushka could see it in the set line of his mouth or the strain in his face when he dropped into her flat. “I had a rough day today,” he told her once. “I bought back several people. The S.S. was really tough. They want more and more. They saw we really wanted those people. They drove a hard bargain.” He sagged against his chair and rubbed his face and let out a long sigh. “Isn't it disgusting to barter a pack of cigarettes or a jar of marmalade or a kilo of coffee for a human life?”

Once they had the people back they had to provide them with lodging, food and papers showing that they were authorized to live or work in Berlin. Often that was where Marushka came in. She had a network of safe houses in which the fugitives could stay for a night or two at a time, as well as an excellent source for counterfeit ration cards, a Chinese printer who worked out of a cellar on the north side of Berlin. Counterfeit identity papers required valid blank forms, but those could be obtained with the help of friendly policemen—sometimes for a bribe, often for nothing. After a document had been forged, there remained the problem of an official stamp. It had to be lifted from some old document and placed on the new one. Marushka accomplished that with an old trick borrowed from her school days, rolling a shelled hard-boiled egg over the old stamp, then transferring the ink onto the new document.

Most of the old documents came from black market sources. Some of the documents were collected from fugitives being smuggled from the country who no longer had need of them. On at least one occasion a document came from an outright theft. Marushka was in line at the grocery one day behind a woman whose pocketbook, hanging from her arm, was gaping open. Inside was the woman's passport. While the woman intently watched the clerk totting up her bill, Marushka gently relieved her of the passport.

The longer the war against the Jews ground on, the more difficult it became to buy them back. Not only did the prices continue to rise, the sellers became more devious. One day Wesslen grimly reported a new tactic by the sellers: to chase after the people they'd just released, take them back into custody and ransom them once more.

Over the weeks Wesslen developed a series of escape routes designed to prevent recapture. He enlisted Marushka's help. One evening he picked up a group of six elderly Jews from the Gestapo and drove them to a rendezvous point, where he turned them over to Marushka. As she led them through a culvert she realized she was being followed. She hid at a bend in the culvert until her pursuer overtook her and then shot him in the leg. The sound of the shot reverberated as though a dozen cannons had gone off. Marushka and the Jews rushed away.

The next day Marushka reported the incident to Wesslen. He was enraged. “That was the stupidest thing you ever did,” he shouted. “You should have killed him.”

Marushka held out her hands imploringly. “I can't kill a man who hasn't got a gun,” she said.

“Of course he had a gun.”

“But he didn't have it out.”

“You're useless,” Wesslen said. “Now we can never use that route again.” He refused to talk to Marushka for several days.

But eventually he forgave her—first, because she was the most valuable ally he had and, second, because he needed her for a vital role in the best plan ever hatched to smuggle Jews out of Berlin.

And now, six weeks later, having played her role, she was trapped in a forest without the slightest clue as to how to get out alive.

Dawn came. Marushka was frozen and hungry, but she was still afraid to move. Whoever had tracked her through the night would be waiting for her to leave the woods. With her wet and filthy clothes she would give herself away.

She waited through the day, praying for an air raid, the only diversion she could imagine that would enable her to escape. As darkness fell, the four curtains of lights came on again. She was still trapped, still hunted.

And then she heard the sirens. Sweet, sweet sound!

Moments later the curtains of lights went out. She heard the bombers droning in and then the thudding explosions. Now or never, she thought. Crouching, weaving, she made her way through the trees until she reached the edge of the forest. Just then there was a tremendous explosion as a bomb hit a factory. Soon the factory was blazing, turning night to dawn. Marushka could see that the road was empty. The moment the all clear sounded she made a dash for the factory. As she had hoped, everyone was suddenly too busy with the fire to pay attention to a lone figure running down the road.

For an hour she helped fight the fire. Soon her clothes were no more wet and soiled than those of the others around her. As soon as the fire was under control she approached an official. “I'm not from this area,” she said. “I was here visiting friends and got caught by the raid, and then I helped put out your fire. Now can you give me some kind of paper saying that's what I've done?” She got the paper without question.

By the next afternoon Marushka had made her way back to Wilmersdorf. When no one was looking she scaled the wall of the churchyard on the Kaiserallee. Wesslen opened to her knock. With him was Erik Perwe, the minister who had succeeded Birger Forell the year before. “Are you going to faint?” he asked.

“I don't think so,” she said.

Perwe grabbed her and led her to a couch.

“How about the people?” she asked.

“They made it,” Wesslen said. “They should be on their way to Sweden.”

Perwe handed her a glass of champagne. She took a sip and fainted.

Involved as she was and great as were the risks she took, Marushka never would learn the depth of the involvement of the Church of Sweden in efforts to assist Jews. Even those persons who worked for the church, either formally or, like Wesslen, informally, did not know everything that was going on. There was only one person who did.

23

H
E WOULD SIT
for hours in the churchyard, working on his ancient charcoal-powered automobile. His staff never understood what he accomplished by his endless tinkering, so they invented an expression to describe it. He was, they said, “polishing his screws.” Wearing a smock and beret, he looked like a French mechanic. Strangers to the church would invariably approach him to ask where they might find the minister. “Well, sit down,” Erik Perwe would say. It would take the strangers several moments to realize that they stood before the brains and guts of the most organized effort in all Berlin to save its remaining Jews.

He was a small but sturdily built man in his late thirties, with burrowing brown eyes that peered out from under protruding brows. Most of the time he walked about with an intense, preoccupied look, as though to warn others away from the secret knowledge he kept. But his smile, when he flashed it, was as hearty as a clown's, and he had the polished diplomat's gift for saying and doing all the right things at the right times. He never said more than a situation demanded, but if the situation demanded a story that would cheer up his listeners, he'd tell that story. While he was concerned with the plight of all oppressed persons, he spent most of his spiritual and psychological resources on the Jews who came to him for help.

One day in September 1942, two weeks after he and his family had settled into the large city villa that served as church, community house and home, Martha Perwe, a striking woman whose beauty was not disguised by the prim garb of a preacher's wife, went down to her husband's basement office to fetch him for lunch. To her astonishment she found a crowd of Jews waiting outside his door, their heads bowed, the Star of David on their coats.

Perwe did not take lunch that day. Instead he sat through the afternoon in his oak chair at his oak desk, listening to his visitors' stories. When he finally came upstairs that evening he removed his horn-rimmed spectacles, rubbed his bloodshot eyes, and said to Martha, “I feel like a lemon squeezed dry.”

“What can you do for them?” she asked.

“I can get them food. I can arrange housing. I can send letters for them.”

“Does that satisfy them?”

“Seldom.”

“What do you do then?”

“I take them in my arms. I cry with them.”

Perwe's dedication to his work was rooted in his belief that God had called him to it. His Church's dedication, no less intense, was both mystical and historical. Its fascination with the Jews went back a hundred years to the time when Jews first began migrating to Sweden. The Church's reaction then had been twofold. First, it attacked the Jews as Christ killers, the classic but superficial response. Second, it sought to convert them.

But the fascination that the Jews held for the Church of Sweden in modern times was only partially explained by its desire for conversions. What lay behind the Church's concern was a sense of guilt for the suspicion in which it had initially held the Jews. The Church's efforts during the Hitler era sprang from a strong desire to atone for its initial attitude.

Coincidentally there existed a practical mechanism for atonement. In 1903 the Church of Sweden had begun to establish missions in those foreign cities in which many of its members had foundered after emigrating from Sweden in the hope of reaching America. Once the plight of the Jews became evident, it was only natural that the Church's Swedish-Israel Mission, founded in the 1870s to assist Jews socially and spiritually—and to convert them—would work through these outlets.

The first major rescue operation began in Vienna in the 1930s, after Austrian priests had been frustrated by the Nazis in their own efforts to help baptized Jews escape the persecutions. Göte Hedenqvist, a minister of the Church of Sweden, was asked by the headquarters of the Austrian Evangelical Church to come to Vienna to assist the converts. But once on the scene, Hedenqvist began to give help to nonbaptized Jews as well. “If they come to me for help, I can't ask them if they are Christians or not,” he told his superiors.

One thousand children and two thousand adult Jews were rescued from Austria before the war made further efforts there impossible. Hedenqvist returned to Sweden and took over the Swedish Mission to the Jews—another name for the Swedish-Israel Mission—as well as the task of resettling Jews then coming to Sweden from Germany with the help of the Church.

The pastor of the Swedish church in Berlin at that time was Birger Forell, a man “as single-minded,” one of his parishioners once observed, “as a dog who's got hold of your pants.” Forell had been in Berlin since 1929; from the moment of the Nazi takeover in 1933 he had been helping Jews and other oppressed persons with a tenacity that often overpowered local authorities. But by 1941 Forell had received so many warnings from powerful Nazis to stop his rescue efforts that he knew his usefulness had ended. In a letter to Perwe, he said, “You should prepare yourself to take over.”