Underground in Berlin (13 page)

In the end Frau Koch found me a lavishly embroidered nightdress with hemstitching round the neck. She had been given it for her confirmation, and had never worn it. ‘It’s a very fine piece,’ she emphasised. She herself always slept in her underwear.

I had learned my lesson: I must tread carefully, and adjust with lightning speed to the habits and lifestyle of anyone who took me in. I depended on the help of other people, and I mustn’t tread on their toes.

The very next day I set out into the city again. One of my first expeditions took me to 44 Rosenthaler Strasse. I felt scared of entering the house, familiar as it had been to me since childhood. It sounds rather infantile, but I was afraid that the house I knew so well would recognise me too, and put me in danger.

I wanted to see Hilde Hauschild, who had been Uncle Arthur’s girlfriend for many years. He had never married her, because she wasn’t Jewish and thus not socially acceptable as our family understood the phrase. But he had helped her to extend an attic at the back of the building, and I had often been her guest in that surprisingly attractive and tastefully furnished apartment.

Hilde and my uncle had met in the market, where Arthur had a stall selling jokes. For instance, you could buy a metal imitation of a big inkblot and put it down on a document to fool someone. Or he sold matchboxes that suddenly began purring and jumping about when you touched them.

Arthur used to flirt with Hilde Hauschild, who helped stallholders in the market, by praising her very strong hair. Her red complexion was not her most attractive point, her nose was not exactly regular, and her teeth were not good. But she had that wonderful hair, and broke a comb almost every day because she couldn’t get it through the tangled strands. Arthur had introduced himself to her by saying, ‘Fräulein, I’ll give you a comb that you’ll never manage to break.’

It hadn’t been easy for Aunt Grete to run a strictly kosher household for her brother on the one hand, and on the other to accept this very unorthodox relationship. She couldn’t stand Hilde Hauschild, and there must have been terrible quarrels between the two women. Grete shouted at her brother’s girlfriend in tones that could be heard right through the stairwell, and Hilde would shout back, ‘Why don’t you cook your brother proper food for a change, so that he doesn’t starve to death?’

However, my own relationship with Hilde Hauschild had always been untroubled, even after Arthur’s death. I had visited her, she had given me food on the sly, and had always acted as if I were a close member of her family. So now I climbed the steps to her attic with my heart thudding in pleasant anticipation. I felt sure that she would help me. Maybe she could send me to her family on the Baltic coast.

When I reached her door I saw a strange name on it. I rang the bell, but there was no one in. Then I tried her neighbours. Finally a woman opened her door and said, ‘Looking for Fräulein Hauschild? She got married all of a sudden, to a good class of man at that, an engineer in Rostock.’ No, she had not left an address. I went sadly away.

I spent a few nights with Tati Kupke, the sister of my aunt by marriage Mia Lindemann. The two of them had a very nice father; old Grandpa Lindemann was a joiner, and a communist of long standing who lived in Pankow. In 1933 he had told Mia, ‘I know you like the comforts of life, and your husband provided them for you. You and he shared the good times together. If you
dare
to leave him and your children by him just because it’s awkward now that the Nazis are in charge, I shall put you over my knee and beat the living daylights out of you. People don’t do such things in our family.’

Sure enough, Mia did stand by Uncle Herbert, and just before the Second World War broke out she escaped to England with him, Kurt-Leo and Hannele.

Her sister Tati had never had any Nazi sympathies either. Her husband Willi had been an active communist until 1933, and had remained true to his convictions. They had half a room with a couch in their little apartment in Pankow, and the couch was made up for me with clean sheets at once.

On the very first night I found Willi standing beside my bed. A weedy-looking man with a crumpled face, and in a nightshirt far too short for him, he indistinctly muttered a few revolting obscenities. You can guess the rest of it. I could neither kick up a fuss nor send him back, so I just let him have his way. But I felt sure that Tati knew what was going on.

I felt so embarrassed that I couldn’t look her in the eye.

The next night Willi appeared again, haunting the place like a nocturnal ghost. There were other reasons why I couldn’t stay any longer. Everyone in that apartment block had sharp ears, and there were any number of Nazis in it. On days of political celebration a sea of swastika banners hung there. Sooner or later I would have attracted attention.

I found someone else to help me. Because he was a Jew, Ernst Schindler, an old friend of my father’s, had been forced to retire ages ago. He was living in a mixed marriage with an Aryan wife in Gaudystrasse, in the north of Berlin. I had met him and the teacher Dr Max Bäcker a couple of times in the last few months. We had begun to learn Swedish together. It was Bäcker, a passionate advocate of the educational profession, and left in a wheelchair after the First World War, who said, ‘Do we really want to waste our time telling each other that the war is a disaster and the Nazis are criminals? Surely we have better things to do.’ Unfortunately we got no further than the third lesson.

Schindler, who himself lived in a very small apartment, found me a place to stay with a woman friend called Lotte in Karlstrasse.
*
In appearance at least this woman corresponded to the idea of an intellectual
par excellence
. She was in about her mid-forties, had her black hair cut like a man’s, and wore a pair of heavy horn-rimmed glasses. Lotte was of working-class origin, but had studied at further education classes, and had then been a secretary for the Social Democrat Party until 1933. ‘I will never in my life be a Nazi,’ she told me right at the start, ‘but I want no more to do with the Social Democrats either. Please don’t ask me any more about that.’ Otherwise she hardly spoke to me. I realised that she wanted to be left alone, and asked her for something to read.

She lived alone in two rooms, one leading to the other, in a cultivated apartment with bourgeois furnishings. Unfortunately the toilet was half a flight of steps lower down in the corridor of the building, and that was a terrible problem. I couldn’t leave the apartment to go to the toilet in the daytime.

Lotte went out early in the morning, and did not come back until late in the evening. I either had to leave the building with her and spend all day walking round the city – or stay in the apartment and keep perfectly quiet.

So Lotte asked me to get hold of a container in which I could put my stools. I couldn’t empty it until she was home. That was disgusting enough, but there was worse to come. I couldn’t find any such container. However, every few days I met Frau Koch in Köpenick. She regularly brought me legs of mutton that she got from an abattoir without ration coupons, handed me the cooked dish in a metal container with a lid, and I had to use the same container for toilet purposes.

Soon I couldn’t stand the sight of mutton. It nauseated me, but I had to eat the stuff cold, with a horrible sauce. My aversion to eating from the container in which I also transported my shit became so strong that I felt sick at the mere sight of it. However, of course, I had to thank Frau Koch effusively for the food intended for me. Once she brought me kohlrabi too, in the same metal pot. I couldn’t bring myself to eat any of it.

One Sunday Lotte took me with her on an excursion. We met a young married couple who were friends of hers at Bernau Station. I enjoyed getting to know them, for the young couple were very well read. We talked excitedly about all manner of things. At some point I mentioned Kant’s
Critique of Pure Reason
. My landlady drew me aside and said, ‘You still have a lot to learn. The Augustins are neither Nazis nor anti-Nazis. They’re nice people, that’s all, so you should hold your tongue.’ In other words, I mustn’t draw attention to myself with remarks about Kant.

After some fourteen days Schindler found me my next place to stay. This time it was with his former cleaning lady. He himself had not been able to afford any household help for a long time, for he and his wife were living on the tiny salary she earned working in an office somewhere.

Ida Kahnke lived close to him, in Schönhauser Allee. Schindler knew that she was an anti-Nazi. The toothless old woman looked like a witch. The entire area round her mouth had caved in, and she had a prominent nose. In addition she was very thin – dried up, but not thin like a piece of string, flat like a bug.

As toilet attendant in a civil service office, she could use every extra pfennig that came her way. She chuckled happily when Schindler, who had no money himself, offered her ten marks to take me in for two weeks. But she made it clear that she would have done that even if no money was forthcoming. ‘When I was young I was a communist, but when you’re older you get religious,’ she often said. She was a Jehovah’s Witness, and they were banned at the time.

Ida Kahnke lived in the back part of what had once been a large and grand apartment. She really had only one room, the former kitchen, which was tiled and terribly uncomfortable. She had rented this room to a friendly young man. Unfortunately he stuttered and wet the bed. He dried his wet sheets in the room, and it made the whole apartment stink. Otherwise there was only a small servants’ room converted for use as a kitchen. Part of that room, again, was divided off as the toilet. The old woman slept in a kind of alcove in a back corner of the entrance hall, and I had perforce to share her big old wooden bed.

Her entire library was kept in the drawer of the kitchen table, and consisted of a few well-worn pamphlets prophesying the end of the world. I had nothing to do all day but sit in a decrepit wicker chair and leaf through these pamphlets. As the paper on which they were printed was filthy, I turned the pages with knitting needles.

I couldn’t move about freely. An invalid lived one floor below, and would have heard me at once. So I sat there idly, waiting for Frau Kahnke and munching the piece of bread that she left for me.

To make matters worse, Ida Kahnke’s brother Hugo was released from prison at just this time. He had served quite a long sentence for killing his wife, or perhaps the woman was his lover. Ida Kahnke was terribly afraid of him, telling me how he could burst in hopelessly drunk, demanding money, and so on. And he turned up just as she had described. I wished I were invisible, but he took no notice of me, and half an hour later he had gone again, because as soon as he got out of prison he had found himself a woman of some kind.

One weekend there was a birthday coffee party at Frau Kahnke’s. I sat inconspicuously in a corner, but found it fascinating. There were some men there, friends of Hugo’s, criminals by profession, and in addition a couple of Ida’s friends, devoutly bigoted members of the same sect. The common denominator, I noted inwardly, was that they were outsiders living a borderline life. They played ancient hit songs on an old gramophone with a horn and danced in the style of around 1900, waggling their hips. It was so grotesque that I pinched my arm and wondered if this was reality or a dream.

However, I also began thinking about social questions. After all, I was living in circumstances that I could never have dreamed of. It was clear to me that this horrid apartment was something perfectly normal, and quite a number of people lived like Ida Kahnke.

One day I was sitting in my wicker chair as usual, when the door suddenly opened and masculine footsteps approached. At first I took fright, thinking it was someone breaking in. But it turned out that the man, who was Bulgarian, lived in the same building, and had a key to this apartment because he had promised Frau Kahnke to decorate her kitchen. He had taken a day off work on the excuse of being sick and was here with a bucket of paint to surprise her.

He too was startled to see me. But he said at once, in broken German, ‘Housebreakers aren’t nice women like you.’ He was charming, and one thing soon led to another. By the time Ida Kahnke came home that afternoon, we were ready to tell her we were engaged. Dimitr Petrov Tchakalov – that was his name – was going to take me home to Bulgaria with him. We only had to find a way to get me there.

I was in love, indeed very much in love. He was a delightful man, with his gleaming black, thick hair, his dark eyes and his snow-white teeth. He often sang Bulgarian folksongs, rather sentimental ones, but in a very attractive voice. I really did want to go with him. Of course I didn’t tell anyone that I was secretly hatching a plan to go from Bulgaria over the border to Turkey, and then continue to make my way on foot to Palestine.

After two weeks, Frau Kahnke passed me on to another toilet attendant, a Frau Schulz in Lychener Strasse. Once again Schindler paid ten marks for me to go there, even though he was so impoverished himself. And once again I ended up in an almost identical wicker chair.

Frau Schulz worked all day, borrowed a lot of light literature from a lending library once a week, and let me have one of the books to read. She hardly ever spoke to me. A Frau Lauer, her former sister-in-law but now her deadly enemy, lived one flight of stairs down in the same building. On no account must this woman notice that I was staying in the apartment; that was the main problem.

But Frau Schulz had a good deal of experience, and she pointed out to me one day, ‘I see what’s up with you – you’ve got a little one on the way.’

She was right, and it couldn’t be ignored any longer. I had been suffering from morning sickness for weeks. I simply could not get down disgusting food like the mutton that Frau Koch brought me any more. I also knew who had made me pregnant. I hadn’t had anything to do with my Chinese fiancé for a long time, and I had only recently met the Bulgarian. The child’s father could only be Ernst Wolff.

The one person who could help me now was Dr Benno Heller. I had already heard a great deal about this Jewish gynaecologist. All the women who had been treated by him praised him highly. I had crossed his path once already, when I visited Toni Kirschstein in the Jewish Hospital after an operation.