Shadows of Berlin

14.

The Grosse Hamburger Strasse

November 1943. After four years, the weight of the war is depressing daily life in Berlin. Ersatz tobacco and greasy margarines are commonplace, as are meat shortages and leather shortages, while chemical substitutes of every ilk abound. Long lines lead to short tempers. Everyone’s patching and mending and re-­mending, and everyone smells stale. The newsreels and headlines are still shrill about ultimate victory, but even the Propaganda Ministry cannot fully camouflage the truth. Hamburg has been incinerated by the British Royal Air Force. And while huge flak towers have been erected around Berlin, bristling with antiaircraft guns, the city remains a regular target for bombers.

In the darkened cinema mezzanine, Angelika listens to a fanfare of trumpets. An iron eagle perched on a wreathed hooked cross is silhouetted by a sunburst as the newsreel title unspools: “Die Deutsche Wochenschau.” Angelika gazes up at the images and listens to the newsreel’s narrator’s bombastic tone. On the screen, at least, the Wehrmacht advances! Victory is still inevitable even in defeat.

She is bundled up against the cold in clothes that are ill fitting and patched. Ten years before, modeling for Lavinia, she’d been dressed in silks from the finest designers. She walked Berlin in the most fashionable shoes. Tuition had been paid for her classes at a well-­known fashion school. She thought she was finally free of the scrimping life. The miserly life of the Barn Quarter. Counting pennies, counting buttons. But then everything was stolen from her, step by step, year by year, until she had nothing left but her looks. Nothing but the green of her eyes and the flame of her hair.

Now she is scrounging her clothing from street markets and rubbish bins because at least these clothes do not include “the yellow ornament” as her father calls it. The Judenstern. She had tried to design stylish cloaks and dresses that could absorb the star into their color combinations, that could truly transform the badge into an ornament of fashion. But ration coupons for material were beyond her grasp. And then? Deportation orders had arrived for her and for her mother. Her mamme was frightened. She didn’t want to go underground, she wanted to obey the authorities, she wanted to report as commanded, but Angelika’s father had refused to allow this. Tatte did not believe the propaganda. At least Angelika can be grateful to him for that. Jewish resettlement camps with work, but also food and warm clothing? What Nazi potentate would invest in that? Think! What was more likely? There were already terrible stories circulating of mass executions and special camps for gassing. No, they would not report. He had stashed away a bit of money. They must go into hiding, Tatte insisted.

Now, up in the mezzanine of a cinema, Angelika’s mother is sunk in beside her daughter. She is also bundled in frayed clothes. Mamme was once a stunning beauty, as she likes to remind anyone who will listen. She could have married a banker’s son. Oh yes. He was interested, and he was a smart man too. He would have seen it all coming. She’s sure of this. Now she could have been living in safety and comfort in Cuba or perhaps South America, in a big house with servants, but instead she picked love like a fool. Her looks are all gone now. Worn away. She looks half-­starved and exhausted. There is something jittery, high-­strung, and childlike about her. With an edgy whisper, she clutches her daughter’s arm. “Something must have happened.”

Nothing is said.

“He should have been here by now.”

Still, no words spoken by her daughter.

“Something must have happened. Gelika. Are you listening to me?”

Nothing.

“I said, ‘Are you listening to me?’”

“I heard what you said, Mamme,” Angelika tells her. “Please be quiet.”

Silence between them. Then, “Where has he gotten to?”

“Mamme, please. He’s coming. Just stay calm.” Angelika returns to gazing at the newsreel, but her mother is clearly not comforted.

“Something must have happened.”

But then there he is, thank God for that, if there is a God to thank. Angelika’s father is squeezing into the chair beside her mother. He is still a handsome man, Tatte, with a silvering beard, though poorly barbered. His face is terribly careworn and his eyes heavy like lead. He wears a hat that’s lost its shape and an oversized coat, and he grips a kraft-paper envelope, pressing it tightly against him.

Her mother gushes with raw relief. “Oh, blessed is the name, Tatte, you’re here. But you’re so late.”

“It took time, Mamme,” he says. “It’s not a simple business.”

“Well, never mind,” his wife says dismissively. “At least we can be thankful now it’s over.”

“Not quite.”

His words take a moment to sink in.

“What?” his wife wants to know. “Gelika, what is Tatte saying?” This is an irksome habit of her mother’s, asking Angelika to translate her father’s meaning. But it’s Tatte who answers.

“There was a complication,” he says in Yiddish, pretending to watch the newsreel. Es iz geven a kamplakeyshan. “The man wanted more money.”

“But…” Mamme swallows. “But that’s all the money we have. There is no more money. Didn’t you tell him this?”

“Of course, I told him, what do you think? Am I an idiot? The man doesn’t care about our problems, Mamme. He wanted more money.” Finally, he confesses at the end of the story. “All I could afford was one.”

Again, a blank terror hushes Mamme’s voice. “One?”

Tatte does not respond to her. He relinquishes the envelope quickly, reaching across his wife and forcing it into his daughter’s hands. “For you, Angelika,” he declares. “Put it away quickly.”

Angelika blinks at the envelope, stupefied.

Her mother is asking, “Why only one, Tatte? Why only hers?”

“Because she is our only child, Mamme. She is the only one who matters to the future.” Then he frowns at Angelika. “Put it away, I said.”

“But what are we to do, Tatte?” Mamme wants to know. “You and I? Gelika, what is your father saying?”

But Angelika understands that her mother has been erased from the conversation.

“You should go. Now,” her father commands. “I think I may have been followed.”

The fear rises in Mamme’s voice. “Followed? Followed by whom?”

Again, to Angelika he speaks. “Go. Your mamme and I will look after ourselves. Go. You must.”

Mamme is whispering frantically. “I don’t understand. I don’t understand… What is happening?” But her daughter understands perfectly, and she is on the move. She kisses her parents quickly. Deflects her mamme’s beseeching voice.

“Goodbye, Mamme. Goodbye, Tatte.” That’s all she says. What else can she say but goodbye? Vacating the mezzanine, she forces the image of her parents into the background of her mind as the martial sweep of the newsreel anthem reaches its crescendo.

The sound of the film is muted as Angelika descends the stairs to the lobby, hurried but measured. Excusing herself, she shoves past a slower-­moving patron, who squawks a mild complaint as he’s forced to clear the way, causing him to bump into two men in leather trench coats who are ascending the steps to the mezzanine. The leather coats and snap-­brim hats are the standard uniform of the Gestapo, so it’s the patron who’s apologizing now. Angelika makes it past without a whiff of Stapo interest.

Cutting through the lobby crowd, she’s almost at the doors to the street. Almost free! When a hand seizes her by the wrist.

“Not so fast,” she hears the man instruct. She doesn’t call out, just tenses for confrontation. The hand belongs to a slyly handsome young man with flaxen blond hair and eyes like gray smoke. He wears a snap-­brim hat and an expensive cashmere coat, but there is something of the working-­class scavenger about him. A handsome fox from the proletariat. Drawing her in closer, he has a question for her. “So. Where is your star, Liebchen?”

He gives her a piece of advice. He, the man with the flaxen hair. Make yourself useful to them. These are the words he speaks as she and her parents are loaded into the rear of a green police lorry along with other captured U-­boats. One of the Gestapo trench coats calls over to him with a certain camaraderie. “Not a bad haul. A good day’s work!” The blond fox grins, showing teeth, but then squeezes Angelika’s arm and whispers into her ear. His lips close. His breath heated. “Make yourself useful to them,” he instructs. Nützlich is the word he chooses for her. Helpful. Beneficial. Valuable.

The stones in the oldest Jewish cemetery in Berlin have been desecrated. Workers have used pickaxes, spades, and sledgehammers to smash tombstones and to dig a zigzagged air-­raid trench through the burial ground. Fractured gravestones bear the Magen David and epitaphs in Hebrew. Bones have been cleared like roots. This is Grosse Hamburger Strasse. Across the street from the cemetery stands what was once the Jewish Community Home for the Aged, but the elderly inhabitants have long since been evacuated eastward. Now the building is the Grosse Hamburger Strasse Sammellager, a collection camp for Berlin Jews. An assembly camp run by the Gestapo for filling deportation quotas set by the SS Jewish Bureau, Referat IV B4.

Inside, Angelika is shivering alone, confined to a dark portion of the building’s cellar. She had been beaten and bloodied for two days in a Gestapo cellar in the Burgstrasse before being trucked over to this place and dumped. It was not the first time in her life she had been struck. As a child, her mother would slap her or come after her with a wooden kitchen paddle, and after a certain age, after certain changes in her body, her father would slap her too. Once after she was caught kissing that goyische boy from the bottle factory, her tatte struck her so hard with a closed fist that she saw stars in the middle of the day.

But never before had she been subjected to a sustained beating as she had been in the Burgstrasse cellar. It was a pounding, administered by a Gestapo brute in his shirtsleeves, who had “interrogated” her while she was manacled to a chair. He struck her face and split her lip. Tore her bloodstained blouse and struck her shoulders with a cudgel, punched her in the stomach so that she vomited bile. Twice he jammed the muzzle of a pistol against her forehead and threatened to fire. And all the while repeating the same demand. Talk. Yet she had nothing to say. She did not know anything. She was not privy to names or locations of black marketeers. She knew nothing of the forger who had produced the false identity card she had been arrested carrying.

Tatte had always handled all the logistics. Their contacts for food. For a roof over their heads. She never knew the names of their hiders and seldom even recognized where they were. Somewhere in Little Wedding? Somewhere in Berlin-­Kreuzberg? They traveled during blackout hours. No lights beyond an electric torch with colored tissue over the lens. But this brute didn’t really seem interested in her explanations. He didn’t really seem interested in answers at all. His entire justification for existence was to beat. To strike. To hurt. This continued until she lost all track of time. Until she felt each blow like a numbing vibration thrumming through her body, until she wondered if the dim light of the cellar would be the last light she would ever see.

But a day later, her lip scabbed, her eyes blackened, she was transferred here. To the Grosse Hamburger assembly camp. Deposited alone in another cellar, where she now assumes she is waiting for death. She assumes that the beatings will begin again and that when the next brute finally grows weary of dispensing the blows, she will actually get the bullet. Since she met Audi Goldstein when she was fourteen and he took her in the rear of his glossy Invicta, since then she has learned many things about men and their desires. Men and their weaknesses. Men and their brutalities.

A slash of light cuts across her face as a key clanks in the lock and the door thuds open. A uniformed SS warder steps in. “On your feet, Jewess,” he tells her, already bored with the process of her death. She is taken to a room abovestairs. A harshly lit room, where she is seated at an oaken table. Can this be the room where she will be shot? It seems a bit too neat. And would they really bother to seat her in a chair to shoot her? There are no manacles here as there were in Burgstrasse. A photo of the SS chief, Herr Reichsführer Himmler, hangs above the head of the table, gazing into the air, as if she is too insignificant for him to notice. The same bored SS man who brought her in now stands by as the door creaks open, and in comes a man dressed in a tailored, double-­breasted suit and a silk tie, sporting a party badge on his lapel. He seems harried as he strides into the room, all business, and plops himself into the chair facing Angelika. Opens a sheath of papers and scowls at them.

“You are the Jewess Angelika Sara Rosen?” he asks, though it doesn’t sound like a question as much as a dreary accusation. His eyes flick upward in response to her silence. “Answer, please,” he tells her. A small moment of instruction.

“Yes.” Angelika obeys.

“I am Kriminal-­Kommissar Dirkweiler. But you will address me as Herr Kommandant,” he informs her.

She repeats the lesson. “Yes. Herr Kommandant.”

“You were found in possession of illegal identification documents,” says he. This time, all he needs do is flick his eyes upward to prompt her reply.

“Yes. Yes, Herr Kommandant.”

“Forged documents.”

She swallows. “May I ask, Herr Kommandant? Where are my parents?”

The man frowns absently. “Your parents? They are in the room above us. What we call the Ost Zimmer. Tomorrow you will join them on the train that will transport you to the east. Unless…”

She stares. Opens her mouth, but her voice has deserted her. All she can manage is a weak gasp for air. The east. It is well known among the U-­boats what this means. Regardless of the promises of propaganda, regardless of the lies told about resettlement of Jewish war labor, by now the truth is known. The east is death.

“Unless”—­the Herr Kommandant repeats himself—­“you decide to confess to your crime.”

“It’s true.” Angelika’s eyes go damp with tears. “It’s true, Herr Kommandant. The documents were forged. It’s true.”

“It’s true, you say. And yet according to the report from Untersturmführer Dr. Kraus of the Stapoleitstelle Burgstrasse, you have refused to divulge the name of the criminal who supplied you with these forged documents. The forger himself.”

Tears burn her eyes. “I cannot, Herr Kommandant,” she says. “I cannot divulge what I do not know.”

“So you purchased forged documents from a man with no name?”

“I have no idea, Herr Kommandant. About any name. I never saw the man.”

“Is that so? Very strange,” he says. “For according to the confession of the Jew…” He must consult his paperwork for the name. “The Jew Ernst Israel Rosen.” He raises his face to her. “That is your father, is it not?” he asks but does not wait for a reply. “According to his confession, it was you—­his daughter—­who organized illegal transactions.”

Angelika is stunned. Devastated. “My father?” She cannot. She cannot believe this. “My father said this?”

“Are you telling me he lied?” Dirkweiler wonders.

But Angelika is too shocked to utter another word in response.

“Must I repeat my question? Are you telling me that your father has lied?”

Angelika stares. Her eyes are bright with tears. Her brain is steaming. She is trying to work out the puzzle. There is a strong answer and a weak answer, but which is which? Whom does she incriminate? Her tatte who just betrayed her? Or herself? And then she thinks of the blond Jew’s instruction. Nützlich! Make yourself useful to them. “No, Herr Kommandant,” she answers. “My father does not lie.”

“No? Then you will confess to your crime, please, and give me the name of the damned forger!”

“Yes, Herr Kommandant,” she answers. Her tears are like acid. “I do confess. And I will give you the name. But first, I beg you. Allow me to see my parents.”

Again the smirk. “You are a very attractive specimen,” the Herr Kommandant decides, but she senses no physical desire behind his words. Only a statement of fact. Then he is up from the chair. “The name of the forger in one hour,” he demands, his voice dull now, devoid of interest. “Either provide it for me, or you and your parents will be on the train tomorrow.”

It’s true what the Herr Kommandant told her about the room abovestairs. In the Grosse Hamburger Strasse Lager, the most unfortunate of the Jewish prisoners are housed on the top floor. The so-­called Ost Zimmer. The East Room. Women, men, children, some U-­boats, some with the Judenstern still sewn to their clothing, all packed together on dirty straw mattresses. Some cry in the Ost Zimmer. Some pray. Some sing to their children. All fear desperately. Angelika is crouched in front of her tatte and mamme. Her bruises still sting. Her rage is an oven. But she contains it all. No screaming. No hysterics. All the pain, all the anger is distilled into the cold of her eyes.

Tatte is beseeching her. “Please, Angele. Forgive me. I had no idea. I thought, with a female, they would be lenient.”

“Look at my face, Tatte. Does it look as if they were lenient?”

“I’m sorry. I’m sorry.” Tearfully he reaches out to cradle his daughter’s face. “My child,” he says, as if perhaps a father’s touch alone can heal the bruises. She winces but does not draw herself away.

“Do you know why we are here, Tatte? Here. Up on the top floor? It’s because…” she starts to say but stops. Removes her father’s hand and gives a quick glance around them. Her voice drops. “It’s because tomorrow, everyone here will be loaded onto the train.”

Mamme is confused, which only amplifies her fear. “The train? What train? Train to where?”

“Mamme, keep your voice down,” Angelika orders and then turns to her father to answer the question. “The train to the east.”

A fearful whisper from Mamme. “The east? Tatte, what does that mean, the east?”

“Shoosh, Mamme. Quiet,” is all her husband has to say to her. He has not broken eye contact with his Angelika. “Is there something?” he says very carefully. “Something you can do, Daughter? Perhaps if one of these officials… If they notice you.”

His daughter stares back at him.

The door opens at the opposite end of the room, causing a rustle of panicky voices. A pair of men from the Jewish orderly squad appear. They wear the yellow star, but they have adopted a bully’s swagger in their dung-­gray coveralls. Of the two, the stocky ordner with the facial scar seems to be the man in charge, since he carries the list, while the other carries the placards.

“Everyone listen clearly!” the stocky one shouts. “If your name is called, you will raise your hand and keep it raised until you have received a placard. You are to wear the placard at all times hung from around your neck until tomorrow when you are boarded onto the train. If you have infants or children under the age of six, they will travel with you but do not require a placard. Is this understood?” He does not wait for the answer that is not forthcoming anyway but goes straight into his list. “Grünberg, Moses. Grünberg, Silva. Hirsch, Otto. Hirsch, Shira. Hirsch, Eva!” And so it goes. As the ordner continues to shout out names—­“Blume, Alfred. Blume, Gottfried!”—­the prisoners dutifully raise their hands, even the children, and the second ordner distributes small placards on strings bearing the letter T.

T for Transport.

“Rosen, Karlotte. Rosen, Ernst. Rosen, Angelika!”

“Must we raise our hands, Tatte?” Mamme wants to know.

He replies with his eyes still locked into Angelika’s stare. “Yes, Mamme. We must raise our hands.” And so he does. Mamme anxiously follows. But Angelika’s hand remains unraised, and her face is coolly decisive.

“Give me the name,” Angelika says.

“The name?” her father repeats.

“The name of the forger,” she tells him.

He swallows. “Angelika. That’s a death sentence for the man.”

“You want me to do something, Tatte?” she asks him. “Then I must give something. Speak.”

Angelika is seated again at the battered table but with the T placard around her neck. The same Waffen-­SS man stands by when the door creaks again sharply, and in comes Kommandant Dirkweiler, now in a necktie and his shirtsleeves. He is no sooner in the room when Angelika blurts it out.

“Heinz Zollinger!”

The man stops dead.

“You asked for a name, Herr Kommandant. I have given you a name,” she says. “Heinz Zollinger. He is a printer’s apprentice in the Warschauer Strasse, Horst-­Wessel-­Stadt. He is your forger.”

The Herr Kommandant slumps slightly at the shoulders. He looks satisfied, perhaps even slightly entertained. “Well. That wasn’t so difficult, was it? To be a little useful after all to the Reich?” he asks. “To me?”

Angelika raises her eyes level with his, those eyes that can cut a man to shreds. “No, Herr Kommandant. Not so difficult. All I ask is for a small amount of mercy. For me,” she says, touching the placard. “For my parents.”

“Fine,” he answers in quite an offhanded manner, waving the matter off, like swatting away a buzzing insect. “You and your parents are off the list.” An inconsequential matter when there are so many Jews in his custody to replace them. “I will see to it that you and they can turn in your necklaces,” he says, indicating the card hung from her neck.

Angelika breathes. “Thank you, Herr Kommandant.”

“But perhaps you are unaware?” he says, frowning.

She is confused.

“Unaware of the special privileges available to some in this lager. There are Jews here who I keep,” he explains. He seems quite intent on apprising her of this. “Certain choice specimens who work in my service.”

His service? “Herr Kommandant. I don’t understand.” Does he mean as a concubine? She’s heard rumors of such arrangements with lecherous types in the party or the SS. Men who keep a Jewish girlfriend for fun. “How—­in your service?”

Dirkweiler smiles briefly, a spasm. “By catching up with your fellow Jews still out on the streets. Your fellow Israelites on the run,” he clarifies, obviously proud of his clever operation. “The Jew Cronenberg, for instance, who brought you in. He’s one of my top hounds, and he seems to think that you are worth my consideration,” the Herr Kommandant informs her. “I’m beginning to believe he might be correct.”