Shadows of Berlin

15.

Rewards for Those Who Work

Der Suchdienst is what it’s called. The Search Service in the employ of Kommandant Dirkweiler. Search Service Jews are allotted special permits typed on green card stock that authorize their travel to anywhere in the city where they prowl the cafés, the cinemas, the street corners. They patrol the parks and the air raid shelters looking to net Jewish U-­boats. They are known as “Greiferen.” Grabbers. Catchers. They are given extraordinary privileges inside the Grosse Hamburger Lager. A share in the loot. Nice clothing that’s free of the Judenstern. Jewelry, liquor, and money to pocket. The best are issued their own pistols. They travel with Gestapo handlers, or sometimes they work without supervision in pairs, surveilling the U-­Bahn stations, the S-­Bahn routes, the parks, the foreign embassies of neutral countries. They are Jews who hunt Jews.

Inside the lager building, they are separated from the population who are headed for the trains. Some are even assigned rooms with a door that they are authorized to close. They are permitted a bed, a chair, and lamps, a table to place a phonograph upon. Emil selects a record for the turntable and lightly drops the needle. A well-­known chanteuse warbles. Sing, Nachtigall, sing.

Emil Cronenberg. Tall, slim, handsome as a wolf, but most importantly blond like any Aryan. He is always happy to explain his ancestral history. A Mischling grandmother and an Aryan grandpa, or was it the other way around? Every time he reviews his family tree, the good German branches tend to change. The tree is never the same twice. But this much Angelika is sure of. He comes from nothing. The factory slums. And even with his fancy leather trench coat and snap-­brim fedora, he holds himself like a prole, hunched against the world. He sounds like a prole. It only takes a few shots of Gilka and he reveals himself as an Urberliner from Neukölln. “Ick gloob’ meen Schwein pfeift!” he shouts in disbelief. I think my pig is whistling!

But there’s a boyishness to him, underneath the leather trench. A defensive posture. It’s obvious to her in his obsession over the phonograph. So proud of it is he. She thinks it means more to him than the glossy blue French Citroën that Dirkweiler has authorized for his use in touring the town on the hunt. The phonograph’s dark mahogany case, the polished brass trumpet. A little slum boy with this elegant possession. It is touching. Having that phonograph, she supposes, is proof that he is someone now. Like all men, he wants to see himself as a force to be reckoned with. And in many ways, he is. A charming force. A brutal force too.

There are other catchers in the Grosse Hamburger Strasse. She works briefly beside a true killer, a man called Grizmek, but he stabs his Stapo handler on a train and vanishes. Why does she not do the same? Why would she? How can life as an underground Jew possibly compare? When Dirkweiler pairs her with Emil, it is a successful match. They grab four U-­boats on their first outing together.

Emil is driving the Citroën up the Friedrichstrasse, a blond forelock hanging out from under the brim of his hat, a cigarette dangling from his lips. He likes the Bulgarian brand. Makedon Perfekt. They are rough smoking, just like he is. Angelika can hear her own voice, edging toward seduction. “Emil Cronenberg… Who is this Emil Cronenberg?”

But really, even as she asks, she wonders: Who will ever know the answer to such a question? That night, they have intercourse on Emil’s bed while the phonograph plays. Rosita Serrano’s chilly “Roter Mohn.” Red Poppy.

Colder weather for Berlin at this time of year. The windows of the Café Bollenmüller are steam-­clouded. The noise of the café’s lunchtime service is subdued. The accordionist is taking a break for a smoke. Angelika and Emil share a table. She wears a long, trimly cut black woolen coat with Bakelite pinwheel buttons and a thick lambswool collar. A black felt hat with a wide, dipping brim and a single pheasant feather tucked into the velvet band. She knows where they came from, these clothes. They came from those who will no longer need such glamour rags.

A shabbily clad girl, skinny as a pike, enters the café and stands anxiously alone by the bar, rubbing her fingers for warmth.

“There’s one,” Emil says. “You see her? The skinny broom that just walked in.”

Angelika looks closer. She wants to learn. He says she has the gift. All she needs is to learn the tricks. “What gives her away?” she asks.

“You tell me. Does she look Jewish?” he asks her.

Angelika squints. This question feels like a trap. “I don’t know. Do you look Jewish? Do I?”

“Pay attention,” Emil instructs.

A pause as she studies the prey. Smoke drifts across her line of sight from Emil’s cigarette.

“She’s frightened.” Angelika can see that.

“Yes, but more. What else?”

“Her clothes are patched,” Angelika offers.

Emil shrugs as he taps a bit of ash into the tin ashtray. “Many people patch their clothes. It’s rationing. But you’re close,” he tells her. “What else?”

Another pause. Her eyes go deeper. Deeper. Then it strikes her like a match struck to a flame. “Her shoes.”

Emil shows her an approving smile. “Good. You have it. She’s a U-­boat. She walks everywhere, day and night, searching for a place to hide, so her shoes are falling off her feet.”

A dark-­headed youth in an old winter coat enters and touches the skinny girl’s arm. She is startled but then relieved. They confer quietly, and the youth guides her to a table.

“Now, he looks Jewish,” Angelika decides.

But Emil is shaking his head. “No,” he tells her. “Never trust that. Never trust the propaganda. Hooked noses, Jewish earlobes. It’s rubbish. See beyond it. You can. You have the hunter’s instinct.”

Another young woman appears at the café’s entrance with a limp. She is alert. Well-­dressed. Olive skin and a thick bush of dark hair.

“Oh no,” Angelika hears herself whisper.

“What is it?”

The girl with the limp searches the room, eyes darting, until she spies the two young people at the table and, with an uneven gait, hurries over to join them. Sitting closely beside the dark-­headed youth. She looks happy. Happy to see them. Happy to be sitting next to this boy.

“I know that girl. The girl with the limp.”

“You know her?”

“We were in the art school,” Angelika says. “Years ago when I was a student at Feige-­Strassburger. Her hair was shorter then, but I remember that goose’s waddle.”

Emil sounds pleased. “Well,” he says, “sometimes the manna simply falls from heaven.” Crushing out his cigarette, he slips on his snap-­brim hat and stands, removing a Walther PPK automatic pistol from his coat pocket. “So are you with me,” he asks her, “or am I working alone?”

The Grosse Hamburger Strasse Lager. Inside the dreary room, her father jumps to his feet as if to rush to embrace her under the gaze of Himmler’s portrait. “Angelika,” he cries aloud, but then he stops dead, stands like he’s nailed to the floorboards. She closes the door behind her, gazes back at his fearful, hopeful eyes.

No embrace is offered. “Sit down, Tatte,” she instructs. But he remains on his feet.

“Your mother,” he says. “She is still abovestairs.”

“Yes,” Angelika tells him. “I didn’t want to deal with her hysterics,” she explains bluntly. “I wanted to speak to you alone. Now, sit.” This time, it’s fully a command. A command he follows, sitting slowly. Carefully.

“You’ve done well, Gelika,” he tells her with a cautious touch of pride. “Managing yourself. Look how beautiful in such clothes. Like a page from a magazine.” Angelika says nothing.

“So?” he asks. “Are we to be released soon?” he wants to know. In other words, has she done her work? Has she done what is necessary—­whatever is necessary—­to rescue them?

“Released?” She swallows the word with a stroke of anger. “No. Not released, Tatte. But you’ll be seen to.”

And now her tatte looks wary. “Seen to? What does this mean, Daughter?”

“It means you’ll both be given work,” she tells him. “There’s a factory in Kreuzberg. It manufactures buttons. You know buttons, Tatte. You and Mamme will be taken there in the morning and brought back here at the close of the day,” she says.

“Buttons?” Her father is trying to smile. “To sell them I know. But to make them?”

“You’ll both learn what is required,” Angelika assures him. “There’ll be food. You’ll be safe from transport. But you’ll—­both of you—­remain on the camp rolls.” At this point, she removes two yellow cloth stars from the pocket of her coat and places them on the table. Yellow cloth edged in black, the dimensions officially proscribed. “Tell Mamme she must sew these to your clothing. Tell her to trade some bread for a needle and thread. If you don’t wear them,” she says, “if you’re seen without the stars, you’ll be put on the next transport and shipped east, and no one will be able to save you from that. Not me, not anyone.”

Her father suddenly has nothing to say. He appears dumbstruck. Blinks at her in pained confusion.

“This is the best I could do, Tatte,” Angelika informs him. Her eyes are suddenly hot with tears, which makes her even angrier. “This is the only deal I could strike.”

“And you?” her tatte asks, looking closely at her now, as if he is only now seeing her. Really seeing her. “What will become of my Angelika? I notice she wears no star.”

Angelika can feel her face harden. “She has her own work to do.”

Herr Kommandant Dirkweiler is also an Obersturmführer in the SS. Forty-­two years of age. Father of four girls. Twenty years in the police services. A middle-­ranked detective with the Kriminalpolizei before transferring to the Gestapo when the war began. Athletic once, obviously, but aging into his body with a certain sag. Fingers stained from too much nicotine as he types at his desk, then yanks the rectangle of green card stock from the rubber roller with a flourish.

A signature is scribbled with his fountain pen before he employs the franking stamp, blots it in a businesslike fashion. GEHEIME STAATSPOLIZEI BERLIN the stamp reads in a circle around the Reich’s eagle. And the name he has typed on the card? Angelika Sara Rosen. When he hands it over, he says, “Now you’re one of us,” as a joke.

Angelika accepts the gift, gazing at it with a kind of covert exhilaration. Even as a prisoner, she feels truly free for the first time in her life.

So she and Emil share a comfortable ersatz existence. They share a room, share a table, share the bed. They share like a married couple, Emil likes to joke, but in fact, Herr Kommandant Dirkweiler has pressed them to marry. Really! As if all those bürgerlich morals and strictures still mean something. He likes to keep his world tidy and in order, the Herr Kommandant. He like to keep his command in order too, likes to keep the moral niceties in place, though sluicing doesn’t bother him. Sluicing meaning a routine of theft. Using his whip on a prisoner’s back doesn’t bother him either. Shipping people to their death? That doesn’t qualify as a matter of morality; it’s a matter of following orders. The Führer commands, I obey! But permitting Angelika and Emil to remain shacked up under the roof of his police lager? This offends his sense of propriety.

But for now she is sharing a sweaty bed out of wedlock. She lies there in her satin slip, listening to the tinny sound of Emil’s phonograph. Heinz Müller singing an upbeat hit, “So Schön Wie Heut!” As Beautiful as Today! The bedsprings creak as Emil stands and starts dressing. His body is lean, as lean as his face. There is something detached about the way he approaches intercourse with her. Something lonely. As men go, he is skilled at touching her. She has no objections there. And they are vigorous together. But she is given the feeling that he is searching for something in the process that has nothing at all to do with her. Searching for something lost. It’s baffling, his lack of animal passion for her. Sometimes she feels rejected, even insulted. Could it be that she is losing her allure? Men have always been frantic for her. She’s learned to count on that as fact.

“Light me a cigarette,” she commands him. A small power play.

He glances at her distantly. But then sits down on the bed beside her, his shirt still unbuttoned, and removes a cigarette from his case. Tapping it, then igniting it and passing it along. She accepts. It both annoys and charms her that he has answered her command in such a way as to quietly rob her of any power over him. Inhaling, she expels smoke in a plume aimed at the ceiling. “So what do you think?” she asks him. “Shall we resolve the Herr Kommandant’s moral quandary for him?”

He snorts a short breath. Lights his own cigarette and breathes the smoke toward his feet. “Is that what you want?”

Angelika lies back. “It wouldn’t kill me, I suppose. To be married. To be Frau Cronenberg,” she says. “I mean, don’t you ever think about the future? About our life after this war is done?”

And now Emil smiles. Not in a happy way but as if he’s smiling at the stone on his own grave. “You really think we’ll have a life after this war?”

An uncomfortable shrug. “Why not?”

Emil doesn’t answer her. He simply smiles again and buttons his shirt, when there’s a knock at the door.

“Angelika?” she hears a familiar voice inquire.

But Emil answers the voice, buckling his belt. “Who is it?”

A pause, and then the answer comes: “It’s Fritz Landau. I’m here for Fräulein Rosen.”

Emil glances back to her with a questioning expression. She shrugs. Blows smoke. Doesn’t bother to cover herself. When Emil answers the door, she sees Fritz’s posture stiffen. He’s aged over the years since they parted, and he looks like an old rubbish collector in his orderly’s coveralls. All his glamour whittled away. It was a shock when she first spotted him in the camp, dressed as an ordner with his red armband. A shock and not a shock. He may be a prisoner, but he still retains his cunning for accumulating power, shred by shred, doesn’t he? Even as a Jew in an SS prison camp. They’ve spoken—­briefly. She’s aware of his position as the deputy to the Jewish lager manager and honestly has been expecting this visit sooner or later. So here he is, frowning from the threshold at her casual half-­dressed insolence.

“How may I serve you, Herr Landau?” she wonders in a languidly vicious tone.

“I thought you should know,” Fritz informs her. “Your parents are on the list.”

She bursts into Dirkweiler’s office, pushing past the outraged objections of his secretary, that ugly SS bitch. The door bangs open. She finds him standing behind his desk in his shirtsleeves. “Take them off the list!” she shouts into his face. “You promised me they would be safe! Take them off the list!”

His face reddens, and his response is simple. He strikes her hard across the face with the back of his hand. She staggers, grabs for the chair to keep from falling, but pulls it over when her knees buckle and tumbles to the floor.

“See what happens when you forget yourself!” he roars at her, a vein popping at his temple. “You filthy Jewish sow, you think you are some kind of queen here? You are Jewish trash! And Jewish trash does not give me orders. Do you understand that, you filthy slut?”

She is still trembling from the blow, her head ringing. She paws at the chair.

Dirkweiler huffs heavily. Dismisses his secretary who had followed the chaos into the office and tells her to shut the door behind her. The anger in his voice has slackened as quickly as it rose. “Get up, get up,” he tells Angelika, now sounding more put-­out than incensed. “Oh, for Christ’s sake, get up,” he commands, righting the chair. Angelika feels herself wrenched to her feet and plunked into the chair’s seat. Her fingers shake as she touches her face. It throbs.

Dirkweiler steps back behind his desk and plops into his own chair as if deflating. He ignites a cigarette and hands it over to her. “Here. Take it.”

She does, drawing in smoke as her hands tremble.

“You see, this is what happens,” Dirkweiler explains. “I’m a reasonable man, but I will not be disrespected.”

She nods. Nods quickly, spewing the smoke. “Yes. Yes, Herr Kommandant. I apologize…apologize for my outburst. You were right to strike me.”

This appears to mollify the man. He frowns and lights his own cigarette, huffing smoke into the air. “So. This is about the list, yes?” he surmises. “This is the problem?”

“Yes, Herr Kommandant,” she confirms. Meekly now.

“You’re agitated because I put your parents on the list for Poland.”

She cannot answer this. Her words forsake her. She can only keep her eyes down, staring blankly at the desktop cluttered with files.

“You must understand,” he explains, “that it’s really for your own good.”

Her heart thumps heavily, but she does not look up.

“They are an impediment to you,” the man assures her. “Can’t you see? They are an anchor around your neck. You must know it’s true,” he says. “To do your work, you must be free. You must free yourself of them. Of their old mentality. I’m sure you know this. I’m sure you know exactly this.”

And now her eyes rise.

“Now, I know that even Jews have feelings in such cases,” the Herr Kommandant is willing to admit. “One’s parents,” he says. “But you must be strong. You must be like steel.”

She blinks downward. “Would it… Would it be possible, Herr Kommandant… Could they be sent instead on the train to Theresienstadt?” she asks. “Not to Poland.”

Theresienstadt. The so-­called Paradise Camp in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. A showpiece for visitors from the International Committee of the Red Cross. But this request causes the Herr Kommandant to sigh. He taps his cigarette against the edge of a brimming ashtray, frowning again. “Well,” he replies. “I have my quota from headquarters to consider. The pencil pushers in the Kurfürstenstrasse demand their numbers be met, and I have a train to fill. Besides, you’re missing the point,” he tells her, leaning forward. “You must free yourself from them completely. Even from their memory. You must take this opportunity to wipe them from your mind. Be truthful with yourself. Are you truly venturing into the streets every day to protect two old Jews? That’s a distraction. A falsehood. You are out there to do your job. And to do it exceedingly well.”

When she leaves Dirkweiler’s office, Fritz Landau is waiting. He takes in her face. The mark of Dirkweiler’s knuckles. But all he asks her is, “Do you want to see them? Before they go?”

She blinks. Then shakes her head. What good would that do? To see them? She couldn’t possibly keep the truth from them. “Let them keep their hope” is all she says.

Fritz nods. He is a man, after all, who can understand the cruelty of truth and the merciful utilities of lies.

A week later, after a day during which she had personally dragged a middle-­aged woman from the toilet in the Café Trumpf, she is called into the Kommandant’s office. It is morning. A crisp Berlin day outside. The birds enjoy the greenery of the cemetery across the way. A pair of mourning doves have taken up residence in the trees, and she can hear their cooing. When she enters the office, she finds Dirkweiler hunched over the telephone. He frowns, snapping his fingers and signaling that she should step forward and shut the door behind her, though he is still mumbling into the receiver. She closes the door and waits, standing like a department store mannequin. There is, she notes, a striped dress box with a ribbon sitting on one of the chairs in front of the man’s desk. Still frowning over his conversation, Dirkweiler breaks free of it long enough to order her to open it.

She hesitates but then does so. She recognizes the box. It’s a famous design, those stripes, from a noted Berlin modiste in the Ku’damm. She unties the ribbon, slips off the top, and draws a delicate breath inward. For an instant, she forgets herself and touches the dress’s fabric intimately. Soft as a cloud. Good Saxon merino wool. Berlin blue, dark as midnight, with scarlet tulle-­covered satin-­weave charmeuse buttons, handmade. Beautiful. But her fingers snap away from it when Dirkweiler’s chair squeaks.

His hand is over the mouthpiece again. “Take it out,” he tells her.

She feels a lift under her heart. Such a lovely creation. She slips it from the box and automatically holds it up against herself to size it, knee lifted and toe pointed, a hand pressed to the waistline. Long fitted sleeves, with a shoulder wedge silhouette and a standing collar. It breaks perfectly below her knees.

Again comes the squeak of the chair. “There are rewards for those who work,” he tells her, then waves her away and returns to his call.