Shadows of Berlin

28.

The Catcher

The numbers are rigid. A thousand Jews ordered for transport. A thousand will go. Not one less. Not one more. But the names? The names are fluid. And that is where Feter Fritz has found his value. It’s the dirty work of negotiations and graft where Feter Fritz excels. He has carved out a small position for himself in the Gross Hamburger Strasse Lager and has even some small measure of power to determine whose name is typed onto which list—­Paradise or Not Paradise—­or if a name is rescued from the list completely. Of course, the entire quite delicate procedure can be overturned with a pencil stroke by Herr Kommandant Dirkweiler, who reigns like a petty god.

“Keep your head down,” Feter tells Eema. “No disturbances. No arguments,” he says, so Eema tries to contain herself in a cage of her own devices. And her little goat follows.

Keep everything in. Don’t react. Don’t expect. Eat what is given. Don’t make noise.

But something shocking happens. Something terrifying for Rashka, though Feter Fritz seems to consider it a wild stroke of fortune. “She has an interest in your daughter,” he informs Eema.

“An interest? What does this mean?”

But Feter Fritz isn’t interested in answering this question. All he says is, “She has power here, Lavinia. Power with the Gestapo. Power over the lists in a way that I do not.”

So he prepares Rashka. Coaches her on how she should behave with the woman she now addresses as gnä’ Fräulein. “Think of yourself as her pupil and she as your teacher,” says Feter Fritz. “Let her talk, but don’t be afraid to ask questions. She likes an interested pupil. Only be careful,” he warns. “Under no circumstances should you question her judgment. Do you understand?”

Rashka can barely nod.

“It’s a generous offer, ziskeit. She has influence here with these lunkhead Gestapo bulls. She’ll make sure your name and your mother’s name are kept off the transport lists.”

Rashka turns to her mother. “This is what I must do, Eema?”

Her mother sighs with mournful resignation. “At least,” she says, “if it keeps us off the trains…”

“But why? Why does she want me?” Rashka wants to know. She wishes to cry but holds it in. “What am I to her?”

A silence. Then Eema says, “She has no children of her own. Perhaps she thinks she’s protecting you. Perhaps she wishes to punish me by stealing you away. Perhaps both.”

“But why?” Rashka asks again. Though no answer to her question is forthcoming.

A café near the Anhalter Bahnhof. “A fresh hunting ground,” the woman calls it. The two of them sit side by side at a table facing the door. Rashka’s clothes are worn and stiff with the grime that comes with U-­boat life. Her shoes battered, she wears a knit hat, but she has been given a new coat. A lovely wool coat with a fitch fur collar. A lady’s coat. A “gift” from the gnä’ Fräulein, so smartly clad and coiffed beside her. Black lace gloves and a matching lace veil over her eyes. Angelika Rosen, la muse rouge. Eema calls her Fräulein Rosen or simply “the lady,” as in “You must do as the lady says,” though Rashka has heard the other names given her. The Red Angel. The Angel of Death.

“Light me a cigarette,” the gnä’ Fräulein commands. Rashka knows how this is done because she used to light cigarettes for her eema when she was small. She strikes the match, sucking in air. The smoke fills her mouth, but she doesn’t inhale. She whistles it out, careful to keep her lips pursed so she doesn’t make the cigarette paper soggy.

“Two coffees, please, and a bun,” the gnä’ Fräulein tells the craggy old waiter, employing a sleekly imperious tone that is both superior and seductive. Then she turns to her pupil. Down to business. “So. Do you know who you are looking for, Bissel?” she asks.

“Jews,” Rashka answers simply, because isn’t that the truth of the matter?

But the gnä’ Fräulein laughs lightly at the absurdity. “Well. If you mean beaked noses and heavy lips? Goggled eyes? Then no, Bissel. No. That’s strictly rubbish. We aren’t here to search for repulsive caricatures. We are hunting the invisible Jew. A very elusive quarry,” she says and expels a graceful drift of smoke from her cigarette.

Rashka can remember a pair of beautiful red suede gloves. Ten years before, when she was a child and the gnä’ Fräulein was not so much older than Rashka is now. The gloves were immaculately stitched with scalloped cuffs. A gift from the artist to her muse, according to Eema, as if that would explain away the light brightening her mother’s eyes. A light seldom bestowed upon her daughter.

The waiter reappears to deliver the coffees and a lumpy bun on a plate. Only old men are left in Berlin to wait at table. Rashka inhales the sweetish smell of the Feigenkaffee, ground from dried figs, and the slight chemical bake of the bun’s ersatz flour.

“Eat,” the woman tells her with a flick of her lace-­gloved hand, so Rashka does so, attempting to refrain from wolfing down the bun, but she can’t really stop herself. Soon the plate holds nothing but crumbs. Crumbs that she collects and licks from her fingers.

“That’s the clue we’re looking for,” the gnä’ Fräulein announces with a taste of disdain on her lips. “There. Exactly what you’re doing now.”

Rashka blinks. Swallows heavily.

“A little mongrel licking crumbs from her plate. Only starved little animals do that. It’s a perfect signal.”

Rashka blinks again. Is the woman angry with her? She sounds like she might be, and Feter Fritz warned her of the lady’s temper. But then the gnä’ Fräulein arches an eyebrow. “Wipe your fingers, child,” she says in a tone that is nearly maternal. “And when you look,” she instructs, “look for yourself in the crowd. You are who we’re hunting, Bissel. Not ‘Jews.’ Not ‘U-­boats.’ You.”

There is a man too. Cronenberg is his name, though the gnä’ Fräulein calls him Emil. Like the Fräulein herself, he has great freedoms. Great privileges. He is handsome like a wolf is handsome and blond as any Aryan might hope to be, though Rashka knows him to be a Jew. Like the gnä’ Fräulein, he is a “Greifer.” A catcher. A grabber. He favors the style of leather trench coat and snap-­brim hat that Gestapo men often wear as an unofficial uniform and carries a police pistol in his coat pocket. He is quite brazenly obvious in his desire for his red-­haired partner. On the other hand, he observes Rashka like she is a dog turd he must avoid stepping upon.

It is his job to make the arrests. The gnä’ Fräulein searches out her prey, and the man steps in with his pistol. Hands up, little mice! The cat is here, and the game is up! He drives a glossy French automobile to ferry their prisoners back to Grosse Hamburger Strasse. It is through Emil that Rashka first hears of the term applied by the Gestapo to their little tribe of catchers. The Search Service. And for whom are they searching? Well, the gnä’ Fräulein has already made that clear to Rashka. She is searching for herself.

By the end of the summer of 1944, things change drastically for all residents of the Grosse Hamburger Strasse when the Judenlager is moved to smaller quarters in the Schulstrasse. Transport after transport, trainload after trainload, even as the city suffers under bombing day and night, has depleted the camp’s human inventory. There simply aren’t enough Jews left to warrant such space. So orders were issued by Dirkweiler’s bosses. The whole operation has been transferred from the former old age home to the Jewish Hospital in Berlin-­Wedding.

An iron gate located at Schulstrasse 79 leads to the pathology building, where Jews are now confined to the morgue. Therefore, in order to cram the whole show into this new, congested space, the fat must be trimmed! The glut of Jews who are of no value to Kommandant Dirkweiler must be shipped out. The Gestapo is finished with many of the Jewish functionaries. Their services are no longer required, nor are the services of many of the orderlies. So a special transport to the Paradise lager is organized. Yet—­a miracle! Feter’s name is scratched from the list! Not by a miracle, really, but by the miracle worker, Angelika Rosen. “Perhaps,” Rashka’s eema posits, “she has not become so hard-­hearted as to completely forget the past.”

On the floor of the morgue, the Jews huddle, sleeping in an imitation of death. The cacophony of snores and snorts, however, indicates life. Rashka is pressed back to back with her eema. She can feel every twitch of her mother’s body like it’s her own, every spasm of sleep. When she hears the scuff of shoe leather on the tiles, her eyes pop open.

“Feter,” she whispers with a small note of joy. Her uncle has crouched down beside her.

“Rokhl,” he whispers in return, pressing a finger to his lips. And then he says, “Don’t wake your mother.”

Walking down the corridor beside Feter, she is hugging her shoulders with her arms against the chill of the cellar. Rashka is confused. “I don’t understand,” she is saying. “Why must I leave Eema?”

“Because it’s the best thing for you,” her uncle tells her.

“Because the gnä’ Fräulein says I must?”

“There’s a small room that’s empty that she wants you to fill. You’ll have better food. Warm blankets.”

“But why?”

“Because the gnä’ Fräulein says you must.”

“I don’t understand,” Rashka repeats. “Why can’t Eema come with me?”

“Your eema will be safe where she is,” Feter Fritz assures her as they walk through the gray light. “Protected,” he says.

“By whom?”

“You know by whom,” he tells her.

“But how can that be? It’s you who protects us, isn’t it? Not her. Feter Fritz?”

“I had some influence once, zeisele,” he explains without much sweetness. “But the Fräulein Angelika? She has the Herr Kommandant’s ear. And that means power in this place. Real power. So at least for the time being,” her uncle instructs her, “I suggest that you allow her to be your mother.”

The room is no larger than an oversized closet. Four walls and one tiny window too high up to peer through. But at least there’s a bare mattress with blankets and a flat striped pillow.

“Your new abode,” Fräulein Angelika tells her. “Now, can you say thank you, Bissel?”

At night, the darkness drenches the room. Rashka huddles under the blanket and breathes. Breathes to stop herself from drowning.

Fräulein Angelika is standing at the entrance, leaning against the doorframe as she surveys Rashka’s closet. “So. Not exactly a room at the Adlon, I know. But it’s clean. You won’t catch any diseases from that filthy Jewish trash in the morgue.”

“But. My eema. She is down there still, gnä’ Fräulein,” Rashka points out, causing the Fräulein to frown.

“That’s the gratitude you’re going to show me? I pull you off the dung heap, and all you can do is whine?”

“I’m sorry,” Rashka says heavily, her ears flushing.

“Your mother understands the situation. Why can’t you?”

“You spoke to Eema?” Rashka asks, feeling an odd nip of hope.

“I have,” the gnä’ Fräulein replies. “And she approves.”

Confusion. “Approves of what?”

“Are you stupid, Bissel? Of what I’m doing. For you.”

Rashka opens her mouth, but not a word escapes.

Frustrated, the gnä’ Fräulein hurls down the sack she’s kept tucked under her arm. Two fruit bar rations and a packet of Eckstein cigarettes spill out. “Why does one have children?” she demands to know.

As a sign of her newfound privilege, Rashka has been provided access to a bathtub. An old-­fashioned tub filled with tepid water and suds from a chemical soap. But it feels luxurious. To be clean? To be clean after so long feeling filthy? She might as well be bathing in a golden basin inside a palace. She feels guilt, of course. To be so clean while Eema is left to the grime and muck. But she drowns the guilt in the soapy water. Next, she is dressed. Given better clothing. Nice clothing that is not frayed or nibbled by moths. A pearl-­gray jumper. A crisp white blouse and a knit pullover the color of a pale rose. A black wool skirt with deep pleats, polished shoes that are not disintegrating, gray wool stockings without holes.

She has also been given cosmetics. Face powder with a puff. A tube of lip rouge. An eyebrow pencil and a tortoiseshell hand mirror. Holding the mirror, Rashka uses the pencil to turn the wall in her closet into her canvas. A small self-­portrait rendered in eyebrow pencil. When she is discovered, however, the gnä’ Fräulein is angry. Her face bleached. Her eyes stark.

“What are you doing?”

Rashka does not answer.

“Do you know how valuable a mirror is? A simple hand mirror? I give you things to beautify yourself, so maybe you won’t look like a dirty little Jewess out on the streets. And this is how you waste my gifts?” Bending down, she smears her hand across Rashka’s portrait, leaving it a greasy dark smudge. Then seizing Rashka by the hair, she forces the mirror into her face. “Look!” the gnä’ Fräulein commands her. “Look at yourself! What do you see?”

Rashka gazes into her terrified reflection.

“I’ll tell you what I see. What the world will see. A little kike sow! That’s what!” And she slams Rashka’s forehead into the wall. Her vision explodes into a shower of stars.

Rashka is in the rear of the auto. The shiny French touring car. Up front, the gnä’ Fräulein is cavalierly smoking a cigarette, while behind the wheel is the slim blond man, Emil Cronenberg.

Rashka coughs. The smoke from the cigarette is drifting into the rear. When she coughs again, Angelika gives her a bored look but rolls down the passenger window a crack.

That’s when Cronenberg tosses a glance over his shoulder into the back seat just long enough to leave Rashka with a frown of disapproval. “I don’t know what in the hell you are doing, Lika, towing this bit of baggage!”

“She is my student,” the woman answers him.

“Student?” He seems to be amused.

“I am the teacher. She is the student.”

The man only snorts derisively. “All I have to say is she better not get underfoot. Because if she does, I’ll stomp her. You hear that, little baggage?” he calls out.

She is too frightened to answer, but the gnä’ Fräulein gives Rashka a knowing wink from the passenger seat.

“So where do you wish to start?” the man wants to know. He has lit a cigarette while he is driving from a gold-­plated spirit lighter. “The Kranzler? Mortiz Doblin?”

“The Kranzler’s played out for now, I think,” Angelika replies. “And the service at the Doblin is abominable these days. Not to mention that the Himmelstorte tastes of horse shit. No, I say the Swedish Embassy this morning,” she decides. “If it’s profitable, we can stop at the Uhland Eck for lunch as a reward.”

Cronenberg shrugs. “The embassy it is,” he says, yielding.

“It’s very easy, Bissel. All we need to do is sit here on our bench and let them come to us.”

“Them?” Rashka asks.

“The Jews, Liebchen,” she explains. “There are still Jews so stupid that they think that there are so-­called neutral countries who will accept some shiny trinkets and give them a visa. Of course, that will never happen.” She smiles. “So we let them go in. And then, when they come out looking dejected and paying no attention? That’s when we pounce,” the gnä’ Fräulein tells her, explaining as if describing the rules of a children’s game of cat and mouse for the playground.

But luck is not with the gnä’ Fräulein. No U-­boats are spotted. The man Cronenberg looks simply bored, smoking, while it’s Fräulein Angelika who frets this way and that, unable to make herself comfortable. A hungry cat without a meal in sight. Finally, she scowls at her pretty diamond-­studded watch. “This is pointless,” she decides, exasperated at the lack of quarry. “Let’s go for a coffee.”

They find a place serving the usual ersatz. The gnä’ Fräulein goes to use the toilet, leaving Rashka alone for the first time with the man Cronenberg.

“My God.” The man sighs. “She is such a gorgeous monster,” he says. Shakes his head. “It’s really a crime.” And then he turns to face Rashka. “Sorry I was so rough on you earlier,” she is surprised to hear him say. “It’s a show for her I put on. She likes to argue. Also, she’s extremely jealous. It would do you no good if I sounded too happy to have another pretty face about.”

Rashka is astonished. She has been eating a slice of cake that tastes of chemical filler, but still she is trying not to gobble it down like a waif. Trying not to gulp down her cup of warm skim milk. Trying to follow orders. Trying not to feel ashamed that she has tried to discreetly pocket a chunk of the cake for her eema. The next bite, she keeps telling herself. The next bite will be her last, and the rest she will take back to her mother. But the next bite is swallowed and so is the next after that. Until this man starts speaking.

“So what’s your name, little baggage?” he asks her.

She must swallow the current mouthful of cake dry before she can answer. “Rashka Morgenstern.”

The man nods as if he figured as much. “Good Jewish name,” he whispers, as if this amuses him. “I’m Cronenberg,” he tells her. “Emil Cronenberg.”

“Yes. I know. And you’re a Jew too.”

“By blood,” he answers. “Yes. And unfortunately, it’s by blood we are all judged these days. Ah well. You must know the old saying: ‘Neither cursing not laughing can alter the world,’” he recites. “You want a smoke?” he asks. “Here, have a taste,” the man offers, proffering the cigarette he has just lit.

She stares at it. Then accepts. Inhales. He chuckles as she sputters smoke. “Head swimming, huh?” he says as he lights his own. “You’ll get used to it. A person can get used to anything. We should know, correct?”

Rashka tries to ignore the sickly taste in her mouth as she tempts fate with another but less ambitious draw of smoke. This time, she manages to keep it down instead of choking it back up.

“She thinks you have talent, you know.”

“She?”

“Your ‘gnä’ Fräulein,’” he tells her, retrieving the cigarette. “And maybe it’s true. God knows, she has the talent. I could see that the first time I looked into her eyes. The animal instinct. Honestly? In your eyes, I don’t see it. I don’t see a killer in you. But maybe for you, it’s different, hmm? If she says you have the ‘doppeltes Gesicht,’ then who am I to argue?” Doppeltes Gesicht. The Double Face.

“She frightens me,” Rashka admits.

“She frightens everyone,” the man also admits, removing a leather-­bound flask from his coat. Unscrewing the cap, he takes a slug. “I think she frightens the Gestapo bulls as well. You want a drink?” he asks.

Rashka shakes her head tightly.

He nods. Then as he stares out at nothing, the bemusement in the man’s voice dissolves. “Until the Tommies pummeled it, she favored cafés around the Gedächtniskirche,” he says. “We Jews love our coffeehouses, don’t we? At the Trumpf, I watched her jam the revolving door with her own body to keep her quarry trapped until I could come running with the pistol. After that? She got her own pistol. A Sauer Model 38.” He says this and allows the smoke to drift from his lips. “You’ve heard what they call her, haven’t you?” he asks, his eyes slitting.

“Yes,” Rashka answers. “The Red Angel. The Angel of Death.”

“But she doesn’t care. I think she takes a certain pride in what they call her,” he says. And then he asks her, his eyes landing on her, gaining weight. “So how old are you anyhow?”

How old? There are men who’ve asked her this question in a different way now. It makes her uncomfortable. She answers, but he only nods at the information. “I figured it was something like that,” he tells her and whistles out smoke. “I figure my daughter’s about that age too.”

Rashka feels herself sit back. A daughter? Such a man and he has a daughter?

“Course, I don’t know exactly. Last time I saw her, she was just a little pitsl in nappies.” He says this, then something about him quiets, settles for a moment with his cigarette before he says, “If you want, you can make a run for it.”

A blink. Rashka believes she must have imagined that this was said, but then the man glances back at her. “Did you hear me? I said you can make a run for it,” he repeats casually. “There’s the door,” he points out. “You can go. I won’t stop you. But you’ve got to do it now. Now,” he repeats. “Before she comes back.”

A kind of confused panic crackles through her. For an instant, her heart shimmers with the possibility. There’s the door! Head out and run! That’s all. Just run. But when she thinks about moving from her chair, something is wrong. She is paralyzed. Where would she go? How would she hide or feed herself? Mostly, how could she abandon Eema to the Gestapo? That’s what she should be thinking. But she is shamed by the other question in her head. How could she abandon the gnä’ Fräulein? After she has invested such faith in her?

A moment later, it makes no difference. The Fräulein returns to the table. She frowns suspiciously as she sits. “And what are you two plotters up to?” she wants to know.

The man Cronenberg returns to his usual frown. “Just have your coffee and let’s get back on the street,” he says. “It’s getting late. Dirkweiler will think we’ve laid an egg.”

Rashka receives grudging permission from the gnä’ Fräulein to visit her eema down in the morgue. “For a few minutes if you must. Just don’t bring any disease back with you,” the woman commands. A chest infection has begun to circulate among the prisoners. Her mother is burdened by it. Eema lies on straw, coughing and sputtering, sweating and shivering under a thin cover. Rashka brings her something heavier. A wool horse blanket. She brings her tea in a steel thermos and bread with lard. Her mother has no stomach for the bread and is too weak to sit to drink the tea, so Rashka spoons it into her eema’s mouth.

“She’s very ill,” Rashka tells the gnä’ Fräulein.

“Yes?” The woman is clad in a silk dressing gown, showing a stockinged leg as she lounges on the davenport in the room that she shares with Cronenberg. She pages through a copy of a fashion magazine. Elegant watercolors of stylish women are on the cover of Modenschau.

“She has a fever.”

“What do you want of me, Bissel?”

“Some medicine?”

“I can get you aspirin for her,” the gnä’ Fräulein is willing to concede.

Rashka is silent for a moment. The gnä’ Fräulein looks up from her magazine. “Yes? Vo den?”

“I thought…” she starts to say.

“Yes? What? What did you think?”

“I thought,” says Rashka, “you loved her.”

The gnä’ Fräulein glares darkly. Then turns back to her. “Would you like to look like this, Bissel?” she asks and turns fashion pages to face Rashka. “So elegant. Can you see yourself in such modern kleyd?”

Rashka doesn’t know how to answer.

“You’re a woman now, Bissel. Aren’t you? I mean, you’re on your cycle now.”

Rashka’s eyes search the air anxiously.

“Bissel?”

“Yes,” Rashka says.

“Yes,” the gnä’ Fräulein confirms. “So you must know that men are looking at you.”

Again, the uncertain silence.

“I wonder is all. Are you looking back?”

Rashka senses a pulse of danger. Shakes her head. “I don’t…”

“You don’t what? Know they are looking or look back?” The question has gained an edge. “It’s all right. You’re allowed to answer. In fact, I insist.”

“I don’t,” says Rashka. “I don’t know. And I don’t look back.”

“Liar.” The gnä’ Fräulein defines her. “I’ve seen you with Emil. You look back at him. And he certainly looks at you.”

Rashka is stunned. Her skin prickles, and she feels her belly hollow out.

“Do you deny it?” the woman asks her, flipping tightly through the magazine pages. “No? Good. At least now we have the truth between us,” she says. “Do you know what the Stapo men call it here—­to iron out a problem? It’s when a problem is flattened. An unwanted wrinkle is pressed out. Do you know how easy it would be for me, Bissel, to iron you out? I need only have the NR erased from your name in the ledgers. Just two little letters.” NR. Nicht registriert. Not Registered for Transport. “I could do it in a snap,” she says, “and you would be on your merry way.” The gnä’ Fräulein allows this to sink in for a moment as Rashka stands frozen in her shoes. Finally, “I’ll get the aspirin to your mother,” she says. “Now, get out.”

The night brings a terrifying bombing raid. An English bomber has dropped from the sky in flames and exploded into a street not so far away. The crash site is still smoking by morning, a tower of black rising upward. In fact, the city as a whole has assumed a pall of smoke that it wears like a shawl over its shoulders. The smell of it follows them even inside. Their little troika has returned to the café in the Friedrichstrasse. Cronenberg has gone outside to smoke. He does this sometimes, Rashka has noted, when the gnä’ Fräulein is in a certain type of mood. Impatient and easily riled.

The Fräulein has her hair done up in a turban, because she recognizes that her red tresses are becoming too famous. Too easily identified among the U-­boats. Rashka is seated beside her, but there is a problem. The gnä’ Fräulein is not happy with her protégé. “I don’t have you tagging along to eat cakes, Bissel,” she tells Rashka. “Emil already thinks that I’m wasting my time. That I should throw you back to the rabble and let the next transport take you and your mother both. So you must produce results, clear? No more loafing,” she scolds.

No more loafing. If Rashka Morgenstern is to be a catcher, she then must catch! She must grab! To save her life. To save the life of her mother, this is what she must do. Find a U-­boat. Find herself in the face of another Jew. So can she be forgiven? Rashka begs of God. Can she be forgiven for what she is about to do? Cannot the Master of the Universe, praised be His holy name, step from her eema’s prayer book and, in His limitless wisdom, see past her sin? Her crime? If she devotes herself to a lifetime of mitzvoth after this moment, can’t her soul be cleansed?

“The girl in the corner,” Rashka listens to herself say. She says this trying to keep her eyes dry. Trying to imitate resolve. It’s the young schoolgirl with the sable braid and wine-­red beret returned. The girl with whom Rashka had once exchanged an innocent wave. She is against the wall alone. The woman who was with her has left the table, so she has no adult attending her for protection. Just as Rashka had been, she is left alone without a mother. The girl allows her eyes to lurk about the café. She must search for danger by herself, shielded by nothing but a fragile bubble of anonymity.

But Rashka Morgenstern has just popped that bubble.

“Why her?” the Angel quizzes.

The schoolgirl happens to catch Rashka’s eyes at that instant. She smiles without artifice. A small smile. But then the smile sinks. She looks unsure. Perhaps perplexed. But not alarmed. She is unaware that she has just been murdered.

Why her? “Because,” Rashka the catcher replies, “she is me.”