I was born in Berlin a few months before Hitler came to power, and my family
were secular Jews. Apart from an aunt who followed us to London, I would
never see any of those faces from my brief Berlin childhood again.
All except one. Her name was Edith, and I had not thought about her in years,
not consciously anyhow, until one afternoon when I was driving down Lisson
Grove in London with my son and his family.
Ahead of us was the Marylebone Road and a red-brick frontage: the disused
Samaritan Free Hospital for Women and Children. Did I ever tell you the
story of Edith? I asked them, remembering how I had once been to the
hospital to visit her. The last time I saw her. It was the year the NHS came
into being.
No, of course I had not told them about Edith. She was only a minor character
in the history of my family. Our housemaid, back in the Tauentz-ienstrasse,
which we left for the last time on a bleak March morning of 1939.
A humble person brought up in an orphanage, she slept in a dark slip of a room
next to our kitchen in Berlin. As a young child, I never saw her in anything
but her black and white maid’s uniform. No make-up, no jewellery, few
possessions for me to look at when she let me into her room during her time
off, patiently answering my childish questions.
In her own way, she was very important in my young life, as servants so often
were in those days. I probably spent as much time with Edith as I did with
my mother. But was she even there when the front door of our apartment
clanged shut for the last time?
I doubt it. It was a traumatic morning. I was on the verge of hysteria at the
thought of not seeing my grandparents one last time, and my father seemed
anxious to get out of Berlin before someone came to arrest him. There were
painful, final goodbyes to be said.
Who would have spared a thought for the housemaid, even though she had been
with us for years? Who wondered what would happen to her, a Jew left behind
in Berlin, while we escaped to Britain?
I spent most of the war alone with my mother in a small suburban flat in
Kingsbury, north London. After being recruited into the British Army, my
father was away in the Pioneer Corps, and my brother was sent off to a
boarding school in Hampshire because my mother could not “handle” him
without a man around.
She became first depressed, then increasingly resentful, and she took it out
on me because there was nobody else around. Now and then, she would blame my
father for leaving her to cope on her own. Mostly, she blamed me for being a
nuisance – not helping out enough, not cleaning enough floors, not washing
more dishes. Bad news from abroad was used as a weapon to hit me with,
including my grandparents’ deportation to the death camps in 1942, when I
was 10 years old.
With my father’s return after the war, I felt relatively safe from the
explosions of emotional and physical abuse. Hearing his shocked rebuke to my
mother when she smacked my face in public was a landmark in itself. The
crockery stopped flying.
In the famously bitter winter of 1947, we moved into a four-bedroomed
semidetached house in Hendon, north London, and for the first time in my
life, at the age of 15, I had a room of my own. I was in seventh heaven.
Most of the people who came to visit us in our new home were people I did not
know, had not even heard of in my early childhood, back in prewar Berlin.
But one person from that now unreachable time did unexpectedly get in touch.
Edith wrote to ask for her old job back. She was still alive.
Hidden by Germans, she had survived not only the round-up of Jews and the
carpet-bombing of Berlin but also the final battle, when Russian troops
reached the city. Apparently she had gone to Palestine, the new Israel, but
was unhappy there. She had found us after all these years. She was coming
home.
For me, nothing so exciting had happened in a long time. During the weeks of
waiting for her arrival, I would poke my head round the door of the spare
bedroom to see how the preparations were going. My first sense of unease
began when I saw how little was being done.
As far as I was concerned, Edith was family, and I knew instinctively that
this was her reason for seeking us out. I began to realise that my mother
did not know this or, if she did, thought it of no consequence.
Since the end of the war, her main aim in life had been to get back the
lifestyle, as nearly as possible, she had enjoyed before Hitler had ruined
everything. She had the house, she had the small spare room, now she would
have the housemaid to put in it. It was as though she had learnt nothing
from the catastrophe that had overwhelmed the world.
And then Edith was suddenly there when I got home from school one afternoon.
Her skin was a little rougher perhaps, and there were a few streaks of grey
in her coarse black hair, but otherwise she was still the same old Edith.
Her arrival meant news from across the chasm of death. But my mother seemed to
lose interest in hearing about what Edith had been through. Within a couple
of days, she was just the housemaid.
While the family ate at the dining table, Edith ate her portion in the
kitchen, ready to pass and receive plates and dishes through the hatch. Once
the kitchen was tidied, she vanished until the following morning.
Not so very different from the old days in Berlin, except that there, the vast
spaces had made such estrangement seem natural. Now, living in enforced
intimacy in a small house, it felt very different. EDITH was hurt that
neither of my parents invited her to sit down with them in the living room,
perhaps over a cup of tea, and say what she had been through since we left
Berlin in 1939. I, on the other hand, was agog with questions. I saw my
chance when my mother was out and I found Edith polishing the silver on the
dining-room table.
So what was it like? I asked, sitting down on a spare chair. In Berlin, after
we left?
A long silence. The french window was open, as it was a fine afternoon. There
was the sound of traffic in the distance from the North Circular road. And a
bird hopping through light in the quiet garden.
“I managed to get by for quite a while, doing unofficial jobs,” she said
finally. “People didn’t like Goebbels, and they didn’t like his plans for
the Jews either. There was a sort of grapevine going, and there were
actually plenty of people willing to employ me, at least for a while, caring
for an elderly relative, minding small children, cleaning, that sort of
thing. Once, I even helped out in a family grocery shop. It had a room at
the back where I could sleep.
“Life was getting difficult for everyone, and I never lied about being Jewish.
How could I have done, given my identity papers? You keep your mouth shut
and I’ll do the same, I was told more than once. Who’s to know? Sometimes we
would agree on some sort of cover story, just in case. I was a country
cousin, up from a rural backwater to enjoy the bright lights of Berlin. That
sort of thing.”
I tried to imagine Edith coping. She was quite incapable of lying her way out
of danger, which meant that others, almost always women, were taking the
initiative.
“Of course, it couldn’t go on for ever. I used to go to the cinema a lot, when
I wasn’t actually working, just hiding out. It meant a few hours of escape,
sitting in the dark, watching newsreels or the latest song-and-dance
routine, all fancy costumes and a romantic storyline.
“Most Berliners didn’t want the war, you know – they remembered how awful the
last one had been. So some of the newsreels of victorious Germans bombing
innocent foreigners did not go down too well, were watched in complete
silence.”
Edith stared down at the silver spread out in front of her.
“And then?” I saw she was visibly distressed. She sat down suddenly on the low
sill of the window overlooking the garden.
“And then I had to go and live in a Judenhaus. One of those places they put
Jews who had been turned out of their own homes. It was awful. I can’t begin
to tell you. Overcrowded, everybody crammed together, having to share
kitchen and bathroom. It wasn’t so much the lack of space, though that was
bad enough. People’s nerves were on edge, arguments would break out over the
slightest thing. Frau A would accuse Herr B of stealing her bread ration,
that sort of thing. One old lady tried to commit suicide, twice. She
succeeded at the third attempt. Nobody knew what was coming next, but
everyone feared the worst.
“Rumours were going round. I was working for a shopkeeper, just before the
forced labour started, and she made me promise not to go if I was called up
to go on a transport. Said she would hide me in the room at the back of the
shop. Her soldier son had just come back from the eastern front and told her
awful stories about what was going on out there, what they were doing to the
Jews. Or was that later? I’m not sure. Said she’d keep food for me if I had
to go and work in a factory, and I reckoned that they’d keep us alive as
long as we were needed for war work.”
What had it been like, doing slave labour in a munitions factory?
“It was hard. Ten hours at a stretch. I think they were trying to work us to
death. The word got round that some factories were better than others. AEG
and Siemens treated their Jewish workers well, IG Farben did not. As luck
would have it, my first job was at IG Farben, making silk for parachutes.
“It meant hours of standing, watching the spindles to make sure the threads
did not break, and the machine room was hot and noisy. In the end, I managed
to get myself dismissed because I started going sick with abdominal pains –
all that standing. The next job was better, and the foreman was really nice.
Saved our lives, in the end.”
Really? Edith gave that subtle little smile of hers. “His name was Hans
Klennermann. Remember that name.”
Hans was a bit of a flirt, she said, and he made terrible jokes about the
Nazis, could have got himself into serious trouble. “But he was popular, and
he wasn’t the only one to take a crack at the Nazis when he knew himself to
be among friends.”
Early in 1943, Goebbels decided he could dispense with Jewish labour, since
there were by now enough slave workers from foreign countries. One day, Hans
Klennermann told Edith and the other Jewish workers not to report for work
the following morning – which was the day lorries arrived all over the city
to pick up Jewish workers for deportation. Edith decided to go underground.
I heard a key turn in the front door. I wandered off into the garden while
Edith greeted my mother.
A few days later, I again found Edith alone, shelling peas. “So then what
happened? When you went underground.”
Edith looked vague, slightly bewildered. I put the kettle on for tea. “Does it
bother you to talk about all this?”
“It’s okay,” she said slowly. “Well, the first thing I did was to take off my
yellow star. Obviously. Though I was careful to keep it. I sewed it into the
hem of my overcoat. For later, when the allies came.
“I was so ashamed when we first had to start wearing them. I didn’t know where
to look. But it was all quite different from what I’d imagined. People were
embarrassed for us, if you know what I mean. It was as if they were ashamed.
“Because we were doing war work, we were permitted to travel by tram, but we
weren’t allowed to sit down. Jews always had to stand. Well, the first
morning I had the yellow star on my coat – and I didn’t dare to cover it up,
like some people did – a man got up and offered me his seat. I tried to
refuse, but he wouldn’t take no for an answer. It happened quite often after
that; women, too. Sometimes, of course, there was standing-room only.
“Once, a woman pushed herself up close to me and put an apple in my pocket.
Another time it was cigarettes. Once, I even got a note with an address on
it, though I never dared to use it. I kept it, though, just in case I had
nowhere else to go.
Luckily, something, somewhere, always seemed to turn up.”
What sort of thing?
“People to take you in. So many people. Sometimes it was just for a couple of
nights, sometimes for several weeks. I’ve slept in an outhouse, in a laundry
room, several kitchens and a printing works for blind people where nobody
was doing any work. The important thing was to keep on the move, so
neighbours wouldn’t get suspicious. I’d be told not to turn the lights on,
or only flush the toilet at certain times.
“There seemed to be a network of people who would suddenly turn up out of
nowhere and take you to a new hiding place. Once I even slept in a boathouse
on the Havel in the middle of winter. It was freezing, I can tell you. But
only for a few nights. The important thing was to look as though you were
going somewhere. Purposeful stride, that sort of thing.”
So you still went out, in spite of everything?
“Of course. It was the only way to keep sane. The mother of a friend of mine
used to go for walks wearing a widow’s veil to avoid suspicion. Women in
black were a common sight by this time, so nobody knew what she looked like,
and of course they respected her grief. Her noble sacrifice for the
Fatherland.
“Besides, it was important to keep in touch with other people who had gone
underground. There were one or two cafes where the illegals could exchange
useful information.”
What sort of information? “The best place to get forged papers, for a start.
If you had those, it made everything a lot easier.”
And what sort of people did you go to? “Well, the police were often very
helpful.”
The police? Edith laughed, actually grinned when she saw the expression on my
face.
“Not the Gestapo, you dummkopf. The ordinary, local police. They were usually
very helpful, if you told them you had lost your papers in an air raid or
something. They’d give you a blank form and let you get on with it, give
yourself a new identity.”
When Edith fell ill with acute bronchitis she turned to a doctors’ surgery on
Oranienburger Strasse that helped illegals. “Secretly, of course, mostly
after dark. I wouldn’t be here today if it had not been for the staff at the
clinic, who came night after night, even after the air-raid warning had
sounded.”
By that time, she was spending most of her time in a cellar. “About six of us
were more or less living down there, so it was rather overcrowded. The top
of the house had been completely blown away in an air raid but we used to
come up in the daytime to cook in the kitchen.”
“Who’s ‘we’?” I asked. “Were you all illegal Jews?”
“Good heavens, no. I was the only one.”
And they knew? “Of course.” The others in her cellar included a “woman, a Nazi
party member, who objected strongly to my presence at first, but seemed to
change her mind after a bit. Perhaps she saw I wasn’t really that bad, but
there may have been other reasons”.
A pause. Edith gave her little smile.
“Everyone knew the war was lost, that the allies were coming, and that
terrible crimes had been committed, especially against the Jews, which would
have to be accounted for. Given the situation, helping to save the life of a
Jew could do you no end of good later, when the day of reckoning came.
“With the war coming to an end, even a poor Jew had his or her uses. Don’t get
me wrong. Most of the time, I was glad to help. People had been very good to
me, often at some risk to themselves, but I can think of one or two people
who just wanted their Persilschein.”
I looked puzzled. “Persil washes whiter,” she added in hesitant English. I
think it was the first complete English sentence I had so far heard her
utter. I burst out laughing. Edith joined in, at least her smile broadened.
After the allies took over, she said, Jews who had managed to survive got
special privileges, extra rations, a decent room. Everybody else had to be
given a clean bill of health, prove they had not collaborated with the Nazis.
“I would be asked to say they had been good to me, helped me out at some
point, given me food, hidden me, and many of them had. As for the rest” –
she shrugged – “often I just felt sorry for them.”
“You what?” Righteous indignation came easily to me in those days.
“You have no idea just how terrible everything was. Nothing but death and
destruction. You couldn’t recognise your own street any more, let alone
expect to find your own front door. No public transport, no water or
electricity most of the time, streets impassable because of the rubble.
“The top brass, of course, had all left by then. You could go and watch them
packing their belongings into lorries on the Wilhelmstrasse. The foreign
workers, with nothing left to do, with factories all out of action, would go
and jeer at them. And it was these foreigners, the slave workers, as often
as not, who helped to put out fires and dug people out of the rubble after a
raid, dead or alive. People who had taken shelter in the underground drowned
when water mains burst. I myself saw dead children being brought out . . .
“And then the Russians. Everyone was afraid of them. So the trains going west,
those still running, were always crammed. I was warned not to try. The
Gestapo, they said, were still checking trains for illegal Jews, even now.”
Edith said she’d had no idea there were Jews as far away as Russia until the
“Ivans” arrived. No woman was safe from the Russians. “Once, when an Ivan
found his way into our cellar, the others told him I was a Jew, and that he
should leave me alone. But do you know what he did? He kissed me on both
cheeks, showed me a photograph of his mother and kept saying Yid,
evrei, pointing to himself, to explain that he too was a Jew. And then
he started to cry.”
Edith lapsed into silence. I had heard about the Russians, what they did to
women. It was best not to ask certain questions.
Extracted from Journey to Nowhere by Eva Figes, published by Granta Books
at £14.99. Copies can be ordered for £13.49, including postage, from The
Sunday Times BooksFirst on 0870 165 8585
