Underground in Berlin is an unusual memoir of a Jewish woman in WWII Germany. Marie Jalowicz Simon avoided the concentration camps by going into hiding in Berlin. With the help of both Jews and Germans, Communists and even Nazis she managed to find shelter and meager food from 1941, when she became “illegal”, until the end of the war. Given that many memoirs by Jews from this period deal with the Resistance and/or survival of the camps, Jalowicz Simon’s memoir is quite remarkable — a Jew who hid in plain sight with the complicity of many who might have turned her in. This is linked to another unusual feature of her memoir — Jalowicz Simon, a leftist with communist sympathies, seems to credit much of her ability to survive to working class spirit. In her recollection of the events of her life just before and during the war, what stood out was how working people helped one another, even if they were fascist sympathizers. Class solidarity trumps politics in her memory of events. Unlike many other Jews who survived the war, Jalowicz Simon chose not to leave Germany in 1945, and instead took up residence in Soviet occupied East Berlin, where she became a university professor and lived until her death in 1998. Shortly before her death, at the request of her son Hermann Simon, she dictated some 77 tapes (900 pages) worth of her memories, which are the basis for this book.
Jalowicz Simon tells her story in chronological order, with the occasional jump forward or backward in time for clarifications. We learn that Marie was an only child descended from well educated German Jews in Berlin, her father a lawyer and her mother his efficient office manager. They had good relations with some non-Jewish Germans, including Emil and Hannchen Koch, who would become pivotal to Marie’s survival. Marie’s mother died before the war and her father died in 1941. Marie had a few other relatives, including an aunt who was sent to the camps and wanted Marie to accompany her. Marie, knowing that the camps were death, refused. Another aunt, who had lived in Russia and fled after the revolution, leaving her children behind, was able to help Marie a bit but eventually disappeared. Interestingly, Marie notes that at one of their last meetings, this aunt admitted that “the Bolsheviks were right.”
The heart of the story is Marie’s ability to survive day by day as repression against Jews increased. She discusses working as a forced laborer in a Seimen’s factory, the introduction of the yellow star, being pushed out of housing, and decreasing rations. Marie’s survival depended on her ability to bluff her way through dangerous situations, her intelligence and bravado, along with the assistance of a diverse group of Berliners. For example, at Seiman’s, where Marie and 200 Jewish women were forced laborers, the tool setters — free men, non-Jews — worked with the women to sabotage armaments, and the Nazi supervisor helped Marie get out of Seimen’s when she resolved to go into hiding. Marie’s recollection, to me, is a bit jarring:
Our experiences of these men … were so good that I often wondered how the dreadful persecution of the Jews could have come about. The men we met here were not really anti-Semitic, they were perfectly nice.
Of course, that wasn’t true everywhere. First, Berlin was different from the provinces. Secondly, I came into contact only with a certain section of society. And thirdly, I realized that the same Aryan Germans who hated the rich Jew … had nothing against starving young girls who worked hard, just as he worked hard himself.
Yikes. This sounds like propaganda from the workers paradise, turning the mass extermination of Jews into a class issue, where virtuous urban workers would never have been complicit. On another occasion, Marie and her “husband” (a fake marriage to a Dutchman working in Berlin) become tenants in an apartment where the landlady, Frau Blase, is an “enthusiastic Nazi supporter.” Eventually, Marie gets to know everyone in the building and even softens in her feelings to the harsh Frau Blase:
In this old woman, I recognized someone who, rejected by bourgeois society herself, took her revenge on it by breaking the law all her life whenever she could.
All of the neighbors look out for Marie (they think she is only “half-Jewish”), and Marie reflects on their support:
None of these neighbors of ours ever denounced me, but they were not opponents of the Nazis, let alone anti-Fascists in general. Some of them might well have reported an elderly man weighing 150 kilos who looked as they imagined a rich Jew would. I was never sure.
Oddly, despite the solidarity and protection afforded by her neighbors, Marie gets upset one day when someone on the street mocks her for having no stockings:
Once again I felt unhappy with my decision to class myself with the poor, oppressed and exploited…. I just didn’t like the company.
Ouch! Marie can also be heartless toward some of those who help her, in particular Hannchen Koch. The Koches had been friends of her father’s, and Hannchen apparently had had a crush on Mr. Jalowicz. It is also implied that Emil forced himself on Marie at the end of the war. Hannchen gave Marie her identity, at great personal risk, when Marie was trying to leave the country, and provided Marie with food from her own rations throughout the war. Marie seems ungrateful and resentful of this, claiming that Hannchen wanted to care for and control Marie. Perhaps Hannchen’s class affiliation made it difficult for Marie to be as sympathetic toward her as she was toward Frau Blase? Marie has some interesting ideas about the war and who was to blame. She encounters an old friend on the street at the end of the war and they fall into talking:
… we were speaking in Berlin dialect. I had learned to love it in the last three years: it was the language of helpful people. Correct High German, on the other hand, had not proved its worth; it was the cultured and educated upper middle class that had failed the test.
From an historian’s point of view, this memoir is fascinating: a view of wartime Berlin from the point of view of a Jew hiding underground. At the same time Jalowicz Simon’s desire to extol the virtues of the working class might be problematic although not surprising from someone who made a career as an academic under East German rule. The careful reader will want to evaluate factual information versus interpretation. In the right classroom, this memoir could lead to some lively discussion.
