Underground in Berlin: A Young Woman's Extraordinary Tale of Survival in the Heart of Nazi Germany

"Well, I was supposed to find five books on Auschwitz. I’m wilfully choosing one which isn’t about Auschwitz, but rather about evading it. I’ve got an issue with the predominant focus on Auschwitz because I think that, important though it is and horrifying though it is, it may inadvertently serve to displace attention from the multiplicity of other experiences and contexts. The Auschwitz story of arrival on the train and selection on the ramp for the gas chambers or slave labour has become the patterned narrative that we expect from a survivor. We don’t expect the miserable homosexual emerging after the war, too ashamed to talk about it. We don’t know the stories of those who are just shot into a mass grave outside their village in Eastern Europe. We have many stories of ghettos, but even there, we sometimes see a kind of implicit hierarchy of suffering or heroism. We also have an implicit view of ‘survivor’, meaning someone who survived the camps. But I think we have to try to understand the full range and impact of experiences of Nazi persecution, including for those who managed to get out before the war. Sadly, too few were able to emigrate in time. The reason I chose Marie Jalowicz-Simon is twofold. First, because she survived in hiding in Berlin, living as an ‘illegal’, and her account shows her own quick-wittedness, her capacity to evade recognition, to think quickly in difficult situations, to have a get-out, to find ways of surviving, and her sheer good luck on occasion. But secondly, because I think her story also highlights the widespread goodness, kindness and willingness of many people to take risks, as well as the difficulties of evading those who might betray her as she moved on from one place to another. This is a very different sort of story from Anne Frank’s. We actually don’t know how many people helped victims of persecution. If you think of an account like this, Marie Jalowicz-Simon was helped by numerous people. And many of these stories of people who went underground— untergetaucht is the German word they use; some called themselves ‘ U-Boote ’ or ‘submarines’—show that you could generally only stay with any given person or in any given place for a short period of time and then you had to move on. We know that between 1,500 and 2,000 people survived by hiding in Berlin alone. Probably more like 10,000-15,000 German Jews actually tried to go into hiding (mostly in Berlin, but also elsewhere across the Reich) but many were betrayed or discovered. For any one of those people, probably 10 or more people would have been involved sequentially in hiding them; in some cases, there were as many as 50 people helping. We’re just estimating here, but hypothetically you could say that more than 50,000 people in Berlin alone must have been involved in trying to hide people, which is a significant figure. It’s worth thinking about what risks they were taking. Why were they doing it? Very often you find it’s basic compassion and a sense of humanity. They think they just have to do it, even though many who were discovered were put to death. Tens of thousands of people are involved here, and I think that’s worth remembering. Some were willing to be duped, to be misled, to pretend they believed the story that someone had been bombed out and had lost their papers or whatever. Others were willing to help actively in forging papers and passing people on and getting people out and I think that’s a really interesting area to explore. We need to understand the machinery of mass extermination that allowed a camp like Auschwitz to be constructed and to function and have all the sub-camps and to have all the involvement of industrialists and employers in slave labour—but we also need to explore why it was that, under some conditions, people who were simply bystanders were actually able to turn into rescuers—and why others chose to remain passive, or were instead complicit, betraying those who tried to hide and those who tried to help. And there were variations in the character of surrounding societies across Europe that affected the capacity of the persecuted to survive in different areas. She had to sell sexual favours as a young woman would have to do, and she was fortunate that one old Nazi that she actually managed to stay with was syphilitic and impotent, and therefore unable to avail himself of what she had on offer, but liked having her around. There were ruses she and many others used, with stories about lost papers, about being bombed out, taking on false identities. I think what’s interesting about her account is also that she’s a clever woman. She subsequently goes on to be a distinguished academic in East Germany. Her son, Hermann Simon, got her to record her testimony late in her life. He took down a very long interview with her and wrote it up, and it came out in an extraordinarily articulate way. He said he barely needed to edit it to produce the book. Not really, although many accounts do adopt at least one of those tones. It’s much less embittered than you would think it ought to be, in part because there was still human contact throughout that period and there were still people to whom she could relate as a human being. She didn’t face the total dehumanization and absolute destruction of the self that people in Auschwitz had to face. That may be a bit glib, but I think the idea that you could go on feeling you possessed some degree of agency was important—it’s that sense of agency that Viktor Frankl was getting at. And she managed to make a fulfilling life for herself after the war. For somebody surviving in hiding, it could be absolutely, terrifyingly difficult, but if you had the fortune to survive, you probably had a sense of a coherent self afterwards, in contrast to the experience Delbo describes of this sharp break with the past. It is effectively an alibi for so many Germans who pretend they “never knew anything about it”. And in one of my previous books, A Small Town Near Auschwitz , I explore the Nazi administrator of a nearby county, just 26 miles north of Auschwitz, who reduces the “it” to just the gas chambers. And there he was organizing the ghettoization, humiliation, degradation and starvation of more than 30,000 Jews in the town, making it easier for them to be rounded up by the Gestapo and the SS. And then, after the war, like so many others, he went on to a successful post-war career in the Federal Republic as a civil servant, and he “never knew anything about it” because he reduces the evil to just the gas chambers of Auschwitz. But it was all part of an enormous system of persecution across the Reich. There was no one in the German Reich in the 1930s who did not know that the Jews were being humiliated, ousted from their professions, ousted from their homes. After Kristallnacht in 1938 it was impossible for Jews to make a life in Germany anymore. And then to just reduce everything to the gas chambers of Auschwitz just seems to me so patently absurd. While I’m as shocked and horrified by it as it’s possible to be, I just wish we could spread our vision a little wider and say, “but what was going on in Berlin or Munich or villages across the Reich”—and indeed across Europe. There was inhumanity across the whole system. It wasn’t just concentrated in the gas chambers of one camp."