Bell Anthea - Gone to Ground : One womans extraordinary account of survival in the heart of Nazi Germany

GONE to GROUND

MARIE JALOWICZ SIMON was born in 1922 into a middle-class Jewish family. She escaped the ghettos and concentration camps that claimed the lives of so many other Jews during the Second World War by living in hiding in Berlin. After the war she was full professor of the literary cultural history of classical antiquity at the Berlin Humboldt University, but rarely spoke about her past. Shortly before her death in 1998, her son Hermann Simon, director of the New Synagogue Berlin Foundation Centrum Judaicum, recorded Marie telling her story for the first time. Gone to Ground was put together by the author Irene Stratenwerth and Hermann Simon from those tapes.

One womans extraordinary account of survival in the heart of Nazi Germany

GONE to GROUND

MARIE JALOWICZ SIMON

TRANSLATED BY ANTHEA BELL

With an introduction by Lisa Appignanesi and an afterword by Hermann Simon

The translation of this work was supported by a grant from the Goethe-Institut, which is funded by the German Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

This book has been selected to receive financial assistance from English PENs PEN Translates! programme, supported by Arts Council England. English PEN exists to promote literature and our understanding of it, to uphold writers freedoms around the world, to campaign against the persecution and imprisonment of writers for stating their views, and to promote the friendly co-operation of writers and the free exchange of ideas. www.englishpen.org

First published in Great Britain in 2014 by

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First published in Germany in 2014 by S. Fischer Verlag GmbH entitled Untergetaucht

Copyright Hermann Simon and Irene Stratenwerth, 2014

Translation copyright Anthea Bell, 2014

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

eISBN 978 1 78283 138 9

Introduction

Marie Jalowicz Simon, the extraordinary woman who narrates the wartime life recorded by her son in Gone to Ground, was eleven years old when Hitler came to power in 1933. She was one of some 163,000 Berlin Jews, approximately a third of the total German Jewish population, which in turn was less than one per cent of the whole. Racist ideology doesnt need vast numbers to feed on. Feeling swamped needs no swamps.

By 1939, some 400 Nazi decrees later, the Jewish Berlin population had dwindled to 75,000. Laws had been put in place excluding Jews from the professions, public and business life, universities and state schools, and finally from unforced employment. Jews were stripped of assets, pensions and homes, compelled by the race laws of 1935 that made Jewishness a matter of lineage not religion, to declare themselves on ID cards and passports, and eventually on their clothes. After 910 November, 1938, Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass, they were excluded from the very literature, theatres, concert halls, cinemas and sports venues that had so bound them to German culture. Eventually they were transported out of the country (on the only trains permitted them) and excluded from life itself. In May 1943, Berlin was declared Judenrein cleansed and clear of its Jews.

But Marie Jalowicz was there. How this happened and how she managed to survive through the war years in Germany is the tale these vivid pages tell. They may be based on seventy-seven tapes of conversations she held with her son towards the end of what turned out to be a long postwar career as an academic in East Berlin, but they bear all the immediacy of the present tense.

Maries mother, Betti, well-educated, vivacious died of cancer in 1938. Bettis brother, an orthodox and eccentric joke dealer, who lived with a gentile woman, followed her two months later, literally starving to death in protest at the Nazi prohibition on Kosher food provision. Maries father, no longer able to practice as a lawyer, refused a visa to Palestine, lived an impoverished life with his daughter in bug-infested lodgings until he followed his wife in March 1941.

By this time Marie had already been working for some ten months along with some 200 other Jewish women as forced labour making armaments for Siemens at their Spandau plant. These were Rosie the Riveters with a vengeance! Their overseers were men, often enough Nazis. But a vibrant esprit de corps existed among the women. Solidarity, together with small acts of sabotage, made the long grind of daily life tolerable. Marie has a young persons curiosity about others and gets to know many on the shop floor. She also has a writers relish for individual quirks and a marked ability to convey character with a telling detail.

Even though they may be anti-Semitic, the overseers bend a rule for her here and there and when she needs extra leave to cope with her fathers death and funeral arrangements, it is granted. Soon after, since Jews cant leave a job, her superior fires her on her request. She wonders at this kindness of strangers, anti-Semites among them. She explains it to herself by noting that Berlin was not the provinces: its share of Communist and Social Democratic voters was far greater. Then, too, I realised that the same Aryan German who hated the rich Jew from the big house like poison had nothing against starving young girls who worked hard, just as he worked hard himself.

Her father dead, Marie has to find new lodgings. All around her relations and friends are being deported. She is pursued by officialdom to take up another forced labour post. But young woman that she is, she hungers for freedom rather more than for those essential ration coupons which come with registration and work. She starts wearing her Star of David only in the areas where she is known, then tears it off and hides it for long daily treks through the city. A threaded needle in her pocket allows her to sew it back as soon as she enters familiar terrain.

In June 1942, when the Gestapo come to arrest her at six in the morning, she manages to outwit them and leave the building in her petticoat. She has now gone to ground, or as the German title of this memoir has it, become Untergetaucht submerged. U-boats was the name eventually given to those 1,700 Jews who managed somehow to survive the war under the surface of officialdom, to disappear, their identities changed and often changing, like their innumerable addresses and places of hiding.

When rules are made by madmen and torturers, justice lies in breaking them. It takes courage, cunning and occasionally a ruthless resilience that the young seem to be better at than the old. It also takes a great deal of the moral luck Marie has in spades to make it through the long, hungry war years, the bombing and the difficult aftermath.