Ilse did it mainly at night: helping to hide and feed Jews stranded in Berlin. Her contacts sprang from a very different social milieu to the writers and artists with whom she spent so many evenings and weekends. It was the aristocratic world of Adam von Trott zu Solz, who would later become an active resister and was hanged by the Nazis in August 1944; and of the Alvenslebens, whom Ilse had met through Ursel’s friend Lexi.
The aristocrats whom Ilse knew weren’t hiding Jews in their own homes, but a network of people had crystallized around them to provide intermittent shelter for Jews on the run. Known as ‘submarines’, these Jews had discarded the yellow stars, emblazoned in black with the word ‘Jude’, that they’d been forced to wear from September 1941 – on the left side of their chest, right over their heart. They’d then gone underground wherever they could find refuge – whether for one night, for one month, or, if they were exceptionally fortunate, for longer.
One member of the network was Christabel Bielenberg, née Burton, a young Anglo-Irish woman married to Peter Bielenberg, a lawyer who was later interned in a concentration camp. Christabel was intelligent, bold, resilient, and astonishingly well connected, in England and Ireland as well as in Germany, thanks not least to her uncles, the newspaper barons Lord Rothermere and Lord Northcliffe.
In her memoir When I Was a German, she records how Ilse confronted her with a Jewish couple who urgently needed refuge. Christabel agonized – then told them they could stay two nights, but that was it. It was the winter of 1942:
She had a blonde woman with her that morning; rather extra blonde who, after shaking my hand, hesitated on the doorstep and seemed unwilling to come into the house. Ilse, too, seemed satisfied that her companion should stay outside and, after glancing at our telephone to see that it was not plugged in, she explained why. The woman was a Jewess. She had removed her star when the Gestapo had come hammering at the door of her flat, and she and her husband had clambered down the fire escape and had been living in attics and cellars ever since. A safe hairdresser had dyed her hair and, latterly, a priest had housed them in his attic; but some members of his flock, pious Catholics all, had recently been making discreet but pointed enquiries. Since yesterday the good Father had felt himself and his house to be under surveillance. Ilse explained that the priest had not asked his lodgers to leave, but they knew that the time had come, and now they had no place to go. She added that the woman could pass as an Aryan . . . It was a little time I suppose before my thoughts returned to the silent sitting room and I remembered to tell Ilse to ask her companion to come in, because of course I knew that outside the front door, waiting patiently beside the doorstep was something more than an unknown woman with dyed blonde hair. Whether I liked it or not, prepared or unprepared, the moment had come to me.31
What Ilse did was brilliantly courageous. Of the few Germans who were resisting at all, even fewer were doing anything for the Jews. And those who were, were hardly Jewish themselves. But did helping to hide Jews also buttress Ilse’s belief that she wasn’t one of them? That they, not she, needed hiding?
At around the same time as Ilse confronted Christabel with the two submarines, over the winter of 1942–3, she unexpectedly received a parcel containing her uncle Theo’s last possessions – among them his Judenpass, the identity card marked with a large J that Jews were required to carry – neatly wrapped in layers of brown paper. It was addressed to her and was sent from the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, just north of Berlin, to which Theo had been deported. It seems extraordinary that any concentration camp would send its victims’ possessions to anyone, and incomprehensible that the authorities, who must have known that Ilse was next of kin to a Jew, would politely return his personal effects, listed in an officially stamped inventory, instead of coming for her too. But that is what they did.
She hadn’t seen Theo for a very long time by then. As she recounted it, their last meeting was a chance encounter on a street corner in Berlin in late 1941. Her uncle wears the compulsory yellow star; his eyes are sunken; he is thin, depressed, hunched, uncommunicative. He looks away, whispering to her not to address him – for her own protection.
‘What a coincidence!’ Ilse exclaims delightedly.
‘Go away,’ he hisses.
‘Uncle Theo, why are you so unfriendly? Have we done anything wrong?’
Her naivety must have seemed aggressive. How could Ilse, who was hiding Jews from certain death, ask her own uncle such a question? Yet, four decades later, she reports this exchange to me in baffled tones, as if Theo didn’t realize that she knew exactly what one could and could not get away with in Nazi Berlin.
‘Go away, go away,’ he repeats, trying not to look nervously around him.
‘We miss you, Uncle Theo! I’ll come and fetch you by car. Then you’ll have no excuses!’
He starts to walk away.
‘Theo!’ Ilse calls, as she catches up with him again. ‘Well, at least let’s have a bite together. We haven’t seen you for ages.’
She still doesn’t get it.
Finally, he points to his yellow star, and murmurs, ‘You and Emmy will both be in terrible danger if they see you with me. Go now.’
‘Danger? No, don’t be silly! I will talk to whomever I want!’
He gives her a haunted stare.
‘Please, Theo, you’re so elusive.’
He walks off. The encounter has barely lasted five minutes. She will never see him again.