Lilly was granted a divorce at the regional court on Alexanderplatz on October 12, 1943. Sergeant Günther Wust, army post number 14 063 B, could not attend his own divorce proceedings, as he had been stationed in Hungary since August. Felice sat shivering on a bench outside the courtroom and used the time to write a poem:
REGIONAL COURT
I promised you, once and forever,
To stand beside you in your need.
And yet at this first difficult endeavor,
It is alone that you proceed.
Dearest! Hopefully they’ll go easy
On you in their gloomy hall.
The dentist’s chair can make me queasy,
But divorce must be worst of all.
You’re still such a small one,
And your hair like copper wire glows.
Later I will not leave you alone
Has Fräulein Schulz perhaps a rose?
In hopefully not too long you’ll be
Here again. Are courtrooms always so cold?
And from then on you’ll belong only to me.
And later—you want the same I see,
Together we will both grow old!
“Am I really divorced?” Aimée stammered in a daze when Jaguar went to meet her after the hearing.
“You’re completely under my control now,” Felice beamed as she presented Lilly with a bouquet of red roses from Fräulein Schulz’s at the Schmargendorf station on Heidelberger Platz. That evening they rearranged the apartment. The bed was moved from the balcony room to the study; the study’s light gray tile stove wasn’t working, so in winter the room was suitable only to sleep in.
Lilly’s divorce decree, dated October 18, was issued “in the name of the German people.” It stated that Lilly had filed for divorce and named Günther as the guilty party, on the grounds that he had broken their marriage vow. Günther, for his part, asserted that Lilly did not wish to have any more children and “for this reason had obstinately refused conjugal relations since December 1942.” Günther Wust’s counterclaim was recognized, with the court ruling that both parties were culpable, because “the reason given by her [Lilly], that they already have four children, is not justifiable.”
At almost the same time in London, a wedding was being celebrated: On October 23, with a large number from the refugee scene in attendance, Irene Schragenheim married Fritz Cahn, from Berlin. The groom was soon to drop his embarrassing first name, thereafter to be known as “Derek.” As coincidence would have it, his sister had gone to school with Käte Schragenheim, née Hammerschlag. Käte in turn, as Felice was to hear through Madame Kummer, had spent the last few years in Palestine, going through Irene’s inheritance. “Our relationship has ceased to exist,” Irene wrote at the beginning of October, and in the same letter responded to Felice’s question of whether she had read Radclyffe Hall’s Well of Loneliness, the classic of lesbian literature: No, she hadn’t read the book, but had been trying to find a copy of it for years. “Personally, things of that nature are foreign to me,” she pointedly added, “as I hope they are to my Putz as well.”
“You will by now have received word of the court’s decision. Your attorney has surely notified you,” Lilly wrote to Günther Wust at the front on October 29:
Nothing out of the ordinary is going on here, except that I can no longer go to my English class. It was taking up too much of my time. If I didn’t have children I could better devote myself to it. Now to the issue of the apartment. It was mentioned at the court session that you would keep it, but it was also stated that it would be very difficult for me to find another, and that you, of course, cannot simply put me and the children on the street.
Soon after this, Lilly was notified that she was to retain custody of all four children. But she remained willing to turn over the two oldest sons to Günther and his nineteen-year-old fiancée, Liesl Reichler, once they married. In October only the two youngest boys were in Berlin; under the threat of bombing attacks an increasing number of city schoolchildren were being removed to the country. Bernd was sent to Grünrode in East Prussia, not far from the Lithuanian border, and Eberhard provisionally went to stay with Liesl in Silesia.
Bernd Wust:
It was a simple country school: first grade—first row, second grade—second row, third and fourth grades—third row, and the fourth-graders sat in the back. In the room adjoining were the fifth-through eighth-graders. They spoke German with a very harsh East Prussian accent. The people I first stayed with were named Skat. In the beginning we were thrashed indiscriminately by teacher and fellow students alike. We had been in a big school in Berlin, and a weak student could always hide behind the rest of the class, but that didn’t work in East Prussia. And in the country they had everything drilled into them by rote. That you could recite your multiplication tables in your sleep was the alpha and the omega of instruction, and we Berliners couldn’t do that. Once we got boxed on the ears for this by the village schoolteacher, and our fellow students, boys to the left, girls to the right, would set us up unmercifully: “Teacher, didn’t you want to run the Berliners through their multiplication tables?” The boy I was with at the Skats’, Knut was his name, was a year older than I and a big bull of a fellow, and he beat up the others for us. In time we all adjusted. We filched apples with the peasant boys, and we had to help out at work. When it was time to harvest potatoes anyone who could crawl on all fours went over to Farmer A’s first, and two days later to Farmer B’s. When the women retired for lunch we played in the barnyard, slinging mud at each other, torturing the mutts, playing hide-and-seek. If one of the men came home on leave and had the Iron Cross, first or second class, then to us he was a big hero.
Those were exciting times. The Führer was going to triumph, the teachers taught us that. Once a month we had a class where some women would show up and tell us some wonderful thing or other. I still remember how one of them said, in a voice thick with emotion, “An assassination attempt has been made on the Führer.” And then there was the Battle of Normandy, and the old men who were left in the town took their guns left over from World War I out of the cabinet and set out for the woods looking for some escaped prisoner of war, or I don’t know what—usually it was Russians. We were discouraged from going too far into the woods by ourselves. The forests that ran along the Lithuanian border began in our area, in northeast Prussia, and went all the way to Leningrad, you mustn’t forget that.
Mutti visited twice during the year I was in East Prussia. A visit entailed a great number of difficulties; there weren’t many trains. I can remember that people laughed when Mutti arrived wearing pants. They were women’s pants, but the provincial women of East Prussia weren’t used to that, their mouths dropped open! And later they said, well, all right, they might come in handy if you ever had to climb through the window of a train. I didn’t feel at home at the Skats’, I was still too much of a city boy. I must have come across as arrogant and unreliable, a fibber. I broke a window once and told them that a tramp had done it. Perhaps it was due to the way Mutti raised us; we were never really punished for anything. If Mutti lost her temper, whoever was standing close by got the brunt of it, and in most cases it was the wrong person. That was the way she was, and I took that behavior with me to East Prussia. But I always got caught when I fibbed, and was punished for it. Then I went to live with another family, the Rimkuses. They weren’t farmers, but agronomists—to the Nazis this was a major distinction. They had two daughters, and I could play with the twelve-year-old. And the wife took a little better care of me. And then when Eberhard arrived my troubles were over. I turned into a real East Prussian yokel. The others always said, yeah, the one from Berlin can work his mouth, but real work is something else entirely. We Berliners weren’t used to it. In the time it took for one of the village boys to harvest a whole row of potatoes, we could only gather about ten percent of what he did, either because we were being too careful or because we got clods of dirt confused with potatoes. Or if we were bringing the cows in from the meadow and one of them put its head down and came at me, I would let go and she would run off into the clover field . . .
The children were removed from Berlin just in time; the “Battle of Berlin” commenced during the third week of November.
Sirens began to wail at 7:30 p.m. on November 22, and around 9:00 the “carpet bombing” began. Reinhard was sick and therefore not allowed to go to the children’s bunker. A deadly silence fell once the lights went out in the cellar on Friedrichshaller Strasse, the only sound was that of mortar trickling down from the walls. In the darkness Lilly held on to Felice’s arm with both hands. She was always afraid they were going to be separated from one another.
“Our building’s made of iron, isn’t that true, Mutti?” Reinhard’s thin voice broke through the all-pervasive fear. One woman gave a shaky laugh, and people came out of their dazed state. “That must have been a bull’s-eye,” someone joked. In the shelter everyone sat shoulder to shoulder and had to deal close-up with the other residents. Frau Kluge, wife of the building custodian, who lived in the basement apartment with their ten-year-old daughter, was a good person. Lilly and Felice would go to her place to listen to Radio London, the radio wrapped in blankets to muffle the sound. “Aunt” Grasenick from the fourth floor was also nice. Lilly always gave her the key to the apartment when she had to leave the children at home alone. “We know you’re listening to enemy broadcasts,” the Eichmanns on the top floor had said threateningly more than once. Lilly and Felice had to be careful as well in front of their neighbor Frau Schmidt, whose enthusiasm for the Führer knew no bounds. “It’s not over yet,” she intoned in the din of the bombing. But whenever the political mood in Berlin changed, her party badge disappeared as if by magic.
After things had calmed down and Lilly and Felice had long since gone to bed, the doorbell rang. Father Selbach arrived in the company of a young woman with Marlene Dietrich cheeks, carrying a large suitcase. Their faces were covered in soot and both were totally disheveled.
“All hell has broken loose out there. Half of Steglitz is on fire and we got caught in it. I’m leaving for the ‘Forst’ tomorrow. Can Lola stay here with you?”
Lola could. Lola Sturm was no stranger to Lilly and Felice. For some time now she had been living in the small room at the Selbachs’, which earlier had served as Felice’s hiding place. And Mutti’s daughter Renate had brought her along for a visit in the past.
“Jessissmaria!” was the only thing she could manage to say.
Lola worked as a secretary at the Berlin subsidiary of the Böhler Works of the “Ostmark,” as Austria was referred to after the Anschluss (Annexation). Böhler Berlin served as intermediary between the OKH, or Army High Command, the OKW (Wehrmacht High Command), and the Ministry of Aviation. Every day the piece numbers of items manufactured south of Vienna in Enzesfeld were sent by teletype to Berlin, which passed them on to the OKH and Ministry of Aviation. The firm had its own plane that flew between Enzesfeld and Berlin. Lola enjoyed a position of trust at the company. The Selbachs had first become acquainted with the twenty-one-year-old Sudeten as she was traveling by train from her native village of Freiwaldau in the Altvater Mountains to Berlin, her important work contract in her pocket. Luise Selbach offered her the empty room, and Lola Sturm appreciated the connection to “Mutti” Selbach and her three daughters, for Berliners did not exactly make it easy for the newcomer. In the streetcar, people made fun of her as soon as she opened her mouth.
But she liked it better at Aimée and Jaguar’s.
Lola Sturmova:
I felt at home there, which was not the case at the Selbachs’. They were strange somehow. I don’t know, it was as if the Selbachs trimmed their sails to the wind, the daughters too. After all, with officers they . . .
They tested me, Lilly and Felice, on my political views. Yes, and discovered that we had always helped people when we could, even here in Jesenik, which used to be called Freiwaldau. And here, too, I had—there was a girl at the high school with me, Marianne Stuckart, she was Jewish, and then there was the Gessler firm, they had the quarry works here, and the Schwalmburgs, who owned the sanatorium in Zuckmantl. People didn’t hate them, it was nothing out of the ordinary, but then in ’38 . . . I knew Felice was Jewish, and Lilly and Felice told me anyway. So I said to myself, we’ll have to help them. People knew about it, but they didn’t say anything. We were always afraid there was a bug hidden somewhere.
Felice was very cooperative, a nice soul, intelligent above all, yes, and the fact that she and Lilly had a lesbian love, so to speak—they were all afraid that they’d get sick somehow, catch something if they went with soldiers. And there were a lot of half-Jewish women who met at Lilly’s, and the couples got together there. Felice always dressed as a man, always, in pants, blouse, tie, and Lilly dressed normal, as a woman. She was in such good shape, despite the four children. But I noticed it. One time I was in the bathroom and was getting ready to take a bath, and Felice wanted to come in. She started grabbing at me, and I said, “Are you crazy!” Yes, and then I knew what was what. But Lilly needed love, and what she probably didn’t get from her husband she just turned around. She was happy with Felice, believe me when I say that. I saw nothing wrong with it.
Two days after Lola moved in Lilly celebrated her thirtieth birthday. Though she felt that she had reached an advanced age, her circle of friends could only carry on about how she had blossomed during the last six months. Felice gave Lilly a Turkish espresso machine made of Jena glass. Only with effort could Lilly hide her disappointment. Günther, too, was always dragging home some appliance or other, absolutely convinced that his wife had only one thing on her mind day and night. And then something as superfluous as an espresso machine! Felice, on the other hand, was delighted by her unique choice. Real coffee could be had only on the black market, and not inexpensively—if that wasn’t a luxury, then nothing was!
As Bernd was in East Prussia, Eberhard in Silesia, and Albrecht and Reinhard were spending nights in the children’s bunker, a cot was set up for Lola in the children’s room, and she easily adjusted to the intricate comings and goings of the Wust household. Her lack of any sense of financial responsibility to Lilly left something to be desired. But her mischievous smile and slanting gray-blue eyes, her delightful Bohemian-Austrian accent and the way she cried “Uj jegerl” and clamped her hand over her mouth when caught unawares by something, made it hard for Lilly to summon up the severity to remind Lola that her rent was overdue. Instead, Lola bought a set of light-colored beechwood chairs and an end table as a Christmas gift for the balcony room.
With Lola’s presence more men began to appear at the house again. One evening she brought home a student from Munich who was looking for a place to live, and Elenai, sensing a willing victim, played the wild woman to the shrieks of the others present.
“What’s going on with all of you?” the young man asked, obviously distressed.
“Nothing at all, my dear young man,” Elenai cooed, and Lola realized that this was one conquest that was lost.
Another time Lola was so late in returning home that Lilly and Felice gave up on her for the night. Erika Jung, Felice’s hairdresser, and her friend Maria Kaufmann were guests for the evening. Inge had also frequented the chic salon on Friedenauer Strasse for a while, until things got a bit too colorful for her. Customers sat in small compartments divided by screens, and as they got their hair cut they would relate to each other the most intimate details of their love life. Anyone who was less than eager to join in promptly was pressured to do so. So Erika Jung was a guest for the evening with Maria, her blond girlfriend. Erika, her masculine haircut held in place with brilliantine, and Maria, an elegant and commanding presence, were dressed in men’s trousers. Both women were in their mid-twenties. Maria lived alone in a huge apartment with carpets as high as grass; one’s feet sank into them. Jaguar had taken Aimée there once, showing her off as if she were a trophy.
“If you go there with me now, you’ll belong forever,” she had said, preparing Aimée for the event.
Duly intimidated, Lilly arrived with Felice at the fifth-floor apartment in the imposing industrial-era building. And sure enough, the two women did their best to induct the novice into the joys of lesbian love. With one of their hostesses sitting on the other’s lap, the air hummed with “Küsschen,” and “Schätzchen” and “Darling.” When Erika began to fondle Maria’s breasts, Aimée was so embarrassed she didn’t know where to look.
On the evening of their visit to Lilly and Felice, it had gotten too late for Erika and Maria to go home. Lilly gave them one side of the marriage bed, but for a reason she later could not recall she didn’t join Felice on the couch. As the other two soon pulled the covers off her, Lilly went into the children’s room for Lola’s eiderdown comforter. Lola showed up shortly thereafter. Tipsy and crashing around, she discovered the cover was missing from her cot and lay down in Albrecht’s empty little bed.
Lola Sturmova:
One fine day my boss, an Austrian from Enzesfeld, said: Let’s go to the Chinese restaurant for lunch. And suddenly I looked up and thought, My God, that man in uniform over there looks familiar. Didn’t we go to school together? And then he handed the headwaiter a note on which he had written: “Is that really you or isn’t it? Tom Lorek.” Well, to make a long story short, we met up and he said to me, I live not far from here and I’ve got some good stuff over at my place. Send your boss packing and we’ll go over and fill each other in on what we’ve been doing since we last saw each other. So I went, and I got a little tipsy, my goodness, and to this day I have no idea how I made it back to Lilly’s! Every once in a while I would sit down on the stairs and sing, until I finally reached the apartment. When they heard someone fumbling around at the door they came out, but by that time I was in bed. And they came into the room—I didn’t have a pillow, nothing, not a thing, only Albrecht’s little bed with its thin cover, where I lay down. I’d get cold first here, then there, and I tossed and turned so much that the whole bed collapsed. And Lilly and the other girls came in and saw me lying on the floor, muttering, “Where’s my covers? I’m cold!”
In the bombing attacks that took place between the twenty-second and the twenty-sixth of November, 3,758 people were killed and almost a half million were left homeless. To keep up the city’s spirits Berliners were given special rations at the end of November—a tin of fish, a can of condensed milk, a half-kilo of fresh vegetables and fifty grams of coffee and tobacco. On November 27 Goebbels visited the areas that had been hardest hit, as well as several ration distribution centers. “One gets the impression that the moral spirit of the Berlin population borders on the religious,” he wrote in his diary. “Women come up and make the sign of the cross over me and ask God to protect me. . . . The rations are extolled as excellent everywhere. . . . One can wrap these people around one’s finger with the slightest display of kindness.”
In mid-December Lilly urged Günther to pay her the money he had promised for herself and the children. The letters exchanged between Berlin and the front became increasingly angrier.
Christmas was celebrated with Lilly’s parents under their large, decorated fir tree. And at the Böhler Works, Lola was given the responsibility of distributing presents to everyone, something that worked to the advantage of the Wust household. Aimée’s gift to Jaguar was a white turtleneck sweater she had knitted for her. Jaguar wrote Aimée a poem:
That there was a time before you—I can’t believe!
To me, we’ve forever been this way,
Together, side by side in life and in dreams,
Surrounded both by darkness and the light of day.
You belong to me! Since you arrived,
And slowly at first, then full of trust,
Placed your heart in my hands, I have strived
For the strength to build a life for us.
So I have hope for days yet to come,
As this year nods and slips into air,
Because before me, like some emblem,
I carry the copper gleam of your hair.
“I have such hopes for the coming year, above all, finally to have a quiet life,” Aimée wrote to Jaguar on December 27:
A life lived for you, and, note this well, you have it in writing: a happy life with you only! Are you satisfied now? Jealous girl that you are, you think I’m writing to “my Hansel”! Silly, silly girl! You don’t know how much I love you. Which is a good thing, actually, for if you knew how much, you would have me too securely in your claws, you old jaguar, you!
Only one thing matters! And that is that soon, very soon now, I will be lying in your arms, in your paws, that is. And then I will be the happiest person on God’s green earth. Then all my worries and cares will be over and I will be safe from all the world’s sorrows. My dearest one, in your white pullover, what do we care for others? We are enough to each other, we need no one but ourselves, but each other we need completely.
The year 1943 ended with a major bombing attack on the night of December 29, and 1944 began with major bombings on the nights of January 1 and 2. Everyone was kept busy sweeping debris, nailing cardboard over windows, searching for friends who had been bombed out and getting settled into basements. Everyone suffered from a permanent lack of sleep and irritability. At night an empty silence reigned in the dark streets, the wind whistling through bombed-out house fronts. Public transportation was infrequently in service. Radio London was amazed at the tenacity with which the German people set about rebuilding what had been destroyed.
As many women as possible were to be mobilized. Goebbels, as of July special commissioner in charge of total war mobilization, raised the age until which women were obligated to work from forty-five to fifty. Government agencies and administration offices were forced to devote thirty percent of their work force to the war effort. Theaters and restaurants closed. Women were accepted into the army.
Each month another transport left for Auschwitz, rarely with more than thirty people, most of them “illegals.”
For Aimée and Jaguar, this was the quietest period of their life together. Their friends, many of whom had been bombed out, were busy with their own lives. Lola had fallen in love and was seldom to be seen. Aimée, who had always been devoted to crossword puzzles, created them for Jaguar. The answer to one puzzle, in which syllables were combined to form words, produced one of Lilly’s favorite sayings: “You don’t love me, I always knew it,” to which was added the challenge, “Puzzle solvers and readers so inclined are invited to vindicate themselves.”
Only once did they have a fight.
“What are you reading?” Jaguar asked. “Let me see,” and took the thin volume out of Aimée’s hands. “Honey!” Jaguar’s indulgent tone held an element of contempt. “Waggerl!” She marched around the room as she read aloud: The girl left the house, the thatch-roofed house on the pond. The house is old and gloomy, nothing more than a hut, but the fisherman’s daughter is young and proud, a princess, as anyone in the village knew who had set eyes on her . . .
“Can’t you find anything better to read?”
“I like it, give it here!” Aimée flushed from her throat to her face, and she tried to grab the book away from Felice. Jaguar jumped out of her path and took refuge behind Günther’s favorite armchair: The girl’s name is Veronica, a pretty name! The fisherman’s daughter could easily have been somewhat less beautiful, it would scarcely have mattered. She is almost too pretty as it is, her forehead covered with lovely dark curls, her heavenly blue eyes . . .
“Say, where did this yokel get to know Elenai?”
“You can spare me your disdain!” Aimée hissed. “I will not have you speak to me like this. You think you’re the only ones who have accomplished anything in literature! That isn’t so. We have good writers too!”
“All right, fine,” Jaguar murmured, stunned.
Lilly had to put her acting talent to good use in overcoming unanticipated problems. When Felice infected Lilly with a boil it was no problem to get the medication they both needed. But when Jaguar came down with conjunctivitis, Lilly had to rub her eyes until they were bloodshot to simulate the condition believably. And with a toothache it was even more difficult. Inge finally located a dentist in Steglitz, whose name, incredibly enough, was Dr. Zahn [“Dr. Tooth”]. He agreed to see Felice without a health insurance certificate, and, more important, to treat her without registering her as a patient. And there was a pharmacist on Bülowstrasse named Hagemann who filled Felice’s prescriptions free of charge, and was constantly supplying her with Dextropur for her baking needs.
Elenai Pollak:
I arranged a meeting one day with Herr Hagemann, through my father, who needed certain medications. Hagemann was a bachelor, and at thirty-five seemed an old man to me. But he was interested in me and invited me to his place one day. It was then I figured out that he only had one thing in mind, and I was put in an awkward situation. I got the feeling he wasn’t a Nazi, and so I tried to establish a conversational relationship with him, in order to avoid the obvious. But that didn’t work, and I found myself in his bed. I talked to Felice about it, and she immediately said, I want to get to know him. What kind of person is he, perhaps he knows something? That was always the important thing. And so all of a sudden he has two Jewish girls standing in front of him. He was highly flattered and right away started coming on to Felice. Both of us smoked a lot—out of sheer nervousness about our perpetually tense situation—and he had an infinite number of cigarettes. After we all had drunk coffee together he left the room at some point and Felice stuck his entire supply of cigarettes in her pocket.
“That’ll keep us in smokes for the next few days,” she said.
I was shocked. “We can’t steal from this man, he’s being very nice to us.” So when Hagemann returned I said to him, “By the way, we just lifted all of your cigarettes.” To which he answered, “Yes, that’s why I put them there.”
Felice had an unbelievable gift for “organizing” things. Whenever there was something to be gotten, she went for it.
By the end of January the quiet period was over. First, Jaguar presented a thousand Reichsmarks to a shocked Aimée: “In case anything happens to me.” Then Inge’s family was bombed out and moved to Lübben, her father’s native village. After combing for jobs in the cultural sphere, Inge was forced to accept a position in a factory near Lübben that manufactured copper coil cable for submarines. Much to Aimée’s displeasure, Jaguar often took off on the weekends to visit her. Then Lola called in tears from somewhere or other to reveal that she was pregnant. The father, Hans-Heinz Holste, known and detested by the Wust-Schragenheim household, was a revolting young man with thick, pouting lips.
“Ha, ha, ha,” was Felice’s wry comment [the German pronunciation of the man’s initials, H.H.H.].
“Lola, calm down, we’ll be there right away,” Lilly said comfortingly, and the two of them set off for Zehlendorf to collect their unhappy friend. But Lola’s tears merely occasioned sarcasm in their circle of women friends.
“This has to happen to you, of all people!”
“Be happy you’re rid of the idiot! You can’t really want someone from the Nordic race!”
Felice was the only one to take pity on her. “Lilly will take care of your baby, don’t worry,” she promised, giving Lola a tender hug.
Last of all, the doorbell rang one morning at 3 a.m. Felice sat up in bed with a start, her body tensed like an animal about to spring.
“For God’s sake, what should I do?” It was the first time that Jaguar had shown fear.
Dressed in her silk pajamas, Felice rushed out to the balcony and crouched in a corner. Outside the door, a confused stranger was asking for someone who didn’t even live in the building.
“Are you crazy, it’s the middle of the night!” Lilly barked at him, and listened until his footsteps grew faint.
“It’s nothing, dearest, come back to bed.”
It was a long time before Felice fell asleep that night.
“It could have been them,” she managed to say as she clung to Lilly, who tried in vain to warm a shivering Felice with her body.
“You are not to be afraid, I will never allow them to do anything to you. Never! They’ll have to shoot me first!”
The next day Felice came down with a cold.
On March 1 the Pathology Building and gatehouse of the Jewish Hospital at Schulstrasse 78 in the Wedding district of Berlin were appropriated and put under the direction of Criminal Investigation Secretary Walter Dobberke as a “collection point for Jews.”
Felice, who saw how hard Lilly was struggling to survive, fell into a depression now and then when she considered the future.
PESSIMISM
I know I cannot hold you,
If someone comes your way.
Quietly we will say adieu,
as when we first met, that April day.
Today it is enough to know
I love you, but that won’t go far!
One day it will be essential, even so,
For you to have a maid and car.
I want to see you having fun,
You’re not the most frugal woman around!
Even if my self-confidence abounds,
Even if I build castles on the moon’s round
Surface, on earth I may not be the one.
The escalating war and increasingly bitter struggle for survival by illegal Jews put an end to group enterprises on Friedrichshaller Strasse. But Felice and Elenai maintained their friendship. They constantly rotated their meeting place, but often it was the small café on Winterfeldplatz where they first had met. When Lilly wasn’t at home Felice would call Elenai. “You can come,” she would say. The two women had agreed that what they had to say to each other could not be discussed in front of Lilly. They analyzed the military situation, reported to each other on which of their friends had been deported, and talked about their fear of being denounced. Was it wise to stay at one address for so long, or was there somewhere else Felice would be safer? But Felice dreaded making decisions, any kind of change frightened her. Elenai was never to know how emotionally entangled Felice was with Lilly.
At the same time, Elenai and Gregor tried to impress upon Lilly what a concentration camp was, and that Felice’s life was in constant danger. A denunciation could destroy their idyllic life at any moment. Lilly often gave Elenai and Gregor the impression that she didn’t really comprehend that Felice’s situation fundamentally differed from hers, that for Felice there was no such thing as everyday life anymore.
“Shut up! I can’t bear to hear any more of this!” Elenai would shout, when Lilly would go off on one of her raptures, stretching Elenai’s nerves to the breaking point.
When Liesl Reichler capitulated to the difficulties she faced with her impending marriage to Günther Wust, father of four, and renounced the engagement, Lilly’s mother had to travel to Silesia to bring Eberhard home. Several days later Lilly traveled with him to East Prussia, where the Rimkus family who had taken in Bernd would also now take in Eberhard. The trip lasted twenty hours. Inundated with the scent of lily of the valley, which covered the forest floor like hailstones after a storm, Lilly passed the night on a straw mattress.
And now it was Felice who expressed her desire through letters:
March 30, 1944
My Beloved,
What am I to do if you are sitting up all night in some horrible train and I cannot talk with you, cannot kiss you, write to you?
Exactly one year ago today I also was alone in your apartment. Surely we telephoned that evening, and surely I was in your thoughts as much then as I am now. During this entire year I was, I think, alone just once with only the ticking of the clock, and that was on the evening you went to the theater with Gerd and the others. I spent that evening looking at all the little things that you hold in your hands every day, or even just look at.
A long time has passed since that evening, and you were always here. It is no wonder that, despite all the evenings I have spent alone in my furnished past, I find no peace on this evening, that I—just imagine, it’s almost midnight!—cannot sleep. Perhaps because you are not asleep either? But you are so often awake long after I have fallen fast asleep. Which reminds me of something I’ve always wanted to ask: What do you think about on those long evenings? Sometimes I find it terrible that one person can love another so much, and share everything with that person, yet have that person’s thinking remain so strange, and know it will always remain so. I’m just jealous.
April 1, 1944
It’s time for you to return. I love you so much, and I’m so afraid that you’ve taken the wrong train, to arrive somewhere weeping. I’ll never let you go off alone again!
During this period Lola took Reinhard to her mother’s in Freiwaldau, and then went on to Enzesfeld, not far from Vienna. At her return, her mother opened the door and slapped her.
“You should be ashamed! Living with such perverse people!”
In his innocence Reinhard had revealed that his mother and Felice kissed each other and wrote letters to one another.
Early in 1944 Felice found a position as a stenotypist on Kochstrasse, in the newspaper district. She worked in the Berlin editorial office of the Essen National-Zeitung, “organ of the National Socialist Workers’ Party.”
Lilly:
Elenai had worked there first, and help was short. Felice had to be smuggled through about ninety-nine channels, but the worst was that she was hired as Frau Wust, mother of two. And I was demoted to the role of sister-in-law. But I had to be careful; once when I called I almost gave myself away. She never revealed to me what she did there; I know only that she typed lead articles for a man named Berns. There was some trouble at the paper once. Felice probably had something printed that was not what the boss wanted, but she was never discovered. She was terribly pleased about it at the time. I knew that she worked for the underground, but didn’t know the what or how of it. I still have Felice’s notebooks, in which she recorded her appointments, but what it all means is a mystery to me. I never found out. She often came home quite late at night; she would call from the Schmargendorf station, and I would get up and go to meet her. She always said, I’ll tell you nothing, not the least little thing, it’s too dangerous. She always said, If you’re standing next to me and they grab me, then I want you to keep walking. Which I never would have done, never in my life! I would have found out thousands of things had we remained together longer. We just had too little time. We lived very intensely, but you must remember, there was a war on.
Lola Sturmova:
She worked, I think, at the Völkischer Beobachter, under the name of Schrader. Apparently she worked under my name as well, as a journalist, I believe. Whenever there was anything going on she would always bring home news of it—it was the Völkischer Beobachter, sorry, but I can’t help it. She held jobs at several different places so that she could have access to the news. And she often came home with something. We kept up with the progress being made at the front, and there was the matter of the assassination [attempt on Hitler], she got the news of that from there too. I never asked her for details, because I thought what she told me was enough. I could figure out the rest.
She also brought home quite a few articles she had written under an abbreviated name, initials really. She had the articles smuggled to England through an officer I knew. He was “differently” inclined, was “Kaleu”—Captain Lieutenant—Henschel, that was his name. He said, Don’t ask, I’ll take care of it. Felice gave me a number of articles from the newspaper to give to him—she herself never met him. But she knew he would take care of it. He had a Saxon accent, and whenever I heard him talk I saw red, but he was a nice fellow. I tested him to be sure we were of the same mind despite the fact that he was in the military. I got to know him at the OKH. And there was this lieutenant colonel, a strange bird. I had just started working at Böhler and he called there, and I kept lowering his rank, addressing him as Oberleutnant [first lieutenant] instead of Oberstleutnant [lieutenant colonel]. And one fine day he arrived with a little book that listed the orders of rank. Whenever I went over to the OKH or the Ministry of Aviation I always checked the little book first, so that I wouldn’t say something stupid. Well, so Kaleu Henschel got a big laugh when I told him I had demoted the lieutenant colonel.
“So many people are being killed because of a schizophrenic, a paralytic,” he said.
Felice’s employment at the National-Zeitung is described by Georg Zivier in his book Deutschland und seine Juden (Germany and Its Jews), in the following words:
This pretty girl, who was a great help to the household and particularly beloved in the air raid shelter, had lost all sense of danger, and in her audacity even accepted a position, under a false name, at the editorial offices of a newspaper affiliated with the Nazi Party. If they had found her out her landlady and all of her friends and acquaintances from her building would have been suspected of espionage and would have faced harsh measures by the Gestapo.
In fact, the true situation was that Elenai had an aunt in Buenos Aires who, as a member of the Association of Germans Abroad (VDA), wished to emigrate to Germany. She found a position as executive secretary at the National-Zeitung, but then married an Austrian who wanted to return to his native city of Vienna. Before the couple departed, Elenai’s aunt asked her if she wouldn’t like to work for the newspaper. It was Elenai’s job to take down in shorthand the verbal reports coming in over the phone, and to pass these on to the central editorial office in Essen, an activity she performed to the full satisfaction of her colleagues. Felice soon expressed her interest in working in the editorial office, and Elenai passed on the request to her boss.
“If she’s as good as you, we’ll accept her,” he said.
“She’s even better,” Elenai responded, and Felice was hired. The only question remaining was which name she would work under, and it seemed just the thing to call herself Frau Wust, mother of two small children.
Then one day Felice had an idea.
“The foreign agencies transmit their reports each morning. I’m sure that we’re not getting to see them all. If we show up at 8:30 they’ll already have sorted through them and we’ll miss the most crucial information. Let’s arrive at 5:00 and take a look at what comes in in the mornings, before the assholes get there.”
Elenai Pollak:
So I had to go to the office with her at five in the morning—we had a key. And we looked through all the reports from the foreign agencies: Reuters and so forth. We made a note of what was most important. I later became rather adept at memorizing things. It wasn’t difficult for either of us to pass on entire lists of information. What we were doing wasn’t conspiratorial, we didn’t make use of the information in a political sense, passing it on to the underground, but only as it concerned our own illegal existence. The foreign press precisely registered what the Germans were doing, or were planning to do. It was so weird that they knew everything and yet never took any action. Information on the military situation was most important to us, for the closer the front moved, the closer came the day of liberation. We calculated it would come at the end of 1944. We had our maps, just like the general staff, and analyzed the situation each time another city was taken. We soon figured out the Russians’ military strategy, it was relatively simple. We considered whether the time had come to leave Berlin and go to meet the Russians, in order possibly to escape having to endure the final catastrophes. But then we didn’t dare, because the first reports started coming in on the rapes—which we didn’t believe at first, of course. We were distressed by the fact that the Americans and the British obviously had a very cautious military strategy, and preferred to let the Russians do the fighting. Yet it was clear to us that it wouldn’t last much longer.
Felice came up with another idea. “The National-Zeitung isn’t a true party newspaper. Let’s go over to the Hakenkreuzbanner, we’ll find out more there.”
“Felice, are you out of your mind?” Elenai said. “The National-Zeitung is truly sufficient, please, not the Hakenkreuzbanner too! You just can’t get enough!”
“Yes, but they run more articles on internal party affairs and I’d like to find out about that,” Felice insisted.
This time Elenai won out, but Felice wouldn’t let go of the idea. She would occasionally answer the phone with “Heil Hitler, Hakenkreuzbanner” when Inge called her from Lübben.
One day one of the editors gave Elenai a true shock. He made his hobby the study of races, and he had his eye on the exotic Elenai.
“I’ve been trying for some time now to figure out which race you belong to.”
“Oh, why is that?” Elenai asked, her heart beginning to pound.
“You’re a very distinctive type. You’re tall and small-boned. You have a narrow face and a prominent nose. I’ve thought about it for a long time, and I’ve finally worked it out—you’re the Indo-Germanic prototype.”
In April 1944 Günther Wust had leave from the front. He stayed with Lilly and Felice during the day, and slept at his parents’ at night. Lilly did everything to make his stay pleasant. Because Günther—having recovered from the shock of his divorce, and not under pressure to marry Liesl—met his financial obligations concerning the family from then on, Lilly saw no reason to resent him further. Their parents found all of this highly strange.
That same April, Greek and Hungarian Jews were deported to Auschwitz in the hundreds of thousands. Of four hundred thousand Hungarian Jews, two hundred and fifty thousand were gassed within eight weeks.
Günther, rested and feeling friendly toward Lilly and Felice, returned from his six-week leave to an idyllic village in Romania, where he found plenty of time to write letters. He described his new post in a letter dated May 12:
My present position is the equivalent of chief clerk. My working quarters are in a separate office—not least because the captain, following several unpleasant incidents involving others, has placed great trust in me and discusses things with me he doesn’t want the others to hear. . . . In addition to my office work I have roughly fifty men I am responsible for, and must see to it that orders are carried out punctually, such as arranging for cars, messengers, etc., and also that the men have proper quarters, that they keep their quarters in order, that accommodations are available for those passing through. Gradually now I am also holding roll call. I’ve scheduled an arms inspection for tomorrow, and now and then I call the whole group together and make announcements and so forth. So I’m slowly adapting to the responsibilities of staff sergeant—and in doing so have become more self-confident before a crowd. This doesn’t mean that I have to relinquish my calm, rather quiet manner. To the contrary, I get along quite well, am certainly not unpopular and am earning respect. And in the process, of course, I am becoming more ambitious. I’m just waiting for them to make me sergeant. Yesterday I ran across an order that indicated I would have to wait another year. . . . You will note from all of this that I am feeling quite content, not to mention healthy in body and spirit. My daily routine is nicely regulated: I rise at 6 a.m. and have until 7 to dress and eat breakfast. Then I work until noon and there follows a one-hour break, sometimes a bit longer. I always see to it that I lie down for an hour. Work stops between 7 and 8 p.m., followed by a horseback ride or a walk through the village until it gets dark. The rest of the evening is spent writing or reading or in pleasant conversation with one or another of my comrades, sharing red wine and cigarettes. Wine gradually has become a standard thing in the evening. I drink approximately a liter a day. I usually don’t go to bed until 11. Seven hours sleep at night and one during the day—I feel alert and refreshed. I no longer get those attacks of fatigue I used to have.
Günther wrote his next letter on the twenty-first, and in it he made Lilly a surprising offer:
Listen, Lilly! In the course of my letter-writing, interrupted by an hour and a half of conversation with my office comrades, I have also finished off my wine and schnapps. This puts me in a lively mood, but not so much that I would go overboard. But now comes something you perhaps have expected, after receiving my recent letters. In consideration of the fact that, during my time as a soldier and even before, in the sphere of National Socialism and my work at the bank, I have succeeded in carrying through my ideas calmly and with a strong will, I now propose that we revive our marriage. We no longer possess the passion or the rebelliousness against our parents that brought us together in 1934, of course. Only a common awareness of our shared responsibilities toward the children could bring us back together again. I was thinking along these same lines when I made this offer last year around the second or third of May, with the condition that you observe my wishes in everything. You rejected that offer, saying I was merely speaking out of egotism. Nevertheless, I must now reiterate that condition. If your pride won’t allow it, then it will be our sons who will suffer. One thing I learned on leave was that neither of us can do without any one of our children. So to avoid this we must live together. But I must reserve the right to fashion our life together according to the ancient Greek saying: Eis koiranos estō! (“Let there be one master only!”).
In order not to upset Günther further during this difficult period, Lilly and Felice did not have the heart to reject his proposal outright, and continued to include him in the large and small issues of everyday life in Berlin. They told him, for example, that Bernd and Eberhard had been transferred from East Prussia to Meuselwitz in Thuringia due to the advance of Soviet troops, that Lola was pregnant and that Ha-Ha-Ha had left her, and that Mother Sturm was unwilling to take her in.
Lola tried to free herself of her heavy burden up until the very last minute, which can be gathered from a letter that Felice wrote to her, perhaps in Freiwaldau, on June 16:
Dear Lola,
A quick note during my lunch break, so that I can give it to a colleague who will take it with him to Berlin, so that you will receive it that much sooner. We’re wildly busy, as you can imagine under the circumstances. I never get home before midnight. Now to the issue at hand: I gave it my best effort, but nothing can be procured that quickly, as my pharmacist is away on a trip. I’m terribly sorry that I cannot give you more positive news at an important time like this. Nor do I wish to build up false hope, but didn’t your doctor once give you a prescription for Argomensin? Do you still have any of it? It’s the best thing, and that’s probably all I could get anyway. But you have to do it soon, before your condition worsens, for then only a doctor can help, and that will cost money. We hope to see you healthy here again soon.
Warm wishes from us both,
Your Felice
At the beginning of June the Luftwaffe began for the first time to train women for antiaircraft service. “Women’s Hands on the Searchlights,” was the headline the National-Zeitung ran on June 18. It was Felice, perhaps, who typed the article, amused by the contortions the writer was forced to make in order to explain this sudden new role granted to German wives and mothers. The article stressed that women were not to be placed at antiaircraft guns or machine guns, as was the case in the United States, England and the Soviet Union, but rather would operate only measuring instruments, searchlights and electrical equipment. “For the German woman should never be militarized . . . that would be incompatible with her dignity and the position she holds in the national community.” Any engagement in the armed forces was to be held to a minimum, “for under no circumstances should women become masculinized.”
During this period Lilly increased the pressure on Felice to demand that Mutti finally return Felice’s belongings.
Elenai Pollak:
Felice told me that Lilly wanted to get her hands on her things. Felice found it was carrying things much too far that she constantly had to be in contact with Mutti because of this. She didn’t feel it was the most important thing going on at the moment. And she was annoyed by Lilly’s insistence that she absolutely had to have those things. Felice finally gave in because she didn’t feel she was in any position to refuse Lilly. Her situation was too precarious for that. I’m sure that she was always reassuring Lilly that it would all work out at some point. She put off the problem, in her typical fashion. It’s also possible that Felice had not simply stored her things at Frau Selbach’s, but that in her generosity she had said to her, just take what you want.
On June 8 Luise Selbach wrote Felice a letter in German script on a tiny sheet of paper, which today is barely legible in several places:
Dear Felice,
I am notifying you today that on Saturday the eighth, your grandmother’s dress and jacket ensemble, as well as your summer dresses . . . will be sent to you there. You will receive a call about them. L. can arrange with the man a time for you to pick them up. Now about the fur coat: I assume you want to sell it. The story with Fräulein P., we talked about it before, is somewhat different now that she, as you yourself reported, has a good position, and so everything has been taken care of. She still has her parents, after all, and you are alone. Do you still want to carry out the original plan, is that still necessary? Whatever the outcome, it’s not my affair in the end. But it is hard for me to imagine that you want to go away, that you can’t even find it in your heart to come to us. Or does Frau W. love you so much that she intends to leave her four children for you? I can’t imagine that. I can imagine, however, that you need money, that I can understand. So sell the fur to me—I assume that your dear grandmother would find it appropriate. So I’m asking that you name a price, something along the lines of: You certify to me that for a certain price . . . it can’t be a fantastic price, of course, but I could see something between eight and nine thousand marks. Then, I hope, the thing would proceed in such a way that both parties would be satisfied. I want the coat and would never accept it from you as a gift. . . . So, my girl, that’s the way we’ll do it tomorrow. You can pick up the money here. Should you need an initial payment soon, let me know. I cannot imagine that you will refuse me in this. If so, I wouldn’t know what to think, would no longer be able to believe anything you said. It would be a great disappointment to me. Otherwise, you must have more news to relate than I. Perhaps you soon will be looking for a new apartment, it could be very nice here. And then, of course, you would need furniture. And in that case, too, a move here . . . with the “bomb ID” I have, it would go well, I think. Don’t forget the rugs. So for today, my girl, I hope and believe that . . .
Greetings as well to Frau W.,
from Your Mother
Lilly had Felice respond to Günther’s marriage proposal to her. Jaguar accepted the role assigned to her by Lilly, that of protectress of a delicate creature, though she—robbed of everything, even her own identity—certainly could have used a caring mother herself. Although more than eight years younger than Aimée, Felice’s experience made her considerably older. “I am two thousand years older than you,” she would say.
Felice’s letter to Günther has not survived, but Günther’s response has:
June 20, 1944
Dear Felice!
. . . I know, too, that over the long run Lilly has accepted my authority, that she not only has bowed to it but in most arguments conceded that I was in the right. Perhaps it is an unfortunate characteristic of mine, perhaps I seem arrogant in this respect, but I cannot simply relinquish my personality. . . . My claim to dominance originated, without a doubt, from this basic feeling, both last year and this, as well. But I have found both then and now that the first response of the female psyche—yours as well as Lilly’s—is to resist, and not to sufficiently evaluate the nature of the one making the demand. Besides which, the female psyche would rather accept countless small gifts than the burden of a great sacrifice. (Is male arrogance speaking here again?)
In his dream of a future life in peacetime, Günther has already accepted Felice and Lola and her “little worm” into the family. “It would be best for all of us to look for a seven-room apartment. Not such a bad idea at all.”
Meanwhile, a totally different life continues at home:
My Dear Little, Big Aimée,
I am so happy with you and love you so much. You truly can count on the fact that I would never, never again go to Mutti. I love you so much because I know that you also love me, and that you always want the same thing, and think the same as I do. You know, don’t you, that I am very happy to be able to work and earn money? I look forward all day to seeing you. But if I were always at home and couldn’t work at all, I surely would not be as happy, but as dissatisfied as a man out of work.
I will always look out for you and take care of you, my little kitten.
Your Jaguar
July 16, 1944
My dear Jaguar,
I want to be as reliable to you as paper and pencil. I will always take care of you, iron your pants, wash your shirts and darn your socks. And I am happy, more than happy to be able to stay at home, and am immeasurably grateful to you for that. I am very glad that you are happy with your work. I have nothing against it, for basically I am terribly glad that you want to work for me and take care of me always. In return I will give you all of my love.
For eternity
Your Aimée
“SMALL CLIQUE OF TRAITORS WISHED TO ELIMINATE THE FUHRER ON BEHALF OF WORLD JUDAISM,” screamed the July 21 headlines of special editions all over the city. That same day, the Majdanek concentration camp was liberated by the Soviet army.
On July 28 Günther Wust again wrote to Felice:
. . . The fact that Lilly has succeeded in convincing you, too, that she knows exactly what she wants shows me that you as well have too quickly confused the confident way in which she presents herself with inner confidence. I think you were a bit more skeptical a year ago. Perhaps it is true—and I would be happy were it so—that Lilly, seeking self-reliance in her present critical situation, has gained in inner strength. It would be all the better for the proposed agreement between Lilly and myself if it were made on a clear basis with clear boundaries. We then would be able to depend on each other that much more. Nonetheless, at this time I stand by my opinion that she is not inclined to stubbornness, is even rather easily influenced. And you, Felice, should know that, as you were more accomplished at leading her than I. . . . Look, Felice, despite your experience and self-reliance in life, you don’t know what it’s like to have children, and I defy anyone, no matter how clever and empathetic, who doesn’t have children to fully comprehend what it is to be a happy parent. . . . In the last paragraph of your letter you spoke of seeing the future there differently than I. My remarks in this regard should not be taken too seriously. It may well be that my views differ from those of you there and yet—well, better to leave it at that! But believe me, my beliefs are strong, and have been so since I reached my political majority in 1926, on my twentieth birthday. Only my belief in people has been somewhat damaged. I am not a political person. And for that reason I do not inveigh against the fact that things slowly and consistently have moved further and further away from the ideals I held in my youth. And that is why I cling all the more to what is left of those ideals: the family.
That same day Felice recorded a kind of last will and testament:
I herewith again explicitly add to my letter of November 7, 1943, that the following possessions are to go to Frau Elisabeth Wust, née Kappler, Berlin-Schmargendorf, Friedrichshaller Str. 23:
1. The table and bed linens sent to L——without my permission by Frau Selbach, which are marked with the initials AS, AFS, ES, HB, EB, HK, P, and some of which are completely new.
2. The cabin trunk (red striped, marked FS) in which the above-named items are stored.
3. 600 (six hundred) Reichsmarks, which I gave to Frau Selbach in 1940 for safekeeping, minus the cost of alteration for the:
4. Persian lamb coat and muff, which Frau Selbach requested to purchase from me for RM 8,000 in her letter, attached, clearly attesting to my right of ownership.
5. Table silver, engraved AS, ES, HB, HK, P (also in L——).
All of the above-listed items are transferred to the possession of Frau Elisabeth Wust, née Kappler, as of today’s date. My sister, Irene K., née Schragenheim, residing at present in England and who may be contacted through Madame Kummer, Geneva, Avenue de la Forêt 17, Switzerland, has been informed of my wishes and is in agreement with them.
As for obvious reasons I am unable to have a notary public certify this at this time, I must therefore request that it be recognized in its present form.
Berlin-Schmargendorf, July 28, 1944
Felice Schragenheim
August 1 was the first day of the Warsaw revolt of the Polish militia. Felice brought home five large sheets of “secret Reich documents” from the National-Zeitung, consisting of columns of numbers, underlined in red, that pertained to transports of Hungarian Jews. The secret papers were hidden in a small cupboard in the living room. In that same room, on the same spot on the wall where Hitler’s likeness once had hung, was now a map of Europe that had been torn from a school atlas, on which Lilly and Felice, with growing satisfaction, used brightly colored pins to mark the action at the front. When the doorbell rang the map quickly was turned to the wall, revealing on its reverse side a picture of the Schloss am Lustgarten, the Berlin palace.
On August 7 Lilly traveled to Thuringia to visit Bernd, and to bring Eberhard home. She no longer wanted him to remain at the home of the high-ranking Nazi where he was staying. On the way from the Meuselwitz station to Zipsendorf it began to storm, and Lilly removed her wooden-soled sandals with the straps and walked the rest of the way barefoot. Eberhard’s foster parents stared in astonishment at Lilly’s feet, covered in mud, the nails painted red.
August 8, 1944 (8:45 p.m.)
My Dear Kitten,
Have you arrived safely at last? Whenever you’re away I always reproach myself for allowing you to set off alone. What if you didn’t make your connection and there was no one to pick you up? Hopefully you didn’t weep. But you’re so good and brave.
I came home around five and there was no one standing on the balcony. . . . So I finally returned the book. The doctor was at home alone and we had a nice talk about the future and such. It will not be easy to switch back to being a normal and responsible person, that’s for sure. And he said, perhaps correctly, that it wouldn’t be the same if we left, either, for we wouldn’t like those on the outside. They will have things and we won’t, and they will be arrogant. And whereas we would be saved some disappointment, we also would miss our connections here. And were we eventually to return we would have to go through the same thing all over again, for by that time those who stayed here would have it all again, whereas we would have to start over. But we both came to the conclusion that we will be spared the need to worry about such things, for there is no chance for us to leave, we shall remain here, and work hard. And perhaps we will wish for the good old days, as crazy as that seems, when someone such as I had only to work occasionally and could lie on the Havel every day in the sun. I would like to take a bike trip with him next week and go swimming if possible. May I? You never let me do anything. But you’ll let me do that, won’t you?
Now I have a headache and am going to bed all alone. All alone.
The Friedrichs were not bombed out, they just received a little nudge. Christine sent me her monthly ration card. Inge got to work really late, and Elenai turned right around again once she saw the damage to Schöneweide. But she wasn’t bombed out, fortunately. I may get together with Nora tomorrow. Your children are being very good. Lola is too. As is
Your wild, noble and good-natured
Jaguar who loves you
There was trouble at home the next evening when Lilly sent Eberhard down to the cellar bunker, for children were not permitted to remain in Berlin as long as the bombing continued.
On August 21 a blackout was in effect in Berlin from 9:12 p.m. to 5:24 a.m. Sunrise was at 5:53 a.m., sunset at 10:12 p.m. In its “Berlin Observer” column the Völkischer Beobachter ran an article on the harp, “instrument for a sensitive time.” Haus Vaterland on Potsdamer Platz was featuring “The Big Bright Cabaret Program,” and at the Scala Theater on Ku’damm was a variety revue entitled Utopia.
The twenty-first of August, 1944, was a hot summer’s day. Felice and Lola both had the day off from work, and Lola agreed to sacrifice her free time to take care of the children. Aimée and Jaguar set off on their bikes for a swim, crossing through Grunewald and then taking the road along the Havel down to the “big window,” where woods and underbrush ran to sand, and they could look out over the wide stretch of river. They had a whole day to swim and lie in the sun, without Lola, without the children, perhaps even without bombs. Aimée could barely believe how happy she was. For weeks now she had been trying to talk Jaguar into taking some time off with her, for Felice had been working even on Sundays of late. The beach was empty of people on this Monday. “Hopefully Lola and the children will be all right,” was the only thought that interrupted their murmurs of endearment. Jaguar had brought along her old camera, the Leica she guarded like a treasure. As always, Aimée made a fuss when Jaguar wanted to photograph her. Her prettiest feature, her chestnut-red hair, does not show up in black-and-white. She was wearing a navy blue beach outfit of thick linen, with breast and hip pockets stitched and riveted in white. Aimée had more fun playing photographer herself, trailing down Jaguar’s long legs with the camera, legs usually concealed by long pants. On this Monday on the Havel, a self-timer was used to take the only photographs of Aimée and Jaguar in which they are alone together. Lilly, with her short legs, appears awkward before the lens, her arms demurely and impassively at her sides, while Felice looks willfully into the camera, serious and fearless. Before they started out on the long journey home that afternoon Jaguar posed once more, barefoot and dressed in shorts of white linen with her father’s bow tie boldly fastened to the collar of her blouse. The shadows at the “big window” were beginning to lengthen.
Out of breath from the long bicycle ride in the hot afternoon sun they locked the bicycles in the cellar and ran up to the apartment two steps at a time, eager finally to relieve Lola of the burden of the children.
“Were they good?” Lilly trilled happily as soon as the door opened. But Lola’s gray-blue eyes were wide with fright. At the same moment that her lips silently formed the word “Gestapo,” two men stepped out of the darkness behind her.
“Who are you? Come in here.”
Aimée and Jaguar were pushed into the living room, and Lola was ordered to join Albrecht, Eberhard, and Reinhard in the children’s room.
“You needn’t bother to deny it,” the menacing SS man with the black hair barked at Felice. “You are the Jewess Schragenheim.” He held a photo of Felice under her nose that had been taken on Luise Selbach’s balcony. Felice said nothing.
To Lilly he said, “You knew that Schragenheim is a Jew.” Lilly said nothing.
Then they were separated. Lilly was ordered to follow the squat, stocky man in the brown uniform into the bedroom while Felice remained behind with his superior. How long had Lilly known Felice, the short one wanted to know, and when did she move in with her. Lilly answered the questions truthfully.
Then she was taken back into the living room where the two were cross-examined further for the names of friends and acquaintances, for addresses . . .
At the moment that both men turned their attention to Lilly, Felice dashed out of the room. It was the peak of summer and all the doors and windows in the apartment were open, creating a draft when Felice opened the apartment door. A door slammed shut. The short man set off after Felice. “Stop her!” he shouted. Felice bounded down the stairs as if possessed, her footsteps echoing through the stairwell. She ran through the yard, into the back building, and up to Frau Beimling’s. It took only seconds for old Frau Beimling to grasp the situation, and shove Felice behind the couch.
“There, she went up there,” fat Herr Rauche screamed in excitement, running out of his ground-floor flat in his undershirt.
The squat man, having found Felice, kicked at her, forcing her out from behind the couch. He then dragged her down the steps of the back building and back up to Lilly’s apartment.
The investigation continued. Where did Felice get her food ration cards, they asked and, again and again, did Lilly know that Schragenheim was a Jew? Lilly feigned ignorance.
“You know that you can be sent to a concentration camp for sheltering illegal Jews,” the squat one shouted. Lilly said nothing.
After roughly two hours more SS men arrived. They had been waiting in a truck a few buildings away.
“Now give each other a kiss,” the black-haired commander said with a malicious grin. Then he yelled, “And you, young woman, we should take you with us. But we’ll let you go this time because of your poor innocent children.”
Without a word, Felice removed the ring with the green stone from her middle finger, handed it to Lilly, and kissed her on the forehead.
Then she was led away.
Lola Sturmova:
I was at home with Albrecht, Eberhard, and Reinhard when someone started ringing the doorbell wildly. I opened the door and he grabbed me—I was already pregnant at the time—and said: “Schragenheim!”
“Who might that be?”
“Don’t try to deny it, Schragenheim!”
“I don’t know any Schragenheim.”
“Let’s see your identification papers.” So I showed him my ID. “We’ll wait here until she arrives,” he said.
Jesus, it was awful. I couldn’t even get word to the other lady, the one who lived below us. I had to go to the bathroom, but he followed me and I had to leave the door open! I wanted quickly to write something down and give it to Albrecht or Reinhard to lower from the balcony. I already had some string, but then I dropped the idea because he was standing right there behind me. At first there were two of them, and then more . . . the whole house was surrounded, and then they hunted down Felice. One of them had a photo of Felice that he showed me. And I said, I know her, but. . . . Then they asked since when did I know her, since when did I live here, where was I employed. They also talked to my boss, the Austrian, and he said, no, no Jew. But the best thing was, he had shown me a photo of his company and said, That’s me. It was in Czernowitz, he’d said. And my father had been a commanding officer in Czernowitz, in the old republic. They were all Jews! So I said to him, So, you’re Jewish? It was a Jewish regiment. He wasn’t a Jew, but he had been assigned to that company. He told them that Felice worked at the Völkischer Beobachter, and that she passed on information. Apparently there was some sort of station down in the cellar where she was sending the reports to England, that’s what the “catchers” said when they arrived. I said, nope, don’t know anything, we only have a radio down there so that when the bombs fall we can find out where they are, the British. They went down to the cellar, took the keys and went down, but they didn’t find anything.
Once the men had left, Lola cautiously opened the door to the children’s room. Lilly was beside herself, screaming and crying. Albrecht and Reinhard were pressed against the wall, terrified. That night Lilly didn’t allow the children to go to the bunker. Lola and Lilly stayed up all night.
“We have to do something,” Lola urged. “The papers! Burn them. Yes, burn them,” she murmured, more to herself than to Lilly, who sat staring into space. Lola pulled the “secret Reich documents” from the dark brown cabinet, then went to her room to gather up other material that Felice had given her for “Kaleu” Henschel in the last few weeks. She then stuffed all of it into the green tile stove in the balcony room.
“Jesus, they were standing right in front of it!”
“No, not that,” Lilly ordered, her voice breaking, as Lola prepared to add to the fire books by Lion Feuchtwanger, Felice’s “uncle.”
Lilly knew nothing of most of the things that Felice had brought home from the newspaper office. Lola and Felice had always tried to keep as much from her as possible, because of the children.
The next morning, when Lilly went into the kitchen to prepare the children’s breakfast, exhausted, her eyes swollen, she found a poem in a coffee cup:
Much of what I think about
Is like a poem to my ear,
I give to you. I cannot shout,
And it seems you cannot hear.
Words exist, which when they’re spoken,
Cannot bear the light of day,
Said aloud, something gets broken,
And can’t be made right in any way.
Nor are they words that I can say.
So you must now bend down to me,
That I might seek in some small way,
To communicate them silently.
Words there are that can’t be spoken,
Not without something broken
Last things will not tolerate
Even a whisper.
So you must now bend down to me,
And softly close your eyes
I want to tell you silently,
My dearly beloved You.
“She didn’t even say good-bye to me,” Eberhard wailed. And Lilly could not find her gold watch, which had been in the bedroom during the interrogation.
No one has ever found out how Felice’s photograph came into the hands of the Gestapo.