CHAPTER 4 STONE BOYS AND BEASTS
BERLIN, 1930
TURNING ONTO QUIET KREFELDER STRASSE, Jules pulled his Model A up to Edith’s six-story upscale apartment building. He patted down his hair, grabbed the bouquet of flowers lying next to him on the pleated leather seat, then nervously rang the doorbell. Though still a baby-faced eighteen-year-old, Jules was here to propose marriage. Albert, Edith’s father, buzzed Jules past the frosted-glass front door and into the posh hallway, which was decorated in the German Art Nouveau style called Jugendstil. Shiny green tiles with embossed fleur-de-lis lined the entryway, while elaborate plaster gargoyles and beasts stared down at young Jules, making him even more nervous than he already was.
He climbed the carpeted hallway stairs two at a time, running his free hand along the polished wooden banister, stopping on Edith’s landing and taking a deep breath before tapping the Art Deco brass knocker. Edith turned the elaborately decorated door handle and, suddenly, there she was. His love. She smiled, gave him a small peck on the cheek, and happily ushered him through the hallway and into the family study with its plush armchairs and tall grandfather clock. The sprawling apartment was well-appointed with antique furniture, imported carpets, and a balcony overlooking the street. Martha, Edith’s mother, kissed Jules on each cheek, and offered to get him a beer. Edith’s father vigorously shook Jules’s hand and told him to sit down. Edith, knowing why Jules was there, took the bouquet of flowers and left to place them in a cut-crystal vase.
Albert adored Jules, but he was worried the boy couldn’t support Edith well enough. Jules still lived with his mother and several of his siblings in their cramped apartment across town on Anklamer Strasse in the Jewish quarter. Their busy, noisy courtyard was filled with empty baby carriages, bicycles, and wagons, and echoed the sounds in the other flats—children crying, fathers laughing, mothers praying, domestic spats building and then dying off each morning, noon, and night. The smells—garbage mixed with cooking cabbage and sauerkraut—drifted in through the windows as well.
Though his family was not well off, Jules had attended one of the best schools in the city, the free Jewish Boys School on Grosse Hamburger Strasse. The arched doorway over his school was decorated with two stone boys staring down into a stone book. He would gaze up at those stone boys each day as he made his way through the curved wooden doors of the school, and some days it seemed as if they looked away from their stone pages and stared right back at him. Jules liked to regale the family—and especially Edith’s kid sister, Ursula, whom they called Ushi—with tales of his schoolboy days, which were barely over. He told stories of his soccer victories, about being a good and reliable student (so reliable he was named crayon monitor). Ushi loved Jules’s stories. Everyone did.
The Friedmanns owned their own textile company in Berlin. Their apartment on Krefelder Strasse was in the well-off Moabit neighborhood just a short stroll from the flowering banks of the River Spree. A proud and decorated Great War veteran—a Kriegsteilnehmer—Albert was part of the establishment in Germany. And he loved his two daughters dearly. Edith was his oldest, and Ushi, six years younger.
Albert was thin and bald, with a mustache and big ears that stuck out from his head. His wife, Martha, was a brunette with full lips and large, melancholy eyes. She was well traveled, having even gone to Cairo solo to tour the pyramids. She had come from an intellectual, cultured family of bookstore owners in Posen, Prussia, and was much more outgoing than Albert, who was three years older than she was. Martha loved to dance and had passed that love on to Edith and Ushi.
Their daughters, somehow, had each gotten a different mix of their best features and were better looking than either of them. Edith, slim with a long face, had inherited her mother’s dark hair, sad eyes, and perfect Kewpie doll lips, and her father’s strong, angular nose, which looked like it belonged in a Picasso painting. Ushi looked nothing like Edith, with curly red hair, freckles on her round face, and a short pug nose. She actually looked Irish, a throwback to some long-lost relative. Their personalities were just as different as their looks—Edith, reserved and serious, and Ushi the chatty, outgoing one. But both sisters were well educated and incredibly smart, kind, and generous.
After taking a seat in the family study, Jules got down to business. Alone with Albert for a moment, he announced he had come to ask for his daughter’s hand in marriage. Jules explained he would soon be opening his own fur shop with help from his sister Mollie and her husband, David, and swore he would dedicate his life to taking care of Edith. Albert, unable to resist Jules’s good nature and charms, gave him his blessing.
Jules set out to prove he could provide Edith with the life she’d grown accustomed to. But it was a difficult time to make a go of it alone, especially in a high-end industry like furs. Times were not good for everyone in Berlin. With unemployment reaching nearly 30 percent by 1932, there were tent cities in the forests just outside town and long lines at the pawnshops. People were in search of a savior, but also for someone to blame for their poverty. Street clashes between Nazis and Communists became more frequent, exploding nearly every day, as the groups marched defiantly against one another, bottles and bricks in hand.
Fearful of a Communist threat—which Hitler featured in his speeches—leaders in Germany’s business community began to join the Nazi Party. In the July 1932 elections, the party was triumphant, winning 230 seats in the German parliament. Usually, the chancellor would be appointed from the party with the most seats in the Reichstag. But Germany’s president, Paul von Hindenburg, was hesitant to make Hitler chancellor. After back-room negotiations and pressure from politicians and wealthy industrialists, Hindenburg finally gave in.
Some politicians and critics failed to take Hitler seriously. They were certain that somehow they could control this fool. But plenty of people took him seriously. Just as Jules was proposing marriage, many of the city’s intellectuals and artists began leaving Berlin; Marlene Dietrich and Albert Einstein, for example, headed to California, the scientist taking his beloved violin, Lina, with him. Fritz Lang, when told by Goebbels that the new chancellor wanted him to head the Nazi Party’s film industry, left for Paris immediately.
“Concentration camps”—for now simply factory cellars and warehouses—cropped up all over Berlin, places where the Sturmabteilung, the Nazi paramilitary wing known as the Brownshirts, took those they didn’t like and beat them, sometimes to death.
Still, the Friedmanns planned a beautiful wedding for Edith and Jules at a banquet hall on the Kurfürstendamm. As the date drew closer, they invited some of the younger members of the large wedding party over to their apartment for dance rehearsals. The young cousins waltzed and laughed and stepped on each other’s toes, trying their best to ignore the evil unfolding outside their windows.
Ushi led the lessons. Mollie and David’s young sons, Bob and Fred, were there, as well as Golda’s son, Don, and his half brother, Paul. At nine years old, Paul was dark and wiry like his father, Simon, with a hesitant smile and big ears. Simon sported the short, cropped mustache of the day, like the one Charlie Chaplin wore, but that would fall out of favor quite soon in the Jewish community. He and Golda ran a clothing company in the center of Berlin near Mollie’s fur shop.
Don, who had come with his mother as a baby from Amsterdam, looked nothing like his half brother, with light hair and a round face like Golda’s. He attended a specialized high school for engineering, but he and his four fellow Jewish students were regularly abused by the other students. And sometimes by the teachers.
“Who are the thieves in Germany?” one teacher would ask each day.
“The filthy Jews!” the class would reply.
“Who are the rapists of German women?” he would ask.
“The filthy Jews!” they would shout again.
When the teacher was done with his verbal abuse, the Aryan boys would throw ink and books at them. When Don came home one day with ink all over his face, Golda called the school’s director, who was sympathetic but helpless against the emboldened Hitler Youth on his rolls. During school soccer practice, Don and his fellow Jewish players were literally beaten on the field by their teammates. One day he stayed home from school and never went back.
Don, sixteen, got a job in the Berlin branch of Ford Motor Company, tending to tractors and cars, and while there, developed an attachment that could convert alcohol or kerosene into high-octane fuel. He was such a brilliant engineer that he was offered a spot by a Jewish organization to work in Palestine, which had opened its doors wide, accepting sixty thousand German Jews throughout the 1930s as part of a transfer agreement with Germany. He asked if his parents and brother could go with him, and the visas were granted. But his stepfather refused to even discuss leaving Berlin. Golda wouldn’t go against her husband, but tried gentle persuasion.
“A window has opened,” Golda said to Simon, “and we should go.” But he wouldn’t move to Palestine. He didn’t like the hot weather, he said, and more important, he had built his men’s clothing business here in Germany and felt he couldn’t leave it behind. But it wasn’t just about the money. A religious man, Simon believed that God would save them all from Adolf Hitler.
And so they all stayed, Don included.
Jules was at temple with his family on a quiet Saturday morning on the first day of April 1933. As they prayed together, mobs of their fellow Germans were busy paying visits to many of Berlin’s closed storefront businesses in the early-morning light. When Jules went to open Mollie’s fur shop for the day, he found a gold and black Star of David painted on the door. The newly elected Nazi Party had launched its first nationwide boycott, its first official attack on the Jewish community. The Brownshirts defaced the fronts of thousands of Jewish-owned businesses in Berlin and beyond.
Jules was enraged. He thought he might vomit right there on the sidewalk, which he always kept impeccably clean, sweeping it several times each day. Part of him wanted to break something, or someone, but he was much too civilized. He simply stared at the star, not knowing whether to scrape it off or display it proudly. It was the Star of David after all—part of his identity.
But it was the words scrawled beside the star, across the shop windows, that made the decision for him.
Geh nach Palästina!
“Go to Palestine!” was painted in black. Next door were the words “The Jews Are Our Misfortune,” and across the street, “Don’t buy from Jews.” Jules, David, and his neighbors got to work with their paint scrapers and scrub brushes, but within the hour, a crowd of Brownshirts showed up. In pairs, they menacingly stood outside David’s shop and all the shops on the street, blocking customers from entering. Some wore sandwich boards that read: Germans, defend yourselves against Jewish atrocity propaganda. Others chanted from the backs of trucks, “Germans, free yourselves of the tyranny of the Jews!” Local police were instructed not to interfere with the boycott. Some customers would defy the Brownshirts, but most turned and walked quickly away, not wanting any trouble.
Not wanting a fight, either, Jules and his siblings closed up shop for the day. It was the Sabbath, after all.
THE SA (STURMABTEILUNG), ALSO KNOWN AS BROWNSHIRTS, PICKETING JEWISH-OWNED SHOPS. THEIR SIGNS READ, “GERMANS, DEFEND YOURSELVES AGAINST THE JEWISH ATROCITY PROPAGANDA, BUY ONLY AT GERMAN SHOPS!” AND “GERMANS! DEFEND YOURSELVES! DON’T BUY FROM JEWS!”