EDITH’S SISTER, USHI, ALWAYS HAD small hands, fine and delicate. Just perfect for assembling radio parts. Under the Nazi regime, she was forced to work at Siemens electronics out near the Spandau neighborhood in Berlin. It took her an hour to get to her Wernerwerk F factory, where she stood at a lathe for ten hours a day dressed in coveralls. Around her, more than eight hundred other Jewish workers toiled here at the company’s main location in Berlin, a five-hundred-acre industrial city called Siemensstadt. It resembled the city out of the film Metropolis and in its heyday was often referred to as the Electropolis by its fifty-five thousand workers. Siemensstadt had been built around the turn of the century in the swampy wilderness on the River Spree as a futuristic, forward-thinking development. But now its vast network of concrete high-rises and sprawling factories used forced laborers to crank out parts for Nazi radios, telephones, and armaments. Ushi’s small “salary” was around $2 a day, which was heavily taxed by the Nazis and not nearly enough to feed her and her parents.
One Monday morning in June 1942, her father, Albert, went to a bakery in their Moabit neighborhood. Any excursion into the outside world was an invitation to disaster, the Nazis looking for any excuse to arrest and deport you “to the east,” but there was nothing left in the house to eat. The Friedmanns had begun to hear terrible rumors and stories of how the Jews “evacuated east” were simply murdered. But how could that be? How could the Nazis kill so many? “It’s impossible,” Albert said, shaking his head.
Albert told his wife he would just buy some bread and hurry back. When he failed to return, Ushi went to the bakery and discovered that her father had been falsely arrested for stealing a loaf of bread. She hurried home to tell her mother the terrible news and the two argued over who should go to the police precinct to help him. Martha won the fight and went to plead Albert’s case. But Martha never returned.
Ushi, sick with worry and guilt over letting her mother go alone, waited and waited, growing more and more panicked as the sun set. She wanted desperately to go and search for her parents, but was afraid to leave the Krefelder Strasse apartment building, which was now pitch-black, like the rest of the city, because of the Allied air raids. Unsure of what to do, Ushi packed a small bag and traveled crosstown to Charlottenburg to visit her friend Leja, who worked with her at the Siemensstadt factory. Ushi told Leja she wanted to go search for her parents, but Leja said it was too dangerous, that there was nothing she could do to help them now.
“You can’t go back there,” Leja told Ushi, shaking her head.
“But everything we own is in that apartment,” Ushi said, wringing her small hands. She thought of the family heirlooms they hadn’t sold yet and the furs Jules had given her parents, a $1,500 Persian wool men’s coat for Albert and the $1,000 long mink marble coat for Martha. Ushi also longed for her comfortable bed and her books and her trousseau, filled with the embroidered tablecloths and napkins that had been made in Albert’s textile company and set aside for her own home someday after she was married. But Ushi didn’t say any of this out loud. It seemed preposterous to worry about furs and embroidered linens when the world was ending around you and your parents were missing.
Leja hugged her friend tight. “When life returns to normal, you can go back and get your things,” she said. But they both knew normal might never return to Berlin. That night, over a simple dinner, Leja and her mother convinced Ushi to move in with them in their apartment in a building filled with fellow Jews. The next night, against Leja’s warnings, Ushi returned to her family apartment and hurriedly gathered a few personal belongings, some photographs, some more clothing, and her typewriter, whose vowel keys had umlauts on them. Typewriters had been outlawed for Jews for many months now and so openly owning one was a sign to the outside world that you were an Aryan.
A few weeks later, the Gestapo confiscated everything else in the Krefelder Strasse apartment: the beds, the dressers, the clothing, the sheets, the linens (including Ushi’s trousseau), blankets, the dining room table and chairs, a sofa, armchairs, Albert’s desk, bookcases and the books inside them, a mahogany and oak buffet with glass doors, the kitchenware, two grandfather clocks, the carpets, the furs (including the Persian wool and the long marble mink from Jules, as well as another coat with an otter collar, a silver fox cape, and a marten cape), paintings, lamps and light fixtures, towels, and even the curtains on the windows. Jewelry, including a pearl necklace, an aquamarine pin and pendant, several gold chains, two gold watches, diamond earrings and necklaces, a brooch, and Albert’s gold pocket watch and chain were all taken, as well as Martha’s diamond engagement ring and the couple’s gold wedding bands. The Nazis took a silver setting for twelve, two silver candlesticks, and crystal glasses, bowls, and vases, including the one Edith had placed the flowers in the day that Jules had proposed to her.
Of course, Ushi would have traded it all for just a chance to say goodbye to her parents. Not that it was hers to trade anymore.
From Ushi’s new Wielandstrasse apartment, the looming spire of the Kaiser Wilhelm Church could be seen nearby. They lived just steps from the Kurfürstendamm, still relatively lively despite the war. Ushi moved in with Leja and her mother that summer, waiting in vain for news of her parents, week after week after week. She and Leja slept in a twin bed together, running to the building’s basement whenever the air-raid sirens rang out and the American and British bombers appeared.
One day that following February, on a short break at the Siemensstadt factory, one of Ushi and Leja’s coworkers pulled them aside in the ladies’ bathroom. It was here that the Jewish female laborers had all their meetings, discussions, and even celebrations—the only place away from the prying eyes of the Aryan foremen. One of those foremen—a secret Communist—had been drinking in a bar the night before and had overheard some SS officers talking about how all the remaining Jewish workers at Siemensstadt would be replaced with Christian refugees. To keep the SS talking, the Communist sent over some more drinks. The drunker the SS got, the more they talked.
“They say they will be transferring all the Jews from here to work camps outside Berlin in two days,” their friend told them in hushed whispers in the Siemens ladies’ room. Because of the Allied bombings, the company was in the process of moving their factories to hidden locations outside the city. Over the past several years, trucks had been pulling up to Berlin’s factories, workers taken away and “sent east” to a vast network of forty-four thousand concentration camps, ghettos, and prisons throughout Europe. Forty-four thousand. Now the last of the Jewish workers would be deported. Forced labor would become slave labor, thousands of Jews transferred and worked literally to death at Ravensbrück and other concentration camps.
The rumors of the deportation drifted through the bathroom and then through the brick courtyard at the Wernerwerk factory. The next day, half the Jewish workforce failed to show up. Ushi walked away from Siemensstadt that afternoon and never returned.
Leja and her mother abandoned their apartment for fear the Nazis would come looking for the girls now that they hadn’t shown up at Siemensstadt. But Ushi decided to stay awhile and take her chances on Wielandstrasse. A few nights later, the Gestapo came and banged at the door. In their deep, gruff voices, they demanded that Ushi open up. But she sat frozen in bed in the darkness. The banging wouldn’t stop, and Ushi, so frightened, stayed perfectly silent and still, like a rabbit at the side of a country road that knows it has been spotted.
In her head, she sang songs from the musicals and operas she had loved, to try and stay calm. Closing her eyes, she silently prayed the Gestapo—still banging—wouldn’t break the door down. She wondered where she could hide in the apartment if they did. Opening her eyes, she strained in the dark to survey the room. Under the bed? The wardrobe? Out a back window?
The banging finally subsided, but Ushi wasn’t sure if the officers were just waiting for her to emerge in the hallway, only to reach out and grab her. So she stayed still for another hour.
Two hours.
Three, her limbs falling asleep, the pins and needles daring her to stomp her feet.
Eventually, Ushi had to pee. After gently tiptoeing to the bathroom, she went as quietly as she could, whispering a stream of pee into the toilet. As her bladder emptied, she kept repeating in her head over and over, Don’t flush, don’t flush. Whatever you do, don’t flush.
The next morning, weary from not sleeping, she tried to crack the door open to see if the hallway was empty. But the door was stuck. Grabbing the doorknob with both hands, she pulled hard. The door gave way, but Ushi saw that yellow tape had been used to seal it shut. The Gestapo had not broken the door down because the building’s janitor had told them Ushi was still working nights at Siemensstadt.
She packed some clothes and her typewriter and moved in with a friend and fellow Siemens worker named Hildegard, an Aryan who took pity on Ushi. Not everyone in Berlin hated the Jews and some would show kindness, especially to those who didn’t fit their stereotypical picture of what a Jew looked like. Dark, curly hair and a large nose were usually only a problem if you were already targeted as a Jew or were gathering with a large group of people who looked like you did. But Ushi looked Irish.
For two years she and Hildegard lived together in the tiny apartment near the Tempelhof airfield, fearful all the while that the Gestapo would knock at the door and take them both away. They slept head to foot in Hildegard’s bed and shared her meager rations. All of Berlin was starving, some even resorting to eating the zoo animals that were killed during the air raids. The bombing over in Charlottenburg was now relentless because of the German antiaircraft gun tower placed near the zoo. The November after Ushi moved out of Leja’s apartment, an Allied attack destroyed much of the area, the spire of the Kaiser Wilhelm Church cracking wide open, its jagged edges giving it the nickname “the hollow tooth.” The train station where Jules and Edith and Wilder’s characters had once met on Sundays was badly damaged. But its golden clock under which they had once met miraculously survived.
Ushi returned only once to Leja’s abandoned Wielandstrasse apartment, boldly breaking the new seal on the door to collect a few more possessions. But she otherwise avoided the ravaged neighborhood and stayed under cover.
Hiding just below the surface, Ushi was just one of seven thousand Jews secretly living in Berlin during the war, known as “U-boats,” or “submarines.” A half dozen other Jewish girlfriends, including Leja, were part of Ushi’s network. Hildegard’s brother, Helmut, a German field officer, rented an illegal apartment for Leja and her mother, helping them to survive.
In small towns, it was nearly impossible to hide out as a Jew, since everyone knew your background. But Berlin was a big city. It was easier to move from place to place anonymously, especially if you had support. Some of Ushi’s friends got jobs working for rich families whose Aryan maids had been forced to work in munitions factories, replacing the drafted soldiers and the many Jews who were murdered. For a while, Ushi got a job working as a milliner making ladies’ hats.
Jewish spies called “catchers” were employed by the Nazis to identify fellow Jews, who would be captured and sent to concentration camps. Ushi worried about seeing someone she knew, someone who was aware of her Jewish background and might turn her in. Though she defiantly refused to look nervous around them, she avoided police and Gestapo officers, children in Hitler Youth uniforms, and Nazi Party members with their red circle swastika pins proudly displayed. While traveling illegally on buses and trains, her eyes were sharp and her body primed to get off at the next stop as soon as an obvious enemy climbed aboard.
Every day she lived, Ushi thought, was a day closer to the end of the war. When she went out during the day, she had to pretend she was confident, not scared for her life. Walking, never running. Smiling, never crying in public.
To pass the hours in hiding, she would crochet or knit, if she could find some yarn, or read, if she could get her hands on a book. Because the noise attracted too much attention, she stopped writing letters on her verboten typewriter. Fearing she would be found out, she stopped writing any letters at all to Edith, who assumed she was dead.