![]() On the eve of World War II in 1938, Marie and her father were living with friends, the Waldmanns. Sometimes, her deception also led her to take lovers and boyfriends as a means of survival. Marie doctored Koch’s papers with ink-erasing fluid and forged an approval stamp by hand, exchanged the photo on the ID card, and called herself Aryan. Marie removed her yellow star and assumed the identity of a close friend, Johanna Koch, 17 years older than Marie. But I am going to do everything imaginable to survive," she told her aunt.Īnd so she went to great lengths to protect herself. "Sooner or later everyone will have to go," Grete reasoned. ![]() Her Aunt Grete, one of the first to be sent, begged Marie to come with her. In the fall of 1941, about a year before her incident with the “rubber director,” Marie watched her remaining family and friends receive deportation orders to concentration camps for certain death. It is valid only for her return to Germany by the Danube route." The German embassy in Sofia made this passport, and added a comment on another page: "The holder of this passport has not proved her citizenship of the Reich. ![]() The temporary passport Marie used to reenter Germany from Bulgaria, in Johanna Koch's name. She lived off the small sum she received from her father’s pension. When her father died, she convinced her supervisor to fire her, since Jews weren’t allowed to quit. She befriended some of the girls, and they rebelled when they could: singing and dancing in the restroom, sabotaging screw and nut manufacturing. Before her father’s death, Marie worked with 200 other Jewish women at Siemens, bent over lathes, making tools and weapon parts for the German army. Marie’s mother, who had been sick with cancer for a long time, died in 1938 her weary, lonely father in early 1941. In the 15 years since her death, Marie's son, Hermann, has been transcribing and fact-checking the tapes, and found that his mother remembered with near-perfect clarity the wealth of names and details of her life in Berlin.įor eight years Marie and her family had witnessed Hitler's rise to power: Jews, wearing the legally mandated yellow stars on their coats, were first excluded from many professions and public places, and then many were sent to do forced labor. For 50 years, Marie kept quiet about her experience, but just before her death in 1998, she recorded her memories on 77 cassette tapes. Underground in Berlin is filled with similar stories that illustrate the sexual politics of being a young Jewish girl in need of protection during World War II. I tried to react in a neutral, friendly manner, but I was overcome by such relief and jubilation that I couldn't sit still, and fled to the toilet."Ī thrilling piece of undiscovered history, this is the true account of a young Jewish woman who survived World War II in Berlin. And then she got extraordinarily lucky: "With bowed head and tears in his eyes, he said he was afraid he must disappoint me: he was no longer capable of any kind of sexual relationship. They sat together and Marie listened to his Nazi rants, growing increasingly uncomfortable until she changed the subject back to the fish. It was a hair from the Führer's German shepherd. Finally, he revealed the secret: he had acquired this item by complicated means and at some expense, as he told me, closing his eyes. "Any idea what that is?" he asked me, pointing at it.Įven if I'd guessed, I would never have said so. ![]() He recalled the time when he was in a sanatorium and made a matchstick model of Marienburg, dedicating it to the Führer. They arrived at his apartment, and the man showed off his wall-to-wall collection of aquarium tanks. And she was to sleep with this man, just to have a place to hide. The "rubber director" earned his nickname from his wobbly gait, and Marie once heard that people in the late stages of syphilis "walked as if their legs were made of rubber, and they could no longer articulate properly." The man walking her to his house was stumbling over his words. Marie had reasons to be alarmed beyond the man’s avowed Nazism. But, the barkeep added, her new patron was also "a Nazi whose fanaticism bordered on derangement." Her fabricated backstory was simple she just couldn't bear to live with her in-laws anymore. The barkeep pulled Marie aside before she left with the man. In 1942, Marie Jalowicz, a Jewish girl hiding in Berlin, watched as a barkeep sold her for 15 marks to a man mysteriously nicknamed "the rubber director." As Marie recounts in the recently published Underground in Berlin, a riveting chronicle of her story told in her words, she was desperate for a place to sleep.
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