Catherine Klein stands in Berlin’s Tiergarten station saying farewell to her husband, who’s leaving on a train to Amsterdam, a visa to England in hand. Both Jews, after years of attempts, he has managed to secure safe passage out of Germany by virtue of being a doctor, one of the few skills considered worthy of emigrant status by the British. She will have to wait until he can arrange for her to join him. It’s the first of August, 1939.
Klein’s memoir of her experience of living as a Jew under the Nazi regime and her near-miraculous escape in 1942 is easily the most gripping book I’ve read in many months. Even before the war starts just a month after her husband’s departure, she details the succession of measures that progressively restrict the rights of German Jews — sometimes moving at glacial speed, then, as after Kristallnacht in 1938, in a sudden brutal sweep. At first, they comply, turn inwards, try to cope.
Then coping is not enough: “Whisky, sedatives’ and bridge cards become necessary commodities.” Her husband’s practice is taken away, then their apartment, then their belongings inventoried. They are harassed on the streets, friends are beaten up, arrested. When he leaves for England, she writes every day, expecting their separation is temporary. Then Germany invades Poland, Britain and France declare war in response, and they are trapped on different sides. “Every bomber setting out from here may bring death to you every bomber you watch taking off may mean death to me,” she writes in a letter she knows cannot reach him. “I am not defeatist, you know that better than anyone, but I now believe that we will not see each other again.”
Alone now, she has fewer resources, fewer defenses as the war provides the rationale for stepping up the pace of persecution. She has to find a room in a “non-Aryan” house. Along with other healthy Jewish women, she is pressed into work at a factory supplying equipment for the Army. The rationing and restrictions on movement experienced by all Germans are imposed even more strictly on the Jews, and in 1941, she is forced to wear the yellow Star of David so that conductors can keep her from using busses and trams, shop owners refuse her entrance, Aryan doctors refuse to treat her. When her father suffers a severe heart attack one evening, she spends hours trying to find a doctor who will come to his bedside. By the time she succeeds, she returns to find him dead.
An American reporter befriends her, invites her to parties at the embassy, passes her goods — peanuts, coffee — now considered contraband. He begins to concoct various escape plans, but the war manages to foil them all. A visa to Switzerland with the possibility of a ship from Genoa? Italy’s declaration of war against France and Britain in June 1940 rules that out. Passage across Russia to Vladivostok and a ship to America? Hitler’s invasion of Russia a year later cuts off that route. Then, Germany’s declaration of war against the United State in the wake of Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941 lands the reporter and other Americans in internment as enemy aliens.
Early in 1942, she is awakened by screams and cries of pain from somewhere nearby. “A pogrom!” she thinks, fearing that the Nazis had decided to abandon all pretense and simply exterminate the remaining Jews in their beds. She discovers, however, that the sounds come from a former schoolhouse just down her street. Puzzled, she asks a neighbor about the sounds.
“Do be quiet, for God’s sake,” she whispers fiercely. “You will lose your head if you go on talking like that! You know just as well as we do what it is.”
“But I don’t, Frau Schultze. Honestly I don’t.”
“You must have noticed that the school has been turned a temporary hospital, haven’t you? That is where our soldiers are sent when they come back from Russia with legs, hands, noses and ears frozen off. Even morphia is no use for pains like theirs. But I’ll give you a bit of advice: you haven’t seen anything, you haven’t heard anything and as for me I certainly haven’t told you anything.”
Despite the relentless propaganda of Joseph Goebbel’s machine, ordinary people still manage to retain some skepticism about the endless reports of victories. “Good news,” an Aryan supervisor at her factory remarks one day. “There were 20 British bombers in last night’s air raid, and the Luftwaffe managed to shoot down all 25.”
With every day, however, she sees her factory workroom growing emptier. More Jews are being picked up and put on trains bound for the rumored camps in Poland. She realizes that she must find a way out. “In my present situation all I can expect from life is certain death. Why not gamble for it?” she reasons. Recalling one of the more fantastic schemes mentioned by the American reporter, she contacts a man in the Italian embassy said to be amenable to selling passports and visas. He proposes to sell her the real passport on an Italian woman living in Berlin and arrange for a transit visa for Switzerland. To pay for it, she has to give him — and the woman — most of the few personal items left to her.
Even this proves extraordinarily difficult in her circumstances. How to obtain a passport photo, let alone twelve copies? Where to find a suitcase — and how to explain why it’s needed? She begins to fear that the train she will board will be one bound for a camp in the east, not Basel.
It’s unnecessary to go into the series of last-minute crises and lucky breaks that enable Klein to make it to Switzerland. The fact that this book exists already tells us that her escape attempt ultimately succeeds. But there are a few important facts that Klein had to omit in the interest of protecting people still in Germany at the time her account was published in 1944. First, her name. In a paper presented to the Jewish Historical Society of England in 1997, Charles Rubens, a relative by marriage, disclosed that Catherine Klein was Käthe Cohn, born in 1907 and married to Doctor Ernst Cohn in 1928. Even her translator, Eva Meyerhof, author of A Tale of Internment, reviewed here recently, had taken the pseudonym of Livia Laurent for the same reason.
More extraordinary, however, is the story Klein/Cohn omits completely from this book. While she describes her father’s last days and death, there is no mention of her mother. As Richard N. Lutjens, Jr. writes in his book, Submerged on the Surface: The Not-So Hidden Jews of Nazi Berlin, 1941-1945, the last great round-up of Jews in Berlin was held in March, 1943. On March 2, 1943, Klein/Cohn’s mother, Ida Gassenheimer, went to her bank to take out a little of the money she was still allowed to keep on deposit. “Frau Gassenheimer! You’re still here?!” exclaimed the clerk. “I have information that by March 5 there won’t be any Jews left in Berlin!”
According to “My Underground Life in Berlin,” a memoir she wrote with the help of her daughter, Ida Gassenheimer was advised by a sympathetic Aryan doctor to take the name of an Aryan German woman he knew was within days of death. Taking temporary refuge with friends, she wrote to registrar in the woman’s hometown and was able to obtain a copy of her birth certificate, pleading that she’d been bombed out of her home. With this, she was able to obtain an identification card and ration book and then to obtain a room — really more of a coal storage closet — in the apartment of an invalid Aryan woman. Here, she managed to survive until the Russian troops arrived in May 1945, and better, to find herself in the American sector when the Allies divided up the administration of Berlin. With the help of the occupying military government, she was able to emigrate to England in 1947 and join her daughter in 1947.
She remained there until her death in 1963. Doctor Ernst Cohn became a well-respected GP and his patients included the novelist Colin Macinnes and several members of the Rolling Stones. He died in 1979 and Käthe Cohn died in 1981. Escape from Berlin has never been reissued.