They'll Have to Catch Me First: An Artist's Coming of Age in the Third Reich

One

O n e IN THE BEGINNING my story is quite ordinary. A normal birth,normal weight, and my mother who tied the dark fuzz on my head in a little pink bow. After the childless rift of World War I, which my father had spent in the trenches of France, I was welcomed warmly as a bonus of the great inflation. My entire family,down to the last great-cousin,a bachelor who kept guinea pigs in his bathtub, lived in Berlin, all staunch German citizens of the Mosaic faith, as we were called by the authorities. With Jewish temperament and Prussian discipline rubbing like tectonic plates against each other, slight neuroses were inevitable. On the whole the prognosis for my future looked normal: an existence in the lap of the family, winding through holidays, weddings, funerals and bar mitzvahs along the Spree River. Maybe with time I could have made a modest name for myself as an artist, a painter of the Spree perhaps, for already as a small child I was fascinated by the glittering lights that trembled on her murky waters. Things were to turn out differently. Born on a Sunday I was told I would have luck in life, a prediction which in some ways was to prove correct, for otherwise my biography would have ended fifty years ago. My birthday fell on Sunday, the thirtieth of January, 1921, twelve years to the day before Hitler came to power. Part of my family would perish in death camps, the rest would be dispersed over four continents by the brutal fist of Nazism — my only relative left in Berlin is a halfJewish niece. But who at that time was paying attention to the hyster- ical drivel of an anti-Semitic corporal from Austria? One had other things to worry about. “Careful with the butter, Grandma,” my father shouted at dinner into my great-grandmother’s ear.“This morning we paid thirteen million marks for half-a-pound. By now the cost may be up to a billion.” “Is that so? Well, then the Almighty will forgive us if we eat lard,” the old woman was said to have answered. Germany had been brought to its knees, vanquished, impoverished. The newbornWeimar Republic lay as helplessly kicking on its back as I did in my baby carriage. While the bellies of his former subjects rumbled and the German currency was so worthless that banknotes were used to paper walls, the Kaiser was away in Holland chopping wood. Whoever had not yet had enough of war, mostly extremists of the left or right, continued their battles in the streets of Berlin. One morning on her way to a walk in the Tiergarten, a large park in the center of Berlin, my mother had been caught up in such a battle . Holding my sister and brother each by a hand, and pregnant with me,she was hurrying to reach the relative security of a side street when she noticed that in the excitement she had lost the paper bag with her children’s lunch. So irreplaceable were the sandwiches,she left the children alone and returned through the line of fire to retrieve them. During the war without my father by her side, she learned to fend for herself and had become strong and self-sufficient. Apart from a few books,documents and a clothes brush,I have only yellowed photographs to show for my eighteen German years. One of these, well preserved in spite of Papa having carried it for a long time in the breast pocket of his uniform, shows my sister and brother praying for him. Two handsome Jewish children with upturned eyes and piously folded hands in the manner of Christians at prayer, beseeching the ceiling of the most fashionable photographic studio of Alt-Moabit in the center of Berlin. Had my father not volunteered at the outbreak of the war, someone in his situation with two small children might have been spared the trenches. As an obvious patriot he was put into the First Prussian Guard Grenadier Regiment Alexander where, even after being shot through both thighs, he would return to the thick of 4 I r e n e Aw r e t things. Was it the indisputable love of his country that prompted him to follow the Kaiser’s call to arms so quickly,or did the vulture of bankruptcy have something...