Submerged on the Surface: The Not-so-Hidden Jews of Nazi Berlin 1941–1945 by Richard N. Lutjens Jr. (review)

In recent years scholarly interest in the Holocaust has evolved beyond the well-established focus on the persecution and destruction of the European Jews. One direction has been toward the subject of survival in hiding. Mark Roseman's study of a young Jewish woman's survival in Germany, The Past in Hiding, is a magisterial example.

Richard N. Lutjens, Jr. makes the history of the "submerged" Jews of Nazi Berlin the topic of his first book. About 6,500 Jews there "dove into illegality" in order to escape deportation and murder, leaving previous abodes and livelihoods, adopting different names and false documents, often spending years fleeing from one temporary accommodation to the next, without ration cards or official papers, in anguished fear of the Gestapo, its Jewish agents, and German informers. Of the 6,500 about 1,700 managed to survive. These had to rely on networks of Gentile helpers who offered shelter and food, in many cases in exchange for money or services.

Berlin lends itself to this analysis, the city with the biggest Jewish population and a metropolis of four million inhabitants, eclipsing Hamburg, with somewhat more than a million, and Munich, with somewhat less. It has been argued that the anonymity of such a large city, and maybe also the specifics of Berlin (a substantial working class not fully imbued by National Socialist ideology, its sheer extent, suburbs, the turmoil caused by the frequent air raids), offered more favorable conditions for survival than other towns.

Four chapters detail the act of submerging, survival in a hostile environment, making a living (only in rare cases by paid employment), and, finally, determining the right moment to re-surface at the end of the war. This structure corresponds to the chronology: chapter 1 covers the years from the first deportations in autumn 1941 to the last major deportations in spring 1943; chapter 2 the period following "submariners"' first year in hiding; chapter 3 the year 1944; and chapter 4 the last months of the war.

Anybody writing about this subject faces several problems: one is the lack of contemporary sources that renders research—statistics in particular—difficult, even haphazard. Letters or diaries do not exist, for understandable reasons. While the Gestapo was aware of the phenomenon and employed its own (Jewish) agents to ferret the submariners out, there was no "official" term for this category of fugitive. One who "dove" or "dashed" was described colloquially as a "Geflitzter" or "U-Boat." Virtually all sources came into being ex post facto and require particular handling. The scholar must bear in mind those who could not give testimony because they failed to elude their pursuers. Furthermore, none of the survivors' testimonies are alike. Deportation swept up hundreds of thousands, and destinies were similar when human beings were turned into "numbers" on a list or in a camp. However, each person who submerged undertook this step at specific moments and under specific circumstances, had very individual reasons for the decision, found shelter with helpers who had their own needs, motives, or agendas, and encountered varying challenges according to profession, age, and gender.

The author relies on four types of survivor testimonies: published memoirs, unpublished written material collected by the Zentrum für Antisemitismusforschung in Berlin, oral interviews from the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies at Yale University, and postwar restitution claims in Berlin. Documentation in the last category proved valuable indeed: while accounts drawn from the former three categories usually originated decades after the war and, due to their form as memoirs, necessarily shared the narrative format of story-telling, the latter were generated in the immediate postwar years, when events were still fresh and record-keeping systematic. To be sure, the curricula vitae were aimed at obtaining official status as "Victim of Fascism" (which guaranteed slightly better rations and access to housing), and they...