Easter Sunday, 1944: escape to Berlin

In Warsaw, when we walked on the streets, I could make out behind me if there was a German coming or not, or if that was a Polish step," my father-in-law told me. "Ninety-nine percent! You get a sixth sense."

Deported from his native Germany in 1938 - the Nazis invalidated his citizenship because his biological father had been Austrian - he lived in and around Warsaw from |38 until 1944. Initially confined to the Jewish ghetto, he and his wife bribed their way out, and, having learned to speak Polish, passed as Poles while living in a small rural community thirty miles outside of the city.

"Nobody knew," he said. "I can't imagine anybody knew. We were able to fool just about everybody.

"The first step was to get out of the ghetto. We had connections outside, we knew people and we did have money. So the problem was to find shelter. The Polish population then was very anti-Semitic. And it was very dangerous to cover up for Jews."

"They used to say," my mother-in-law interjected, "if we find a Jew in your apartment we'll burn your house down."

With determination, money, and plenty of luck they were able to survive. As the war continued and the eventual German defeat and Soviet conquest of Poland became more and more obvious, a different problem presented itself. Could they survive in Poland once the Russians arrived? But what else could they do? Where could hunted Jews go?

"That was the thing!" my father-in-law said excitedly. "What Jew would go back to Germany? You don't go in a lion's den."

But on Easter Sunday in 1944 they did.

"I realized our luck couldn't last forever," my father-in-law said of the prospect of staying on in Poland. "After a certain time, people do run out of luck. Some people start to see something suspicious. The question was how to get out.

"Number one," he went on, "we didn't want to get caught in an uprising. Number two, we did not like the Russians.... If we were able to beat the system in Poland for three or four years, we should be able to beat the Germans. But we weren't sure we could beat the Russians. We knew how to handle the Germans.... Our chances to survive would be better if we somehow were able to return to Germany and hide for one more year. We had connections. We realized that should Poland come under Russian occupation all the transcripts [identification papers] that we had wouldn't be of much value. We didn't like the Nazis, we didn't like the Russians. That's all."

"We knew plenty of people in Berlin," my mother-in-law added. "There were still some good people in Germany. I must tell you, that most of these people were Catholics. Hitler didn't like the Catholics. Didn't you know that? The Nazis were very antireligious."

But the crucial, life-saving connection in Berlin was a relative by marriage, a Lutheran, who first gave them the necessary identification papers to travel, and then hid them in the attic of his house for the last ten months of the war. He was killed by the Nazis in the very last days of the war.

"He gave me his own military papers and the regular permit to pass the border," my father-in-law said. "They were of particular value because he was 4-F. That was ideal."

They chose the four-day Easter weekend, anticipating a lack of diligence on the part of the German authorities.

"We thought it would be a wonderful time to leave, and it worked out perfect, because they would be in a festive mood."

"There was still some religion," added my mother-in-law. "People liked Easter... [at least] we hoped they would like Easter," she laughed.

"We bought a ticket, first class," he went on. "We were treated very well. It was the regular train from Warsaw to Berlin. Overnight. We were in Berlin in the morning. The Gestapo checked our papers ton the train]. He was very friendly. He liked us, that was the funny thing. He was the only one who checked us. No one suspected."

Once in Berlin, they made their way to the suburb where they were hidden until finally rescued by British forces in 1945.

I asked if in looking back on their decision to return to Berlin, did they think it was particularly ironic that their escape was accomplished on Easter.

"No, no," my father-in-law said. "We only thought, you know, you don't stage an invasion in the middle of a hurricane."

"I know you didn't think about it then, but now in looking back at it?"

"You mean the connection with the Jews coming out of Egypt?"

"Was it Passover?" I asked.

"I wouldn't know, "he said quickly. "There was no way [he'd have known].... We had other problems.... Neither one of us is cry religious," he added. "We were not before the war and we certainly didn't become religious after the war.... There is a tendency among all people in the world - people are cruel, not just the Germans. The easy thing is for any government in trouble to pick on someone."

Religion, he added, was part of history, that's all. "I don't want to offend you," he said. Not at all, I assured him. He went on. "Jesus was a Jew, right? Jesus' parents, Mary and Joseph, were Jews. So you tell me, where does the Virgin Birth come in? That's where the problem is. To me this is a fairy tale."

My in-laws are reticent when speaking about their experiences during the war, and I do not press them. The conversation above, which I recorded several years ago, was the only time we've talked in any detail about how they survived. I offer it now, in conjunction with Paul Gediman's splendid essay (p.13) on the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, as further reflection on the difficulties of placing these horrors in any kind of moral context. I am sympathetic to Gediman's worries about the inadequacy of "representation" and metaphor and the danger of using the Holocaust "to affirm some transcendent ideal." Yet silence, as Gediman explains, risks a kind of idolatry as well.

Beyond silence there is, I think, the Jewish theologian Franz Rosenzweig's often quoted remark: "The belief [of a Jew] is not the content of a testimony, but rather the product of reproduction. The Jew, engendered by a Jew, attests his belief by continuing to procreate the Jewish people. His belief is not in something: he is himself the belief."

I was brought up in a world where cruelty was confined to battles over toys or games, and where the possibilities of human goodness and evil seemed exhausted by the moral complexities of "The Wide World of Sports" and the "Dick Van Dyke Show." I have little experience of persecution or of suffering, let alone of desperation and killing. And yet it does seem to me a fact, not a metaphor or an idealization, that my wife's parents walked into a lion's den, were thrown into a fiery furnace, and quite unexplainably walked out again. It is also a fact that they were as miraculously preserved from the flames as Daniel, as inexplicably brought back to life from certain death as Lazarus, and as improbably summoned to America, and into my humdrum suburban existence as was Mary summoned by that importuning angel. When I look at my children, I know in a most tangible way what Rosenzweig meant by the persistence of belief. The fact of the existence of these children in this word of "Sesame Street," Cub Scouts, and Bill Clinton, makes the Incarnation and the Massacre of the Holy Innocents more, not less, real. (I can see my father-in-law raising a very skeptical eyebrow at this.) Each and every life is rescued from a tumult of impossibilities, and some lives, mysteriously, are rescued again and again. In some real sense, my very ordinary American children, like their mother, have also been plucked from the oblivion the world once intended for their grandparents. It is not my place to make a religious or transcendent claim about this; there is certainly nothing otherworldly about it. I'm just trying to understand the fact of it.

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