“You’re Jewish. You must let the world know that that doesn’t mean you’re not every bit as good as they.”

So begins Inge Deutschkron’s Outcast: A Jewish Girl in Wartime Berlin (1978; translated by Jean Steinberg, 1989). The memoir mostly concerns her time as a so-called U-Boot—a Jew in hiding during the war—but it begins on March 31, 1933 with these words, urgently spoken to her by her mother. Hitler has taken power the month before; being Jewish suddenly matters a lot. At the time, ten-year-old Deutschkron knew neither that she was Jewish, nor what that meant. She doesn’t ask, either: “I sensed that it would upset [my mother], and me too.” Deutschkron, who honed her sense for when people were equivocating during her nerve-wracking hears of hiding in plain sight, must have caught the hesitancy, even the internalized prejudice in her mother’s command: “You must let the world know that that doesn’t mean you’re not every bit as good as they.” However unconsciously, the mother’s double negative frames the experience of being Jewish from the perspective of the antisemite.

But the world wouldn’t let Deutschkron ignore her newly revealed identity. The upshot might be good for the writer, but it’s hard for the person. She is positioned as an outsider and an observer. Turning away from her mother’s demand, the child directs her attention to the world outside her window:

What interested me was what was going on outside in our corner of Berlin, on our quiet street. I liked looking out of the window of our apartment on Hufelandstrasse. It may have been nothing more than a sleepy little corner, yet for a ten-year-old there was much to see. I could watch the other children play. I was not allowed to play outside, my parents thought it wasn’t safe. I, of course, didn’t agree. I knew all the children by name, but I wasn’t allowed to play with them. All I could do was watch. It hurt.

This passage is typical: neither showy in style nor demonstrative in tone. Deutschkron is smart, capable, forthright, gently ironic. She often holds her feelings in reserve. Perhaps she thinks that although her experiences were exhausting, frightening, debilitating, and risky they weren’t representative of the persecution of the time. It’s true, this is a Holocaust story without trains, camps, or ravines (even though these elements hover at the margins of her tale, where lurks the suffering she knows she is always only one step away from, even if she can’t quite fathom its exact form). Yet one of the salutary aspects of Outcast is to expand our sense of what the Holocaust was, and what we expect of those who survived it.

I said reserve is characteristic of Deutschkron’s self-presentation. But I don’t mean she’s unfeeling. Look again at that opening anecdote. Yes, her separateness gives her a certain power: where others might see nothing, she sees a whole world, the better for being barred from it. But turning suffering into wisdom isn’t much fun. Deutschkron first says she liked to look out the window. But she ends by reversing course and admitting the harder truth: “It hurt.” The emotion stings the more for the effort of trying to hold it in check.

A few pages later, Deutschkron admits that she has not even especially been looking at the neighbourhood kids. In fact, she’s not looking at anything. She’s pretending to look as a cover for her real activity: waiting. Her father is late, should have been home long ago. Word has gone around that the Nazis will be boycotting Jewish-owned businesses the next day. People talk of arrests and violence. Deutschkron’s worry is fueled by her sense that her mother, too, is worried. She keeps sticking her head out the door and looking down the stairwell. The doorbell rings. A friend has come with a warning: “‘Your husband must get out of town immediately.’”

Eventually the anxiety subsides—for now. He is safe with friends for the night, mother and daughter learn, and returns the next day full of laughter: the man he stayed with, a doctor, put him up in his office, where he slept under the watchful eye of a skeleton. But Deutschkron’s mother doesn’t think it’s funny. All day she burns papers and sorts books. The Deutschkrons are committed socialists, everyone in the neighbourhood knows this, including the child herself, for whom socialism was her earliest identity. (If she’d been born in the US a decade later, she would have been a Red Diaper baby.) And it is being a socialist, more than a Jew, that, for the time being, is most dangerous. The family takes precautions, but they feel they are safe enough, things will blow over. They spend a few nights with relatives across town, and later move to a different neighbourhood where nobody knows their political affiliation, but they don’t pursue emigration. Even a couple of years later, when the father has the chance of a job in Australia, he doesn’t leave: “‘After all, I’m a Prussian civil servant; I can’t just run away.”

Claude Lanzmann, who interviewed Deutschkron for three hours during the making of his epic film Shoah (1985), sadly leaving all but a few minutes of their conversation out of the final nine-and-a-half-hour cut, notes that by equating leaving with running away the father reveals how much he felt he belonged to Germany. Like so many assimilated German Jews, the Deutschkrons story is a story of betrayal, of failed belonging. In this sense, the memoir’s English title is quite accurate. Germany’s Jews were indeed cast out. (The original title, Ich trug den golden Stern, I Wore the Yellow Star, references this exclusion more obliquely.) In this regard their persecution was different from that of Jews elsewhere, especially in Eastern Europe, who had never been allowed to feel they belonged.  

As Deutschkron grows up, she responds to her increasing feelings of alienation by resisting however she can, saying Aufwiedersehen instead of Heil Hitler, declining to give to “the countless collections for various national and social causes.” But even though she is undoubtedly correct when she tells Lanzmann that she is “a fighter,” her resistance can opnly go so far. Little things get to her. Sitting for a portrait at a photography studio, she is asked to tuck her hair behind her ear. The photographer had no ulterior motive, Deutschkron says, but the girl bursts into tears anyway: Nazi “race science” claimed you could tell a Jew by their ears. (I’m reminded of Carlo Ginzburg’s brilliant essay “Morelli, Freud, and Sherlock Holmes: Clues and Scientific Method,” which takes the study of ears as an index for modernity’s various ways of knowing, among which, Ginzburg would surely insist, we must include phrenological racism.) Deutschkron doesn’t tell her parents what happened, fearing that they will only laugh (shades of her father’s return from his night at the doctor’s office) and retell the story, which circulated among Jews at the time, about the man pulled from the crowd at a Nazi rally to demonstrate Aryan typology: unbeknownst to the Nazis, the man with the perfect German ears is a Jew. No one cared if the story was true: “Jews loved it because it helped them bear the humiliation of this particular indignity.” Deutschkron is unconvinced, though—just as she is unimpressed by the tenderness of the policeman at her local precinct as he wiped her fingers when the family are forced to comply with a fingerprinting decree. Yes, the officer might have been more embarrassed than her by “this demeaning procedure,” and, yes, the ear joke is a way for those who have suffered to claw back a brief moment of control over their lives, but Deutschkron implies that these moments don’t amount to anything significant.

They don’t, for example, keep the family together. In April 1939, her father leaves for England. After Kristallnacht, England eased its immigration policy slightly, granting visas to those who had relatives in England and could prove they had applied for admission to other countries. Her father had a cousin in England, and he had applied to go to Palestine. But the cousin could only sponsor him; Deutschkron and her mother would have to stay behind. Fitting, then, that she’s alone with her mother in the book’s opening scene, for this will be their fate throughout the war. The father is absent from the rest of the book (his story too must have been interesting); even when they are eventually reunited, Deutschkron says almost nothing about him. Hard for me to read this elision as anything other than judgmental.

From the time the war begins, Deutschkron’s memoir might have taken the title of Lore Segal’s own description of her wartime experience, Other People’s Houses. For the next five years, Deutschkron and her mother will shuttle through a series of rooms and other, less orthodox, hiding places. Their experiences support Mark Roseman’s claim that those who survived relied mostly on a network of helpers, some of whom they knew, and others they didn’t, some of whom provided long-term assistance, and others who helped spontaneously or briefly. The Deutschkrons relied on their friends in the socialist movement. One man had a grocery and gave the women fruit and vegetables; another, a butcher, sold them cuts of meat without ration cards. Still others offered places to stay or let them work off the books.

Deutschkron’s formal education had ended in April 1939 when the Nazis closed all Jewish schools. Her options were either to work in a Jewish household or in a factory. But for some reason the Jewish training school for kindergarten teachers had not yet been closed, and so she enrolled for the one-year course. The school was run by a highly educated woman who offered her students a much more wide-ranging humanistic education than would have been expected. Deutschkron appreciated the opportunities, yet she did not find early childhood education to be her métier the way one of her fellow students did. This a beautiful girl from the Ruhr valley was Marianne Strauss, the subject of two books I’ve recently been reading—this connection impressed me in a spooky, almost mystical way, as if even in the midst of destruction all manner of connecting webs still existed.

After graduating from the course, Deutschkron took a job in the household of Dr. Conrad Cohen, head of the welfare department of the Reich Association of Jews in Germany. As such, he and his family still lived in relative privilege. Deutschkron did cleaning, laundry, childcare for the family until April 1941, when a new edict declared that Jews could no longer keep household help. That left only compulsory factory work. Through her connection to Cohen, Deutschkron was sent to see Otto Weidt, who ran a workshop in which blind and deaf workers, most of them Jewish, made brooms and brushes for the army.

Weidt might be the most remarkable person in the memoir, which is saying something. Legally blind, at times reliant on an oxygen machine, active before the war in pacifist circles, aided by his competent and shrewd wife, Elise (regrettably absent from Deutschkron’s account), Weidt routinely defied the Gestapo. “He was a gambler and a risk-taker and liked a good fight.” Thanks to his army contracts Weidt had been deemed essential to the war effort. He obtained extra materials on the black market (paying policemen to cut hair from their horses’ tails, for example) so he could exceed his production quota and sell the extra illegally. That allowed him to hire more workers, almost all of them Jewish. Contrary to regulations, he even let able-bodied Jews work in the office as secretaries and accountants. Weidt offered one such place to Deutschkron, where she worked closely with Alice (Ali) Licht, a young woman with whom she became close and who, thanks to Weidt, would survive the war in the most extraordinary way. The 60-year-old Weidt became a surrogate father for Deutschkron, though one more kindly and less threatened by his daughter’s sexuality than most. When Deutschkron fell for a man named Hans Rosenthal, who worked as a purchasing and distributing agent of the Jewish Community (which meant relying on black market connections), Weidt would facilitate meetings between them. He even arranged dinners for his favourites at the factory. When the Gestapo descended on the workshop, as they regularly did, Weidt would pretend to curse his employees for their laxness, though always ending by noting to the Nazis that he could never fill his army orders “without these Jews.”

Outside the workshop, the situation got worse and worse. The first deportations left Berlin in October 1941. Over a thousand people, one of whom had for a time lived with Deutschkron and her mother in a shared apartment, were corralled in a synagogue before being shipped east. Deutschkron and her mother walked by the building in case they could catch a glimpse of their friend. Thinking of the mostly elderly people inside, they felt at once relieved and guilty: “We breathed a sigh of relief that we were still able to work, and we felt ashamed.” Deutschkron knew there was no good reason why they were outside the building and not with the others inside.

That conviction was reinforced when Deutschkron herself received a notice. Her mother insisted that she would voluntarily register so that they won’t be separated, an idea Deutschkron furiously rejected. At their wits’ end, they went to see Dr. Cohen for advice, who angrily tore up the notice. There had apparently been a mix-up; it was meant for someone with a similar name. “For a while I was haunted by the thought that someone else was going to take my place,” Deutschkron says. Note the temporariness of her feeling (“for a while”); it was difficult to worry about others.

By mid 1942 the Deutschkrons moved into a Judenhaus, apartments in which Berlin’s remaining Jews were crowded together—eleven of them in a five-and-a-half-room flat. Friends disappeared; even the Cohens were deported. Hans Rosenthal escaped deportation by a hair’s breadth—a Gestapo officer familiar with his contacts thought it would be better to make use of them than to send him away.

Deutschkron movingly describes visiting her aunt and uncle (her father’s sister) on the day of their deportation. She and her mother consoled the couple as best they could, slipping out of the house just before the Jewish police arrive:

To this day I can hear the squeaking of the stairs. As we stepped out from the dark hallway into the wintry street we saw a police car approach. We stopped to watch. Two Jewish orderlies wearing the yellow star went into the house. They reappeared minutes later behind my aunt, who was lugging the heavy backpacks. She walked quickly, as though eager to get it over with. My uncle followed haltingly. They didn’t look back as they stepped into the car, not a single backward look at the city that had been their home for almost thirty years. I cried. My mother, although just as moved, warned me to control myself. “Suppose somebody were to see us?” We had gone out without our stars. We were the only ones on the street. Strange how the Berliners knew when to make themselves scarce so as not to have to see what was happening on their streets. It is anybody’s guess how many watched from behind their curtained windows.

It’s as though Deutschkron were a little girl again, forced to watch the neighbourhood from her apartment. Yet what she watches now is more terrible. Is her looking compensation for the backward look her relatives can’t bring themselves to give? As in the earlier scene, there is here an us and a them, yet unlike the moment a decade earlier, when “they,” the children at play, were visible in the street, here, they are invisible. They are hiding now. Notice that they are “the Berliners,” not ‘our fellow citizens.’ Notice too how Deutschkron, in a reverse synecdoche, substitutes the city for their apartment building: “not a single backward look at the city that had been their home.” It’s as if she is accompanying them all the way to the station, and beyond, as the train departs for the East. This is telling, because Outcast is more than most memoirs I’ve read, even of Jews who lived there, a Berlin story.

All the more amazing, then, what a select few of its inhabitants were willing to do. Weidt, in particular, continues to perform miracles—when his disabled workers are taken in a raid, he marches to the Gestapo and somehow gets them back. But he mutters he won’t be able to do it again. Death is all around. A friend tells Deutschkron that their neighbour’s son has come back from the east with news about what is happening there to the Jews. This corroborates what she and her mother have heard on the BBC, which they listen to in secret whenever they can: “There’d been vague allusions to gassings and executions that none of had believed, or, rather, wanted to believe.” The friend insists they must not let themselves be deported. This is January 1943. Almost no Jews are still living in Berlin; the last will be taken in February. Deutschkron and her mother will have to go underground.

The U Boots move frequently, from place to place, all uncomfortable and risky, sleeping for a while even on the floor of a stationary stop owned by Socialist friends, and, later in their boathouse outside the city. They never stay anywhere long. If they are introduced by their hosts as friends on a visit, neighbours soon say, “They’re staying a long time, aren’t they?”

In the summer of 1943 the Gestapo finally “cleans out” Weidt’s workshop—everyone is deported, though Weidt manages to get Ali Licht and her parents (who he had been hiding in a false room at the back of the shop) sent to Theresienstadt. He didn’t know that the so-called model camp was just a station on the way to Auschwitz, though Ali managed to get a note to him when she was deported there. Ali’s story is remarkable: Weidt actually travelled to Oświęcim, the town where the camp was built in a former army barracks, found out that Ali was in fact in Birkenau, and bribed a Polish worker to smuggle a letter to her explaining that he had rented a room in town and left civilian clothes there, should she ever be able to escape—which she did in the chaos of the camp’s evacuation in January 1945. Ali Licht returned to Berlin and was hidden by Weidt for the rest of the war.

Deutschkron’s path to survival was less fraught than Ali’s but still harrowing. In the fall of 1943 the Allies begin bombing Berlin regularly. A terrible time for the city’s non-Jewish citizens is a boon for Deutschkron (though still dangerous, especially since she can’t go to the bomb shelter when she is hiding in someone’s apartment). She is able to get help at the NSV (National Socialist Welfare Agency) like any other bombed out victim; she even gets a new ID, after claiming that hers was lost in a raid. That doesn’t mean she is in the clear, though. After all, she has to worry about death from above as much as denunciation from those around her. Friends take the Deutschkrons to Potsdam, just outside Berlin, where they rent a meager shed, a “former combination goat shed and laundry room.” With only a few interruptions they spent the rest of the war there, scraping together enough to eat (while foraging for mushrooms, Deutschkron dreams of being able to take a walk without having to think of survival) and dodging identity checks. Once Deutschkron is even recognized by an old acquaintance on the subway, which is almost her undoing. Later she is threatened with denunciation by a woman jealous of her husband, who is hiding Inge and her mother. Even when the war shudders to a close and the Russians appear in Berlin, Deutschkron isn’t safe. Now she needs to dodge “the Ivans,” narrowly avoiding several assaults and attempted rapes.

After the war, hungry and weary, Deutschkron falls ill; moreover, she is depressed about the news out of Belsen and Auschwitz. She finally hears from her father, but she and her mother can’t get to the UK until August 1946. The last pages of Outcast are more concerned with the machinations between socialists and communists in immediate postwar Berlin than with her feelings. The shell Deutschkron has offered readers from the beginning of the book seems to have hardened. Even her final references to Israel, where she eventually settles, are perfunctory, giving nothing away. But why should we expect anything different? Deutschkron doesn’t owe us tears. Besides, the descriptions of how the communists repressed the socialist movement she and her parents had so identified with, and her concomitant claim that Israel is the only place she can be safe (ironically the book was written just at the moment when, with the election of Menachem Begin, Israel was abandoning its socialist past) do in fact get at what eats at her most: her exile from her home, Berlin.

Describing the roundup that swept up the city’s last Jews, Deutschkron declares: “A Berlin without any Jews was inconceivable.” She was living proof that such a city in fact never existed, but not for lack of trying. Jewish Berlin persisted only in hiding, in stealth, on the other side of a window or around a corner away from the invisible prying eyes of those who did everything they could to make the inconceivable a reality. Less bitter than Ruth Kluger in her postwar response to Vienna, less ambivalent than Marianne Strauss’s postwar attempts to identify with a new Germany, Inge Deutschkron is the clear-eyed, composed, yet wounded fighter who appears not just in this fascinating memoir but also in that interview with Lanzmann, which you can watch here. (Highly recommended; she’s amazing.)

Lanzmann likely cut Deutschkron from his film because she didn’t fit the story he wanted to tell. He wanted to focus on those forced to do the Nazis’ evil work in the extermination camps; his is a more lachrymose tale. I doubt Deutschkron cared that Lanzmann had no use for her. Well, maybe she did. But she might have expected something of the sort. She was used to being on the outside, looking in. She answered her mother’s demand—she proved herself as good as the ones who wanted to kill her—but it left a bad taste in her mouth.

I read this for Caroline and Lizz’s tenth annual German Literature Month. Lots of other great posts here.