Marie Jalowicz Simon (1922—1998) was the only child of accomplished, elderly parents. Her father, a lawyer interested in jurisprudence but uninterested in the day-to-day aspects of being a lawyer, let his brilliant wife run the practice. Jalowicz Simon’s beloved uncle, perhaps her closest confidante, a man seriously committed to silliness, was both a communist and a deeply Orthodox Jew who basically starved to death once Nazi regulations prohibited kosher slaughtering practices. Her mother died of cancer in 1938; her father in 1941, possibly of a stroke. In the last few months of his life he had unwillingly become involved with a woman named Johanna Koch, an old family friend, who, together with her husband, Emil, would later help Jalowicz Simon survive, despite complicated mutual hate-love.

In 1940 Jalowicz Simon was sent to Siemens as a forced labourer. She became close with many of her coworkers, both Jewish and not, and was even accepted into a saboteurs’ ring at the armaments factory. She avoided deportation in 1941 by telling the postman who brought her notice that the woman under that name had disappeared, and then, in June 1942, dressed only in her petticoat, slipped past the two SS men who had been sent to pick her up. At that point she “went under,” becoming, like Inge Deutschkron and about 1500 other Berlin Jews, a so-called U-Boot.

She was briefly engaged to a Chinese man (they could not speak to each other), and later went to Bulgaria with another man she had fallen in love with; in Sofia a sympathetic German official gave her a false pass to enable her to return to Berlin rather than be arrested. A family friend, a doctor who performed abortions and together with his hated wife helped out many Jews in hiding before himself disappearing in mysterious circumstances, placed her in various safe homes, but she could never stay in any of these places for long. For a time she stayed in a villa outside the city with a former circus performer. In the most grotesque and extraordinary moment of these dramatic years, she was sold for 15 Marks by a scurrilous associate of the abortionist to a syphilitic ardent Nazi who boasts of his ability to sniff out a Jew and who paid handsomely for a hair from Hitler’s dog, which he framed and hung on his walls. (Even as I write this I can’t believe what I’m saying, but it’s all true!)

Through Hannchen Koch Jalowicz Simon was introduced to an important player in the communist resistance; this woman, Trude Neuke, in turn passed her on to a Dutch volunteer worker with whom she shacked up in an apartment owned by an old woman. Jalowicz Simon came to both love and loathe this woman, a “repellent, criminal blackmailer with Nazi opinions”; as she later put it, with characteristic insouciance, “life is complicated.” Jalowicz Simon stayed in this curious ménage—the Dutchman would occasionally beat her, but she was grateful for the bruises as they helped her blend in to the neighbourhood—from late 1943 until early 1945. She spent the end of the war and the months immediately after it in far-eastern Berlin, at great risk from the Russian soldiers who had ostensibly liberated her, not to mention the increasingly paranoid fantasies of Hannchen Koch who was convinced the young woman was out to steal her husband.

After the war, Jalowicz Simon decided to stay in what became East Germany. A member of the Communist party, she became a professor at the prestigious Humboldt University, where she taught classics and the history of philosophy. She almost never spoke of her wartime experiences to her son, the historian Hermann Simon, until the very end of her life, when she recorded 77 tapes’ worth of reminiscences, which came out, her son tells us in his foreword, in elegantly phrased lectures, with almost no uncertainty. Hermann Simon was able to confirm almost everything in her story; together with the writer Irene Stratenwerth, he turned the tapes into a memoir, Underground in Berlin: A Young Woman’s Extraordinary Tale of Survival in the Heart of Nazi Germany, capably translated into English by Anthea Bell. (It has a wonderful map of the city, showing the locations of all her safe houses; I wish more books did this.) The book is particularly valuable for its frankness on sexual abuse, which is only now becoming a significant topic in Holocaust Studies.

I recently read and discussed Underground in Berlin with some students who are working with me on a Holocaust education project. Before we talked I circulated some questions about the text—which, I hope I’ve made clear, is well worth reading, both a fascinating and suspenseful narrative—and I’ve copied these here, in case they are of interest.

• Most of you have read at least some Holocaust memoirs. How does Underground in Berlin compare? You might answer this question by thinking about material you expected to find but didn’t, or, conversely, material you didn’t expect would be included but is.

• Jalowicz Simon grew up in mostly left-wing circles at a time when one’s political affiliations really mattered. She later spent most of her life in a communist country (East Germany). No surprise, then, that class is so important to her memoir. But what about cultural background? (I’m thinking of what the sociologist Pierre Boudieu called “cultural capital.”) What is the relation, for Jalowicz Simon, between cultural capital and class? Take a look at pp. 258 & 308 for just two examples.

• I’m interested in Jalowicz Simon’s interest in excretion—what she with bracing directness calls shit and piss. Finding somewhere to relieve yourself is a big deal in the memoir. And on a couple of occasions, excretion is disgustingly related to eating, like the chamber pot that becomes a dish. How do such moments contribute to our understanding of the text? (Some examples: 100, 142, 151)

• Sex is central to Jalowicz Simon’s wartime experiences. Sometimes she uses sex or its promise (flirting, etc.) to get something she needs (72, 87, 143). Sometimes sex is a price she has to pay for staying alive (25, implied on 326, the whole Galecki experience). And sometimes sex is violently forced upon her (i.e. rape on 99, 314, 323-4, or the threat on 125). Sometimes it is replaced by violence (238). When she meets a man who has no sexual interest in her she finds it noteworthy by virtue of being so unusual (192). What did you make of Jalowicz Simon’s portrayal of sex? When is she overt and when is she covert? When does she tell us straight out, and when do we need to read between the lines? What difference does this difference make?

• You surely noticed how many places (apartments, cottages, sheds) Jalowicz Simon stayed, and, correspondingly, how many people were responsible for her survival. You also doubtless were struck by the varying motives of her helper/rescuers. (Is that even the right term?) Her experiences support the historian Mark Roseman recent claims that we like to think of rescuers as being altruistically motivated, and clearly motivated (not changing their minds, not being ambivalent); we similarly like to think of victims as being helped by a single person over a sustained period. (Think Oskar Schindler.) These fantasies are not borne out by the historical record. To save a life required a network of actors, many of whom did not know each other or think of each other as being involved in a common enterprise. What are the consequences of rethinking rescue?