Gone to Ground

Marie Jalowicz Simon

Have I ever told you my Jack Metzger story? OK then, here goes…

I was about ten years old and Jacky had come to my parents for supper. He was visiting from Israel. As we sat down to eat, the conversation turned, as it often does in Jewish homes, to the Holocaust. I wanted to join in. ‘If I’d been in Germany,’ I ventured, ‘I’d have pretended to not be Jewish.’ At this remark, Jacky went ape-shit. He turned on my father: Ted, how could you raise a son to say something like that? Dad wasn’t fussed – or didn’t seem to be – but I felt ashamed – even though I didn’t understand what I’d said wrong

During The War, however, Marie Jalowicz Simon did exactly that: she pretended not to be Jewish, right in the heart of Berlin. Sometime in 1942, after working as forced labor in the Siemens factory, Jalowicz found a way to get sacked from her job. Then she removed her yellow star and went to ground.

Such people, submerged in the Third Reich, were known as U-boats. They survived through tenuous networks of support, moving between temporary homes, sometimes staying with opponents of the Nazis, sometimes with blackmailers or with weirdoes. In the case of Jalowicz, there were a number of unwanted (but unavoidable) sexual relationships – and it probably helped that she was young, charming and pragmatic. Many other U-boats lost their nerve at some key point. Many were denounced by neighbors, informants or fanatical Nazis.

I remember Talia Goshen telling me about her grandmother, who at the time was alive and well and living in Israel – and mentioned by Talia and Sasha as a much-loved, warm, enlightened woman. Like Jalowicz she’d gone to ground – only in the forests of Romania. ‘I don’t know how she managed it,’ said Talia, ‘one doesn’t ask. I expect she did whatever she had to.’

As an old lady, looking back, Jalowicz stressed the importance of luck. Hers involved several key people but above all a working class Aryan couple, Hannchen and Emil Koch, who happened to have purchased the Jalowicz country cottage outside Berlin. Frau Koch lent Jalowicz her own identity document – and several times found places for her to stay. And yet Koch emerges gradually (to the reader as to the young Jalowicz) not only as a resistance hero but also as a very creepy woman.

The world is full of thrilling stories, but what elevates Gone to Ground is the intelligence of the storyteller. To read the book was to fall in love with this young woman. The afterword is that the book was composed by her son, Hermann Simon, a historian, based on a series of taped interviews he did with her in the early 1990s. After the war, Jalowicz decided to remain in Berlin, realizing that what happened in Germany might have happened anywhere, if only the mob was stirred up; and that, really, Berlin was where she came from – and she didn’t have the energy to start over. So she stayed in Berlin (actually East Berlin), married an old friend from her high school, and became a professor of classics. Never did she openly discuss the war years. But when her son arrived with his tape recorder, all those years later, and said it’s time to talk, she talked – and apparently it flowed over 90 consecutive hours, all perfectly constructed, and without a single factual error when Hermann cross-checked it.

When Jalowicz first went to the Siemens factory (aged only 18 years old), she began to spend her spare time walking. Everything might depend on her knowing her city. One day, chancing on a café full of Jewish men idling and kibitzing – doing nothing, really, but wait for their deportation orders – she experiences a great urge to split away. It’s a really powerful moment. She describes too, and with a kind of contempt, the almost jolly mood of preparation that came over people who had had their deportation orders. One realises that unlike them the young Jalowicz is emphatically not in denial. She senses how this will end and her attitude is defiant.

A moving scene: at the end of the war Jalowicz is interviewed for some kind of permit by a German U.N. guy – a gentleman of obvious decency and culture who uses a tense – the subjunctive – that she’s not heard for three years. Jalowicz has spent the war years with strangers, watching every word that she says. Now the subjunctive signifies a relaxation and her emotions start to flow again.

In 1982 I was travelling around Israel with Nicki, Sivan and Paul Scanlon. We were waiting for a bus at Jerusalem Station, sitting on the curb in the summer heat. Beside us, also waiting for a bus, sat a lanky, bearded soldier. Though he didn’t recognise me, I recognised him: he was Jack Metzger. I ventured to introduce myself. He jumped up. ‘Ted Nathan’s children in Israel – this I don’t believe!’ Forty years after Marie Jalowicz skipped her deportation orders, Jack Metzger had answered his army call-up.

It is 1946. Jalowicz sweet talks an apartment out of the administration and trundles down her few belongings. On the way she vows that: (i.) She will never marry a man who isn’t Jewish. (ii.) She would rather be alone than marry a man without higher education. (iii.) She will be honest and good – like her parents had been. Moreover, she will never speak about ‘The Germans’, as if that were one thing. No, she will always make distinctions. This is a key to this book, and one reason why I read it in the first place. Fascism is always a danger – everywhere, now as ever.