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Joachimsthaler Street 12 in Berlin-Charlottenburg, just a few meters away from the Kurfürstendamm. Heavy traffic flows through the four-lane main street, the full sound of the strike rings from the bell tower of the nearby Gedächtniskirche. Alice Simon lived here until early 1943. Now, a police officer is guarding the house, automatic gun in his hand and bolstered with a bulletproof vest. The fact that he or one of his colleagues keep watch day in and day out has no immediate connection to Alice Simon. Her apartment does not exist any more; not even the building is the way it used to be.
Nevertheless, history connects. The police officer patrols with a stoic face in front of the four-story apartment building, constantly keeping an eye on the bookstore on the first floor. It is a Jewish bookstore. The same as all Jewish institutions in the city, it needs special protection.
A strange feeling of familiarity grips me as I stand in front of the house that is no longer the house in which Alice Simon used to live. In my thoughts, I have wandered through her abandoned apartment countless times. I climbed up the stairways to the first floor; stepped into the spacious hallway of a deserted apartment.
Once again, I have opened the door. I walk past the living room, look into the study, peek into two guestrooms, into the dining room and the kitchen. Home furnishings give a hint of the upper middle class ambiance: chandeliers, heavy furniture, glass cabinets, sideboards, armoires with carvings or mirrors, chests of drawers, bookshelves, liquor cabinets, ice chest, high shelves, plenty of dining tables, work desks, side tables, sofas, leather upholstered chairs, plush armoires, easy chairs. Large area carpets (the one in the dining room, for example, covered an area of 7x3.5 meters), runners, rugs, oil paintings, tapestry and decorative wall plates, table lamps and floor lamps, floor vases, marble busts, clocks.
My tour through the seven rooms in addition to the kitchen and hallway is provided solely by a form of the Department of Finance in Alt-Moabit. Ten meticulously filled pages list the entire inventory that a tax officer together, with a free-lance assessor, “has recorded and assessed conscientiously”. 162 entries are listed and, according to the guidelines for the “use of the confiscated property of enemies of the Reich”, are appraised under value. Alice Simon was a Protestant. However, she was considered an enemy of the Reich just as all other Jews were because of her Jewish ancestry.
The old house that today exists only as an edifice of idea has no face for me. In the bookstore, I am looking for a pictorial with views of Berlin from the twenties and thirties. The salesperson names a title that is not in stock. I leave the store, take a last look at the façade that has remained alien, and depart to head for the Kurfürstendamm. The search is ending unsuccessfully. This is not the place to find out about an annihilated life story.
Alice Simon’s last job was as accountant at the Reichsvereinigung der Juden in Deutschland (Reichs Association of the Jews in Germany), an unpaid position. As such, she declares it in a financial statement. Until 1939, this organization was called Reichsvertretung der deutschen Juden (Reich’s-Representation of the German Jews). The forced renaming by the Nazis already reveals the ostracism of the Jews.
Jews were, as had been determined earlier by the Nuremberg Laws, not Germans anymore. Therefore, one did not talk about the German Jews but only about Jews in Germany. Soon there were supposed to be no more Jews in Germany. Germany was to be, as they called it, “free of Jews”. First, they deprived them of the means of existence and since 1942 the remaining Jews were taken away by the Gestapo to the extermination camps in the East.
The Central Office of the Reichsvereinigung in the Kantstraße had to close on June 10, 1943. The Reichsvereinigung had lost its accountant shortly prior to that. Sometime in the spring of 1943, she left her home in the Joachimsthaler Straße for good. She did not move out as one normally leaves an apartment, for her belongings were left behind. Yet, hardly anybody learned, that the 55-year-old woman now lived in a nursing home in the Große Hamburger Straße. You grew old quickly when you were a Jew in Berlin in those weeks, because the Gestapo admitted thousands of them of any age there. By the end of 1942 the Jewish Nursing Home, located in the Scheunenviertel, had been turned, just as the neighboring Jewish boys’ school, into a collection spot with bars on the windows. For a large portion of the more than 55,000 Jews of Berlin who were deported into the extermination camps in Eastern Europe, this was the last place of residence in the homeland.
In one of the wings of the old house, offices were set up where conscripted civil servants of the Jewish community, based on a nationwide order, had to process financial statements of interned Jews. In cases of false or incomplete statements, they were threatened –as if they were not already headed there- with concentration camp and additional confiscation of property.1 On May 10, 1943, Alice Simon signs such a document and adds faithfully in her handwriting “Recorded from memory in the Große Hamburger Straße”. Not only does this paper list the entire inventory of the apartment, it also includes a summary of bonds and bank accounts and documents indirectly. Thus it documents indirectly how crowded it must have been there in the end, since it states the number of subtenants. Five forcibly admitted Jews and the housekeeper shared the seven rooms with Alice Simon.
Alice Simon’s assets were taken by the German Government and sold for a bargain price. In accordance with the laws and rules decreed by the Geheime Staatspolizei (Gestapo, Secret State Police, a branch of the SS) on February 1, 1943, it was put on record and the Internal Revenue Office later adds to its files: “As described by the § 1 of the Law Regarding the Confiscation of Communists Assets from May 26, 1933 – RGB1. I P. 293 – in compliance with the Law of the Confiscation of Assets of Enemies of the People and State in the Country of Austria from 11.18.1938 – RGB1. I P. 1620 – the decree regarding the Confiscation of the Enemies of the People and State in the Territories of Sudeten Germany from 05.12.1939 – RGB1 I P. 911 – and the decree regarding the Confiscation of Assets in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia from October 4, 1939 – RGB1. I P. 1998 – in compliance with the Order by the Führer and the Reich’s-Chancellor in Regard to the Utilization of Confiscated Assets of Enemies of the State from May 29, 1941 – RGB1. I P. 303 – all assets of Alice Sara Simon nee Remak born on 08.30.87 in Posen, most recently residing in Berlin W. 15 Joachimsthaler- Straße 12 will be confiscated in favor of the German Reich.”
The housekeeper Ottilie Lenz was temporarily permitted to stay in the Joachimsthaler Street until the subletting of the apartment was sorted out. By mid-June, the Vermögensverwaltungszentrum (Center for the Utilization of Assets) of the Oberfinanzdirektion (Regional Tax Office) in Berlin received the report from the property management “that in the meantime all Jewish subtenants have been picked up” and only “an Arian matron at the age of 75” was occupying a room, “the rest of the living space is all sealed.” On July 19, 1943, a prospective buyer from Berlin-Schlachtensee assured per signature “to take over the Jewish apartment of Alice Simon … in the condition and for the price that the Herr Oberfinanzpräsident (the President of the Regional Tax Office) chose to offer.” The Oberfinanzpräsident chose to assess it for the amount of 12 000 Reichsmark and to terminate the subletting contract of Ottilie Lenz for September 30, 1943. “Your moving–out has to be reported to me on that same day, possibly before that, so that I can initiate the removal of the belongings of the deported landlord.”
There had been several potential buyers for the inventory of the Simon family. For reasons that are not known, the prospective buyer from Schlachtensee canceled the purchase. A civil servant from the Hauptplanungsamt (Department of Urban Management) in Berlin also released himself from the commitment.. He gave the following reasons for his decision: “The apartment is henceforth rented by the Croation Luftattaché (Air Force Attaché) Herr Major Schuch, who lost his present accommodations in the air attack from September 3. to September 4. of this year. Since Herr Major Schuch lost all his furniture, he would appreciate it if he could take over the furniture of the Jew Simon. Therefore, I am willing to pass on this furniture on behalf of the Herr Major Schuch and ask you to assign a transfer to him.” Eventually, on October 11, 1943, the same Major Schuch gave a receipt to the Vermögensverwaltungsstelle of the Oberfinanzdirektion in Berlin “to have purchased the confiscated items from the assets of the expatriated Jew Alice Sara Simon that were offered for sale today.” The sale was a cash transaction.
Who was Alice Simon? Her apartment in the Joachimsthaler Straße 12 in Berlin suggests that she was part of the upper middle class. Biographical details were of interest for the authorities only as far as they were related to the confiscable assets. Alice Simon stated in her financial statement that she was born on August 30, 1887. However, where and how she spent her almost 56 years until May 10, 1943 is not disclosed in the document. In one of the few columns of the financial statement that provides an insight into her biography, the tax authority demands to know: “Which family members have already emigrated? To where?” Alice Simon’s reply gives the clue for my investigation decades later: “Brother Curt Isr. Remak to Theresienstadt, son Carl in the USA, daughter Hedda to England.4
The further fate of Alice Simon’s brother was the fastest to acquire. Theresienstadt was not an extermination camp as was Auschwitz or Sobibor. Nevertheless, the survival rate was only at 15%. This was on one hand the result of the conditions of life that were gravely different from the lies told by Nazis – one just has to remember the propaganda movie “The Führer gives the Jews a city”. On the other hand, the far larger proportion of Jews arriving in Theresienstadt was later deported to Auschwitz for extermination. In the book for commemoration in Berlin, one learns through a little entry that the native of Posen, Curt Remak, born on March 8, 1897 had his last residence in Berlin-Schöneberg and was deported on March 17, 1943 to Theresienstadt. Finally one can read “Place of death: Auschwitz, missing.”5
Remaining were the son and the daughter: Hedda Simon who probably got married and changed her last name in the following decades and Carl Simon whose name is represented in dizzying multitude in American phone
directories. Moreover, how could one be sure that one or both children were still alive after all this time?
The name Remak is less common than the name Simon, the name under which Alice was born in Posen. Was she possibly the granddaughter of the physician Prof. Robert Remak, the first Jewish assistant professor at the University of Berlin and founder of the electro diagnostics who was also born in Posen?6 After waiting approximately six months, I received an answer to my request at the civil registry office in the Polish Poznan´ (Posen) and was able to rule out that assumption. Regardless, the family register contains scarce data through which the first stations in her life become apparent.7 According to it, Alice was born to the family of a businessman in Posen. Father Arnold Remak and mother Hedwig Löw got married in 1886. Of their three children Julia Alice, the oldest, was born in 1887, followed by Else (1888) and much later by Curt (1897), the youngest. The parents divorced in 1904 and the following year the mother moved to Berlin-Charlottenburg with her small children. Independently of them, the father moved to the German Capital in 1923.
The civil registry office of Charlottenburg possesses no records about Alice Simon or her children, whose birthdates I did not know at the time of my request. In the directories of Berlin of 1937, one can find for the first time the addendum “Widow” with her name. There are no known documents in the archive of the Centrum Judaicum of Berlin that could provide information about Alice Simon. Indeed, I owe the director Dr. Hermann Simon for a number of useful research tips, but here he had to give up, neither was he related directly nor by marriage.
Were all conceivable resources exhausted? Numerous times, I had tried search engines on the internet, to no avail. Most of the time no useful answers were displayed. However, in December of 2001 “Google” listed one very unexpected hit after the entry of the names Alice and Simon and Carl. It was an entry from August 31, 2001 at 20:15pm into the International Guestbook of the homepage of the Evangelical Church in Germany (EKD):
“The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you all! I was born in Berlin, Germany, over eighty years ago. In 1935, Pastor Gerhard Jacobi at the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gedaechtniskirche confirmed me. My father, Dr. Herbert Simon, was a prominent attorney in Berlin. My mother was Alice Simon, nee Remak. My father was born in Bromberg, now Bydgodsz; my mother in Posen, now Poznan. I came to the USA in 1939, and eventually was ordained as a minister in the Presbyterian Church, USA. Is there anybody still alive who remembers my family in Berlin?”
The writer was Carl Simon, I had not received a single response in the first three and a half months and the astonishment on both sides of the Atlantic could hardly have been greater when the contact between us materialized due to this strange internet connection. Alice Simon, nee Remak, was his mother, wrote the 80-year-old minister. His father was Dr. Herbert Simon, who was drafted as a soldier during WWII and afterwards started a law firm with notary office and hired Alice Remak as his secretary. Both fell in love, decided to be married and converted to Protestantism prior to their marriage. They were married on August 2, 1920 and twins, Hedda and Carl were born on June 30, 1921. Both were baptized, the confirmation took place in 1935.
“Both our parents lived in their world, we children lived in our world” says Carl Simon retrospectively. In searching for details from his everyday life with his parents in Berlin, he cannot remember much. As long as the children did not go to school, the children shared a room. After that, each child had the privacy of his own room. Children sat together with father and mother during the meals and there it was similar to mealtimes in other families: The adults did all the talking; the children had to listen. Part of the group of adults was the paternal grandmother and the housekeeper Ottilie Lenz. Carl Simon’s most beautiful childhood memories are centered on the summer vacations when the family used to travel to the Baltic Sea, to Swinemünde. “Each summer we spent two months there, just us children with our mother without a nanny. Father kept us company on a few weekends.” In this land of childhood memories an ideal world is kept, in which you enjoyed long walks and motorboat rides, swimming in the Baltic Sea or sunbathing on the beach. “I remember how I hated it when we had to return to Berlin because the school year began,” reports Simon.
However, Berlin was also the counter world, in which the SA (Sturmtruppen: Storm Troops; brown-shirted militia of the Nazi Party), marched and in which the power transfer took place on January 30, 1933. The Nazis did not hesitate! After the blitzkrieg over democracy, they directed their first campaigns against the Jews, which escalated into genocide. “I decide who is a Jew”, was Hitler’s saying. Henceforth, the Simons who had converted to Protestantism were Jews again – with all the consequences – whether they liked it or not. As a former front-line soldier, the father Herbert Simon was indeed still allowed to continue with his law firm but the permit to run the notary office was revoked in late 1935.9 He died on January 26, 1936, only 55 years old.
After the death of her husband, Alice Simon sent her twins for further education to London. Carl in the summer of 1936, Hedda the following year. The children never came to know what motives ultimately tipped the scales; neither did they know how long they were supposed to stay. In hindsight, Carl Simon assumes that his mother initially felt confident that the Nazi-nightmare would soon end and son and daughter could return carefree to Berlin.
Nevertheless, there was no end in sight; on the contrary, the power broadened. Austria was annexed to Germany in the spring of 1938 and Hitler plans to bring the Sudetenland “home to the Reich” – “one way or another”, as he threatens on September 26, 1938. He gets it – anyway. The Conference of Munich at the end of September 1938 gives its placet. One can read in one of the few preserved letters that Alice Simon, taking great interest in politics, responds relieved. “We have put an alarming time behind us”, she writes on October 3, 1938, “thanks to the meeting of the leading politicians everything could be arranged for the better at the last minute. Every country had to suffer
during the last horrible war that everyone remembers well. You will probably understand how happy and grateful we all are because the peace is secured.” The writer had just returned from a visit to London that had lasted several weeks. She had met her children for the first time after a whole year.
“We had a wonderful time, but time was flying and was far too short”, Alice Simon continues. She felt happy that she had found Carl and Hedda in good health and safe and sound. In addition: “I am looking ahead brave and confident and I pray to the heavens for a heavenly destiny for my children.”
It was the last time that mother and children would see each other. Two days after the letter had been sent the passports of the Jews living in the German Reich were confiscated.
The people who had given Alice Simon accommodation in London had tried to persuade her not to return to Berlin, but to no avail. They had offered every support to start a new life. However, Alice Simon refused because she had promised her husband to take care of his nearly blind mother for as long as possible. She decided in favor of her mother-in-law who probably would not have been capable of surviving without her daughter-in-law.10 However, she did not decide against her children either, since she knew they were safe. Nonetheless, her promise did lead her into a dilemma that should have fatal results. The evidence of a seemingly secure peace should soon prove to be deceptive.
The addressee of the letter let us become witnesses of Alice Simon’s hope to live in the United States and influenced Alice’s son to make a decision that should have a deep impact on his life. She had taught for a year as a teacher in Great Britain and had offered to continue the education of the gifted student in Michigan, free of charge. She was a benefactress and had made up her mind to sponsor a refugee child. Carl’s mother was under great pressure concerning her responsibility since a cutting of the cord was imminent that could hardly be any more radical. That was precisely the reason that she had gone to London. She had moved heaven and earth to be allowed to leave the country. She discussed everything with her son and the headmaster to check which road would be the right one. A friend of the American Teacher had made a detour to Berlin during his trip to Europe in the beginning of August 1938 and experienced Alice Simon as a charming and cultivated woman with great charisma. Nevertheless, it did not escape his attention: “that she is very brave but the tragedy of the present situation is written in her eyes.”11 On this occasion, he mentioned as her main concern that the American benefactress may overstrain herself in terms of money. Not that she had expressed that directly but the guest was apparently of a keen sense so that he detected also Alice Simon’s great dream: to follow some distant day with her daughter to the United States.
Carl Simon is sure: His mother sensed that they would not see each other again. Almost 9 months passed until he got his visa for the United States. On May 1, 1939, the almost 18 year old passed the Statue of Liberty in New York on board of the “Mauretania”. This moment had more than just symbolic meaning for him.
Carl and Hedda made their way, he in the US and she in Great Britain. It was deeply troubling that, after a certain point in time, no more news was coming from Germany. For a long time, the siblings remained in uncertainty, it took some unsettling months after the capitulation of the Nazi-Reich before they could find out more about the fate of their mother. Information through official channels was long unavailable. Hedda Simon received the first information from a friend of her mother in February of 1947:
“I can tell you quite a lot about her last months. Physically, she was so miserable – but her mind was great and strong. With what dignity she bore herself in such an undignified life. Yes, it was the time of heroism! Nevertheless, different, a different heroism than the one they loudly glorified here. If ever a human being deserved to be called a hero, my dear Miss Hedda, then your mother deserves it. How difficult was her destiny already, to live apart from her children, because so rarely did she receive a sign of life from you and Karl. She had to sustain herself on those minutes of celebration in her difficult life. Then, when her fate closed in on her, she could almost anticipate when it would be “her turn”! With what ease and composure, she was looking in the face of this moment! Moreover, what noble-mindedness of her to return from you to Germany because she, as she told me when I reminded her of her unwise action, could not forsake that elderly woman, your grandmother. To take care of the mother-in-law she went into misery; because if she had stayed in England, she would still be alive. My dear Miss Hedda Simon, yes, the situation with your mother looks dire. I am afraid she is not among us living. I have tried on various occasions to make inquiries at the proper places. It is all in vain. It is all so painful for you when you think of your mother because one does not know a thing, one can only presume the worst – but when you think of your dear mother, you could and should remember her proudly. You should think of her as a human being who inwardly and outwardly stayed the course to carry out one’s duty as a human being. You should think of her as a human being who was great and proud, who was a hero. No visible monument will be raised for her. However, the monument in the hearts of her children cannot be larger. Moreover, since even here we are able to talk frankly about that time, I have mentioned your mother already on several occasions as a person who deserves to be never forgotten.
Hedda Simon also wrote to the former nanny of the family who had lived from time to time with them in the apartment on the Joachimsthaler Street to receive more information about the fate of the mother and grandmother. The answer came also in February of 1947 and contained concrete information about Alice Simon’s further fate.
“She was picked up by the Gestapo (Secret State Police, branch of the SS) in May of ’43, stayed in a camp here for 10 days and then came to the camp in Auschwitz where she certainly met her end. She had to pack her backpack in two hours and then the thugs delivered her at the police station next door. Since she had forgotten a pair of glasses, I was graciously permitted to bring them to her. I stayed with her until the car picked her up.
Every night I brought her something to eat during the ten days in the camp on the Hamburger Street but I was not allowed to talk with her or see her. That was the last thing that I could do for her and she sincerely thanked me in little notes that she secretly sent to me. Then, two month later, I received again a short greeting card from her from the K.Z. (Concentration Camp), Birkenbau at Auschwitz. That was the last sign of life from her. Then the horrible end may have come.”
Alice Simon’s mother-in-law had to leave the apartment in 1942 and had to move into a Jewish nursing home where she died in late December of 1942. After Alice Simon had been arrested, “nothing was allowed to be touched”, reports the nanny in her letter, everything was confiscated and sealed by the Gestapo. “Of course, Nazis took up the premises but they did not have much luck. On September 1, 1943, they chased Aunt Lenz and me out and already on November 23, 1943 during the first major offensive on Berlin, the building Joachimsthaler Street 12 was leveled. The police station next door was completely destroyed by an bomb and thereby the right side of your house was taken down (thus precisely your apartment). The rest of the house completely burned out.”14
The Jews of Berlin were carried off in 122 transports, organized by the Reichsicherheitshauptamt (Main Office of the Reich Security). The lists with the names of the more than 50 000 persons are almost completely preserved. One of the lists reports that Alice Simon had to leave Berlin on May 17, 1943. Also on the deportation train was 41-year-old Margot Aaron15, who last had lived as subtenant of Alice Simon in the Joachimsthaler Street.
The number of Jewish women, men and children from Berlin who arrived on May 19, in Auschwitz was just under a 1000. More than 800 persons were immediately killed in the gas chambers of the extermination camp. The remaining 115 women and 80 men were committed to the camp; Alice Simon was one of them.16 A helper at the camp headquarters, probably a conscripted detainee, tattooed the number 45263 on her left lower arm. Official documents with hints concerning her further destination are missing since July of 1943, when she had to participate in a mass examination on suspicion of typhus. She may be missing is all it says.
Nobody learned that she did not perish in Auschwitz. What was in store for her was in a sense murder in installments.
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