Summary of Marie Jalowicz Simon's Underground in Berlin

Everest Media

Description

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book.
Sample Book Insights:
#1 My parents, Hermann and Betti Jalowicz, were married in 1911. My father, who had been to law school with Zirker, had gone into partnership with him and Heilbrunn. He had a desk job and attended to the day-to-day work of the practice.
#2 My grandparents on my mother’s side had both died before I was born. After that, my aunt Grete took over the apartment at 44 Rosenthaler Strasse. She gave dinner parties there for the whole family circle on the major Jewish holidays.
#3 My great-aunt Doris presided over the family, and she always wore grey silk with a ribbon around her neck. She had once been a very rich woman, and had fled from Russia to Berlin before the revolution.
#4 The apartment in Rosenthaler Strasse was also the scene of many family stories that were told only surreptitiously. One of them was about my aunt Ella, and happened when I was still a small child.

Sujets

• Personal Memoirs
• Biography
• Autobiography

Informations

• Publié par: Everest Media LLC
• Date de parution: 17 mai 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9798822512979
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Insights on Marie Jalowicz Simon's Underground in Berlin
Contents Insights from Chapter 1 Insights from Chapter 2 Insights from Chapter 3 Insights from Chapter 4 Insights from Chapter 5 Insights from Chapter 6
Insights from Chapter 1

#1

My parents, Hermann and Betti Jalowicz, were married in 1911. My father, who had been to law school with Zirker, had gone into partnership with him and Heilbrunn. He had a desk job and attended to the day-to-day work of the practice.

#2

My grandparents on my mother’s side had both died before I was born. After that, my aunt Grete took over the apartment at 44 Rosenthaler Strasse. She gave dinner parties there for the whole family circle on the major Jewish holidays.

#3

My great-aunt Doris presided over the family, and she always wore grey silk with a ribbon around her neck. She had once been a very rich woman, and had fled from Russia to Berlin before the revolution.

#4

The apartment in Rosenthaler Strasse was also the scene of many family stories that were told only surreptitiously. One of them was about my aunt Ella, and happened when I was still a small child.

#5

I began going to elementary school in 1928. It was a time of mass unemployment, and many very poor people lived near the catchment area of this school. My parents did not want to send me to an exclusive private school, but they wanted to limit my contact with that world.

#6

I was taken to school by my nanny, Levin, every morning. I was stripped and washed from head to foot after class, and I wore a fresh set of clothes. I did not like the school, and I did not learn much there.

#7

My parents were in a terrible situation in 1938. My father had run up debts everywhere, and was not allowed to practise as a notary since 1933. His permit to run a legal practice was valid until September 1938, on the grounds of a regulation making an exception for Jewish frontline fighters in the First World War.

#8

In 1938, all Jews with Polish passports were expelled from Germany. Several boys in my class at the newly founded Jewish secondary school in Wilsnacker Strasse were affected. We reacted to the parting in a remarkably disciplined manner: we kept silent for a while, and then went back to lessons.

#9

I had to move out of the Waldmanns’ apartment, and rent two little rooms from a family called Goldberg at 32 Landsberger Strasse. They were typical petits bourgeois, and inquisitive. We couldn’t put up with it in the long run.

#10

The Jewish holiday of Passover is marked by the prohibition of leavened bread, or matzo. In the narrative read on the Seder evening, we are asked why this night is different from other nights.
Insights from Chapter 2

#1

In 1940, the Nazis began sending Jewish men and women to do forced labor in the armaments industry. I was ordered to go to the Central Administrative Office for Jews, the employment office on Fontanepromenade, in Berlin.

#2

The Siemens factory was a place where I worked as a tool-setter. The work was hard, and the monotony of making the same movements all the time was unbearable. But the most painful part was the fact that we were working for the German armaments industry, which made us feel like we were doing something wrong.

#3

The tool-setters were always saying ours said or ours thinks, and they competed to claim the tool-setter who was the most friendly to Jews. There were many extremely pretty girls and young women among them.

#4

Ruth Hirsch was a Jewish woman who worked at a factory in Berlin. She was the best worker in her gang, and she loved her job. She had a great experience when she was told to make a whole blancmange with plenty of sauce and eat it by herself.

#5

The first name of my neighbor at the bench of lathes was really Anna. Her parents were Russian, and had called her Nyura when she was little. As that pet name wasn’t known in Berlin, it became Nora. She was a beautiful girl, but she suffered from something I had not seen in any of the other women doing forced labor: swollen legs as a result of malnutrition.

#6

After the terrible times, other days would come. We should tell posterity what was happening now. I was going to be the only one who would survive.

#7

I had to hand over a five-gram or ten-gram fat coupon, and you would need a magnifying glass to search for a globule of fat on your plate. The restaurants cheated their customers at the time, and in particular, Jews who had to depend on such establishments.

#8

I learned to adjust to an abnormal situation and come to terms with it. But I was always beside myself with rebellious feelings, and I wanted liberty. I wanted to know as many of my colleagues as possible and find out about their individual lives.

#9

I was always trying to meet other women in the factory, and I met a very nice nursery-school teacher from the hall next to ours. She was a good-looking young married woman, with two children.

#10

The author noticed a similar conflict between Schönfeld and himself. They both had the same grey-green eyes, the same nose and mouth, and the same teeth. They might have been twins.

#11

The sabotage ring was extremely successful, and was never exposed. It was led by Max Schulz, a tool-setter, and Hermann, a strong-minded intellectual who had been a Social Democrat before 1933. They took in hand the anti-Nazi Herr Schön, and gradually convinced him that the Nazis were criminals.