Every knock was a threat. It was 1940, and Lisa Fittko was staying in a little room in the French border town of Banyuls. She could have been arrested at any time, Still, when the knock came she answered it, and she opened the door to find the famous German philosopher Walter Benjamin standing there. “Your husband said you would take me over the mountains,” he said. Of course, she thought, Hans would say that–even though he, back in Marseilles, had no idea that she had found a safe path over the Pyrenees; he didn’t even know for sure that she was still alive. But he had had faith that somehow she would manage to make the perilous trip from Marseilles to Banyuls, and that somehow she would save Benjamin.
Her father had invested all the family’s money in the magazine. Her mother helped out by selling her embroidery and knitting. But their idealism couldn’t survive long in a desperately poor country that had just lost a war. The family moved to Berlin in 1922. Ignaz Ekstein went into the import-export business, but continued to write. “We were much better off then,” Fittko says. Her father no longer took an active part in politics, but the family values didn’t change. “One thing I miss is when children grow up without being taught what integrity is,” she says. “I don’t think my parents ever said, ‘Now Lisa, you must have integrity,’ but I always knew what it meant. And I guess you can get very old, as I’m doing now, and there’s still some basic childhood–well, a focus through a whole life. You never think it through. I never sat down and wondered, ‘Is integrity so important?’ It’s just there.”
It is often believed that Hitler was elected by the Germans. In fact he was appointed chancellor. “They never had a majority,” says Fittko. “They became among the parties the strongest, but if, in the election of 1932, the Social Democrats, the Communists, and the Liberal Democrats had cooperated, they would have had the clear majority. The votes of the Nazi Party were threatening, but they never had a majority; they had only 33 percent of the vote. But the left wing and the center could never get together.
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It was some time before the Nazis began killing their enemies in an official, organized way. At first they used the storm troopers, who sought out and murdered those who opposed them and those they disagreed with. (The word Nazi, says Fittko, was coined by the Berlin Left to ridicule the storm troopers.) But in 1933 the president installed Hitler as chancellor. On February 27, 1933, the capitol building–the Reichstag–was allegedly burned down by a communist. The communists were trying to overthrow the government, the Nazis said. The next day a series of edicts, over President Hindenburg’s signature, was issued that represented the first phase in the undermining of the constitution. It was, Fittko says, “the sign that the terror was beginning.” On July 8, after a series of political maneuvers and the rounding up of 15,000 Social Democrats and Communists, Hitler declared, “The party has now become the state.” Jews were defined as non-Aryans and all Jewish civil servants lost their jobs.
By 1933 Fittko was no longer living with her parents, who had hastily moved to a new neighborhood when Hitler became chancellor to escape the surveillance of the police, neighbors, and storm troopers. “They thought they would be safe in the new, rather fancy neighborhood, because they didn’t know what was to come. Nobody knew,” Fittko says.
“It wasn’t quite clear who was on what side for a long time,” says Fittko. “The storm troopers didn’t know how much power they had when Hitler was appointed chancellor. They rampaged through the working-class districts, which were all left-wing, but they didn’t know just how much protection they would have from the police or the government. Sometimes they would come for someone–he would run up to the roof and shout, ‘Call the police.’ And the police would come and claim him as their prisoner. They would accuse him of murder or robbery and would take him to jail, which was a safer place for him to be. The police at that time were mostly Social Democrats, too. But the police didn’t always come; they didn’t always know what to do. It was a mixture of organized terror and some kind of order, but mostly chaos. There was no gestapo yet. It was at first only storm troopers in neighborhoods going after people they knew and hated. They were taking revenge on their enemies, even enemies from grade school. It was mad.”
Fittko decided to go back to her parents’ apartment, where she was no longer registered but where her brother was still living. She hid in the maid’s room at the back of the house. In the morning the storm troopers arrived. They were students, and when her brother showed them his student ID, they immediately became friendly–though they couldn’t know he was Jewish. They left without searching the apartment.
