Underground in Berlin: A Young Woman’s Extraordinary Tale of Survival in the Heart of Nazi Germany
When in November 1942, Marie Jalowicz Simon, after a failed attempt to escape Nazi Germany with a forged passport, is forcibly returned to Berlin, she is destined never to leave the city again. Having gone underground the previous year whilst her friends and relations were deported in ever increasing numbers, Marie returns to her existence as a ‘U-boat,’ spending the remainder of the war in the households of various Berlin regulars and misfits—circus performers, communists, and Nazis—whilst marveling that she is never denounced. Surviving even the Allied bombings and the Russian liberation, Marie arrives at an understanding of the ‘undeserved suffering the war brought to non-Jews and Jews alike’ and becomes one of the GDR’s most revered humanist scholars. Reminiscent of Victor Klemperer’s I Will Bear Witness, Underground in Berlin is the deeply moving chronicle of a Jewish woman, who experienced the Nazi terror living amongst ‘ordinary’ Germans, and a truly remarkable record of what it means to exist in a society where one’s humanity is taken away. Marie’s inner strength and moral stamina stay with readers long after they have finished the book.
