Free The Last Jews in Berlin by Leonard Gross

mother’s death Hans and Gert were living apart; Gert, then nine, was in an orphanage, and Hans was in Fürstenwalde, a training camp for Zionist Jews planning to emigrate to Palestine. *
    The atmosphere in which Hans Rosenthal grew up had not been especially Jewish, let alone Zionist. He and his parents and his brother had lived with his father’s parents, the most religious of whom was his Grandmother Agnes, the convert to Judaism. Although Hans had been bar-mitzvahed at thirteen, there was always a tree at Christmas, so that he and Gert would not feel different from their Gentile friends. When Hans first embraced Zionism, it was not out of any desire to settle in Palestine but solely to escape Germany. Only later, after working in Fürstenwalde, did he become excited and committed. But his mother’s death intervened, and Hans knew then that he couldn’t emigrate. Even though he was only sixteen, he was now responsible for Gert.
    A few days after his mother’s death Hans was given permission to leave Fürstenwalde and return to Berlin to live with Gert in the orphanage. Three weeks later all of the Jews at Fürstenwalde were sent to Auschwitz. For Hans it was the first of many narrow escapes.
    In April 1942 Hans turned seventeen. The director of the orphanage told him that he was now too old to remain there, and in August, Hans was transferred to a home for young Jewish men on the Rosenstrasse. Two months later everyone at the orphanage—Gert included—was deported.
    Hans was so upset over Gert’s deportation that his own second instance of good fortune scarcely registered. All that spring he had looked in vain for someone to hide his little brother. Even his Grandmother Agnes had refused. “It’s impossible to hide a ten-year-old,” she had said. “He can’t remain quiet.”
    Hans soon found a job working in a Berlin factory that manufactured small containers of canned heat used by soldiers in the field to warm their meals. The factory would receive huge shipments of old cans, recondition them, fill them with flammable hydrocarbon jelly and seal them. It was good business; the owner, Alfred Hanne, bought the used cans for thirty marks a carload, then sold each unit for twenty pfennigs. Hanne behaved correctly to his mostly Jewish workers but without the slightest sentiment. Several of the Jewish employees had once been wealthy—one had owned a department store, another a shop on the Kurfürstendamm—but the past had long since ceased to be of consequence. A worker’s salary was based solely on performance: for every 1,000 tins manufactured above 4,000 a day Hanne paid a bonus of five marks.
    Hans was soon making 9,000 tins a day. He could not allow himself to consider that his earnestness was in behalf of his enemy. Life had been reduced to an exquisitely simple precept: make yourself invaluable to someone and you’ll survive.
    What better proof of that than this journey with Hanne? A week before, the owner had approached him and said, “I’m opening a new factory in Pomerania. If you want to come with me, you can.”
    â€œI have a star,” Hans reminded him. “How can I go?”
    â€œYou’ll go. You’ll take the star off and you’ll go.”
    When they arrived in Torgelow, the Pomeranian town where Hanne’s new factory was located, Hans discovered he was the only Jew. He did not put his star back on. Hanne quartered him in a bunk room in a building adjoining the factory hall, where he lived much better than the other workers, a few of them Belgians, most of them captured Russians who spent their nights shivering in a nearby camp.
    A few days after Hans arrived in Torgelow the Gestapo raided the Jewish youth home where he had been living before he left Berlin and sent all of its inhabitants to Auschwitz. His third close call. Had Hanne known? Hans could only wonder.
    Weeks passed. Hanne’s manner