Jewish woman praises WWII Germans! SS man singled out as a true gentleman

Book review. Gone to Ground: One Woman’s Extraordinary Account of Survival in the Heart of Nazi German
Marie Jalowicz Simon. 2014

Marie Jalowicz Simon survived WWII as a Jew in Berlin. From 1942 she was illegal, but survived . She was helped by hundreds of Germans. Thousands knew about her. Nobody snitched

She is full of praise for the Germans who helped her. She names her managers at her forced labour job at Siemens and praises them to the skies. She names various SS, SA and other enthusiastically anti-Semitic people who helped her, because she was obviously just a Little Jew, not one of those nasty Big Jews that everybody loves to hate.

She came to a realization that might be useful in stopping the current Israeli slaughter. Is there some way to transmit this message to the Israeli population about the general Little Jew population over the world? It might help reduce the persecution mania.

I realized that the same Aryan Germans who hated the rich Jew from the big house like poison…had nothing against starving young girls who worked hard, just as he did himself.

This story could be made into a superb TV comedy. It is a wonderful antidote to the horrific allegations of widespread German cruelty towards the Jews.

Marie is by her own account, mostly kosher, mildly Zionist and enthusiastically communist. Praising goys is forbidden by the Jewish religion. Even accepting a favour from a non-Jew invokes a blessing on the non-Jew and therefore should be avoided. The socialist and Zionist will also object to the praise of Germans.

Her words of praise are somewhat swamped by the amount of insulting and scandalous details she reveals about the people who risked their necks to help her. A Dutchman saved her by allowing her to live unregistered in his apartment for two years. She is quite insulting about the man, considering that if discovered the authorities could potentially charge him with a crime and even hang him.

She is gracious enough to describe how she provoked him into throwing a boot at her and giving her a black eye. She admits that she was behaving outrageously.

She reveals much of her personality: cruel thoughts about people who helped her and a remarkable tendency to tell lies when there was absolutely no advantage to lying. At the end of the war, the Dutchman invites her to come back to Holland with him. She declines and advises him not to tell people that she declined, but instead to tell the lie that he could not find her.

She has very high praise for the postmen of Berlin. If they were prepared to swear to the authorities that they knew the person, it could help with getting a type of ID card. Not one Berlin postman refused to help!

She describes a sociological experiment she persuaded her two glamourous Jewish lady friends to take part in. They dressed up well and put on their newly obligatory yellow stars. Then they asked various policemen for directions. When the cops advised them to take public transport, they sweetly told him that as Jews, they were forbidden to use it except for getting to and from work. When the cop suggested a route through central Berlin, they told him that they were forbidden even to walk in those areas. The cops were embarassed at the restrictions. One policeman gave them good advice, which they followed: You don’t look like Jews. Take the stupid star off and nobody will know any different.

In some ways being a Jew in Nazi Berlin was a bit like being unvaxxed in the Covid era—stupid restrictions on Little Jews while Big Jews bought Aryan certs and partied with the Nazis.

She tells how by the right attitude, an awkward situation can be resolved. A minor official threatens to have her arrested because she didn’t have her ID card with her. She starts thanking him profusely for not arresting her and promising that she will carry her ID card in future. He relents.

She prepared a plan for her arrest. It worked. She feigned unconcern when the policeman knocked on her door in the early morning and told her she must come to the station for questioning. But she asked about food. It might take many hours, the policeman agreed. She asked if she might go downstairs and some get bread from a neighbour. “I’m half naked, in my slip. You know I won’t run onto the street.”

He says OK. She unobtrusively picks up her wallet and a bottle as she leaves. She plans to use the bottle to hit the second cop over the head, if necessary. At the main door, the other cop is waiting. She switches roles and pretends her two-year-old boy has locked her out of the house and she must go for two minutes to get the spare key from her mother-in-law’s place.

She also makes a suggestive remark to him, which causes him to roar with laughter and slap her on her rump and she goes out the door. She walks slowly, turns the corner and runs.

She asks the first person she meets for help: “The cops want to arrest me! Can you help me?”. It’s an old German man. Of course he can. He gives her his coat and walks with her to friends where she can get more clothes.

It seems that she got much more practical help from random Aryan Germans than she got from fellow Jews — even her own family. This is an important message that every Little Jew should be made aware of.

It is greatly to her credit that she does not spare Hebrew blushes when she describes bad behaviour by her tribesmen. This reviewer strongly suspects that in the 600 pages that did not appear in the book, there is much unflattering commentary about the behaviour of Big Jews in Berlin during the war and their links to the Nazis. She was a native Berliner who knew all sorts of people. She heard the rumours and they must be in the extra pages.

Her description of the SS manager in Siemens is the portrait of an honest and decent man. She claims that she and the SS man closely resembled each other and they were both aware of it.

At break time the Jewish girls used to boast about how much their various managers loved the Jews. Some were smuggling in sandwiches for them.

There was only one nasty German at Siemens, and Jalowicz specifically states his nastiness was nothing to do with Nazis.

It seems that management/labour relations were better in the Siemens’ forced labour workshops than in many modern workplaces.

She describes only a handful of times where someone was suspicious of her and threatened to call the police. Only once does she describe rude behaviour by a state official. In the busy waiting room of the Jewish Labour Office, a guy is desperate to know if he can smoke. The head of the whole office is passing by and she asks him whether smoking is allowed. He roars an ethnic insult at her. But he doesn’t hit her or punish her in any way.

That is it. That is the only insulting remark made to her by an official of the German state.

The book is based on 77 tapes recorded in the months before her death. They yielded 900 pages, but only one third made it to the book. What was omitted?

There is a lot of detail of her daily life and scandal, and very little on political matters.

Zionist collaboration with Hitler was well known at the time, as was his collaboration with strongly Jewish communists. Rumours of Jewish ancestry amongst high-ranking Nazis were commonplace. Otto Strasser tells us that even amongst Party leaders, it was common to ask what Adolf was doing in Munich in 1919 when a Jewish communist revolt was ongoing? Was the Fuehrer a Jew-loving communist in 1919?

The missing 600 pages must surely have some comments on these questions.

Hitler’s numerous Jewish helpers must have been an inspiration to the thousands of Big Jew-hating Berliners who knew she was illegal but didn’t snitch on her.

“If mein leiber Fuehrer can have Jewish SS men (Oppenheimer), financiers (Schroeder), doctors (Morell), girlfriends (Eva, Geli Raubal), soldiers (150k), PR guys (Lazar) and sundry assistants, there can be no harm in me turning a blind eye to this charming little Jewish girl.”

After the war, she had a successful academic career in east Germany. Her son is a historian and edited the book.