80 years ago today, the first train with more than 1000 Jews crammed into cattle transport coaches left the station of Berlin-Grunewald for the East. Hundreds more were to follow. The first contingent were brought to Riga, and shot on arrival. Later, most trains either left for Theresienstadt (with Jewish celebrities, Jews married to 'Aryans', or Jews who had been decorated in WW 1) or straight for Auschwitz (most everyone else).
On June 19, 1943, Joseph Goebbels, in his capacity of NSDAP Gauleiter (regional subdivision head) of Berlin, would declare Berlin judenfrei (Jew-free). He was wrong, as always. More than 7,000 Jews had escaped deportation and lived in Berlin illegally, under constant threat of death or deportation, with no food stamps or access to air shelters in a city under continuous bombardment, clinging on to dear life.
One of them was Lissa Bauer, an unassuming teenager at the time. She and her mother survived, and she went on to be a musician and cultural figure in what was to become West Berlin, giving piano lessons as well as breathing and yoga courses. Four decades after her ordeal ended, she became the piano teacher of an utterly unremarkable pubescent boy and his mother, who both truly sucked at piano but who were fascinated, almost mesmerized by her magnetic and inspiring personality.
She was the one person I ever smoked pot with, the person to whom I confided my unending infatuation with a girl that didn't love me back (oh, Richard_A could tell you stories of that one), a person who opened a different, somewhat alien, world for me. She gave a huge party for her 65th birthday, it must have been around '93, '94, and that was the last time I met her. She disappeared out of my life, and I don't know what became of her. She would be in her 90s now, and quite possibly, she isn't anymore. Google turns up nothing except a few beautiful photos taken by an American decades ago.
So thanks, Lissa. Thank you for surviving the horrors, thank you for giving the finger to all the fuckheads up in the Nazi Party, thank you for being just fucking
better than all those fucktards and ass-fucks with their uniforms, their black leather coats, their handguns and all their murderous fuckwittery. Thanks for making it to give piano lessons, at sixty DM an hour but always unconcerned about extending it at leasure when necessary, to an utter failure at the keyboard like me.
Thanks to my wonderful parents for shelling out the money every week, no questions asked. Thank you for making it through Hell, Lissa, and thank you, thank you so much for having
me, of all people, over for some lessons on a life truly well lived.