The Jewish Hospital of Berlin

Several years ago, I read a book titled "Stella", written by journalist Peter Wyden, father of Oregon Senator Ron Wyden. Wyden had grown up Jewish in Berlin, moving to this country with the advent of the Nazis. One of his school mates was a very attractive, blond, Jewish girl named Stella Kubler. He had lost track of her after his move to the United States.

At some point many years after the war, he discovered that Stella was still alive in East Berlin, and that she had survived the war in Berlin acting as a 'Spitzel', a name for a Jew who was given survival preference by cooperating with the Nazis to seek out and finger other Jews in hiding in the city. Not, as you can imagine, a very well respected occupation.

The story he wrote of Stella was an important one, because it took and black-white situation and painted it gray. After all, Stella acted in part to save her parents as well as herself. It was clear that the motivation was mixed. It was also clear that Stella did not survive the war whole, that she had been internally compromised, and that in her older years, she did not present a sympathetic face to the world, and especially not to the Jewish world.

One of the interesting facets of "Stella" was the reference to Berlin's Jewish Hospital, which Wyden reported as having continued to function with Jewish staff throughout the war (and with, for a while, sheltering Stella).

The fact that the hospital continued to function in this manner (and still does today, by the way) was beyond fascinating, so when I saw a fairly recent book, "Refuge in Hell" by former CIA and NSA general counsel Daniel B. Silver, I was intrigued.

The story is indeed fascinating, and its survival (and the survival of about 800 employees and patients and prisonsers upon liberation) cannot be fully explained. But it did function, as the sole hospital for sick or injured Jews, as a prison for Jewish prisoners (some of whom needed medical care and some of whom did not) and as a collection point, like so many others. Under Gestapo control and the leadership of Dr. Dr. Walter Lustig (he had an MD and a PhD), the hospital provided medical care until liberation and, as well, became the home of the Jewish Gemeinde, the recognized Jewish community. Staffed largely but not exclusively of Jews married to Aryans, or children of mixed parentage, it and its staff had its share of troubles (including arbitrary punishments, some fatal, and forced 'selections'), but formed an unknown repository of Jewish continuity in the Prussian capital.

A very interesting book.