Ian Buruma has written many fine works of nonfiction, which include books about Spinoza and Churchill. But his book Stay Alive: Berlin 1939-1945 is personal. It is a story of anti-Nazi Germans, mischlings (people of non-Aryan origin), and the odyssey and observations of Buruma’s own father, Leo, who was sent from Holland to work in Germany in the spring of 1943 because he refused to sign an oath of loyalty and not to engage in acts of resistance.
Upon Hitler’s ascent to power in January 1933, there were 160,000 Jews in Berlin. At the end of the war, only 1,500 remained alive in the shadows. They were often hidden by anti-Nazi Germans whose own families would have been executed if discovered. They hid precariously in the interstices of a vicious and vengeful state. While it is a story that has been told before, it never loses its power to shock the reader.
Most Germans were shallow fellow travelers with the Nazis in 1940. In their eyes, Hitler had made Germany great again by defeating and occupying one European state after another while wiping away the ignominy of defeat in World War I.
Some older Germans were embarrassed by what had come to pass – after all, tens of thousands of German Jews had fought for the kaiser in the “Great War.” The younger generation, which had drunk from the poisonous wells of Nazism, cared less.
Erich Alenfeld, a Jew, felt that his German patriotism would see him through and even believed that he would be allowed to fight in Hitler’s armed forces. He also felt that his 10-year-old son should be allowed to join the Hitler Youth.
The introduction of the yellow star in September 1941 marked all Berlin Jews. Decades later, his exasperated daughter wrote a book titled Why Didn’t You Leave?
In the early years, Veit Harlan, a non-Nazi, the director of the antisemitic film Jud Suess, was seduced by the possibility of making a big-budget spectacular – and closed his eyes to the reality around him. After the war, his niece married Stanley Kubrick, the Jewish director of A Clockwork Orange and 2001: A Space Odyssey.
All was sweetness and light when they occasionally met; it was all talk about film and filmmakers. No one dared to mention the war.
Joseph Goebbels was a great fan of the American cinema – at least when the United States was officially neutral at the start of the war against Nazism. Films that featured Jewish actors would not be shown. Goebbels saw Romeo and Juliet in March 1941, starring Leslie Howard, and was mesmerized. No one had told him that the British actor’s full name was Leslie Howard Steiner.
In 1943, some 10,000 Berlin Jews were rounded up and held in five different locations. In one synagogue, Jews tried to commit suicide by jumping from the women’s gallery above to the stone floor below. Gestapo doctors were on hand in case of the necessity to pump Jewish stomachs to rid them of the lethal pills taken.
As the war went on, shrinking into indifference and fading out of the gaze of the Gestapo defined many. The Allied bombing by the RAF Lancasters and Halifaxes by night and the US B-17s by day changed minds. Yet the Nazis still ensured that Jews were separated from non-Jews in bomb shelters.
The destruction of a city was characterized by the word “Koventrieren” after the repeated bombing of Coventry in the British Midlands. The greeting between Berliners meeting on the street became “Stay alive.”
Buruma’s book is divided into seven parts – each representing a year between 1939 and 1945 – which follow not only the Berlin collective. It also traces the stories of individuals, Jews, mischlings, and anti-Nazi Germans who cheered on every Allied victory and secretly listened to the BBC.
It is perhaps the last chapter of 1945 that is the most harrowing. Nazi fanaticism reached its zenith as Hitler’s regime reached its lethal denouement in a fit of spite and paranoia.
A careless word or action could mean instant death, and the lampposts of Berlin were adorned with the hanged corpses of the unlucky. Buruma records that 5,684 Germans were executed in the first four months of 1945.
Hitler’s delusional madness, which had sucked in so many in the 1930s, did not equate with Berlin’s moonscape in 1945. The Sachsenhausen camp in the Berlin suburb of Oranienburg could now not be ignored.
Those involved in the July plot in 1944 to assassinate Hitler met a gruesome end just days before the end of the war. Figures such as counterintelligence officer Helmut von Moltke ridiculed the tirades of judge Roland Freisler and told him that he believed in God and not the führer.
As all this was taking place around them, the actors in Goebbels ’ blockbuster film of German history, Kolberg, assembled for its premiere in Berlin on January 30, 1945. Most Berliners never saw the film, shivering in their shelters. It symbolized the delusions of the Nazis at the end and the reality outside their door.
Another film, Life Goes On, was started at the end of 1944. It featured a fictional engineer who had invented a machine that could deflect British bombers. In a disintegrating Germany, money was no obstacle in funding this feature film. Nothing was allowed to challenge the Nazi reality – so the deportations went on. On March 27, 1945, a train carrying 45 Jews left Berlin for Theresienstadt.
For the Nazis, the führer had to be obeyed. Rules were rules. At some point, a survival instinct took precedence, which was different for different individuals. At the transportation center on Iranische Strasse, the SS commander was approached by a spokesperson for the prisoners. They told him that they would help to save his life after Germany’s defeat if he would now save theirs. He agreed, and the prisoners all signed a declaration which testified to his magnanimity.
Two hours later, they were freed.
Some 27 million Soviet citizens had been killed by Hitler’s willing executioners. The Red Army responded with rape and plunder as it made its way to Hitler’s bunker.
Anti-Nazi Germans and the last Jews of Berlin feared that this would be their fate, as the vast majority of Soviet soldiers had never left the USSR, knew little about Western Europe, and could only speak Russian. There was no common language of communication and explanation.
Leo Buruma and other inhabitants of their sanctuary, including a Jewish woman, were placed against a wall for immediate execution when an English-speaking Soviet officer miraculously appeared and saved them.
This is a book about the human condition. Ian Buruma interviewed many who lived through those dark times – the now frail and the bedridden, their sons and their daughters – and searched for answers to unanswerable questions.
Why did some people stand up for their values, while others looked the other way? Why did a pleasant neighbor become a genocidal murderer? Why did a few Berliners risk the lives of their children to harbor a Jew? Why did others obey orders until the end? Why did religious principles matter for some and not for others?
This excellent book addresses its readers directly and personally. It is a message for today and not one that coldly records the history of yesteryear.
Jerusalem Post 13 March 2026