The horrors of the Holocaust are well known but bear repeating and continued exploration. The Jewish and Gentile resistance to the murders and forced labor of Jews and others under the Nazi regime are less known, yet are a vitally important aspect of history. From the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising to individual efforts to save lives and thwart the Nazis, there are many poignant and powerful examples of resistance to the genocidal hate of Hitler and his government.

One such story of resistance is that of Marie Jalowicz Simon, a young Jew in Berlin who, with the help of several friends, neighbors and strangers, managed to “go to ground” and hide out from deportation and death, surviving the war in the heart of Nazi Germany. After years of near-silence about her experiences, she finally dictated her story to her son. The result is UNDERGROUND IN BERLIN, a harrowing memoir about deprivation and survival.

Simon was born into a highly educated, middle-class Jewish family in Berlin in 1922. They lived a comfortable life as both part of the Jewish community and in the wider culture of the city. She was surrounded by family and started school in her neighborhood, but by 1933 unemployment was high and anti-Semitism was on the rise. That year, Simon witnessed her teacher being arrested and led away from school because she had Jewish blood. In 1938, her mother died following a long battle with cancer, and things were becoming increasingly difficult and dangerous for the Jews in Berlin. Simon and her father soon moved into a smaller apartment and sold their summer house to two previous tenets.

"UNDERGROUND IN BERLIN refuses to allow the events and people it recounts to be romanticized. It is gripping and terrifying, and a vital addition to survival literature."

As the expulsions and deportations of Jews got underway, Simon, along with her father and many of the Jews they knew, began plans to immigrate to Palestine or leave Germany for safer places. In 1940, Simon was conscripted into forced labor at Siemens; she and roughly 200 other young Jewish women spent their days on a physically difficult assembly line, trying their best to remain safe. There she met many Jews and non-Jews alike, who were already resisting the violence and oppression of the Nazis either by sharing information or by sabotaging the products they were forced to fabricate.

One day in 1941, Simon came home to find her father dead. With her parents and much of her family and community gone, she was on her own. When, in 1942, the Nazis began deporting masses of Jews from Berlin, Simon made the difficult decision to hide out and try to survive the war. Until the liberation, she moved from one hideout to another doing her best to evade her would-be murderers.

Her survival often hinged on Johanna “Hannchen” Koch, whose identity she assumed for years with a set of false documents. Koch and her husband, along with a doctor named Benno Heller, also helped Simon find rations and places to stay. She moved from place to place, sometimes assuming an Aryan identity and other times known to her hosts as a Jew in hiding. Between 1922 and 1945, she lived in a total of 19 different homes, some of which were freezing and bug-infested, and the neighbors could not know she was there. She was totally vulnerable to the whims and decisions of her hosts, as well as her unpredictable and tense relationships with Koch and Heller. She stayed with Germans on the fringes of society: prostitutes, resistance workers, circus performers, the lonely, the violent and the insane. Sometimes she worked to earn her stay; all too often she was physically, sexually or emotionally abused by her hosts and helpers. More than once she was totally homeless, sometimes going without shoes or food, lacking for a toilet or a bath, and forced to exchange sex for temporary safety. She was always afraid and never fully emotionally dealt with the loss of her family and friends.

Simon's account --- perhaps because after years of refusing to do so, she finally shared her story, or maybe due to the translation --- is a detached litany of events and figures. Her memory was amazing, but like that of many survivors, her account is seemingly devoid of emotion. It is a difficult and painful read but an important one as it gives readers, and history, a fuller vision of the terror of World War II and the incredible resilience of people like Simon, who died in 1998 after creating a family and building a successful career in academia.

In her struggles not only to stay alive but to keep intact her Jewishness, Simon developed a fierce endurance that will astonish readers for page after page. She recalls a moment when she cried out, “Chaverim (comrades), I'm shut up here with an impossible Dutchman in an apartment full of bugs belonging to a Nazi... But I want to live! I'm fighting, I'm doing my best to survive! Shalom! Shalom!”

UNDERGROUND IN BERLIN refuses to allow the events and people it recounts to be romanticized. It is gripping and terrifying, and a vital addition to survival literature.