Underground in Berlin Paperback by Marie Jalowicz Simon

Product Details

• Publisher: Vintage Canada (2016-08-02)
• Language: English
• Paperback: 368 pages
• ISBN-13: 9780345809704
• Item Weight: 322.06 grams
• Dimensions: 7.99 x 5.18 x 1.0 cm

By turns thrilling and terrifying, Underground in Berlin is the autobiographical account of a young Jewish woman who ripped off her yellow star and survived the war by going underground from 1942 to 1945.


Berlin, 1941. Marie Jalowicz Simon, a nineteen-year-old Jewish woman, makes an extraordinary decision. All around her, Jews are being rounded up for deportation, forced labour and extermination. Marie decides to survive. She takes off the yellow star, turns her back on the Jewish community and vanishes into the city.
     In the years that follow, Marie lives under an assumed identity, moving between almost 20 different safe houses. She is forced to accept shelter wherever she can find it, and many of those she stays with expect services in return. She stays with foreign workers, committed communists and even convinced Nazis. Any false move might lead to arrest. Never certain who can be trusted and how far, it is her quick-witted determination and the most amazing and hair-raising strokes of luck that ensure her survival.
Underground in Berlin is Marie's extraordinary story, told in her own voice with unflinching honesty, for the first time after more than 50 years of silence.

About the Author

MARIE JALOWICZ SIMON, daughter of a Jewish lawyer, born in Berlin in 1922, survived the period of National Socialism by going underground in Berlin. After the liberation in 1945, she remained in Berlin and was professor of Ancient Literature and Cultural History at the Humboldt University. Her son, Hermann Simon, director of the New Synagogue Berlin-Centrum Judaicum, asked his mother to recount her story of survival on 77 tapes.

Marie Jalowicz Simon died in 1998 in Berlin.