Untertauchen by Arthur James
A German Jewish couple must use every ounce of their strength and wiles to survive under the nose of the Nazis in this harrowing story based on the lives of Hans and Anna Bracher in Untertauchen by Arthur M. James.
Untertauchen (“to go underground”) is the impeccably researched tribute to Hans and Anna Bracher, as well as their family and friends, who found themselves trapped inside Hiter’s Thousand-Year Reich. James begins his sweeping novel in 1932 as Hans attends a meeting of the Social Democrats’ Black-Red-Gold party — opposed to the increasing power of Hitler’s rising Nazi party — when the first whiffs of Nazi persecution waft into the room. Excited by his new family-arranged courtship with the vivacious and intelligent village girl Anna Gerson, Hans senses a Nazi spy in the midst of his political gathering and decides to hide his list of fellow Nazi resisters. Soon, teenage SA officers bang on the Bracher family’s door and take Hans in for questioning, leading to a humiliating episode and a pistol-whipping that will forever impact Hans’ health.
Determined to escape Berlin and the SA officers hunting him, Hans heads for Anna’s village of Nochern, where they continue their courtship, and he finds work with Anna’s father’s grocery business. But their belief that the “toxic tentacles” of the Nazis will not reach them in the countryside is soon shattered as Hitler’s increasing antagonism toward German Jews spreads like a rabid infection across the land.
The Writing on the Wall
James weaves historical events of Hitler’s rise to power seamlessly with Hans and Anna’s increasingly fraught life as Jews within Germany in the run-up to World War II. It is never a static story, as Hans leaves Germany twice to escape the authorities (to Corsica for work as a railroad builder, and then to Paris as a manual laborer). He returns to Berlin in 1936, where he and Anna are finally married. But the signs of Jew hatred are everywhere, and Hitler’s mounting laws against Jewish citizens reverberate like war drums.
“Life had become like treading water with no shore in sight. Decree upon decree, law after law. It had become a daily dole.”
As Germans, Hans and Anna are proud of their heritage but disheartened to see German friends and neighbors slowly turn from them to preserve their own safety, lest they be tagged as collaborators with “the enemy.” James recounts the endless furtive jobs they take to eat and find shelter — from working at a Jewish Boys Home to housekeeping for class-sensitive Jews — the resilience of the Brachers is breathtaking.
A Desperate Chance at Survival
As WWII begins and Hitler’s “final solution” unfolds, the Brachers receive a summons for “resettlement” — a veritable death sentence, they both know. They then decide to untertauchen — to go underground and disappear — that James details in searing detail as the Brachers find a way to live on the streets of Berlin and evade Nazi soldiers for thirteen months.
“Nights had their own personality. One might be on the rails, coursing the streets with the trolley. The next in an abandoned storefront. Rooftops of secluded buildings were safest but also the coldest. Ideal was to find a bombed-out building during the daytime and locate a corner…”
With a hair-raising conclusion that speaks to the indomitable human spirit, Untertauchen is a brilliant marriage of history and fiction that tells the story of two souls who rose above and outlived a monstrous regime.
Arthur M. (Art) James is a bilingual retired journalist and former TV news anchor and talk-show host. Following his undergraduate degree in Journalism, he spent three years in Europe, at the University of Vienna Summer School in Austria and four semesters at the University of Heidelberg in Germany.
