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Cioma Schönhaus
Der Passfälscher
Scherz Verlag, August 2004. 235 pp. These memoirs open with the image of a pea rolling across parquet flooring and almost miraculously dropping into a small hole. As a Jew in war-torn Berlin the author’s chances of survival should have been equally slim, yet he has lived to tell the tale. And a riveting one it is. Living with his White Russian parents and still a teenager, Cioma Schönhaus is forced to give up his course in graphic design and is put on to making guns. Since this work is considered essential to the war effort he escapes deportation to Poland. The rest of his family are less fortunate and soon the author, left alone in his uncle’s deserted flat, is selling off the family possessions to raise money to go into hiding. From then on, he is on the run. He forges identity documents, including his own, assumes different names and backgrounds, and before long, with the money he is now earning from his illegal activities, is eating at the most exclusive restaurants, entertaining women, and sailing on the city’s lakes. But Berlin is his prison as well as his playground, and it only takes the loss of his own identity papers to arouse the authorities’ suspicions. In the game of cat and mouse that follows he has to change lodgings every night (registration with the police was required within twenty-four hours), and when members of the group for whom he forges are arrested, the time has come to get out. He cycles across Germany, crosses the Swiss border, and is safe.
Schönhaus owed his survival to good fortune, talent
and an ingenuity often born of desperation. Sixty years
later he tells his story, recalling the events of the past
with immediacy and naturalness. Gathered at the end
of the book are a series of official reports, confirming
that the German authorities were only ever a few
steps behind him. His flight to Switzerland was a
lucky escape indeed.
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