History's Secret Heroes: Series 3: Curt Bloch and the Underwater Cabaret

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You're about to listen to a brand new series of History's Secret Heroes.

Episodes will be released on Tuesdays, wherever you get your podcasts.

But if you're in the UK and can't wait, you can hear the full series right now, before anywhere else, First, on BBC Sounds.

A cafe in Alexanderplatz, Berlin, the summer of 1943.

In a cafe,

where people relax a little bit more and drink some day, loosen their tongues a little bit.

People were telling jokes, anti-Nazi jokes all the time, but you had to be very careful where you told these jokes.

On that day, there was a particular joke which spread through the cafe.

It was based on a rhyme which children used to say before they go to sleep.

Bow your head now, fold your hands and think about Adolf Hitler.

Come Adolf and be our guest and give us only half of what you promised us.

We don't want potatoes in the skin or herring.

We would like also to eat like Hermann Göring and Josef Goebbels.

You know, we want to eat the same things as they are eating.

Among those in the cafe overhearing this was a civil servant, Fritz Panker.

He returned to his office, but was unable to get the poem out of his head.

He told his colleagues what he'd heard.

And they started probably laughing or,

you know, grinning about it.

Panker had an idea.

We should write it down and then pass it on.

And that's what they did.

The civil servants wrote a new verse for the poem.

Under the flag of the Second Reich, it said, they had eaten their daily bread.

Under the Weimar Republic, butter came rolling in barrels.

But now

under the swastika flag we eat nothing but bare bolts.

Nothing on the ground, nothing in the basement, nothing in the pot, and nothing on the board.

On the toilet, not even paper.

Fuhrer, we thank you.

No schnapps and no beer either.

My Fuhrer,

we follow you.

A couple of months later, on the 4th of October 1943, Pranker and three of his colleagues stood in the dock of a courtroom, draped in swastika flags.

At the bench was the most fearsome judge in Nazi Germany, Roland Freisler.

Freisler pronounced the poem unparalleled in its deceitfulness and malice.

He accused the defendants of trying to shake belief in the German final victory.

That's treason.

Treason of the fatherland.

The trial was swift.

The four were found guilty.

Freisler's judgment was final.

The next day, they were executed by hanging.

Four people executed for one poem.

These executions were reported in the pages of the Kohnische Zeitung, but it wasn't the only publication to report this cautionary tale.

In a cramped attic in the Dutch city of Enskede, a Jewish man was in hiding.

His name was Kurt Bloch.

News of the hanging of the four civil servants sent a chill through him because Bloch had been writing his own poems of resistance in far greater quantities.

So my father wrote a poem that said,

Recently, I read in the newspaper, human blood was shed, yes, because of distribution of just a single poem.

Four people had to die.

The verdict of this people's court would ruin me too.

I asked myself with surprise, what would happen to me?

I have nearly 400.

I'm Helena Brunkarter, and for BBC Radio 4, this is History's Secret Heroes.

True stories of deception, acts of resistance, and courage from World War II.

Kurt Block and the Underwater Cabaret.

I'm Simone Block, Kurt Block's daughter.

I'm speaking to you from New York, from my home here on the Upper West Side.

After the end of the Second World War, Simone Block's parents, Kurt and Ruth, emigrated to New York.

They began a new life as antique dealers, specializing in European furniture.

So the whole house was full of weird stuff.

It was easy to miss a bound set of magazines on the family's bookshelf.

There were four volumes of them that had dates that went from 1942 to 1945.

Simone knew they were the work of her father, Kurt.

But they were handwritten and his handwriting was practically indecipherable to me.

Also, they were in Dutch and German.

The covers had pictures, collages that were hard to understand too.

Images of Adolf Hitler as a tap-dancing clown.

A gorilla wearing a swastika armband.

A deep-sea diver holding his oxygen supply hose as if it were a microphone.

You know, I was just like, oh, that's some weird stuff.

Like most of the dads on the block had been in the United States Army, fighting with guns and planes.

My father was making collages.

Another weird thing to be doing as a dad.

In January 1933, Kurt Block was 22 years old.

He was a gifted scholar and had already been awarded a doctorate in law.

He worked as a clerk in the district court in Dortmund in Western Germany.

Then the Nazi Party came to power and his fledgling legal career stalled.

At the firm where he worked, there was a Nazi lawyer and he hated Kurt because he was a Jew.

This is Gerard Gronewald, author of The Underwater Cabaret, The Satirical Resistance of Kurt Bloch.

Bloch's colleague was a member of the SA or Brownshirts, the paramilitary wing of the Nazi Party.

They sent a party of these brutal SR men to the house of court.

Someone came to the door.

They were looking to murder him, but he knew that they were coming and he escaped by going across the rooftops and escaping to Holland.

So he fled to the Netherlands where there were a lot of Jews there.

There was a Jewish community.

In Amsterdam, Bloch had to find a new job and joined a company selling Persian rugs.

Two years later, he moved with them to The Hague on the North Sea coast.

Block enjoyed seaside life, yet he was all too aware that back in Dortmund life was getting harder for his family.

In 1938 the SA launched pogroms against the Jewish community.

Jewish homes, hospitals, schools, businesses and synagogues were attacked in what would become known as the Night of the Broken Glass.

Kristallnacht.

So he thought, well, it's better to get my mother over here.

A few months later, Bloch's mother, Paula, and sister, Helena, finally arrived in the Netherlands.

And he thought, okay, Netherlands, neutral country, nothing will happen to us here.

For a year, they were safe, but early on the morning of the 10th of May, 1940, hundreds of German warplanes flew over the Netherlands.

Within five days, the Dutch armed forces were overwhelmed.

The Nazis occupied the country.

The Nazis ordered all all non-Dutch immigrant Jews to leave the coastal provinces.

Bloch's business transferred him inland to the city of Enskede, where he lived in a house with Paula and Helena.

Life for Jews in the Netherlands was getting steadily worse.

In 1941, telephone cables linking the German occupying forces were sabotaged.

Afterwards, 105 Jewish men were arrested.

They were deported to Mauthausen concentration camp and murdered.

The people of Enskedir were horrified.

Lendert Overdaun, a pastor from the Reformed Church, hid three Jewish people in his own home.

Soon he and his two sisters established a secret support network along with some 50 volunteers.

They hid Jewish people in the homes of trusted allies.

One of those, they re-housed, was Kurt Block.

Finding an address where an elderly couple, no children, and he went into hiding there.

This was no easy decision.

And when Kurt went into hiding, he persuaded his mother and sister also to go into hiding.

But they separated the families always in hiding, so they separated children from their parents, etc.

Paula and Helena went to the city of Leiden while Block remained in Enskede.

He was placed with a Meneke who lived at number 15 Plattenstraad.

The husband was an undertaker, his wife was a cleaner, they were not well off.

They took another Jewish man in almost the same age.

This other man's name was Bruno Lovenberg.

He had a girlfriend, Carola Wolf.

Everyone called her Ola.

So they lived, the three of them, on an attic very small.

By 1942, the anti-Jewish laws were becoming more and more extreme.

That was when you had to start wearing the yellow star in Holland and comply with Nazi law.

Jews were going to be deported east, you know, be relocated.

At that point people knew what that meant.

As a Jew you cannot walk in the streets anymore without taking a lot of risks.

It was time to go underground to go underwater.

Separated Separated from his mother and sister, Block had no idea where they were or how they were doing.

He found his life in the attic uncomfortable.

The walls were very thin.

If somebody would speak, you probably could hear from the other side what was being said.

And if you cough, then you will hear that too.

When the Meneker left for work, Block and his roommates emerged.

The three of them, they had to crawl from the attic in order to avoid the windows to go down to the living room to sit the kitchen was behind so you could not see the kitchen from the street side and they were sitting then in that kitchen as the days stretched into weeks then months block felt more and more stifled by this monotonous existence he needed to keep himself occupied

After a year in hiding, in August 1943, he had an idea.

Just with a pair of scissors, some glue and a little bit of paper, he created a magazine for himself.

He called it Het Onderwater Cabaret.

The underwater cabaret.

The word onderwater means that he was in hiding.

In English, we'd say underground.

But we have maybe more water, so we say.

We say on the water.

The second part of the name was satirical.

Dutch collaborators with the Nazis produced a radio program called the Sunday Afternoon Cabaret.

He thought, well, I could do something completely from the other side.

And Bloch created with his magazine the opposite satirical anti-Nazi cabaret.

Dutch audiences were familiar with the cabaret format, with its sketches and comic songs.

Bloch subverted it.

He wrote poems, satirical poems about all kind of things that he found in the newspapers.

The cover of the first issue, issue dated the 22nd of August 1943 is the first of many to feature a surreal photo montage.

On this issue all that can be seen are a couple of pairs of feet.

Inside the first issue is a poem entitled Great Men.

Bloch writes that people were drawn into the war by Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler, but that now it has gone wrong for both of them.

Mussolini was already a man knocked out, and Adolph will soon be the same.

Bloch made a second issue the following week and another the week after that.

By the end of the year, he had created 19 issues of the Underwater Cabaret.

They're very small.

They measure 10 centimeters by 15 centimeters.

Paper was, of course, very scarce.

You could not waste paper.

The magazine was compact for other reasons, too.

A very small magazine you can hide very easily.

They look very funny but they were absolutely dangerous to the people who owned them.

If you had these in your house or if you were on the streets and you were caught with one of these magazines then you could be sure that they would arrest you.

There was only one copy of each issue.

but each was probably read by several people.

There are messengers coming all the time bringing food and my guess is that he let them read what he was making because he was proud of it and these people you could trust.

Block may have lent copies within his network.

He could also read it in front of people.

Alongside the weekly edition of the Underwater Cabaret, Block also produced a second, even more secret edition.

This was intended for a readership of one, his roommate, Ola.

My father had a huge crush on this woman, and he wrote like another edition of the Underwater Cabaret just for her.

So his edition for her was called Secret Service.

So Court started writing love poems for the girl, which created a kind of tense situation with the two boys as well.

When he started writing poems to divert her and to help her, he created things like an imaginary trip to Paris to make her smile.

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When Block heard of the arrest and execution of Fritz Panker and three other civil servants for reciting satirical poems about Hitler, he was reminded of the enormous risks he was taking.

Every issue you make is evidence.

You're very vulnerable if they would have a raid in the house where you are hiding.

There was a big chance that it would discover it.

In one poem called A Goal, he wrote, My poetry is like dynamite.

It's nitroglycerinic.

It breaks the Fuhrer's building's granite.

Satirical, mocking, cynical.

But I can leave the explosive function to the British.

They will deliver to Adolf Hitler's throne the final blow.

The more issues Block created, the more biting the satire became.

One issue deliberately targeted the Führer's mother.

He had a very close relationship with his mother, Hitler.

On the cover is this market woman who's yelling with her mouth open and no teeth.

If you saw this woman, you would go the other way.

You would not want to buy from her.

She looks like a bag lady.

And this is my father's rendering of Hitler's mother, who he in a poem talks about like a shrieking, hideous saleswoman, and he's he's inherited her qualities.

Where does he get his big mouth from?

You know, Hitler is shouting, and it's, oh, you know, it's probably his mother was a woman from the market.

Irreverent doesn't even begin to describe the, I mean, it would be blasphemy to the Nazis to insult the Führer's mother.

That's like, you know, the Virgin Mary.

Children prayed in school at the beginning of the school day to Hitler.

Though some of Bloch's poems make it clear he worried about the risk, he did not stop creating magazines and he did not tone the content down.

I think that if your mind has a kind of creativity, you will always be able to help yourself out of a very dark situation.

You are in an attic.

You have no way of escaping.

It's quite dangerous.

There is no way out.

You have no idea when this war or when your situation is going to end.

He's making an effort to find a mental resistance against his situation to survive.

In another issue, Block imagined increasingly desperate Nazis escaping to outer space.

He imagined a situation where

things are getting worse for the Nazis and for Hitler.

So Hitler was looking through a telescope and looking at the stars.

Maybe I go to Venus to go into hiding there if things get too tough for me here on Earth.

Yet in this poem entitled Astronomical Possibilities, Venus is less than hospitable to Hitler.

The planet says, You've done all these terrible things.

I don't want you here.

Get away.

One day, late in 1944, Block and his roommates Bruno Lohenberg and Ola Wolff were alone downstairs in the Menneke house.

And the neighbor stepped in.

It's what they do in these rural areas.

You just walk in through the back door with your neighbors.

Block froze.

And he thought, huh?

Who are you?

And they were sitting three unknown people there in front of him, you know, and he could not say a word.

And they looked at this man, they did not know him, and they thought, oh my God, we are discovered right now.

Nobody said a word.

The man turned and...

walked away and Kourt got to his senses, stood up, went after him and he said, listen, you probably know what this means, right?

And he said, could you please do not tell anyone?

The stranger nodded in agreement.

But they could never be sure, you know, because these things spread around easily, so they had to go to another address.

Block said goodbye to Loevenberg and Wolff and the Meneke and left Enskeder.

In December, he found refuge 20 kilometers away in Born.

Three and a half years into Nazi occupation, exhaustion had set in.

He could hardly wait to document the Nazis' downfall.

He's predicting almost from the beginning that they are going to lose the war.

That is, of course, to encourage his readers, but he's waiting, waiting for the invasion.

In September 1944, Allied forces carried out a huge airborne attack against the German occupation in the Netherlands, Operation Market Garden.

Yet it fell short of its objective to establish a bridgehead across the River Rhine, and much of the Netherlands remained occupied.

At the end of 1944, the country was deep in a hard, cold winter.

So he's really in some of the poems he's sometimes depressed.

He says, I'm going to stop because the British told us they would be coming here here and now they are still not here and at some point he's very serious and he says this is the last issue I'm going to stop

the next week there's another issue and he picks up his spirits again and there he is and and then he goes on at the beginning of January 1945 Block wrote the victory promised so many times will finally arrive and those who believe in Adolf's words and in the Nazi dreams will soon be disappointed.

No matter what Hitler says, I don't give a dime for it.

I haven't figured out.

It's clear to see the Führer is going to perish this year.

This time, Block was right.

Spring came, and in April, the Allies finally took Enskerde.

The following month, the whole of the Netherlands was liberated.

Approximately 1,200 Jews had been in Enskede when the Nazis arrived.

Thanks to Pastor Overdown's network, not all of them were sent to the camps.

The total who survived numbered around 500.

Bloch marked his liberation by publishing a final copy of the Underwater Cabaret.

The cover featured a photo montage of a hidden person emerging from a cellar hatch.

It bore the title Above Water Finale of the Underwater Cabaret.

Over the course of three years in hiding, Block published an astonishing 96 issues.

When he finally resurfaced though, the world he once knew had changed beyond recognition.

When everything is over, you would think, oh, finally, things are over.

Now you can go on with your life.

What life?

Right after my father went into hiding, not long after he learned that his sister and his mother had been discovered by the Nazis and he knew that they'd been taken.

Block had no idea what happened to Paula and Helena.

When he found out, it was devastating.

They were caught in Leide and they were murdered in a concentration camp in Sobipor.

So to pick up your life again, that's quite hard, even for somebody who kept his sense of humor during the dark days.

Months later, at a dinner in Amsterdam, Kurt Bloch met a woman called Ruth.

I was in concentration camp.

I was in Auschwitz.

I have a number on my arm.

And all my family,

nobody came back.

The same was also with Kurt.

His family also did not come back from the war.

He was the only survivor.

Within a year, Ruth and Block were married.

He didn't talk about much

of

those years.

He never asked me about the concentration camp.

I mean, everybody knew what was going on.

Why ask again?

We lived it.

We didn't have to

talk about it.

But at the time, we had to first become normal

again.

It was psychologically not so easy

to move away from it.

A couple of years later the couple emigrated to the United States.

Block brought his copies of the Underwater Cabaret with him to New York City.

The bound editions sat on their Manhattan bookshelf for decades, gathering dust.

What his aspiration was that after the war, his idea was he would do a show in real life with these poems and have them set to music.

I mean, my mother said, after the war, my father was very depressed and the idea of putting on a show

didn't really make sense.

I imagine that would have felt like doubling down on survivor's guilt, which he was already feeling.

There was a satire boom in New York in the 1950s, led by Jewish comedians such as Lenny Bruce and Jewish cartoonists such as Harvey Kurtzman, editor of Mad magazine.

Though Bloch had a sense of anarchic humour that might have fitted in, he never returned to making magazines.

Instead, he sold antiques until his sudden death at 66 years old.

Years later, Simone Bloch's daughter picked up her grandfather's magazines and began to research his history.

When Herard Herard Ronevelt went to New York to see the underwater cabaret for himself, he was astonished.

It was completely different from any other wartime newspaper.

I never saw anything like that before.

There were people who made cartoons, of course, but not in this sense.

The archive of Bloch's secret work brought to mind another German Jewish refugee in the Netherlands.

We were amazed to find the testimony of Anna Frank.

Well, Kurt Bloch came to the Netherlands before Anna Frank.

Anna Frank came also from Germany.

She wrote a diary, not supposed to be read by anyone else but herself.

But after the war, it tells her story of what happened of a girl.

And this is, in a satirical way, telling the story of this man.

and what happened to him.

After the war, people who survived wrote, sometimes wrote their stories, etc.

But he did this during the occupation, and that makes it extraordinary.

There is no second example of Het under Water Cabaret.

A handful of people Bloch knew may have read the Underwater Cabaret at the time he wrote it, though it would have been electrifying for those who did.

Now, though, it is a treasure trove, a unique record of Second World War humour and subversion, and an extraordinary glimpse into another man's life in hiding.

Last year, the Jewish Museum in Berlin exhibited all of the issues.

Bloch's widow, Ruth, is 98 years old.

For her, this was an extraordinary moment.

It means the world for me.

He will live on that way.

He has left something

for people to contemplate.

He would have more than loved that.

Next time, on History's Secret Heroes, an undercover Polish operative deliberately sets out to be arrested and sent to Auschwitz.

What they wanted was someone to work out what was happening there, get the reports back to them, which they could then pass on to the Allies.

Vital Pilecki, the infiltrator.

Hello, Greg Jenner here.

I am the host of You're Dead to Me from BBC Radio 4.

We are the comedy show that takes history seriously and then laughs at it.

And we're back for a brand new series, Series 9, where we're covering all sorts of things from Aristotle to the legends of King Arthur to the history of coffee to the reign of Catherine of Medici of France.

We are looking at the arts and crafts movement and the life of Sojourner Truth and how cuneiform writing systems worked in the Bronze Age.

Loads of different stuff.

It's a fantastic series.

It's funny.

We get great historians.

We get great comedians.

So, if you want to to listen to Your Dead to Me, listen first on BBC Sounds.

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