“He read from them a few times at dinner parties,” he said in an interview, “but I never understood German before.”
Years later, however, Simone’s daughter, Lucy, became interested in the magazines, not just as family mementos but as markers of history. He got a research grant to travel to Germany, where he learned more about his grandfather’s history. Simone then spent years looking for a way to expand public awareness of the magazines, one of the few undiscovered literary efforts documenting the Holocaust in Europe.
This led to the production of a book, “The Underwater Cabaret: The Satirical Resistance of Curt Bloch,” by Gerard Groeneveld, published in the Netherlands earlier this year. Soon there will also be an exhibition at the museum, “‘My Verses Are Like Dynamite.’ Curt Bloch’s Het Underwater Cabaret,” which is set to open in February at the Jüdisches Museum Berlin.
“Any time an almost completely unknown work of this caliber comes to the fore, it’s very important,” said Aubrey Pomerance, a museum exhibition curator in Berlin. “So many writings created in secret have been destroyed. Otherwise, they would have come to the public’s attention long ago. So, it’s very exciting.”
Pomerance and Groeneveld’s research for the exhibition and the book helped to illuminate many aspects of Bloch’s life, which had previously received little attention. Born in Dortmund, an industrial city in western Germany, Bloch was 22 years old and working his first job as a legal secretary when Hitler became chancellor of Germany in 1933. Antisemitic violence in Bloch’s hometown was increased even before official measures against the Jews were instituted.
After a colleague threatened his life that same year, Bloch fled to Amsterdam, where he took a job with a Persian rug importer and dealer. He hoped to find refuge there before fleeing west, but his plans were thwarted when the Germans invaded in 1940, the borders closed, and the nightmare spread to the Jews there as well.
