A Woman in Berlin

SATURDAY, 5 MAY 1945

The May sky is dreary today. The cold doesn’t want to go away. I sit hunched on the stool in front of our stove, which is barely kept burning with all sorts of Nazi literature. Assuming everyone is doing the same thing – and they are – Mein Kampf will go back to being a rare book, a collector’s item.

I just polished off a pan of cracklings, and am giving myself a thick spread of butter, while the widow paints a black picture of my future. I pay no attention to her. I don’t care about tomorrow. I just want to live as well as I can for now, otherwise I’ll collapse like a wet rag, given our recent way of life. My face in the mirror is round again.

Today the three of us discussed the future. In his mind Herr Pauli is already settling back at his desk at the metal works; he forecasts a huge upturn in the economy with the help of our conquerors. The widow wonders whether she could land a job there herself as a cook, in the factory cafeteria; she’s pessimistic about the modest annuity from her deceased husband’s insurance, and is afraid she’ll have to look for work. And me? Well, at least I’ve studied a number of things; I’m sure I’ll find something. I’m not afraid. I’ll just sail blindly ahead, trusting my little ship to the currents of the times; up to now it’s always managed to carry me to green shores. But our country is despondent, our people are in pain. We’ve been led by criminals and gamblers, and we’ve let them lead us like sheep to the slaughter. And now the people are miserable, smouldering with hate. ‘No tree is high enough for him,’ I heard someone say of Adolf this morning at the pump.

A number of men showed up in the afternoon, German men this time, from our own building. It felt very strange, once again being around men you don’t have the slightest reason to fear, men you don’t have to constantly gauge or be on guard against or keep an eye on. They recounted the saga of the bookseller that is now echoing throughout the building, the tale of how this Bavarian, a gnarled stump of a man, really and truly yelled at a Russian. It all happened right outside the couple’s door, when an Ivan grabbed the bookseller’s wife as she was coming back with water. (She won’t let her husband go to the pump because he was in the party) The woman shrieked, and her husband came running out of the apartment, making straight for the Ivan and shouting, ‘You damned bastard! You prick!’ As the saga has it, the Russian piped down, shrivelled up and backed off. So it can be after all. The Russian’s barbarian-animal instinct must have told him that the bookseller was capable of anything at that moment, that his rage had blinded him to all consequences – so the soldier simply relinquished his booty.

It’s the first time I’ve heard of one of our men responding with that kind of red-eyed wrath. Most of them are reasonable – they react with their heads, they’re worried about saving their own skins, and their wives fully support them in this. No man loses face for relinquishing a woman to the victors, be it his wife or his neighbour’s. On the contrary, they would be censured if they provoked the Russians by resisting. But that still leaves something unresolved. I’m convinced that this particular woman will never forget her husband’s fit of courage, or perhaps you could say it was love. And you can hear the respect in the way the men tell the story, too.

But they didn’t come just for conversation, they’ve made themselves useful. They’d brought a few boards, which they sawed off size on the kitchen table and nailed up diagonally across the jambs of the back door. They had to work quickly so as not to get caught by some Russian. As payment we handed out cigars from the ample supply the major brought yesterday. We really are quite rich.

After the entire doorframe was boarded up, a Russian appeared on the back stairs. He kicked hard at the boards, tried to break in, but without success. That was a relief. Now we won’t have strangers barging in night and day. Of course, they also come to the front door, but that has a good lock and is made of solid wood. As it is, most of the people who know us call up from outside, just to reassure us: ‘Zdyes’ Andrei’ means that it’s Andrei. And the major and I have worked out a special knock.

A touching story: around noon we have a visit from Fräulein Behn, our fearless lead mare from the basement. She’s now lodging with young Frau Lehmann, whose husband is missing in the east, and helping out with her two children. To date, neither the young mother nor Fräulein Behn has been raped… although both are quite nice-looking. It turns out the small children are their great protection. They understood this from the first night of Russians, when two rough men showed up, shouting and pounding their rifle butts and demanded to be let in. When Fräulein Behn started to open the door they just pushed her into the room… then stopped in front of the crib where the baby and four-year-old Lutz were sleeping together. One of them said in flabbergasted German, ‘Small child?’ They both stared at the crib a while – and then stole away on tiptoe.

Fräulein Behn asks me to come up for a couple of minutes; they have two Russian visitors, one older, one young. They’ve been there once before and today they’ve brought some chocolate for the children. The women would like to speak with them, so they’ve asked me to play interpreter.

Soon we’re all sitting across from one another: the two soldiers, Fräulein Behn, Frau Lehmann with Lutz clinging to her knee, and me. The baby is right there in her stroller. The older Russian asks me to translate: ‘What a beautiful little girl! A real beauty!’ And he winds his index finger into one of the baby’s copper curls. Then he asks me to tell the two women that he also has two children, two boys, who are living with their grandmother in the country. He fishes a photo out of his battered cardboard wallet: two crew-cut heads on paper that’s turned a darkish brown. He hasn’t seen them since 1941. I’ve figured out that concept of home leave is foreign to nearly all the Russians. Most of them have been separated from their families since the beginning of the war; that’s nearly four years. I assume that this is because most of the war has been fought in their country, and with the civilian population being transferred back and forth, no one knows for sure where his family is at any given moment. On top of that there’s the enormous distances and the pitiful condition of the roads. It’s also possible that, at least in the first years of the German advance, the authorities were afraid their people might desert or go over to the other side. Whatever the case, these men were never entitled to home leave like ours were. I explain this to the two women, and Frau Lehmann says, full of understanding, ‘Well, that excuses some things.’

The second Russian guest is a young boy of seventeen, a former partisan who joined up with the westward-advancing troops. He looks at me, brow deeply furrowed, and asks me to translate that in his village German soldiers stabbed some children to death and took others by the feet and bashed their heads against a wall. Before I translate I ask, ‘Did you hear that? Or see it yourself?’ He gazes off and says in a stern voice, ‘I saw it twice myself.’ I translate.

‘I don’t believe it,’ answers Frau Lehmann. ‘Our soldiers? My husband? Never!’ Fräulein Behn tells me to ask the Russian whether the soldiers in question had ‘a bird here’ (on their caps) or ‘a bird there’ (on their arms) – in other words, whether they were Wehrmacht or SS. The Russian understands the question right away – the villagers probably learned to make that distinction. But even if it was SS men in this case, our conquerors will consider them part of the ‘nation’ and charge us all accordingly. Talk like this is already making the rounds; today at the pump I heard several people say, ‘Our boys probably weren’t much different over there.’

Silence. We all stare into space. A shadow has fallen in the room. The baby pays no attention – she bites the foreign finger, cooing and squealing. I feel a lump rising in my throat. She seems like a miracle to me, pink and white with copper curls, flowering here in this desolate, half-looted room, among us adult human beings so mired in filth. And suddenly I realize why the warriors are drawn to the little baby.