A Woman in Berlin

WEDNESDAY, 23 MAY 1945

Fitted out with bucket and dustpan, I marched off to the Rathaus in the grey morning rain. Before I got there it was coming down in sheets; I could feel my knit dress soaking up the water.

The rain kept coming – now a light drizzle, now a substantial downpour. Nonetheless we kept on scooping and shovelling, filling bucket after bucket with dirt so there wouldn’t be a break in the chain of hands. There were about a hundred women of all types. Some proved sluggish and lazy and didn’t move a muscle unless one of our two German overseers was looking. (It’s always the men who get to do the supervising.) Others went at it like avid housewives, with dogged determination. ‘Well, the work has to get done,’ said one woman with great conviction. Once a cart was loaded, four of us shoved it up to the trench. I learned how to operate a swivel plate. We worked until the heavy rain forced us to take a break.

We stood under a balcony, huddled close like animals, our wet clothes sticking to our bodies. The women shuddered and shivered. We took advantage of the opportunity to eat our wet bread as it was, with nothing on it. One woman muttered in a thick Berlin accent, ‘Never ate the likes of this under Adolf.’

She was challenged on all sides. ‘It’s thanks to your Adolf we’re eating this.’

Embarrassed, the woman said, ‘That’s not how I meant it.’

We stood like that for over an hour in the pelting rain. When it began to taper off, our supervisor – a man with a Czech-sounding name and a Viennese accent – sent us back to the carts. We called these carts ‘lorries’ – which sounded like a girl’s name, and christened one the ‘Laughing Laurie’ and the other the ‘Weeping Laurie’. But someone scratched out ‘Weeping’ and wrote ‘Smirking’ instead.

Around 3 p.m. our Viennese overseer finally checked our names off his list and let us go home. On the way back I was swinging my bucket gaily, in the spirit of ‘what doesn’t kill me makes me stronger’.

At home I found the widow all keyed up. She confessed that for the past few days she’d been feeling ‘this itching and burning’, so she’d consulted the encyclopedia under ‘syphilis’ and ‘gonorrhoea’. As a pharmacist’s wife she’d learned a great deal about human ailments, but this was one particular area where she lacked the necessary experience. ‘I have these little bumps,’ she declared, very sure of herself. According to the encyclopedia, little bumps like that are symptomatic of early syphilis, breaking out three to four weeks after infection. The widow calculates that it was exactly four weeks ago that her stairwell rapist, that little beardless boy, had his way with her.

‘What? Vanya? That child?’ I can’t believe it. ‘You mean you think that he—?’

‘Why not? Exactly, a stupid little boy like that. Besides, I’m not sure if that really was Vanya. How could I know? And then that Pole!’

The widow starts sobbing miserably. What am I supposed to do? There’s no point in my taking a look, since I don’t know a thing about it. And she fiercely dismisses my suggestion that she ask Herr Pauli. So all that’s left is to wait till tomorrow and get to the hospital as early as possible, to the special clinic that’s been set up for women who’ve been raped. Then I remember how my ears started to ache back in school when we were studying the human ear with the help of oversized anatomical models. It’s likely that the widow’s symptoms flared up when she read the description in the encyclopedia. We’ll just have to wait until tomorrow. I may have to go and get examined myself soon. I’m one day late.