A Woman in Berlin

THURSDAY, 24 MAY 1945

The alarm jangled – time to get up for shovelling. Today I dressed in my blue training trousers and tied on a kitchen apron. Once again the sky was overcast. It was drizzling when we arrived. We shovelled diligently. There were two men shovelling alongside us, at least when the supervisor was watching – otherwise they didn’t do a thing. All of a sudden around ten o’clock we heard some shouting and a Russian voice, ‘Woman, come! Woman, come!’ A command that’s been all too popular. In a flash all the women disappeared, hiding behind doors, crawling under carts and piles of rubble, squatting to make themselves as small as possible. But after a moment most of them, including me, re-emerged. ‘Surely they’re not going to…? At least not here, in the middle of the street. Besides there’s only one of them.’

And he now went into action. A lieutenant, evidently equipped with orders, rounded up the remaining women and herded us together. We trudged along behind him, in front of him, while he raced around us like a sheepdog, brandishing his rifle. We cut across the garden plots and finally wound up in front of a machine-tool factory.

The large halls lay empty, the hundreds of workbenches deserted. A German shout of ‘Heave-ho!’ came echoing off the walls – a team of German men under Russian command were using cranes to hoist a disassembled forging press onto some train wagons. The parts were bigger than they were. Everywhere you looked you saw men unscrewing things, turning switches off, oiling machines, hauling parts away. The siding outside the factory was lined up with one freight wagon after the other; several already piled high with machine parts.

What were we women supposed to do here? We loitered about, not knowing where to go. We realized right away we couldn’t leave, since all the gates were guarded by soldiers.

Finally we were ordered to the assembly hall, where we were told to collect all the brass and other ‘bright metal’ we could find and haul it, in crates, to the freight wagons.

Together with another woman who stubbornly refused to respond to my attempts to strike up a conversation, I dragged out a box and went around picking up shiny bits of metal – copper thread, brass ingots – just like a magpie. I rummaged through the workers’ lockers, finding pipes, crumpled handkerchiefs, neatly folded sandwich paper – all as if they’d just finished yesterday. Then we tossed our magpie booty onto the floor of a train wagon, where two women were clambering about, sorting the metal like housewives, nicely according to size.

At noon we were ordered into a different hall, a kind of

storage shed, with high shelves holding metal bars of every type, threading and bolts and nuts as big as a fist. We spent an eternity passing them all from hand to hand. The woman at the end of the line stacked everything in crates, as ordered.

I thought about what the widow had experienced yesterday, and waited in some suspense for the bottoms to break when the crates were moved. But it never came to that. As soon as they started to lift the first crate, it was clear that it was too heavy. Not even our slave-driver, a squint-eyed NCO with a chest like a cupboard, could make it budge. There were no wheelbarrows or anything of that nature. The man muttered a few crude curses and ordered everything taken out of the crates and passed hand-to-hand all the way to the freight wagons. In that way a minimal amount of work was accomplished with maximum of effort.

New labour details showed up, mostly young women but with quite a few older ones as well. Word went round that we were to be fed. And indeed after 3 p.m. they ordered us into the factory canteen, where we found some steaming thick bread soup. But there was a shortage of tin plates and spoons, so that each woman had to wait for the woman next to her to finish. Hardly any of the women ran up to use the tap; most just gave their spoons a quick swipe on their skirts or aprons and then took the plates from the person before them.

Back to work! Rabotal There was a considerable draught in

the shed. This time we spent hours passing zinc fittings down

the line. Finally, it must have been around 8 p.m., our squinteyed

task master showed up and shouted, ‘Woman – go home!’ and started shooing us out with his arms, as if we were a flock of chickens. A happy cry of relief. Then we went to the canteen, where were given another 100 grams of bread. After that a cask was rolled in, with a thick white liquid streaming out of it – some kind of syrup. We queued up. ‘Tastes great,’ the first women to try it reassured us. I didn’t know how to handle it until one woman gave me a piece of bilious green paper she’d found in the shed that I could fold and use as a container. The green comes off, the woman said, but claimed that it wasn’t poisonous.

I showed up at the widow’s around 10 p.m. and proudly displayed my booty. I scraped the gluey liquid off the green paper and the widow merely shook her head. I took a spoon and licked it and wound up with a mouth full of paper. No matter – it tasted sweet. Only after a while did I remember about the encyclopedia and the widow’s ‘little bumps’.

‘Oh, it’s nothing,’ she said, in answer to my question. ‘The doctor told me I’m all right.’

I drilled her a bit more, wanting.to know what it was like at the clinic.

‘There were two other women there apart from me,’ the widow reported. ‘The doctor was a cheery sort. He fiddled around a bit and then said, “Green light, track’s all clear!” She shook herself ‘No, I’m through with that.’ Incidentally, an official expression has been invented to describe the whole business of raping: ‘forced intercourse’. Maybe they ought to include the phrase next time they print up the soldiers’ phrase book.