A Woman in Berlin

THURSDAY, 31 MAY 1945

Today I began my solitary hungry existence in the attic apartment. It must have been some instinct that made me eat the way I did at the widow’s, with no holding back. After all, I knew it couldn’t last. That’s why I stuffed myself with as much food as I could. They can’t take that away from me now. But the shift from the good life to nearly nothing is all the harder. I have no supplies laid up, and as of yet they’ve hardly doled out a thing. That leaves bread, which we do receive promptly – in my case 300 grams, i.e. six rolls of grey rye bread, which I easily eat up just for breakfast. As it happens, today there weren’t any rolls, so I had to take a kilogram loaf. I made a cross over it the way my mother’s very devout mother used to do. May I never lack for bread up here. I notched the crust to mark off three daily portions. There’s no fat of any kind to spread. The widow gave me some dried potatoes and the remaining pea flour, but those won’t last more than two midday meals. For supper there’s really nothing except for nettles. It makes you so listless. As I write this I feel as if my head were a balloon that might fly away any minute. I get dizzy if I bend over; the change is too drastic. Nevertheless I’m glad I had those few fat weeks. They’ve left me some strength. Presumably food will be doled out sooner or later. I can’t count on a Russian provider – that’s all over.

I spent the whole day slaving away in the attic, a day of complete silence and solitude, the first in a long time. At one point I noticed that the real tenant’s radio had disappeared. There were handprints on the whitewash where the radio should have been. Proper fingerprints, too – good specimens for a Sherlock Holmes. I deduced that the roofers were expanding their own inventory, taking one piece here, one piece there. Well, I intend to give them a piece of my mind. I can get their address from the housekeeper of the landlord who took off towards the west. She’s running things on his behalf, already collecting rent for June. The May rent was cancelled: in the official records for 1945, that month won’t count.