A Woman in Berlin

TUESDAY, 12 JUNE 1945

The automatic walking machine was back to Charlottenburg. No more joyrides on the S-Balm. Something went wrong after the first few runs and the trams are once again out of commission. We worked hard; now our designs and proposals must be submitted to all the various offices.

On the way I had a new experience. Bodies were being exhumed from a grassy lawn, to be reinterred in a cemetery. One corpse was already lying on top of all the debris – a long bundle wrapped in sailcloth and caked in loam. The man who was doing the digging, an older civilian, was wiping the sweat off with his shirt sleeves and fanning himself with his cap. It was the first time I had ever smelled a human corpse. The descriptions I’ve read always use the phrase ‘sweetish odour’, but that’s far too vague, completely inadequate. The fumes are not so much an odour as something firmer, something thicker, a soupy vapor that collects in front of your face and nostrils, too mouldy and thick to breathe. It beats you back as if with fists.

At the moment the whole city of Berlin is reeking. Typhus is going around, and hardly anyone has escaped dysentery – Herr Pauli was hard hit. I also heard that they came for the lady with eczema; apparently she’s been quarantined in a typhus-barracks. There are fields of rubbish all over, swarming with flies. Flies upon flies, blue-black and fat. Must be the life for them! Each bit of faeces is covered with a humming, swarming mass of black.

The widow heard a rumour that’s going around Berlin: ‘They’re making us starve as punishment because a few men from Operation Werewolf recently shot at some Russians.’ I don’t believe it. You hardly see any Russians at all in our district, so the werewolves wouldn’t have anyone to prey on. I have no idea where all the Ivans have disappeared to. The widow claims that one of the two drink-and-be-merry sisters who moved to our building – Anya with the cute little son – is still receiving Russian callers with packages. I’m not so sure that’s a good thing. I can picture her lying across her sofa, her white throat slit.

[Scribbled in the margin at the end of June] Not Anya and not the throat, but a certain Inge, two buildings down, was found this morning with her skull bashed in, after a night of boozing with four unknown men, still at large. She was beaten with a beer bottle – empty, of course. Probably it wasn’t malice or even a lust for murder. More likely it just happened that way, perhaps after an argument over whose turn it was. Or maybe Inge laughed at her visitors. Russians are dangerous when drunk. They see red, fly into a rage against anyone and everyone else when provoked.