A Woman in Berlin

FRIDAY, 15 JUNE 1945

I went down very early to get my six daily rolls. They’re dark and wet – we never had anything like them before. I no longer dare buy a whole loaf, because I’d eat up the next day’s portion.

Today we broke into my old employer’s basement. The Hungarian, the engineer and I slipped in through the back, through the laundry room. We had managed to prise open the crate, which was standing untouched in the shed, when the wife of the company’s representative appeared on the basement stairs. They’re still living in the building. I mumbled something about having left some files and papers lying around. The men hid behind the crate. Then we broke off the frames, tore out the pictures – photographs signed by young men decorated with the Knight’s Cross – and stacked the glass panes; we had brought some packing paper and string with us. After that we were able to make our getaway through the back entrance. I don’t really care if they notice the loss; after all, I lost my camera and all my equipment, which I had left at work at my boss’s request, when the place was destroyed by a bomb. What are a few panes of glass compared with that? We absconded with our loot as fast as we could, each of us lugging a heavy stack of glass to my place where the men had parked our two valuable company bicycles. I was given four panes as commission. I could have glazed one whole window in my attic apartment – if I’d had any putty.

In the evening I read some of the rather random selection of books belonging to the apartment’s rightful tenant. I found a copy of Tolstoy’s Polikushka and read that for the umpteenth time. Then I ploughed through a collection of plays by Aeschylus, and came across The Persians, which, with its lamentations of the vanquished, seems well suited to our defeat. But in reality it’s not. Our German calamity has a bitter taste – of repulsion, sickness, insanity, unlike anything in history. The radio just broadcast another concentration camp report. The most horrific thing is the order and the thrift: millions of human beings as fertilizer, mattress-stuffing, soft soap, felt mats – Aeschylus never saw anything like that.