A Woman in Berlin

TUESDAY, 24 APRIL 1945, AROUND NOON

No news. We’re completely cut off. Some gas but no water. Looking out of the window I see throngs of people outside the stores. They’re still fighting over the rancid butter – they’re still giving it away, but now it’s down to a quarter of a pound per ration card. The Schutzpolizei are just now getting things under control – I see four of them. And on top of that it’s raining.

At the moment I’m sitting on the window seat in the widow’s apartment. She just stormed in, all worked up. A shell hit outside Hefter’s meat market, right in the middle of the queue. Three dead and ten wounded, but they’re already queuing up again. The widow demonstrated how people were using their sleeves to wipe the blood off their meat coupons. ‘Anyway, only three people died,’ she said. ‘What’s that compared to an air raid?’ No question about it: we’re spoiled, all right.

Still, I’m astounded at how the sight of a few beef quarters and hog jowls is enough to get the frailest grandmother to hold her ground. The same people who used to run for shelter if three fighter planes were spotted somewhere over central Germany are now standing in the meat line as solid as walls. At most they’ll plop a bucket on their head or perhaps a helmet. Queuing is a family business, with every member on shift for a couple of hours before being relieved. But the line for meat is too long for me; I’m not yet ready to give it a go. Besides, meat has to be eaten right away; it won’t keep for more than a meal. I think they’re all dreaming of eating their fill one last time, a final meal before the execution.

2 p.m. Just caught a glimpse of the sun. Without giving it a second thought, I strolled out to the balcony overlooking the courtyard and sat down in my wicker chair, basking in the sun – until a formation of bombers whizzed by overhead and one explosion merged into the next. I’d actually forgotten there was a war on. As it is, my head is oddly empty – just now I jerked up from my writing, something fell close by, and I heard the clink of shattering glass. Once again I’m having hunger pangs on a full stomach. I feel the need to gnaw on something. What’s the baby who’s still nursing supposed to live off now, the baby who can’t get any milk? Yesterday the people queuing up were talking about children dying. One old lady suggested that a piece of bread chewed up and full of saliva might help the little ones when they can’t get milk.

An infant in the city is a sorry thing indeed, when its elaborately constructed supply of milk has been disrupted. Even if the mother manages to find something for herself and get halfway nourished, the source is bound to run dry soon enough, given what is approaching us so mercilessly. Fortunately the youngest child in our basement is already eighteen months old. Yesterday I saw someone slip the mother a couple of biscuits for the baby – in what was likely the only recent act of giving. Mostly people squirrel away whatever they have and nobody thinks about sharing anything with anybody.

Back in the basement, 9 p.m. Towards evening a woman we didn’t know showed up and asked the widow and me to go with her to help in the field hospital.

Smoke and red skies on the horizon. The east is all ablaze. They say the Russians have already reached Braunauer Strasse – ironic, considering that it was in Braunau that Adolf first saw the light of day. That reminds me of a quip I heard yesterday in the basement: ‘Just think how much better off we’d be if his old lady’d had a miscarriage.’

When we reached the hospital, the whole place was filled with smoke. Men were running about wildly, screaming and hollering: An ambulance driver: ‘Hey, we’ve got a shot lung with an impacted bullet!’

‘Move, go away, didn’t you hear? We don’t have a single bed left.’

The ambulance driver is fuming: ‘This is where they told me to go.’

‘Go away or else!’ The sergeant threatens with his fists. The driver storms off, cursing.

Lightly wounded men go slinking through the corridor, one barefoot, his bleeding hand wrapped in his socks. Another, also barefoot, leaves bloody footprints as he walks, the soles of his feet squelch as he lifts them off the ground. Waxy yellow faces peek out of head bandages, with rapidly spreading stains of red. We look into two or three other rooms.

It’s very stuffy, a smell of men, bivouacs, nervous apprehension. One man snarls at us: ‘What do you want?’

The woman who’d come to get us answers shyly that a man in a truck had driven by shouting that the field hospital needed women to help.

‘That’s nonsense. We don’t have anything for you to do here. Go back home.’

So they don’t want female help, but what a peculiar tone, so dismissive, disdainful. As if we wanted to get our hands on the guns, or play at being soldiers. Here, too, I have to relearn everything I’ve been taught about women in war. Once our role was to play the ministering angel. Scraping up lint for bandages. A cool hand on a man’s hot brow. At a healthy distance from the shooting. Now there’s no difference between a regular hospital and a field hospital. The front is everywhere.

Admittedly this particular hospital is trying to remain a kind of island in the midst of the storm. The roof is painted with gigantic crosses, and white sheets have been spread out in the form of a cross on the yard in front of the building. But aerial missiles are impartial, and the carpet of bombs is tightly woven, with no holes for compassion. Which they know in the field hospital – otherwise they wouldn’t have crammed everyone down in the basement the way they have. Men’s faces peer out of every barred window.

Back in the shelter, the cave dwellers are feverish with excitement, agitated, nervous. The woman from Hamburg tells me with her sharp ‘s’ that they’ve managed to phone some friends on Müllerstrasse in north Berlin. ‘We’re already Russian,’ her friend shouted into the telephone. ‘The tanks just rolled in down below. Masses of people are lining the streets, the Ivans are all laughing and waving and holding up babies.’ It could be true – that’s an old Communist district, known as Red Wedding. Her story immediately sets off a heated argument. Some people wonder whether our propaganda has simply made fools of us. So ‘they’ aren’t as bad as we thought, after all? But then the refugee from East Prussia, who otherwise never says a word, starts yelling in her dialect. Broken sentences – she can’t find the right words. She flails her arms and screams, ‘They’ll find out all right,’ and then goes silent once again. As does the entire basement.

The distiller’s wife is peddling yet another rumour: von Ribbentrop and von Papen have just flown to Washington to negotiate with the Americans in person. No one answers her.

The basement is full of gloom. The kerosene lantern is smouldering. The phosphor rings painted at eye height on the beams so no one bumps into them in the dark give off a greenish glow. Our clan has increased: the book dealers have brought their canary. The cage is hanging off a joist, covered with a towel. Shelling outside and silence within. All dozing or asleep.