The Woman at 1,000 Degrees

113 Every Man for Himself 1945

I sometimes stared at my feet with great interest, astounded by their stamina and perseverance. They seemed to belong to some other inexhaustible person. I called them Nonni and Manni, after the characters in the children’s book. Those brothers always stuck together, never letting anything come between them except the mud.

No matter how far we walked, the war always resounded with equal loudness behind us. We’d thought we were fleeing, but now we seemed to be towing the war behind us like a heavy black-smoke-spewing locomotive. The Oder River seemed to have been no obstacle. The signposts promised Berlin on the other side of the next woods, next hill. We slept in barns and abandoned farmhouses. Occasionally we found potatoes in a drawer, a crust of rye bread on a counter, but more often than not we nourished ourselves on tales of lucky fugitives who had stumbled on mansions full of food. On a woman’s corpse on the side of the road I found a piece of butter, which I stored inside my clothes; it lasted me a whole week.

The snow melted and the roads were filled with even more refugees: Prussians, Poles and Germans, even Volga Germans and other nationalities. Thousands of people trudged down the muddy paths, passing abandoned tanks and bomb craters full of water, like mute, weary figures out of the Old Testament, the only difference being that no god was observing them from the clouds on high.

Occasionally, trees appeared on the side of the road, standing in long rows, watching us march past towards the sunsets, which were sometimes beautiful but always sad. One morning a single file of Russian children paraded past us, with expressions that seemed to have already viewed their lives from beginning to end. The next day, dozens of Soviet women streamed by, heading east, and we had to step aside and wait for the flow to end. They were on foot, most of them around thirty or older, trudging by with sullen expressions as in a silent film. One of them spat at a German man in our group. Was the war over? Some were pregnant and now carried their German fruit towards their Belarus; ultimately these babies would be the only triumphant invaders of the eastern front, if they weren’t drowned at birth.

Greybeard offered me a place on his carriage; I was allowed to dangle my legs from it for a whole two days, until his horse was stolen one night. We found its head in a ditch the next day. Even though he had lost all his family, Greybeard took the animal’s death very much to heart and soon lagged behind. I looked over my shoulder and saw him vanish into a group of women enveloped in veils and shawls, his tiny, red-nosed face and greyish-white beard under the immense, sooty sky.

That’s how people perish: they get sucked away with their red noses and grey beards into the grey sky.

I joined a group of Poles that day. Villages loitered like beggars by the roadside in the hope of some help. Every house and church seemed to be begging to be uprooted and taken to a better life. But where was there a better life? Someone said that we were all headed for the Führer’s bunker, where he awaited us with boiled cabbage and schnapps.

One night we took over an old guesthouse in a deserted village. In the biggest bedroom, there was an immense bed; the heat from a steel stove warmed up the exhausted travellers. I ended up talking to a man who, of all things, turned out to be a Swedish oboe player. His cheeks and nose were sprinkled with sizable warts. He told me his strange story, how he had ended up in this historical context; but he was also willing to help, he said. Then he pulled out some cigarettes and offered me one, lit it for me, and taught me how to smoke. I threw up after the first, coughed through the second, but managed to tolerate the third. A few weeks later I tied the knot with Mr Nicotine, and we’ve been an item ever since and celebrated our diamond anniversary in the spring of 2005.

‘The war is over,’ said the warty Swede. ‘It’ll be finished in a month. The Yanks are crossing the Rhine. They’ll meet in Berlin, Stalin and Roosevelt. I know a man there who can help you. He goes under a German name, but he’s American, Bill Skewinson. You should look him up. He lives at Bühlstraße 14. If he can’t get you to Iceland, no one can.’

Then he led me up to the second floor and lay me on the bed. I soon fell asleep but woke up with his hand under my jumper. ‘I can help you,’ he whispered in German with a Swedish accent, and then he shouted after me the name of the street in Berlin as I rushed out of the room.

I stuck to a group of women after that. We were all on our own. Jeder für sich, und Gott gegen alle – Every man for himself, and God against everyone. The war brought people together to then break them apart. Each day was an entire lifetime. Finally I shook off my fatigue and entered into a trance. The road turned into a conveyor belt, and I felt the forest, houses and signposts were moving towards me and not I towards them.

One day the following happened: Some officers beeped through the crowd, and people stood aside to make way for three uniformed SS men in an open convertible. They stiffly stared into the distance, as if sculpted in stone, until a puny woman threw a dead rat into their back seat; two of them turned, firing their revolvers: two women who had been standing beside the rat woman collapsed on the road, and the car vanished. Two screaming boys pushed the old woman into a ditch and trampled on her until she was swallowed by the mud. We silently passed the bodies. An elderly woman stood by them, staring into the leafless forest with vacant blue eyes. Why was I alive and they not? Why hadn’t I been mowed down by some invisible machine gun? Why hadn’t I had a sip of wine with the lads seven nights ago? They had found a wine cask in a shed that was full of poison and were now all dead. Was it all pure chance or was there some will behind it?

Nonni and Manni seemed to know the answer, because they pushed me along the path without hesitation. To my left a farm was burning in a blaze of flames and smoke, and through the trees the first birds of spring could be heard.