The Woman at 1,000 Degrees

115 Bühlstraße 14 1945

It can undoubtedly be considered a privilege to have been able to walk into Berlin in the spring of 1945 and experience the beauty of its annihilation. And the freedom of despair.

What appeared was the skeleton of a city. Empty eye-sockets, gaping ribs and broken bones. The sun shone through the stone walls that still stood. Entire neighbourhoods had been transformed into heaps of rubble, and the streets were little more than hollow tracks between them. But in the public parks, God continued his tasteless comedy routine by allowing the trees to bloom and flowers to sprout out of the earth and filling them all with chirping birds.

Black-clad creatures scuttled across the streets like rats. We were all in the same boat: searching for food. Dark jets of smoke billowed in the distance, and somewhere the war still hissed like a wounded dragon trapped down a blind alley. On the corner a soldier lay face-down in a fancy uniform, and up against a wall sat a sleeping woman beset with flies. On the third floor a fire waved through a window.

Occasionally one could hear the sound of a collapsing building or an air-raid siren, but no one paid any heed. And somewhere, someone was playing an accordion, that resilient instrument that resounds on the most momentous occasions of European history.

A tank appeared at the corner and crawled down the road like some prehistoric beast, but no one tried to distinguish whether it bore a Nazi cross or a star. An arm protruded from the caterpillar track on its right side and followed the circular tread, up off the street and down again, like a tragicomic flag. We were all, like the city itself, on our last legs, numbed by the carelessness that takes over when prolonged fatigue is drawing to an end. When you’ve had to struggle to survive every day of your life for so many years and victory is finally in sight, you’re suddenly overwhelmed by indifference.

I clambered over crumbled walls, having lost track of those two thousand people I’d encountered on my journey across Poland. And I didn’t have a door to knock on, because there were no doors left. But I had more than many others: a plan and travelling funds; the name of an American man; and a rare pearl in my pocket. Maybe I was the richest girl in Berlin.

I asked for directions, slowly approaching the street. The neighbourhood was a mound of debris. A hunched woman was rummaging through the ruins for food and looked up when I asked her. With a cleft lip she answered, ‘I think Bühlstraße was there where that building stands,’ pointing out over the cluster of stones: a distant flat-roofed house stood in the wreckage like a summerhouse in the countryside. The spring sun shone on this entire tragedy like a housewife who switches on the light in the middle of a late-night party, making it shine with evil intensity on a mayhem of vomit and broken glass: although I welcomed the good weather after the long winter, it irritated me just as much as the darned birdsong. I scrambled towards the building as if I were crossing an Icelandic lava field. It was a classical two-storey building with damaged walls and two pillars in front of the door. In front of its four steps stood a guard in a long coat.

He was a tall German soldier, but obviously one of those dimwits who had been left at home, like that oaf Hans at the Hamburg station. He was sweating out his last days in the war there under the sun; drops trickled down from the shadow cast by his helmet. I asked him whether this was Bühlstraße and he answered yes. Then whether a certain Hauptmann lived here and he said no. The warty Swede had said that the American’s code name was Gerhard Hauptmann.

‘Does a man called Gerhard Hauptmann live here?’

‘No.’

I pondered a moment.

‘But an American called Skewinson?’

‘No.’

But I could tell the guard was lying, and after some thought I finally dug into my pocket and took out the travelling funds that were supposed to buy my passage to Iceland on the next American ship home. Right, I wasn’t just some destitute orphan but a girl who was perfectly capable of taking care of herself and paying full fare. I stretched out my open palm and showed the tall soldier the precious Italian pearl from the days of Casanova. Rainbows glistened under the sun; its value remained unchanged. He snatched the pearl out of my hand and slipped it into his mouth, tried to chew it, but then swallowed.