A Woman in Berlin : Eight Weeks in the Conquered City: A Diary

by Marta Hillers

  2p.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 for gotten 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, 9p.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 every one 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 Mullerstrasse 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.

  WEDNESDAY, 25 APRIL 1945, AFTERNOON

  To recapitulate: around 1a.m. I left the basement again to go up to the first floor and throw myself on the couch. All of a sudden there was a fierce air raid, the flak started raging. I simply lay there and waited, too sleepy to care. The window pane is already broken and the wind is blowing in, along with the stench of fires. I felt an idiotic sense of security under the bedcovers, as if the sheets and blankets were made of iron –though they say bedding is extremely dangerous. Dr H. once told me how he’d had to treat a woman who’d been hit in bed, the bits of feather had lodged so deeply in her wounds he could barely remove them. But there comes a time when you’re so mortally tired you stop being afraid. That’s probably how soldiers sleep on the front, amid all the filth.

  I got up at 7a.m. and the day began with quaking walls. Now the fighting is moving in our direction. No more water, no gas. I waited for a minute that was halfway calm and raced up the four flights of stairs to my attic apartment. Like an animal backing into his lair I crept into one room at a time, always on the lookout, ready to beat a hasty retreat. I grabbed some bedclothes and toiletries and fled back downstairs to the first floor, to the widow. We get along well. These days you come to know people quickly.

  Buckets in hand, I made my way to the pump, through the garden plots, which were in full bloom. The sun was beating down, very warm. A long line at the pump, everyone pulling for himself – the lever was squeaky and difficult to move. Then the fifteen–minutes walk back with splashing buckets. ‘We are all of us fine sumpter asses and she–asses.’ (Nietzsche, I think.) Outside Bolle’s they’re still shoving one another on account of the free butter. And in front of Meyer’s there’s an endless dark queue, all men, they’re selling liquor there, half a litre per ID card, anything they have.

  Right away I turned round and made a second trip for more water. A sudden air raid on my way home, a column of smoke and dust rising over the patch of grass outside the cinema. Two men threw themselves flat on the ground, right in the gutter. Some women bolted for the nearest entranceway and ran down any stairs they could find, with me at their heels, into a completely unfamiliar basement that didn’t have a trace of light. And all the time I couldn’t let go of those buckets, othewise they’d be stolen. A crowd inside the pitch–dark room, startled, very eerie. I heard a woman’s voice moaning: ‘My God, my God... ‘ And then things went quiet again.

  Was she praying? I remember an event from about two years ago, see myself back in that hole, the most pitiful basement imaginable, under a one–storey cottage. A village of 3000, a place of no significance, but conveniently located on the way to the Ruhr Valley. A candle was burning in t
he dark, and the women (there were hardly any men) were reciting the rosary, the sorrowful mysteries, I can still hear their droning: ‘and for us was cruelly scourged... ‘ And then more: the Lord’s Prayer, the Ave Maria, monotonous, muted, soothing, freeing, just like I imagine the ‘Om mani padme hum’ of the Tibetan prayer wheels. Only broken by the occasional hum of motors, and once by a series of bombs that set the candle flame shivering. And then they went on: ‘and for us carried his heavy cross.’ Back then I could literally feel the prayer spreading its coat of oil over the troubled faces, helping make things better. Since that time I haven’t been inside another shelter where people prayed. Here in Berlin, in this mortley mix of five–storey tenements, you’d be hard–pressed to find a group of people willing to come together and say the Lord’s Prayer. Of course, people whisper prayers, perhaps more than it seems. And people do moan ‘My God, my God... ‘ But the woman moaning probably doesn’t understand what she’s really saying, she’s only grasping at empty phrases, repeating the words by rote, without meaning.

  I never liked the proverb ‘Need teaches prayer’ – it sounds so haughty, like ‘Need teaches begging’. Prayers extorted by fear and need from the lips of people who never prayed when times were good are nothing more than pitiful begging.

  There is no proverb that says ‘Happiness teaches prayer’, but a genuine prayer of thanksgiving ought to rise as high and as freely as fragrant incense. But this is all speculation. The fact that our German word for praying – beten – is so close to our word for begging – betteln – obviously means something. After all, there was a time when beggars were as much a fixture at the church door as the handle, as legitimate as the king himself and every bit as graced by God, so that the king would have his exact opposite here on earth, and so that whoever prayed to God in supplication would have someone to whom he in turn could extend divinely sanctioned charity. But I never will find out whether the moaning in the dark basement really was a prayer. One thing is certain: it’s a blessing to be able to pray easily and unabatedly, amid the oppression and torture, in all our despair and fear. People who can do it are lucky. I can’t, not yet, I’m still resisting.

  After I came back from getting water, the widow sent me to the meat queue to find out what’s going on. People were cursing, evidently they keep postponing the deliveries of meat and sausage, which maddens these women more than the entire war. That’s our strength – we women always focus on the task at hand. We’re happy whenever we can flee into the present to escape worrying about the future. And for these women the task at hand is sausage, and the thought of sausage alters their perspective on things that may be much more important but are nevertheless much further away.

  Back in the cellar, around 6p.m. I couldn’t lie down upstairs any longer – there were some hits close by and I got scared when thick pieces of plaster started falling on my blanket. I dozed down here until Henni came from the baker’s and reported that a bomb had landed right on the pharmacist’s next to the cinema. The owner was killed on the spot, though it was impossible to say whether by shrapnel, the blast or a heart attack. According to Henni he didn’t bleed. One of the three elderly pudding sisters got up and asked, with elegantly pursed lips: ‘If you don’t mind – how did he get finished off?’ That’s the way we talk these days, that’s how far we’ve fallen. The word ‘shit’ rolls easily off the tongue. It’s even spoken with satisfaction, as if by saying it we could expel our inner refuse. We are debasing our language in expectation of the impending humiliation.

  THURSDAY, 26 APRIL 1945, 11 A.M.

  My fingers are shaking as I write this. Thirty minutes ago we took a direct hit on the fourth floor. We’re still breathing the dust from the plaster. I’m out of breath, having just raced back down from my apartment in the attic. The place looks like a dump, full of shattered plaster and splinters and broken glass. Farewell, my fleeting bit of home, I hardly had a chance to know you. For the moment you’ve been rendered uninhabitable.

  I grabbed what I could: a pot, some towels, some gauze for bandages –things we need. My throat is parched, still burning from the dust. I don’t have anything to drink down here. And countless gallons of water have just drained out of the radiators upstairs. We spent–

  Wait, first I want to recount everything that’s happened –there’s been so much it’s so long since I last wrote. It all started yesterday around 7p.m. when someone came to our basement and announced that they were selling pudding powder at the comer store. I went along with everyone else and queued up. Then, out of the blue, Russian bombs. At first the queue merely regrouped in the ruins of the building next door, as if the broken walls would protect us from the bombs. Smoke and flames were coming from Berliner Strasse. Another series of bombs exploded closer by. I gave up on the pudding powder and hurried across the street and back to the basement. A man called out to me, ‘Stick to the wall !’ Rattling gunfire, flying debris. Back in the shelter at last, pudding or no pudding. The wife of the concierge started wailing that her daughter was still at the corner store, she probably hadn’t felt it was safe to cross the street under fire.

  She showed up half an hour later, also without any pudding powder. She was pretty damn lucky, as she put it, having just managed to squeeze into the shop’s basement when a bomb fell right outside. A teenage boy who hadn’t made it inside caught a fragment in his skull. She had to step over his body on her way out. She pointed to her temple and showed us how the wound was gushing white and red. Tomorrow they’re supposed to resume selling the powder. Evidently the store has plenty left.

  The cave dwellers went to sleep around 9p.m. The widow has made a sort of bed for me as well, in the front area of the basement, since there isn’t any space left close to the support timbers, but it’s soft and warm. I slept until the bombs woke me up. My hand was dangling over my bed and I felt something licking it – Foxel, our absent landlord’s terrier. There, Foxel, good dog, don’t be afraid. We’re alone here in this front room. There’s no support structure, but the air is cleaner, and nobody bothers us with snores and groans.

  Up early the next morning, to fetch water at the pump. I read my first printed text in days, hot off the press, too. A newspaper called the Armoured Bear. Someone pasted one next to the baker’s display window. It had Tuesday’s official Wehrmacht, report, which meant it was two days old. According to a report: a) the enemy was pushing ahead and b) German reinforcements were on the way. The Bear also said that Adolf and Goebbels were still in Berlin and would stay. One very smug piece told of a soldier named Hohne who had deserted and was now dangling from a rope at the Schöneberg station for all to see.

  Breakfast in the basement. Everyone is trying as best they can to recreate some semblance of family life. A genteel morning meal served on trunks, crates and chairs, with paper napkins and little tablecloths. Pots of hot drinks cooked over wood fires or spirit stoves are lifted out of their cosies. You see butter dishes, sugar bowls, jam servers, silver spoons, everything. The widow conjured up some real coffee and cooked it on a fire made of broken champagne crates – that did us good. But people are fidgety, cranky, getting on one another’s nerves.

  A little before 10a.m. a trunk–sized bomb landed on the roof of our building. A terrible jolt, screams. The concierge’s wife staggered in, pale as a sheet, bracing herself against one of the support beams. Then came eighteen–year–old Stinchen with the Hamburg ‘s’, leaning on her mother. Her hair was grey with plaster dust, completely tangled, and covering her young face which was streaked with trickles of blood – she’d been hit while crossing the courtyard. Even the canary in its cage felt the general agitation, which was zigzagging back and forth as it cheeped away.

  It wasn’t until fifteen minutes later that someone noticed that the radiators were losing water. We ran upstairs. Well, not all of us. The postmaster’s wife, for example, waved around a medical certificate and shouted that her husband had a heart condition and couldn’t come along. And Curtainman Schmidt lost no time pres
sing his old spotted paw against his heart. Others hesitated as well, until Fräulein Behn bellowed like a lead mare, ‘You dopes are sitting here babbling while your homes are about to float away’ and charged ahead without turning round to see who followed. I joined some fifteen others in going after her.

  Up on the third floor a whole ocean of water was rushing out without stopping. We waded up to our ankles, wrung out the rugs, slaved away as it continued to pour from upstairs. We used dustpans to scoop it up and then we dumped it out of the window just like that into the street, so brightly lit by the sun and so utterly deserted. Shells kept exploding the whole time, many of them quite close. Once a flurry of shattered glass and bits of plaster splashed into the water, but no one was hurt.

  After that we headed back to the basement, damp but quite excited. I hunkered down, squatting on wet socks – my feet still inside them, of course – and wondered whether the whole effort had been a smart thing to do. I’m not sure. In any case it was very soldierly. Lieutenant Behn had charged ahead, an assault troop of volunteers followed and everyone risked their lives to secure the endangered position – all under enemy fire. (It clearly wasn’t just about possessions either, about people rescuing their carpets, since practically none of the ones who went along had any more to do with those apartments than I did.) We followed orders blindly, without looking to save our skins. Except that there will no books or songs to celebrate this deed, and no one will receive the Iron Cross. Still, I now know one thing: in the heat of battle, in the thick of the action, you don’t think– you don’t even feel afraid, because you’re so distracted and absorbed.