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

by Marta Hillers

  By chance elections to the Reichstag were being held then. The ten or fifteen largest parties convened assemblies every evening, and we would march over in little groups, spurred on by our teacher. We worked our way from the National Socialists through the Centrists and the Democrats to the Social Democrats and Communists, raising our arms in the Hitler salute with the Nazis and letting ourselves be addressed as ‘comrade’ by the Communists. That’s when I started my first diary, out of a desire to form my own opinion. For nine days, I believe, I faithfully wrote down the gist of what the speakers had said - along with my youthful rebuttals. On the tenth day I gave up, although my notebook still had many blank pages left. I couldn’t find my way out of the political undergrowth. It was the same for my friends. Each party. we felt, was partly right. But they all engaged in disreputable tactics - horse-trading, we called it - the haggling, the lobbying, the jostling for power. No party seemed dean. None stuck uncompromisingly to their principles. Today I think we probably should have founded a party of sixteen-year-olds just to satisfy our moral demands. Whatever grows older, grows dirtier.

  Monday around noon we had a visitor. Not from the building and not from next door, but from distant Wilrnersdorf, a district in the west of the city, two hours from here by foot. A girl named Frieda, whom the widow had heard of but never met.

  Thereby hangs a tale, which begins with the widow’s nephew who was a medical student once upon a time. One night he was assigned to air-raid duty at his university. A young female medical student was assigned as well, and their joint watch produced a pregnancy and a shotgun wedding. The bride was nineteen and the groom twenty-one. Then the war machine snatched him and sent him off to the front, and no one knows where he is. His wife, however, who is now in her eighth month, moved in with a girlfriend, the Frieda now sitting on our kitchen chair and bringing us news from the outside world.

  The widow’s first question: ‘And you, did they also... ?’

  No, Frieda is still unscathed - well, not entirely: some Russian pushed her against the wall of the basement, but had to run off and fight so he couldn’t take his full pleasure. It seems the soldiers reached the block where the two girls are living shortly before the surrender, and galloped through without setting up camp. The expectant mother had tapped her belly and said, ‘Baby,’ and they didn’t touch her.

  Frieda delivers her report and turns to us with blank, shiny eyes. I know that look, I saw it far too often in my mirror, back when I was living off nettles and porridge. And that’s the predicament the two women are in now, which is why Frieda took it upon herself to make the long, arduous journey here, through streets she says were completely silent and deserted. She asks if she could have some food for the widow’s niece by marriage and the child who is on the way. She tells us that the young woman spends the whole day flat on her back and gets dizzy at the slightest attempt to stand up. A nurse who looks after her occasionally explained that when a mother isn’t getting proper nourishment, the foetus sponges off her body’s calcium and blood and muscle tissue.

  Together the widow and I look for what we feel we can give: some of the major’s butter and sugar, a tin of milk. a loaf of bread, a piece of bacon. Frieda is ecstatic. She herself looks pitiful, her legs are like sticks and her knees jut out like gnarled bumps. Even so, she’s quite cheerful and not afraid of the twohour trip home. For our part, we’re happy to have this envoy from the distant district. We ask her to describe in detail the route she took. to tell us what she saw. We pet her and beam at this calflike, half-starved eighteen-year-old, who mentions that she once wanted to teach gymnastics. Well, there won’t be much demand for that any more, not here, not for the foreseeable future - people are happy not to have to make any extraneous movements - or at least the others are, the people going hungry. Right now this doesn’t apply to me, I still have my strength. The widow hits a sore point when she suggests to Frieda, ‘Well, my child, couldn’t you find some halfway nice Russian and give him a pretty smile? So that he’d bring you girls a little something to eat?’

  Frieda gives a smile, a little foolishly, and says that there are hardly any Russians left on her block, otherwise... And she packs up the presents and stashes them in the shopping bag she brought along.

  Her visit really bucks us up. So we’re not entirely cut off from the world -we, too, could risk hiking across town to see friends and acquaintances. Since Frieda came we’ve been planning and scheming, wondering whether we should take our chances. Herr Pauli is against the idea. He sees us both being nabbed and sent off somewhere to do forced labour, possibly to Siberia. We think of Frieda, who managed to do it, and keep on planning.

  It’s late afternoon as I write this and I’ve just returned from my first big trip. It came about very unexpectedly. I was sitting at the window seat, even though you hardly see anyone on the street now except Russians and people getting water. And lo and behold, a Russian comes bicycling right up to our door - it’s the major.

  I race downstairs. He has a sparkling new German man’s bicycle. I beg and plead: ‘Could I take it for a ride? Just for five minutes?’ The major stands on the kerb, shakes his head. He’s not sure what to do, he’s afraid that someone might steal the bike from me. At last I persuade him.

  Sunshine. The weather turns warm in the twinkling of an eye. I pedal as fast as I can. The wind roars in my ears. I’m speeding because it makes me happy, after being so miserably cooped up all the time - and also because I want to prevent anyone stealing the bike. I race past blackened ruins. In this part of town the war ended one day earlier than where we are. You can see civilians sweeping the streets. Two women are pushing and pulling a mobile operating unit, probably recovered from the rubble sterile lamps ablaze. An old woman is lying on top under a woollen blanket, her face is white, but she’s still alive.

  The farther south I ride the further the war recedes. Here you can even see whole groups of Germans standing around and chatting. People don’t dare do that where we live. There are even children outside, hollow-cheeked and unusually quiet. Women and men are digging around in the gardens. There are only a few isolated Russians. A Volkssturm barricade is still piled up in front of the tunnel. I dismount and push my bike through a gap in the barricade. Beyond the tunnel, on the lawn in front of the S-Bahn station, there is a knee-high mound strewn with greenery, marked with three wooden posts painted bright red and affixed with small handwritten plaques - edged paper under glass. I read three Russian names and the dates of their death: 26 and 27 April, 1945.

  I stand there a long time. As far as I can remember this is the first Russian grave I’ve seen so close. During my travels there I caught only fleeting glimpses of graveyards, weathered plaques, bent crosses, the oppressive neglect of poor village life. Our papers were always reporting on how the Russians hide their war dead as a disgrace, how they bury them in mass unmarked graves and stamp down the earth to render the spot invisible. This can’t be true. These posts and plaques are obviously standard-issue supply. They’re mass-produced according to a pattern, with a white star on top - coarse, cheap and thoroughly ugly, but at the same time utterly conspicuous, glaring red, garish and impossible to miss. They must put them up in their country, too. Which means that they, too, practise their own cult of graves, their own hero-veneration, though officially their ideology rejects any resurrection of the flesh. If the plaques were just there to mark the grave for future reburial, a simple sign with the name or number would suffice. They could save themselves a lot of red paint and star-cutting. But no, they envelope their dead soldiers in an aura of red, and sacrifice both work and good wood to provide them with an aureole, however paltry it may be.

  I pedal on, as fast as I can, and soon see the former manor house where my firm was last housed. I wonder about the family on the ground floor, if the little baby made it through the milkless time.

  No children, no young mother - none of them are there. Finally, after much knocking and shouting, an elderly man appears, unshaven and we
aring an undershirt. It takes me a while to recognize him as the authorised representative of our former publishing house, someone who was always immaculately groomed from cuff to collar - now in a dirty state of decline. He recognizes me, but doesn’t show the least bit of feeling. Grumpily he tells me how he and his wife snuck over here when their apartment was hit on the last day of the war. The place was deserted, all the furniture carried off, whether by Germans or Russians, he can’t say - presumably both. Inside, the building is ransacked, wrecked, and reeks of human excrement and urine. Even so, there’s still a mountain of coal in the basement. I scrounge around for an empty carton, and pack it full of briquettes, much to the man’s displeasure, but the coal is no more his than it is mine. The idea of helping me doesn’t occur to him. With effort I haul the box over to the bike and tie it onto the luggage rack with my belt and a bit of string I find lying around.

  Back home, on the double. I race up the street,._ this time past endless rows of soldiers hunched on the kerb. Typical frontline, men, tired, grimy, dusty, with stubbly chins and dirty faces. I’ve never seen Russians like this before. It dawns on me that we’ve been dealing with elite troops: artillery, signal corps, freshly washed and clean-shaven. The lowliest types we’ve ever seen are the supply-train men, who might have smelled of horses but weren’t nearly as battle-won as these soldiers, who are far too exhausted to pay attention to me or my bike. They barely glance up, it’s clear they’re at the end of a forced march.

  Quickly, quickly, there’s our corner. The old police barracks is swarming with automobiles, that hum with a deep, satisfied drone - they smell of real petrol. The German cars never smelled like that.

  Gasping for breath, I proudly carry the bike upstairs, along with my load of coal. This time it’s the major who comes running down towards me. He’s all agitated, imagining his bike stolen and me who-knows-where. Meanwhile the Uzbek has drifted in as well. Right away the widow sends him to the pump with two buckets to get water for us. He trots off goodnaturedly; he’s become like part of the family.

  I’m sun-drunk and exhilarated from riding fast. I feel more cheerful than I have in weeks, practically elated. On top of that the major has brought some Tokay wine. We drink it; I feel good, cosy as a cat. The major stayed till 5p.m.; after he left I felt rotten. I cried.

  [Weeks later, scribbled in the margin, to be used by novelists: For three heartbeats her body became one with the unfamiliar body on top of her. Her nails dug into the stranger’s hair, she heard the cries coming from her own throat and the stranger’s voice whispering words she couldn’t understand. Fifteen minutes later she was all alone. The sunlight fell through the shattered panes in broad swathes. She stretched, enjoying the heaviness in her limbs, and brushed the tousled fringe back from her forehead. Suddenly she felt, with uncanny precision, a different hand burrowing into her hair, the hand of her lover, perhaps long dead. She felt something swelling, churning, erupting inside her. Tears came streaming out of her eyes. She tossed about, beat her fists against the cushions, bit her hands and arms until they bloomed red and blue with tiny tooth marks. She howled into the pillow and wanted to die.]

  TUESDAY, 8 MAY 1945, WITH THE REST OF MONDAY

  Evening came and we were all alone - Herr Pauli, the widow and I. The sun went down red - a repugnant image that reminded me of all the fires I’d seen over the past few years. The widow and I went to the little pond for some dirty washing water. (For drinking water a German still has to count on an hour’s wait.)

  It might have been 8p.m. - we’re living without a clock because the one wrapped in a towel and hidden in the back of the chest keeps stopping. Things are quiet around the pond. The murky water is littered with bits of wood, old rags, and green park benches. We fill our buckets and trudge back, letting the cloudy liquid inside the third one slosh away as we carry it between us. Beside the rotting steps that lead up the grassy slope we see something, a shape on the ground - a person, a man, lying on his back in the grass, knees bent and pointing upward.

  Is he sleeping? Yes, and very soundly, too: the man is dead. We both stand there gaping. His mouth is hanging open so wide you could stick your whole hand inside. His lips are blue, his nostrils waxen, caved in. He looks about fifty; dean-shaven, bald. Very proper appearance - a light grey suit with hand-knit grey socks and old-fashioned lace-up shoes that are polished and shiny. I touch his hands, which are splayed out on the lawn next to him; his fingers are crooked into claws, facing up. They feel lukewarm, far from the cold of rigor mortis. But that doesn’t mean anything since he’s been lying in the sun. There’s no pulse; the man is definitely dead. His body hasn’t been looted though; there’s a silver pin in his tie. We wonder whether we should check his vest for papers in case there are relatives to notify. It’s a creepy feeling, disturbing. We look around for people, but there’s no one in sight. I bound a few steps down the street and see a couple standing in a doorway; a young woman and a young man, and ask them both to please come with me, there’s a body lying over there. Reluctantly they follow me, pause beside the dead man a moment, don’t touch a thing. Finally they leave without a word. We stand there a little longer, at a loss, and then we leave as well. Our hearts are heavy. Nevertheless my eyes automatically register every little piece of wood, and just as mechanically, my hands stash them in the bag we’ve brought expressly for that purpose.

  Just outside the door to our building we run into our old friend Curtainman Schmidt, together with our deserter. I’m astounded that these two have dared venture out onto the street. We tell them about the dead man, the widow imitating the position of his mouth. ‘Stroke,’ mumbles the ex-soldier. Should we all go to have another look?

  ‘I wouldn’t,’ says Curtainman Schmidt. ‘Next thing there’ll be something missing from his pockets and everyone’ll claim it was us. ‘ And then he says something that makes even us immediately forget about the dead man. ‘The Russians have all left.’ While we were getting water from the pond they moved out of our building and out of the block and drove off in the trucks. Curtainman Schmidt describes how well upholstered these trucks were, with mattress parts and sofa cushions from the abandoned apartments.

  They’re gone! They’re all gone! We can hardly believe it. Out of some involuntarily reflex we look up the street, as if trucks had to be arriving any minute with new troops. But there is only silence - an eerie silence. No horses, no neighing, no roosters. Nothing left but horse manure, which the concierge’s younger daughter is already sweeping out of the hall. I look at the sixteen-year-old girl, up to now the only person I know who lost her virginity to the Russians. She has the same dumb, self-satisfied look she always had. I try to imagine how it would have been if my first experience had come in this way. But I stop myself - it’s unimaginable. One thing is for sure: if this were peacetime and a girl had been raped by some vagrant, there’d be the whole - peacetime hoopla of reporting the crime, taking the statement, questioning witnesses, arrest and confrontation, news reports and neighbourhood gossip - and the girl would have reacted differently, would have suffered a different kind of shock. But here we’re dealing with a collective experience, something foreseen and feared many times in advance, that happened to women right and left, all somehow part of the bargain. And this mass rape is something we are overcoming collectively as well. All the women help the other, by speaking about it, airing their pain and allowing others to air theirs and spit out what they’ve suffered. Which, of course, doesn’t mean that creatures more delicate than this cheeky Berlin girl won’t fall apart or suffer for the rest of their lives.

  For the first time since 27 April we were able to lock the door to our building. And with that, unless new troops are housed here, we begin a new life.

  All the same, at around 9p.m. someone called up for me. It was the Uzbek repeating my name over and over in his laboured voice (actually the Russified version of my name that the major bestowed on me). When I looked out, I saw him cursing and making threatening gestures at me and poi
nting at the locked door with great indignation. Well, my chubby friend, that won’t help you one bit. But I let him in, the major close at his heels, limping badly. It’s clear that the bicycling hasn’t helped his condition. Once again the widow fixed some compresses. His knee looks hugely swollen and dangerously red. I can’t imagine how anyone could bike, dance or climb stairs with that. They’re sturdy as horses, we can’t keep up.

  A bad night with the feverish major. His hands were hot, his eyes bleary; he couldn’t sleep and kept me awake. Finally the new day dawned.

  I escorted the major and his man downstairs and unlocked the door, which once again belongs to us. Afterwards we had a revolting job: the Uzbek evidently has some kind of dysentery, and sprayed the toilet, the wall and the floor tiles. I wiped it up with issues of a Nazi professional journal for pharmacists, and cleaned things as well as I could, using nearly all the water we brought from the pond yesterday evening. If only Herr Pauli knew, with his constant grooming, and his sissy manicures. and pedicures!

  It’s Tuesday. Around 9a.m. the secret knock, which we still use even though there are no longer any more Russians in the house. It’s Frau Wendt, with the eczema; she’s heard a rumour that peace has been declared. The last of the uncoordinated German defence has been broken in the south and north. We have surrendered.

  The widow and I breathe more easily. Good thing it happened so quickly. Herr Pauli is still cursing about the Volkssturm, all those people senselessly sent to die at the last moment, old, tired men just left there to bleed to death, helpless, with not even a rag to dress their wounds. Fractured bones jabbing out of civilian trousers, snow-white bodies heaped on stretchers, and bleeding in a steady drip, every trench and passageway blotted with slippery; lukewarm puddles of blood. No doubt about it: Pauli has been through a rough time. Which is why I think the neuralgia that’s kept him chained to his bed for over a week is half psychosomatic it’s a refuge, a retreat. He’s not the only man in the building with that kind of refuge. There’s the bookseller, for instance, with his Nazi party affiliation, and the deserter with his desertion, and any number of others with this or that Nazi past that makes them fear deportation or something else - they all have some excuse when it comes to fetching water or venturing out to perform some other task. And the women do their best to hide their men and protect them from the (angry enemy. After all, what more can the Russians do to us? They’ve already done everything.