Letters From Berlin: A Story of War, Survival, and the Redeeming Power of Love and Friendship

by Kerstin Lieff

  I could not help but be amazed at the passion and the courage that burned throughout the letters as I read, and this thought came to me: I should translate them. Someone should hear what she wrote during the most harrowing weeks in Berlin in 1945. I wanted to believe she trusted me to make of her stories what I would. And the idea for this book was born.

  I pulled out the cassette tapes, the ones with her stories, and listened to them again, now much more closely, one by one. I took notes. I asked myself questions. I transcribed, and then I researched. I began to read every book on the subject of that era and that war I could find: William Shirer, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Albert Speer, Anne Applebaum—anyone who could give me more information about that time in her life, and that time in history.

  Then I remembered something: On one of our Sundays, a later one when we were winding down and there was little more that she could recall, she had handed me a box. “I thought you’d be interested in this,” she had said. The box contained documents, old family papers such as baptism and immunization certificates from her childhood in East Prussia. At the time, I simply thanked her, but asked her to keep it in her home. Somehow it seemed too old and too valuable—at least to her—to have it living in my home with dogs and wild grandchildren running around. I did not know then how important this box would become.

  As I made an outline of the history of Germany before and during the Second World War and organized her stories around it, questions regarding time lines arose. Oh, what a blessing it was, now, to have that box of documents I so cavalierly told her to keep! In it, I found answers to so much that I was missing: a bundle of letters that her brother, Dieter, had sent from the war front. I found school report cards, and marriage certificates, the British interzone pass that allowed her, finally, to stay in West Germany. I found the Russian papers that certified her release from prison. And, to my disbelieving eyes, there was her Ahnenpass, the Nazi passport that certified her genealogy for the previous ten generations.

  Another invaluable gift she left me was a number of photo albums. How they were preserved I can only guess. But now that I needed to confirm her stories, the photos were there. All of them. There were photos of the farm where she worked, of her Jewish friend, Hilde, and of her beloved maid, Bertha.

  Little by little, as I transcribed and translated and cobbled together her memoirs, the arc of her story came into focus. I was introduced to a new woman, not the mother I had always known. She became a teenager who sometimes clashed with her parents and got herself in trouble. I learned of her longings, her disappointments in life, and her dreams. And, when I read her letters, she became a young woman in love. Evidently, she grew up to believe she would be her own person, free to pursue her passions and to make decisions based on her own values—something new for women, and something that may have given her the spirit to survive all those years of war and imprisonment.

  Over the decades since 1945, the stories from wartime Europe seem to have organized themselves neatly into accounts of the good guys versus the bad, and understandably so. It was, to be sure, an era of extreme evil and heroism and persecution. Yet our many bookshelves dedicated to that era have left little space for the stories of the millions of others who also suffered but whose voices were stifled because they came from the wrong side of the war.

  In this regard, to have been given a chance to peer into Margarete’s young soul has been a profound privilege. She has left us with an important piece of history that is rapidly dying away, as fewer and fewer survivors and witnesses to that era remain alive. Hers is a testimonial seldom heard, one that had been silenced for more than fifty years.

  Margarete would be happy to know, I am sure, that her stories and her letters, and her many years of unspeakable suffering, were not in vain. I hope I have done them justice.

  —Kerstin Lieff

  Note to the Reader

  When I told my family and the few friends who knew her that I planned to write my mother’s memoir, “ambitious” was a word that came up more than once. And then, “daunting.” I didn’t think so. After all, I had all my mother’s stories on cassette tapes. Wouldn’t I just need to transcribe them and then translate? The information was all there: her stories in her own voice and her diary containing the letters written to Franzel. But as I began to write, I began to see the magnitude of the project: a life lived in three countries, on two continents, in three languages, and over the course of two decades—and then the story was not even my own! What I thought would be no more than a few months of typing became two exhausting years of research, correspondence, travels … and countless questions. I was, to say the least, daunted, and after two years I still didn’t know if I had all the facts right.

  As I read, wrote, and reviewed my mother’s stories, I began to realize that she could have made some mistakes—that, as vivid as her recollections were, her memory, after fifty years, may have blurred, that characters may have actually been other than the ones she said they were, and that some dates were actually different from the ones she gave. In fact, I did find some errors. For example, she remembered clearly that the first day of war was a Sunday. She remembered it because they were at the beach that day when she heard the announcer over the loudspeaker and her Mutti broke down in tears. And yet September 1, 1939, was a Friday. I took pains to figure out what possibly happened on that Sunday that left her with such a profound memory, and I believe I discovered the answer—food rationing was announced on the Sunday just five days before the actual start of war. But I left her story as it was, mistakes and all.

  I hope you will bear with me—those errors I was able to catch I noted. I dread to think some others may have slipped by unnoticed. When it came to descriptions of places I’d never visited, I had to rely on friends, films, histories, memoirs, and other personal accounts to verify what she had told me. I’ve never been to Russia, but Russia was a big part of her life once, so I was faithful to her descriptions yet filled in certain historical gaps from research. Historians may question the accuracy of her historical and political comments. However, I decided to leave her story as she told it, making notes wherever I saw fit to clarify what may have been errors on her part.

  She used many names in her stories—some I find fascinating that she even remembered at all: Felicitas Jahn, for example, a woman who shows up only once in her later life in the Gulag. But she doesn’t remember her beloved maid’s full name. It was only ever Bertha. She spoke of Hilde, one of her best friends, but never mentioned her full name, either. Some of the people she talked about with such emotion, and often tears, that I felt I needed to keep the names exactly as they were given to me. At other times, it seemed, she offered names in order to keep a flow to the story—something she was so good at. Whether someone actually existed as “Klaus” rather than “Wolfgang” I’ll never know.

  And in this vein, in a true Mamma vein, bits of dialogue often appeared in her narrative, and even the occasional long monologue. Summoning those voices was her way of introducing me to the characters of her past. In most instances, I followed my mother’s lead and let those individuals speak for themselves—but always, of course, as she remembered them.

  I would be remiss if I did not include the possibility that I have made some mistakes. I am not a historian; I’ve been an artist most of my life, and creative writing has been my passion. Thus, this book is not meant to teach history, but to share a young woman’s personal experiences through her eyes. I took my mother’s stories, which were often told out of chronological order, and often even repeated with varying details over our three years of collaboration together, and worked to put them into a readable memoir. In my research, I found some stories could have been remembered out of sequence, and when I could I annotated such instances.

  As this story was told to me in German, there are words that I have not found a match for in the English language. My mother used a number of temporal idioms, such as Landser and Lazarett. Rather than repeat the tedious and rough tra
nslation of “infantrymen” and “army hospital,” I took the liberty of keeping them German. However, there are other words that I personally have wanted to keep German because of the meaning they hold for me. For example, an “apartment” has never been as grand as a Wohnung. Surely this is because my grandmother in Hamburg always, in my memory, had a majestic Wohnung! Even visiting as an adult, I remember high, high ceilings with crown molding and door handles so large it took two hands to pull them down.

  There are other words in this book, especially acronyms, that I have never pronounced in English. Jena, my mother’s beloved university town, would lose all its charm if not pronounced “YAY-nah.” The BDM will always be the “bay-day-em” for me, and the NKWD, the dreaded Soviet police, will always be the “en-kah-veh-day.” I have left many of the nouns, those that are particularly German, capitalized, as is normal in the German language. Margarete studied “the Maths,” because it is only right that she did so, and her parents will always be “Mutti” and “Papa.” And so, I hope to have passed a bit of her German-ness on to you, the reader.

  Part I

  PARADISE LOST

  1933–1942

  1

  PARADISE

  I.

  The year I want to tell you about, the year everything changed forever, I was nine. Bertha cried, not because she was sad, but because she was happy. Papa fell off his horse. And my brother kept asking, “Am I still the way we used to be?”

  II.

  My father, whom I called Papa and whose name was Werner, was a good rider. My mother always said this about him—and about herself too. He had turned thirty-nine in September, and he said that made him very old. He was a tall man, against other men, and had a clear forehead that reached all the way to where a thin line of dark hair wrapped around his head, and his eyes were brown and kind.

  My mother’s name was Helga, but I called her Mutti. She was beautiful, with green eyes and dark hair that she combed up into a bun, and she would tuck the stray hairs in at the back of her head with a comb made of ivory, from India. She was elegant, and her fingernails were painted red most of the time. Mutti was four years younger than my Papa. Her family had come from Sweden, which is where my grandmother and grandfather still lived and where we went to celebrate our Christmases most years. Mutti’s dark hair, she told me, came from her mother, who was of French descent. I knew from my history class that many French people had been persecuted in France, and they had to flee that country, because they were Protestant. And I knew these people were called Huguenots. Her mother’s family name had been deGobbin.

  My brother, Dieter, was younger than me by twelve months and twenty-eight days. We were together, always. He was slight for a boy, and he had a serious face, delicate skin, and long fingers. He loved listening to Beethoven on the gramophone, and he was always singing songs he kept in his head. On indoor days, the days when the northern sky of Germany was heavy with rain, we recited poems to each other that we had learned by heart and I would play my violin. Dieter would sing along, but he only knew words to a few children’s songs, so he would sing along to any melody I played: Hola-hie, hola-ho, hola-hie, hola-ho, which really meant nothing at all. And he knew the words to “Kling, Glöckchen, klinge-linge-ling”; it was a Christmas song, which didn’t matter to him, because he loved to repeat the words that described the church bells ringing, klinge-linge-ling, klinge-linge-ling. This is what he would sing so many times I would finally have to tell him to stop. And then we would giggle. He was my little brother, after all, and I loved him.

  Bertha was our maid, and I loved her too. She was a soft woman. Her voice was quiet, and her body was big and round. She had pale blue eyes and hair that curled around her ears on both sides, and she cut it herself. I know this because I used to watch her do it. Her body looked like a pillow that was divided in half by the apron she wore. It was a white starched apron, and it ran to the length of her skirt. Her hands, which were large and red, seemed always to be clasped in a sort of prayer just at her waist. It is what she did most of the time instead of talking.

  Bertha helped my Mutti in the house, ironing our school uniforms and polishing our shoes. She dusted the furniture and peeled the potatoes in the kitchen. She cooked most of our meals, though Mutti always locked all the silver away in a drawer, and Bertha had to ask for the key to take it out each day before we ate. “Because,” Mutti said, “one never wants to tempt the help in times like this, and silver, you know, is valuable.”

  Bertha swept the hallways and hung the washing out in the garden, and she lived with us most of the time, except when she went home to her family to visit for a weekend. Which rarely ever happened. Usually she stayed with us on these days to work, for which she would earn a few extra Marks.

  Her room was a small one just off the kitchen, and it had its own door that she could lock with a key from the inside when she wanted to be alone. But she always allowed me to come in if I knocked. I sat on her bed and watched when she made herself ready for the day. Her bed had a fluffy duvet—we called it a Steppdecke—and several down pillows, large square ones, stuffed loosely into white linen pillowcases.

  There was a tall window with long lace curtains at the far end of her narrow room, and on the windowsill below it was a photo of a boy inside a black frame. Bertha said it was her brother, and I think he was dead. Behind the window, just outside, was an apple tree. For me it was a magic tree. I was sure there were fairies living in it. In the spring it was fully pink—a perfect place for fairies to dance—and in the summer, when the red apples appeared, I thought elves had taken the fairies’ place to sit among the leaves. In the winter there were only thin black branches on that tree and a few shriveled apples hanging here and there, and by that I knew the elves and fairies had left for the winter to live under a rock or somewhere else in the garden to stay warm. And then the spring and the pink would arrive again, and the dance would start all over.

  Bertha always had large cups filled with coffee and warm milk waiting for Dieter and me when we awoke in the morning, and the breakfast table was heavy with cheeses and the smoked ham we called Schinken, and there was a basket with tiny pillows inside it that kept the soft-boiled eggs warm, each egg in its own pocket. Small bowls filled with jams of all colors—gooseberry, orange, and the large blackberries we called Brombeeren—were on the table too, and then, of course, there were Brötchen, warm bread rolls Bertha had just bought from the baker. Next to my plate was Bertha’s jar of dark honey with a small wooden spoon sticking out of it. She always placed it next to my plate so that I could be the first to have the honey for my Brötchen.

  Swinemünde was the name of the small town where we lived.1 It was on the Baltic Sea and had a white and sandy beach that ran along the northern shore, and there was a river that merged with the sea, called the Swine, just there where our house was. On the other side of the Swine there was a great lighthouse with a big and frightening head on it that lit up at night and peered at Dieter and me no matter where we were.

  Swinemünde had broad streets and short houses, a cathedral and a town hall, and there were some very old houses that had been built so long ago—the Middle Ages, my Mutti told me—that they were built of handmade bricks, large, in the style called Backstein.

  In 1934 there were not many people living in Swinemünde yet, mostly those employed by the sea—sea captains, sailors, shipping companies—and there were even a few people who came as tourists if they could afford it. They came to our town for a Kur—a visit to the sea, prescribed by a doctor, “in order to improve the health.”

  My Papa was not employed by the sea. He was the overseer for the mining operations in a coal mine somewhere else, and I didn’t know where that was.2 I knew he left home early each day, and he came home late each evening, and he often was tired.

  My family owned two horses, which we boarded at a private riding club, where I took my riding lessons and where Mutti won championships. We had a real telephone and a car and a maid. My f
riends at school did not have these things. We were well off for a family in Swinemünde.

  Margarete and Dieter, about ages six and five, on horseback.

  Swinemünde was all I knew about the world, and the world, for me, was paradise. The sound of waves splashing against the yachts in the harbor and the ships that came in from far-off places like Hamburg or Stockholm, the caw of seagulls flying under a sky that hung low over the sea, sand between my toes when I came home at night, and the taste of salt in the air—this was my Swinemünde.

  Winters were long in Swinemünde, but I knew there would always be spring, just as I knew the pink would come back, just as I knew my mittens would come off again when everything melted. Summers, on the other hand, were too short, but we filled them with adventures on the long beach and in the forest that went on forever.

  We could see the lighthouse nearly everywhere we played, Dieter and I, and we told stories of who might live there. A witch, of course. And the purpose of the light she flooded over the iridescent sand at night was just to find us. We screamed out loud when we told each other these things. Each time the stories scared us more, and we would run through the woods as fast as we could. Then at night—cold, out of breath, and dirty—we would run home, my hair in tangles (oh, would my Mutti scold!), my coat open to the wind, and often my knees and hands bloody.

  III.

  The year I want to tell you about was 1933, the end of it, and 1934, the beginning. Life was difficult for many people, Mutti said often, and I didn’t quite know what she meant. It didn’t seem so for me, but my Papa told me his family had lost all their money during the Inflation, and that their house, where he grew up, had once had a real elevator in it, and that it had been sold for a bag of wheat to a rich lady. He said when he studied at university he wore white clothes and traveled in impressive circles and that he was a chosen student, a Korps student, and that even his father was a Korps student, someone from whom much would be expected, and that he used to put pomade into his hair. This all was because he thought he was important. And then the family became poor. And now Papa was who he was, and he also sang to me and played music for me on the piano, and at night he read to me from the book of Grimm’s fairy tales.