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

by Kerstin Lieff

  Oh, the fear. I led, with Dieter close behind. “I’m here with you,” Dieter kept saying in his little-boy voice. “I’m here. Don’t worry, Grete. I’ll protect you. Don’t worry,” and I imagined him at Christmas again. Don’t worry … Just step on the flower patterns …

  Floor one, the vestibule, was intact. The marble stairway was still standing. There were bits of plaster lying around, but nothing more. Floor two was intact. Floor three, which is where we lived, the hallway was all right. So far, so good. We opened the front door and walked around. A cabinet had fallen over and some cups had broken. In my bedroom a few books had fallen to the floor, and Dieter noticed that his desk drawers were standing open. So far, though, all seemed well, and I felt encouraged. No smoke, nothing smelled of fire, and we left our Wohnung to climb the stairway to the next level.

  The doors had been left unlocked. This was the rule, right along with leaving the bathtubs full of water and the gas turned off. We let ourselves in and looked around. We then opened each door, each closet. It was such a different home from the one that we lived in. So old-fashioned! The same space, and yet old, old things. An old couch and a chair that was worn to a thread. Nothing matched. The lace curtains were old-fashioned. Dieter looked at me impatiently. “Come on! What are you doing? Looking around like this? We have work to do.”

  We walked around, went through the entire house, opening all the doors to all the bedrooms. Several framed photos had fallen, and I picked them up and placed them back on the bedside table. I didn’t want Frau Ahlbeck to have a fright. Dieter had already gone on ahead to inspect the floor above, and suddenly I heard him yell, “Aei! Margarete, come quick!”

  I hurried. Dieter was standing in the open doorway of the bathroom in the top-floor Wohnung. He looked at me, his eyes large as moons. Neither of us knew what to do next.

  We stared, and looked away, and stared some more. There, in the tub full of water, like a monster, was a bomb: dark steel and pointed on one end, lying silent and unexploded. I had no reference, no knowledge of what this discovery would mean. I was only a girl of sixteen, but at that moment I felt like I was three. I wanted my Mutti, and I wanted someone to hold me, and I didn’t want to see any more of this war.

  “Come, Dieter. We should go back down and tell the others.” I grabbed his arm. We weren’t sure whether we should run or walk, or if our running could rattle the bomb enough to explode it, so we tiptoed down the steps quietly. Let the monster sleep. We made it down the steps, and as soon as I saw my Mutti, I fell into her arms and sobbed.

  Herr Schulz called the neighborhood officials whose job it was to make sure all the homes were safe after a bombing raid. It was soon decided that the bomb would not explode, because, in fact, this monster had “drowned.” There was, though, a broken window through which the bomb must have entered. It had simply slipped into that tub and peacefully gone to sleep.

  “It’s our great luck and the grace of heaven and of God that we are still alive,” Herr Schulz, looking rather shaken, told the rest of us who were still waiting in the bunker. The monster was later removed, and we were all given one more day.

  That day of bombings took many of the important buildings in Berlin, including the Reichstag and the Propaganda Ministry. But most sadly, many residential neighborhoods were decimated too. And still our street, the Windscheidstrasse, had no damage other than the broken window in our house and the house across the street with the big hole it in.

  Bombings soon became a daily event. We would sit together in the dark, and there we would wait. Some of us prayed; some of us just fell asleep. Sometimes our house would shake and we would hear furniture falling in the upper floors. There were sirens and more sirens, and then we would hear a wall falling somewhere. We could hear bricks crashing—it was a horribly loud noise—entire houses falling, and we never knew which one had been hit. And there were loud explosions, some off in the distance, some very near. We would usually discover later it was a gas line that had been hit and the gases had caught fire.

  When all was clear, it often was morning already. We students were so tired, we just fell asleep in class; some of us would fall off our chairs in the middle of a lecture. And, more and more frequently, a classmate or a teacher would simply never show up again. We never asked why.

  III.

  We had all been in our basement shelter since about six one night, and it must have been early on in the war years, because Dieter was with me. “Did you hear that?” Dieter gave me a good shove. No, I had not heard a thing. I was sound asleep, and if a bomb should have dropped on us, well, I would not have known.

  “Did you hear that? We must have been hit!”

  Everyone in the bunker stood up from their seats, some pressed their ears to the walls, hands trembling with fear. “O Gott, O Gott!” Frau Schulz kept wailing. Her kitty had been left behind in her apartment, because she would never come when she was called.

  Then it came again. A violent shudder; everything shook. Mortar fell from the walls. “Good God! Oh God! We’ve been hit! We’re on fire!” No one could move; the fear simply stunned us.

  And then the world went silent. We had to wait for the all-clear to sound, and all we could do was wait. And cry. Certainly there were those of us who did. I heard a whimpering coming from the corner of the room, but there was no light anymore. I only sucked in my breath and prayed a quick Thank you, God. After all, we were still here and alive, all of us.

  It was so late, maybe three in the morning, when the all-clear sirens finally sounded, and we were going to be able to see what had happened and what was now gone.

  Again it was Dieter and I who were sent to inspect. This time, Dieter bravely took the lead. Stay inside the flower patterns …

  I ran up the stairs and into the first-floor Wohnung. Everything was broken and covered in dust—the chandelier was lying on the floor, chairs were tipped over. Everywhere there was glass. Broken wine glasses, a cabinet that had fallen over face-first. Everywhere, a silent, dusty darkness. Each Wohnung looked to be the same—a mess—but the building itself seemed still to be intact.

  We had a small hatch in the ceiling of the top floor that opened to a roof garden. It was where we hung our laundry to dry and where the women of the house would go to shake their rugs. This hatch had a ladder with a rope on it, and Dieter said we needed to open it. What if the roof were burning? That was always a great danger, because if the roof caught fire, the whole house could come down, even after the bombings had stopped.

  It was I, then, the older one, who had to do the climbing, and I took my first step, though I was filled with fear after what we had just seen inside the house. I climbed up and carefully pushed open the hatch.

  What I saw filled me with terror. Red! Red! Nothing but red! The calm I had tried to maintain as we made our inspections instantly became hysteria.

  I took a deep breath. I had work to do. I was the one who was standing on the ladder; I was the one who would now need to climb up farther onto the roof to see. How much was on fire? Where was it burning? It wasn’t courage that made me go up another step. I was supposed to do it, and that’s what drove me.

  Outside, on the roof, the noises were unbearable. And yet, I could finally feel relief: The red I saw was the sky burning, not our building. It was filled with flames, and all the houses around us were burning. Tall buildings with fires leaping up higher than twice the size of our building. I looked over to my left and saw that an entire city block was on fire. Explosions everywhere. I could hear them, but I did not know where they were coming from.

  A house on fire in Berlin. “What I saw filled me with terror.” (akg-images)

  The air was hot, like on a midsummer day. I tried hard not to shake, but my knees threatened to buckle. I stepped back down and shut the hatch door. “We’re safe, Dieter.” I heaved a large sigh, and I hugged him. Then I wept.

  Adults came soon; they had heard my screams. No one had a heart attack, and school wo
uld begin in only a few hours. The neighborhood fire inspectors arrived and everything was checked to make sure no gas lines had been hit, no water lines. As everyone was busy with something, Dieter pulled on my sleeve and said, “Come on. Let’s go out. No harm can come to us now. The bombings are done, and shouldn’t we be the ones to see what has become of our neighborhood?”

  Funny to say, but this invitation brought some relief. It was something to do. And we quickly walked down the stairs, stopping first in our Wohnung so that I could get my scarf and a coat. Dieter already had his boots on, and he was in a hurry.

  Oh, what a shock to see everything burning. I mean, everything. The house kitty-corner from ours, completely up in flames. All the windows had exploded, and behind them was nothing but red, fires burning on every floor. And where were our neighbors? I didn’t know; I never would know, but the building was going to be gone very soon. Our block would begin to look the way so much of Berlin already looked, broken and empty. We made our way down the street, stepping around debris, piles here and there, burning, and walked in the direction where I had seen the block of houses on fire. Trucks were standing askew, blackened or burning; trees were burning. As we rounded a corner, a sudden blast of hot wind hit me in the face so hard I had no time to even tighten my scarf, and it blew right off my shoulders! I screamed, sure no one heard me. I clung to a lamppost. Dust was blowing everywhere, and the winds were blowing backwards, headed back into the burning houses! I saw a baby buggy, and I watched as it was suctioned up into the wind and then ignited.

  Through the dust and the wind I saw that, up ahead, Dieter too was holding on to a lamppost. He too had his head ducked down against the wind. Aei! Aei! I screamed at him, and from under his arm that had been shielding it, his face appeared as he tried to look in my direction. He waved one hand and together we turned and ran back home as fast as we could.

  I would learn later that what we had experienced was a firestorm, and I would never again leave my house just after a bombing.16

  When I came home from school the next day, I learned from Mutti that the bakery had suffered a direct hit, a Volltreffer. The entire house was gone, every brick of it. Gone. Mutti went that morning, hoping to buy her usual Brötchen, and found nothing but a crater in its place where the baker and his wife and their young son had lived.

  Mutti said she just stood there with her net bag in her hand, the one she had hoped to fill with Brötchen, and stared at the gaping hole. Others came, other neighbors who had survived, all with their sacks hung around their arms, and they too just stared.

  The family had lived in the rooms behind the bakery. There was no basement, so there was no bunker. The baker, we learned, had decided to stay with his family until the raid was over, and that’s how they died. I pictured him, this young man with a small boy who had only recently learned to ride a bicycle. I pictured him kissing his boy, saying, “Sleep, young man. The noise will soon be over.” And I thought of Frau Ritter, and I wondered, Where will we buy our Brötchen now?

  9

  I’LL BE HOME IN NO TIME

  I.

  Then things were quiet in Berlin again. Oddly so. We all thought the war was coming to an end. No more bombers flew over our city for nearly two years. We still had the food rations, and some of our buildings had been destroyed, but there was a strange sort of calm before the devastation that no one saw coming.

  Signs of our changed times were certainly still there. There were more and more uniformed men on the streets—the SA men who wore brown uniforms, and the SS in black. Both were frightening, but the SS in particular were the men we stayed away from. Even their hats that stuck up so weirdly in the front were intimidating. We got to know who our “friends” were—the soldiers we could speak to—and whom to avoid. The SS and SA had the eagle emblem on their collars. Regular soldiers wore the eagle on their chest. This is how I could tell them apart, because even they had brown uniforms. We distinguished them like this: “Bird here, good,” pointing to our chest. “Bird there, bad,” pointing to our collar.

  On the radio we heard only good news: “Another successful campaign on the Eastern Front … Another successful campaign in the deserts of Africa …” And I continued to study for my final exam, the Abitur, which I took and passed in March of 1942.

  Although no one knew it at the time, my class would be the last one to take this exam. After our class graduated, the big bombers would start to arrive over Berlin, daily, and all the schoolchildren were evacuated to the east to be further educated there in what was called the Kinderlandverschickung, or the KLV.

  The teachers in all schools were supposed to wear the Nazi insignia on their lapels, showing their loyalty to the Partei, but oddly, in my school, I don’t remember that any of them did. We called it the Bonbon, the “candy.” It was a round red button with, of course, the swastika on it. I have told you about our Maths teacher, the one who refused to give the Heil Hitler salute, as he was supposed to do when he entered our classroom, but our director was not a Partei man either. He was a religious man, and he let us all know it. He encouraged discussions in class—about what was righteous and how one should serve God. This man did not stay long. After my class graduated, he was replaced by a Nazi headmaster. Who knows what happened to him. He was probably sent to the Wehrmacht.

  II.

  Dieter turned sixteen while I was busy with my Abitur. He was old enough now, he said, to fight for his country, and he enlisted in the Wehrmacht of his own free will. “Idiot!” That was my only reply to his announcement. In two years he would have been drafted anyway, and by then the war would have been so close to over that he might have avoided combat altogether. But, of course, we didn’t know that.

  His friend Otto Lippert enlisted too, and so did Hilde’s brother. Her brother came home one day after having already spent time in service to his country. I was at her house when this happened. I heard him exclaim, “Das ist aber gemein!” “Mean!” is what he said about the new laws.

  He was not allowed to enroll in the officer’s training school, which is something all the boys hoped to do. He said he was told he could only be a foot soldier if he wanted to fight, because he was a half Jew, and half Jews were not allowed to become officers.

  Dieter in his uniform, age sixteen.

  “He was old enough now, he said, to fight for his country.”

  Dieter packed his rucksack. “I won’t need much. They’ll provide.” He was sure of himself. He’d stuffed a few changes of underwear into his pack and an extra pair of trousers, a comb and a toothbrush. His face shone with the pride of a boy who knew he was about to become a man. His eyeglasses were polished, and he stood at the front door waiting for Mutti and me to go with him to the train.

  Mutti was trying hard to fight back her tears. This was her baby boy, after all, and she knew what war could do. Had we not already seen too many of those one-legged men with eye patches and empty sleeves? I tried to be positive. He’ll be all right. With luck, because he’s the son of an officer, he may stay away from the front lines. Maybe even get a desk job. I prayed to the secret place I had created inside of me, the place that had protected me, so far, from bombs.

  Dieter was to leave from the Schlesischer Bahnhof, which would take him east to Frankfurt an der Oder, not far from Berlin, where he would receive his training. With its numerous tracks and platforms, it was a bustling train station. Everywhere there were soldiers and crying women, people hugging each other, waving white handkerchiefs as trains rolled off. The air was filled with a constant drone of train whistles and loudspeakers announcing arrivals and departures. Mutti and I stood there on the platform, in the midst of all this, and we watched our boy board the train. He was confident, smiling a huge smile. Mutti held her handkerchief to her mouth with one hand and waved with the other. I cried, and slowly the train moved forward.

  Dieter and a man who would soon become his comrade leaned their bodies halfway out an open window. “Don’t l
ook so worried, Mutti! I’ll be home in no time!” His voice drifted away as Mutti watched, and when his waving arm was merely a speck, she broke down in sobs. “It’s not possible … It’s not possible … ,” she kept muttering.

  “Mutti, komm,” I told her. “In two weeks, Dieter will know where he’ll be sent. And we can visit him soon.”

  Then we made our way home, a place that would now have one family member fewer.

  III.

  My mother was stupid. She always decided things for me. And I should have just once said, I won’t do this. But I didn’t. She sent me to the Frauenschule. She thought she could get me out of the Arbeitsdienst, the work service, this way, but instead I ended up doing both.

  So, I went to the Frauenschule for a year. That was the school where women learned all things to do with women’s work: childcare, cooking, ironing, and the like. I didn’t do well in those subjects. I didn’t want to be a Hausfrau! I wanted to be an athlete. I still had dreams of competing in the next Olympics, whenever that might be. But I did receive the highest grades in Leadership and Cultural Folklore. For those I got an A.

  I finished that horrible year, and I was finally able to return home in April of 1943. I had learned how to iron clothes, and I had wasted a year because Mutti’s plan to keep me out of the Arbeitsdienst didn’t work. That’s how I saw it. I still had the Arbeitsdienst before me, and it would take another six months, but it turned out to be some of the most fun I’d ever had in my life. I wished I had simply gone straight there and Mutti had not meddled. After all, I was a grown woman. I was eighteen.

  The Arbeitsdienst was one of the things Hitler created, when he first came to power, that actually helped our industry. He formed the Labor Service, which once again provided work for the people who had been unemployed as well as for the young people. We were needed to work, and we were happy about that. It provided us with something to do. The youth of the Arbeitsdienst built roads and canals and cleared away swamps for farmland. We lived with families or in barracks and received a small allowance for our work. And some, like me, got a uniform. For me, the work was on a farm, and it was a wonderfully healthy life.