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

by Kerstin Lieff

  They liked to throw Feuerplätchen. Plates, like saucers on fire, would whirl out in all directions. Some would come flying through open windows or open doorways, and in an instant the entire building would be engulfed in flames.

  But the Feuerplätchen weren’t the worst of them. The worst were the Americans. They would come with their planes in huge formations, a hundred at a time, blackening the sky with their presence, filling the air with a dense drone. And when they dropped their bombs, if one of them hit your house, you could only pray that you’d die quickly. Those bombs would go straight to the bottom floor and then burn straight up, bringing the house down within minutes.

  Our night skies brought what we called “Christmas trees.” British planes would circle the area and drop flares, so the bombers could see their target, and from this we knew exactly who was going to die. Everything in that neighborhood would glow red, and minutes later the bomber formations arrived, dropping their death loads.

  Anne-Marie and I sat together and said things like “How on earth will this all end?” and “How much longer can this go on?” One night, one very dreadful night, she told me she had a guardian. She said it was a man, an angel, with wings taller than she, and she could see him often when things were really bad. He would stand behind her and hold her shoulders with his hands.

  This is how we survived. We talked and told each other our secrets for survival. Everyone just had to figure out how to make it through another day. How to find enough food, how to keep their spirits alive. It had been five years already.

  We would sit and count the minutes some nights. Sometimes we’d say, “What’s going on? Where is he, that Brit? He’s late.”

  If we were relatively at ease, relatively sure it would not be Charlottenburg this night, we might have tried to make a joke of it: “He’s probably found a girl over there in France, probably still trying to zip up his trousers.” But on most nights we simply clenched our teeth and prayed it wouldn’t be us.

  It was on one of these nights when Anne-Marie and I were huddled in our corner with our suitcases underneath our feet. Everything outside was burning. Doors were slamming and windows were shattering when suddenly, with a blast of hot air, the door to our bunker blew open and a dog came flying in from who knows where, frightened out of his wits. I opened my mouth and thought words had come out, but they hadn’t. I was as surprised as the dog. He took a quick, frightened look and then ran around the room, circling it as fast as his little legs would go, and he never stopped. I suppose he had a right to that, what with all the panic, the terror, the need to run it off. He was no different from any of the rest of us. We sat and watched the poor thing until he finally fell over dead. From exhaustion or a heart attack, or because there was really nowhere else for him to go.

  II.

  More and more, there were refugees arriving at my train station. People fleeing from the Russians. Children and women. But the first were of a different sort—well-dressed families, fathers and mothers with children on their laps. Who were these people in their fancy first-class cars?

  The Partei people. The “Hundred Percenters.” The ones with their nice little Bonbons on their lapels and their women dressed in smart hats and gloves. The very ones who, only days earlier, warned the villagers they would be shot if they tried to leave. They were the mayors with their families who had left their villages in the middle of the night.

  Days later, when the real floods of refugees arrived, I heard stories. Bad ones that I don’t want to tell. About children being murdered … no, I can’t tell.

  But I can tell this one, from a refugee I became friends with:

  “We could already hear the artillery from the Russians, and we still weren’t allowed to leave. If we did, they showed us exactly what would happen. They would kill us. It’s true. A neighbor was hanged from a lamppost, right in the village square only a few days ago. I knew him. He used to bring the feed for our horses. Just a man, a farmer. He tried to leave with his horse and cart. They hanged him. Just to show us what would happen if we tried to do it ourselves.

  “We heard women screaming from a neighboring farmhouse. It was a woman I’d known my whole life. With her were her sixteen-year-old daughter, her mother, and some others. People who were staying with them. I recognized the voice when she screamed, ‘Please! Nyet!’ She tried the only word she knew in Russian—No!

  “But it was to no avail. The screams continued, then I heard gunshots. And then all was quiet …

  “We packed a bag. I didn’t even have time to take my fur coat. I ran so fast, through the fields and into a ditch. On the road I saw horses with wagons attached to them. The horses were dead. The wagons just stood there, some tipped over. People were trying to run, but the snow was so deep—up to their knees in places.

  “The roads were completely clogged. Nothing could move. Horse wagons, people running with wheelbarrows. Snow began to fall, and it fell all day and all night. It was so deep, and the air so cold. Children. I saw children, dead, alongside the road. The parents were either dead or, somehow, had gone on alone …”

  She was missing a finger. I only noticed it when she began her story. Her hand was wrapped in a scarf, fully brown with dried blood. It was the finger that had once worn her husband’s gold band. She had arrived in Berlin without family. Her mother, her father, grandmother, two nieces and a nephew—they were all missing.

  “My family fled when they saw the Russians advancing. I hid in the barn and didn’t run until late in the night. I thought it would be safer to run when I couldn’t be seen. But I had such a fright! As I made my way to the barn door, I heard a noise behind me. There had been a Russian soldier in the barn all this time! He was asleep, possibly drunk, I don’t know—maybe a defector? I don’t know. Maybe it was just an animal who, just like me, was scared.

  “I ran so fast then, in the darkness, and my ring caught the latch on the barn door. I was delirious. I had to run.”

  And then she showed me the stump that was leaking pus. Horrified, I brought bandages to her and washed her hand in warm water. I helped as well as I could and told her there was a Lazarett, a military hospital not far from us where she should go to be treated for tetanus.

  This poor refugee woman needed help that I couldn’t give her. She was sad beyond words, but she was also hungry, so I gave her some tea and we sat by my stove. I told her to stay as long as she liked. “But Berlin is no safer,” I told her. “We’re being bombed nearly every night. You should continue on if you can. Somewhere north. I hear from other refugees that they are trying to get to the Baltic, where they hope to make it onto a ship.”

  I heard later that one of these ships was sunk by an American bomb.21 Was that good advice to give her? It was the luck of the draw. Stay here, you’ll die; go, you’ll die. Stay here, you’ll survive; go, you’ll survive. It was just dumb luck, either way.

  III.

  On the twenty-sixth of January—it was now 1945—I received my official certificate from the Red Cross that would allow me to work in a real Lazarett. I was to do real work in a real hospital. I would see real emergencies, and, I felt, I would be able to help much more than I had been doing by handing out tea and a few bandages.

  My new place of work would be at the Lazarett number 109 on the Heerstrasse, where I would treat soldiers coming directly from the front. I was to assist the doctors in whatever capacity I was needed—in the operating rooms or in the recovery rooms.

  I was excited about my new position—and fearful. I had been promoted, yet my appointment had been mandated by the “medical emergency law,” which had an ominous sound to it. But this was war. Everything was ominous.

  The Lazarett on the Heerstrasse had been a boys’ school, converted to a hospital about a year earlier. By the time I arrived, it was already filled to capacity: one hundred patients on each of the three floors. The rooms that had been classrooms once and the auditorium we called a Gymnasium where lectures had been held were now filled with beds of d
ying men.

  One level down from the main floor was the “OP,” the operating room. This was where all the severely wounded men would be sent to have their bullets removed or their legs amputated. It was a dreadful place, but we had a bright and caring doctor in charge. He was from Estonia, a short man with broad hands and a small sweep of brown hair that he combed over his otherwise bald forehead. He had gray eyes with heavy lids that often made him look like he was sleeping. His name was Dr. von Lutzky.

  All the medical assistants were women, and they were all about my age. We soon became close friends. Christa, Gerda, Heidi, Trudi, Anika, and Ruth are some of the names I recall. At night, when our work was finished, we shared stories; we talked about what we had heard on the BBC. The toilet room on the second floor was a great place for talking. We sat here often, with a cigarette, and gossiped. We called it our Zigaretten Klosett.

  Anika was a strong woman, one who would survive, and she had such fascinating stories. She had been studying medicine in Weimar when the universities were closed. She stayed on in Weimar but needed to figure out how to survive. She said it was wit that told her how to make money, but intuition that saved her life. She taught herself how to make donuts over the Bunsen burner she stole from the school. And she sold these donuts in the streets. Then the idea came to her to buy leather from a farmer with which she made bags and sold them on the black market.

  Often she sought refuge in the lobby of the one of the grand hotels in Weimar. When the weather was bad in the winter, as it often was, she would walk in, sit on one of the lovely sofas, have a smoke, and pretend as though she belonged there. On one of these blustery days, when she was sitting in the lobby, she spied a newspaper on a table just across from her and got up from her chair to pick it up. Just in that moment a bomb crashed through the ceiling and landed right where she had been sitting! The sofa was demolished in the blink of an eye, but she was untouched.

  We all had stories like this, stories that amazed even ourselves. I had my man in the U-Bahn station, the bomb in the bathtub, and I knew what we were all thinking. We were somehow, so far, the lucky ones.

  Our friendships grew closer as the times outside became worse. Even the men who arrived at the Lazarett, the soldiers with their terrible wounds, became dear to me. We all clung to each other, each moment, each conversation, as though everything had a special meaning. When it was Ruth’s birthday, all we could do was pick a few flowers from outside and light a candle for her, but just that held a meaning as if it was the most important event of our lives.

  We were known as the Schwestern, the Sisters. Schwester Christa and Schwester Gerda. I was Schwester Margarete. At the Lazarett we had a bunker under the building where we retreated some nights, or even during the day, when there was a bomb attack. Just because this was a hospital didn’t make the waiting in the bunker any easier or the fear any less. We only sat, as we did in any bunker, and prayed while we heard the walls falling outside, doors blowing open, the winds, the machines roaring overhead.

  Among us were two nurses who never got along and fought openly. One of them, Schwester Gerda, was what we termed a “brown nurse,” one of the braunen Schwestern. She was a proud member of the Partei, and she wore her Bonbon clearly visible on her lapel. The other, Schwester Jutta, talked on and on about the boyfriend she was madly in love with, and she talked too much. We soon learned that this boyfriend was in fact French. She called him a Fremdarbeiter, but in fact he was a prisoner.

  Jutta talked too much about other things, too, things like the war and how foolish it was. How irresponsible the Führer was, how crazy it all was. And how eager she was to have it be over.

  Weren’t we all?

  One night, as we were sitting in the bunker waiting out the sirens, Jutta began, once again, with her opinions about the war.

  Schwester Gerda sat just beside me, Jutta across from us on another bench. Gerda was a tall woman with dark eyebrows who stood erect, and she called herself “a doer.” I secretly considered her narrow-minded and shallow.

  “How can you say these things?” she started in on Jutta. “You and your silly ideas of French boyfriends. You can’t even call yourself a German! You! It’s people like you who are betraying our country,” she snarled.

  Jutta was not about to let Gerda get the better of her. I was afraid of what I was witnessing.

  “You? Who are you? If it weren’t for that stupid little Bonbon you pin so proudly each morning on your lapel, who would you be? A nothing! What have you ever given? Do you think it’s you who’s saving this country?”

  The brown nurse cocked her head and sneered back at her, “Now, tell me, Jutta. Tell me, honestly. Do you mean to say you really believe all this?”

  And the two of them went on fighting as the rest of us sat in silence.

  Poor Jutta. The morning came. I arrived for work and walked through the front door of the Lazarett in time to see a flash of uniforms and badges and Jutta being hauled off, held by each arm between two SS men.

  Jutta was never sentenced, an intervention of fate. She could have gone to the concentration camp for this, but the war ended before her sentencing date. Meanwhile, we had all learned to keep our mouths shut tight around Schwester Gerda.

  We were treated very well at the Lazarett. We were the Red Cross, after all, and we felt safe because of that. We moved about with relative freedom and a rather false sense of protection.

  We received food in the Lazarett. Bread, and sometimes even enough that I could take some home to Mutti at night. My blood donation money also allowed me to buy extra eggs and butter, and sausage and Schinken, much of which I also gave Mutti.

  We all made our monthly donations to the Red Cross blood bank, for which we received twenty Marks each. Mostly, if we could find it, we’d buy wine with this money, and on nights when we couldn’t go home and we had to stay in the Lazarett, in the bunker, we’d bring bottles with us. We would light a candle, smoke a few cigarettes, pass around a glass of wine, and wonder to ourselves how this would all end.

  The Americans were advancing; they were already well into German territory. The Russians had begun their offensive against us, and it seemed from the news on the BBC that the German troops were rapidly losing ground. Often I thought of Dieter but said nothing. To talk about him would only bring tears. All of us had tearful stories of men we missed and worried about, and we all stayed silent about them.

  A soldier was brought to us by our Sanis one morning—Sani is what we called our paramedics. He was very, very sick with a fever, a cough, and a sore throat. It was something we all had, illnesses like this, poorly nourished as we all were and susceptible to all the sicknesses around us. Besides, everything was so dirty! Every street was filthy from rubble, and the dust of ruined homes was constantly flying around in the air we breathed. It’s no wonder people were sick.

  I approached this man who was lying on a stretcher, a blanket up close to his face, to help the Sanis move him over to a bed. I stepped back, shocked. I recognized the face. It was Otto Lippert! Dieter’s good friend, the “insurance mathematician”! Oh, but I was happy to see him!

  He immediately asked about Dieter, and we exchanged news about our worried mothers. Then I asked Otto about himself. Had he been to the front? What news did he have? His eyes lowered, and it took him a moment to answer.

  “It doesn’t look good, Margarete, but we are making some headway.” Then his voice unexpectedly dropped to a whisper. “Grete. I have to tell you a secret. I’ve never even gone to the front! Can you believe this? I’ve tried. I’ve tried. And every time I try, another problem crops up. I broke my arm first. That was my first ‘battle wound,’ but it didn’t even happen in battle. It was a silly thing. Just jumping up onto a train with my bag over my shoulder. Somehow it caught on the door and I fell backwards. When I landed, my arm lay behind me, my shoulder socket empty. It was in a cast for nearly six months. You know, they won’t let you shoot if you have only one arm.

  “When I w
as let out, I left to find my company, but I couldn’t find it. Every time I was directed where to go, by the time I arrived by train or S-Bahn, my company was already gone. I followed, but again, when I arrived, they had moved on. I finally returned to Berlin and was given, once again, the orders to go out and find my company. I have never found them! Now I’m sick.”

  I took his hand in mine, gave a chuckle, and said, “You’re lucky. Stay sick as long as you can. Stay sick!”

  “What about the war? What about my duties?”

  But I just said, “Stay sick.” Then I said, “I have to go now.”

  A letter from Dieter, January 15, 1945.

  I needed to tend to the other patients, but I went to his bedside and visited with him often. The other men probably were jealous. We were supposed to spend equal time with them all. Otto stayed with us for several weeks, and when he had healed well enough to leave, they put him in an SS uniform and sent him out. We never heard from him again. I’m sure we would have, had he survived.

  Berlin was a major target now. Britain was bombing us every night; the United States was bombing us during the day. The Russians were advancing, and the city kept burning. More and more I saw death—in the Lazarett, in the streets—but I continued to do what I was supposed to do: I went to work. And I did what everyone else did: I looked toward the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gedächtniskirche. The church’s steeple, visible from nearly every corner of Berlin, gave us hope. It was, for us, an omen. “If the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church still has its steeple, Berlin will stand” was what we said to reassure one another.

  At first, when it was still safe enough, I rode my bicycle to the Lazarett and then home again in order to be with Mutti during the night. It was easier than finding a train that still ran, but it also gave me courage to ride my bicycle, like I had some control over my fate.

  IV.