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

by Kerstin Lieff

  Signs all over Berlin had been attached to walls long ago with the initials LSR, meaning Luftschutzraum, bomb shelter. They pointed to basements under churches, houses, subways—anywhere that might provide a safe place to hide when the bombs came. But I began to see something new. Someone had painted graffiti on these signs, small print between the letters L-S-R, so that it now read: Lernt Schnell Russisch! Quick, Learn Russian!

  The Eastern Offensive is what we called it. The march of the Russians into Germany. It began in late 1944, a bitter winter, and continued into the spring of 1945. In January the Russians had recaptured Warsaw, and they continued to recapture the rest of the territories Germany had taken, city by city—thirty to forty kilometers a day. Hitler’s orders were crazier than ever. It was obvious we had lost the war, and yet he insisted on feeding the enemy more and more human fodder.

  Königsberg fell to the Red Army in April, then Danzig, and when we heard that the Russians were already on the Oder River, we could not believe the fighting was still continuing. The Oder was only seventy kilometers away.

  The bombing raids continued, and you would think, by now, there was nothing left to our city. But they bombed us all the same. The city was completely camouflaged in smoke as it burned, every day, all day long. The sky was an ugly yellow. We could not see the sun through it, so we kept our lights on nearly all the time. We walked with handkerchiefs across our mouths in order to breathe. Fires smoldered for days, and corpses lay everywhere. What a gruesome sight: a charred body shrunken to half its size or, most terrible, a charred baby you think must be a burned doll. Corpses of soldiers had been one thing, but now there were so many civilians.

  When the bombings ended each day, bodies would be dragged out into the streets. I suppose the intention was so relatives would be able to identify them. So many of them had such ghastly looks on their faces. I would, when I could, take a jacket or a shirt and pull it up over a corpse’s face, so at least it would have some dignity as it lay there.

  On the Windscheidstrasse, Mutti saw victims, casualties, and corpses from the war, too. She did what she could. She helped those who were wounded, bandaged those she could, called for the Sanis to come help when it was needed. And it was needed all the time.

  New friendships developed quickly in our bunker as we sat huddled together. One of the new people was a woman named Frau Götke, who had with her a young boy. She told us the boy had been born out of wedlock to a mother who was a nurse and could no longer keep him with her. The boy spoke German without an accent, though Frau Götke told us he was Dutch. He stayed quiet, with his large, terrified eyes watching her as she told her stories. We wondered about him, but we stayed silent. Frau Götke seemed unafraid to talk anymore, and as our friendship grew, she told us stories, terrible stories, about what she had seen. She said she couldn’t hold these things in any longer, and that she didn’t care what they would do to her. She had principles, she said.

  She had been a member of the Partei, fully pledged, and she had worked most of the war years in the east as a secretary. She had been well paid, she said, and as a single woman, she enjoyed her position very much. It was high up, and she was able to be “in the know,” as she put it.

  She had witnessed something that finally drove her to leave the Partei, to run away, putting her own life in danger.

  “It was the Jews.”

  Now I heard for the first time some of the terrible things happening to the Jews, and from a woman who’d been there.

  “It was just on the outskirts of the city. It was a row of women. They were naked, all of them, and they were made to stand against a wall. Men in uniforms were there, with guns. I wondered if this was some sort of aggressive voyeurism. You know—because they were powerful men and the women were weak. It was bizarre and weird and frightening. No one else was there. Only the women and the men in uniform. I was a secretary. I was to take studious notes. The women had panic on their faces. Where would this lead?

  “A lovely girl with thick long hair had enough courage to walk up to one man, an SS officer, who stood alongside others, barking orders. She had a pile in her hands, and as she approached, I realized it was the clothes she’d taken off. A thin dress and a pair of brown shoes.

  “She looked at this man, walked up to his face, nodded, placed the pile at his feet, and then remarked, ‘I never knew you Germans could be such pigs!’ It was said in a heavy accent. She must have been from western Poland, somewhere there, but she stood tall as she made her way back to the line.

  “And then they were shot. All of them.”

  We were horrified. Such a story did not even ring true, but she had told it. We were stunned. Then she told us this: She fled in the middle of the night. Running through forests and fields, it took weeks to get here, to Berlin. She knew she would be put to death if she were caught. No one runs from the Partei. From stories like this, and from rumors we were beginning to hear, we knew some terrible things were happening to the Jews in the east. That’s all we knew.

  Though no one ever spoke about it, it became clear that the boy she had with her was Jewish. No one said a thing. And, of course, no one turned her in. We all had our own worries. We had brothers and fathers on the fronts, our own lives to try to save. Shelter from the bombs.

  15

  WHO WILL SAVE US?

  I.

  The ring around Berlin was rapidly closing in on us. The Americans were marching in from the West. Some of our people, the nurses and Sanis who worked with us, those who lived in the suburbs west of Berlin, could already see from their rooftops (the ones that still existed) the American troops. What they saw was surprising, because we had expected the Americans to come to our rescue, but the Americans were just standing around, smoking cigarettes and talking. They didn’t seem to be making any effort to save us.

  The night was late. I had much to do at the Lazarett, so many new arrivals, and it really was too late for me to leave for home. But I tried anyway. I didn’t want to leave Mutti alone. I decided to run this time and leave my bicycle behind, just in case I would have to duck into a bunker somewhere.

  The sirens had been blaring for some time, and the planes were already nearly sitting on top of my head. I put my hands to my ears and kept running. My prayer: Forgive me, Father, for I know I have made a mistake.

  Suddenly, I heard zisch! A bomb had fallen just beside me, or just behind me. I nearly jumped out of my shoes. I screamed. I was confused; noise was everywhere and I had no idea anymore where to run.

  I spotted a doorway. As fast as I could, I ran to it to take cover. Then—I don’t know why I did this—in a split second I decided to run to the other side of the street to hide in another building’s entry. Why did I do this? I’ll never know. It must have been Providence, because in that moment the building I had just left was hit by a bomb.

  I knew I had to run again, and I did, and suddenly the second building was hit by a bomb. Everything around me began to burn.

  I looked back for just an instant and saw there were two people inside a building that was fully on fire. Their mouths were open as if they were screaming. Their hair was on fire. They were running down a hallway that was about to plunge to the ground. Their doom was so near, only seconds away. My only thought was May they just die quickly.

  All around me was noise, and I had no idea where I was even heading anymore. I just kept running. Walls were crashing, bombs were whistling, sirens were screaming. The winds started. Suddenly I just stopped in my tracks and stood, looking around at that inferno. It all felt so insane and so useless, this running. Anyway, everything was gone by now.

  This thought came to my mind, and I believed it with all my might: I am the only one left alive. Off in a distant part of the city, I could still hear the bomb sirens. But what good were they to anyone now? Everyone else is dead.

  I lifted my head then and saw, just up ahead of me, something sway like a ghost. It was hard to make out in all the smoky air, but I recognized it as a tree,
and I suddenly realized it too was alive. I made my way over to it and took its trunk in my arms. I held my face against its bark. I was so grateful that it was there.

  Its branches seemed to respond. They seemed to reach down for me, as if we were in an embrace. I could feel life flowing through its limbs. I was frightened out of my wits, certain that I would die before the day was over. But this tree, it stayed with me; it did not let me go.

  Then I felt something brush up against my arm. Something very gentle, very soft. And that’s when I heard a voice. It was no more than a whisper—but you must understand, I heard every word of it. Was it the tree? No, it was an angel, I was sure of it. Who else would speak to me in a moment like this?

  It said, “You shall have a child.”

  That’s all, and then it vanished.

  I dropped my arms. I stood for a long minute, and after that minute I knew something had changed in me. I was alive and I knew I would survive this war.

  No sirens now, and I began to walk in the direction of home. I heard no dog, no soldier, not even a bird. I looked to the sky and saw no sun.

  I looked to the east, expecting to see fire. Indeed, there was fire. But, to my horror, I did not expect this: the Kaiser Wilhelm Church was in flames, and the steeple was gone.

  Berlin was finished.

  II.

  At the Lazarett, we sat in our Zigaretten Klosett and listened to the BBC. We believed the Americans might arrive in Berlin by Sunday, and we made preparations for this. We kept hearing the reports of their progress. They had already entered Hannover. They had taken Thüringen.

  Meanwhile the Russians kept advancing from the east. Daily, refugees were arriving by the thousands. People from the east—East Prussia and Pomerania—and everyone in the west was running too, because their cities had been bombed out. It was a terrible mess. Everyone was running, everyone was afraid of the Russians, but where were they to go? All the cities were bombed out. Even cities that once seemed safe, like Dresden, had been bombed out.

  In Charlottenburg, Papa Spaeth walked through the door late one night. He looked tired. He kissed his wife and said, “Keep yourselves safe. This is all coming to an end soon. I’ll be home in a few weeks.” And with that, he took his attaché case and left the house. We would not hear from him again for a very long time.

  We did not know who would enter our city first, the Russians or the Americans. We hoped it would be the Americans. At least we knew the Americans would treat us with kindness. We were deathly afraid of the Russians. We’d heard too many stories of terror from the refugees from the east.

  The Kaiser Wilhelm church, destroyed.

  Mutti and I made a plan. If it became clear that the Americans weren’t coming, we’d take off and run to the west, to Thüringen perhaps, like all the others. We never thought further than that, though. We never thought, What then? Because where would we go then? “Whatever we do, Papa will find us. But we have to care for ourselves now. He’ll find us … he’ll find us,” Mutti kept saying, and we worried and planned, but we never came to a decision.

  Then, one afternoon, a good friend of Papa’s came to our home to talk with us. Maybe Papa had contacted him? I don’t know. “I’ve come to tell you, it’s too late,” he said. “Do not try to leave Berlin! The circle has been closed in. We are completely surrounded by Russians. You will never escape. Your fate would be the worst imaginable. You’ll be killed, or at the very least taken prisoner. I beg you. Please listen. Don’t leave!”

  Whether this was good advice or not I’ll never know, because we decided to stay in Berlin.

  In the Lazarett, we had heard on the BBC that the American front had come to a standstill. The Russians, however, kept advancing. I stood in my uniform at the Lazarett and looked out the window. I wondered if this was going to be my last moment of peace. I remember how lovely the spring appeared. It was Eastertime, and flowers were springing up here and there through the cracks and the rubble. The sunshine was warm and pleasant. How does nature do this? All this ruin and destruction, and yet she still arrives in full bloom.

  Dr. von Lutzky, the Estonian, was a smart man. All of us nurses still had our Red Cross passports, but they still had the Nazi signatures and the covers still had the Nazi swastika stamped on them. This could pose a problem when the victors entered Berlin, so he decided to write us all new passports, bearing only the Red Cross stamp and his personal signature. We were the Red Cross, he wanted the victors to understand, and we should, under the Geneva Convention and under all circumstances, be immune from war and kept under protection. But, of course, we had no idea how our captors would react. Better to be wise.

  Dread and hope commingled in the air. The hope was that the war was about to be over. It was inevitable, although there was still fighting going on. The dread was the arrival of the Russians. That too seemed inevitable.

  Schwester Christa arrived out of breath that Friday, running through the front door. “Listen to this! I just spoke with an SS man outside. He told me everything! He said the Americans are indeed coming, and they are coming to join what’s left of the Wehrmacht. The British are coming to join us too, and together we will all fight against the Russians. It will take time yet before the war is over, but it will be over. The war will be over! The Americans will be here!”

  It is true that there was an American general who was a bit more farsighted than the rest of them.22 He did want to continue to fight against the Russians. He foresaw exactly what would happen. A division of the world, half of it going to the Communists, and the Soviets would be the world’s future enemy.

  The Americans arrived at the Elbe River, just west of Berlin, and did not budge. Nothing moved.

  As we sat together taking our cigarette breaks, I recall saying, incredulously, “I can’t even imagine the Americans would be so stupid as to allow the Russians to march into Germany’s capital! It’s unthinkable. Surely the Americans won’t forsake us. It’s unthinkable. Unthinkable!” We were already practicing our English. We were already talking about how to receive these men, our saviors. To let Berlin fall to the Russians seemed, to us, an impossibility.

  And yet, the Russians were now in Bernau, only fifty kilometers east of us. And they kept marching and driving their tanks forward, ever closer.

  It was the weekend, then, I suppose. One of those fat Nazi men came to our hospital that morning and demanded all of our attention. The nurses, the soldiers, wounded men.

  “Attention! Everyone! Announcement. The Russians have not entered Bernau! This is propaganda being disseminated by the enemy. It is a lie. And if a single one of you says that the Russian has come that close to our well-defended city, he shall be shot. Do you understand? On the spot. Then hanged right here in this schoolyard. Right here from the very lamppost outside your door. That one right there,” he snarled, pointing to the door. “All the world will then see what a coward and a traitor he was. Does everyone understand this? It’s an order! No one is to repeat these enemy-disseminated lies again!”

  The man looked around the room, looked each one of us in the eye, and glared. With that, he made the Heil Hitler salute and strutted out. What we heard days later was that he boarded a train that very night and headed west for safety. He and his entire cowardly family nicely escaped the doom he wanted us all to deny. He was from Bernau.

  Everyone in Berlin was preparing for the worst. It didn’t look like anyone was coming to help, and the Russians continued to march in from the east.

  Young boys, old men, and women: that’s all that was left to defend the city. The Volkssturm was established. All men who had been previously deemed unfit for military service were called to join. It was a sad sight. The units we saw didn’t even have proper uniforms. Some of the men wore their own fedora hats, others just a suit and tie. Many of them were mere boys with boy voices, boys who had been members of the Hitler Youth, only twelve years old. I saw invalids marching with their crutches, elderly men who probabl
y had fought in the last war, the Great War, but were certainly not fit to fight now. Some carried rifles, but not all. We all wondered where on earth they were going. But it was a Führerbefehl. In other words, they were given orders from the highest command, something you could not refuse even if you wanted to. All men of all ages were to defend the city.

  What would they be able to do once the tanks rolled in? Boys? Old men? And when did they have the time to practice for this? They created roadblocks all over the city using burned-out trucks and buses and furniture. It was laughable, really. But what else were they to do? Once one of those Russian panzers started rolling in, would an old broken sofa stop it?

  Refugees from the east had brought stories of violent rapes. “They aren’t satisfied just raping a schoolgirl, or her grandmother, or setting a young fourteen-year-old soldier to a woman, just to see how he’d have his first-ever and then laughing at his clumsiness. They will shoot the woman as soon as let her live, when they are done with it all.” These were the stories we’d heard. Even more terrifying was what they did to the children.

  III.

  I was still traveling home in the evening on my bicycle, and Mutti was brave. She would fight them if they came, she said. “Have no worries! I won’t, after all this, let even one of those Russian Buben do anything to me.”

  Who knew if that would be true. I could only help her prepare. We pulled all the rubble we could find into our vestibule. Windows, doors, sofas and chairs, chests, all broken things, and then buckets of glass. Then we scattered the debris all up and down the stairs of our building, all the way up to our home, making it look as though there was no possibility anyone still lived there.

  The idea was this, and it worked: We knew the Russians liked to drink their Wodka, as Dieter had so innocently described it in a letter only a year ago. And we knew they could get quite drunk. Wouldn’t it be during a night of drunkenness that a Russian boy, who had not seen his woman in six years, would get the idea to rape? In such a state, and finding a stairwell so cluttered with debris, couldn’t this deter that one Bube? Wouldn’t he prefer an easier find, a woman on the first floor, for example?