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

by Kerstin Lieff

  Maybe it was Sunday. Herr Stichler, the proprietor from the tavern across from us, stood in the street and called out to all the neighbors. He just stood there and shouted loud so everyone could hear. He said he was pouring beer, and anyone could come and take as much as he liked. It was early in the day, and Herr Stichler seemed unusually full of fun for an ominous day like this.

  Mutti handed me a large milk can—one of those impossible-to-carry metal cans with the two handles on either side—so I could have it filled up to take home. “He said it’s free,” Mutti said.

  “Grete! How nice it is to see you. I always love when you visit.” Herr Stichler tried to smile, but this time I did detect the worry behind his eyes. We all knew what would happen if the Russians found his taps full. He, in his own way, was also preparing for the worst: the Russians, drunk. We all knew what that could mean.

  The Estonian doctor hung a huge sign outside the Lazarett entrance: epidemic hospital. It was written in Cyrillic. Thank God this man knew how to speak Russian. In huge, unmistakable letters, and on two sides of the building, he warned them not to come into our hospital.

  And he did one more thing. He gave each of us nurses an ampoule with a lethal dose of morphine to keep in our pockets. “Just in case,” he said with a wary and very weary mouth. There was nothing more he needed to say. We understood.

  One night, when I arrived home from the Lazarett, Mutti showed me what she had found. She had come upon a man in the street, dead, an SS man, right in front of our house on the Windscheidstrasse. “Of course they stole his boots right away. It was such a ghastly sight, this man with bare feet. I wanted only to cover his face, to give him some dignity as he lay there. The entire street was full of corpses, you know, but this one just bothered me so. I couldn’t look at him anymore. As I pulled his jacket up to cover him, something heavy fell out of a pocket. It was a bundle of knives. Nice ones, even. Look.”

  Mutti pulled out a set of table knives, maybe six of them, and laid them on the kitchen table. They had ivory handles with wide, sharp blades, the kind of knives used for fancy dinner parties. Then I saw why they had caught her attention. The initials LAH were engraved on the handles. Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler was what they stood for, the bodyguard of Adolf Hitler. I took a deep breath and stared at them. Was this SS man one of his bodyguards? Or was he merely a man who had stolen the knives? We would never know. He was dead, but now those things lay in our kitchen.

  “Mutti, put those away! What will happen if the enemy comes into your house and sees what you have? They might misunderstand and think you had something to do with the Leibstandarte. Mutti, hide them! Throw them out! You won’t even be able to trade them on the black market!” I think I was somewhat more aware of the potential danger because I had been so involved at the Lazarett and heard so much of the news.

  She then threw the knives onto the stairway that was already so cluttered with debris, and there we let them lie.

  A girl offers water to a young member of the Hitler Youth. (akg-images/ullstein bild)

  IV.

  Very near the Lazarett was a large training center for the Hitler Youth. All the boys for the Volkssturm were recruited from there. As the battles in Berlin continued, many of these boys came to our Lazarett, sometimes just for a drink of water. There was a boy who was so small and his uniform so large that he kept tripping on the pants legs that dragged behind him on the floor. His steel helmet kept slipping down over his eyes. Again, it was Schwester Ruth who met him just as he entered the door. He was thirsty, he said in his little-boy voice.

  “Where are you coming from, Bübchen?” we asked.

  “From the Front!” he announced proudly, saluting. “From the train station, Ostkreutz!”

  I brought him a cup of water and whispered to him, “Don’t shoot at everything that moves, all right? Only the enemy. Understood?” I was half joking, but we had heard that now that the Hitler Youth were out there with guns, no one was safe. They simply shot at anything that moved. They played war as if it were a game. They were children, some no older than twelve, and we saw the results in our Lazarett. Horrible wounds. Legs and arms missing, gunshot wounds to the stomach.

  I was in the lower level of the Lazarett and happened to look out the window, which was eye level to the street, and saw a pair of soldier’s boots walking by. They did not look like those I’d seen on the corpses in the streets. Then, to my horror, I realized they were Russian!

  I dropped what I had in my hands, maybe a bandage roll or an ampoule of morphine. I knew this was going to be a terrible night. I ran up the stairs and announced, “They’re here!” Everyone pretended not to know what I meant. We continued to do our work into the night, but our hands were trembling.

  “No nurse is to go near a window!” were the orders from Dr. von Lutzky. “And no one is to go outside. We will continue to conduct our business as we have always conducted our business.” He was a man who stood by his actions, but I could see that he too was afraid. “And may God be with us all,” he added, bowing his head.

  Sometime later that day, a general walked into our Lazarett. He was in a green uniform and wore high boots. There was red piping on his sleeves and red insignias.23 He was clearly not one of ours. He was Russian. We all pretended to go about our business, but we could not help sneaking peeks at this man. He looked not much different from us. Tall and slender, tanned skin.

  The Estonian doctor, our savior, walked up to this man and began to speak to him in a low, controlled, and correct voice, in Russian. He waved his arm as he spoke, taking in all the staff and all the wounded soldiers around him. The Russian nodded and smiled in a way that seemed to relax our doctor. They both then gave a respectful nod of the head. The Russian straightened himself up and turned to walk out the door.

  As soon as the door slammed, a cheer went around the entire ward. We understood that the doctor had told him we treated infectious diseases, and it would be unwise for anyone to enter without need. He had convinced the man in the green uniform that no Russian had any business entering our Lazarett unless he was wounded. And if he was wounded, we would take the utmost care of him.

  Within hours, we received our first Russian patient. We pampered him and gave him extra tea and a bed in a corner where he would not be taunted by our Germans.

  He was shy, this soldier, and grateful that we were treating him. He had a wound to his leg, which I bandaged. I could not help but feel some hostility. I thought, How many of my men have you killed? How many boys are lying in the street now, dead, because of you? But I took pity on him. It was my job, after all, to care for my patients.

  16

  THE FINAL DAYS

  I.

  We heard intense noise approaching from the east—tanks and artillery—and finally we saw them with our own eyes. The Russians were crossing over into our city. They had made it as far as the Heerstrasse U-Bahn station, just around the corner from us. The Volkssturm was still holding them back at the train embankments, but it was inevitable that they would be here by the morning.

  We were not allowed to go home. Amazingly, the telephones worked, and I called Mutti and told her to come to the Lazarett. It would be safer, I said, at least safer than there in Charlottenburg. But she refused.

  The situation at the Lazarett was dire. Soldiers were screaming for their bandages to be removed, for someone to care for them, for someone to say, “It’s going to be all right,” for someone to hold their hands and say the Lord’s Prayer with them. We did what we could.

  It was growing dark, and I knew we were to finish soon. No more lights. Who knew what the night would bring? With a sense of dread, we continued to work. Outside there was the noise of war.

  We could already hear women screaming. They would scream and scream and then there was a gunshot and no more noise. We were next. We were sure of it, and yet we worked as if it were just any other day.

  There was more screaming, this time from the c
onvent just down the street. “Oh no! Not the nuns! Not the nuns!” We were horrified. The screaming went on for a long time. Then it was quiet.

  None of us thought we heard a gunshot. We prayed that perhaps they were saved. Who knew?

  Late in the night, with only candles to give us light, when the work was finished and the fighting was over, all the nurses, one by one, walked the stairs to our small “party room,” the Klossett where we took our cigarette breaks. It was nine or so, and we were all hungry and tired. Schwester Ruth had picked a few tulips earlier that day and had put them in an old milk bottle that served as a vase. She had even arranged a tablecloth of sorts. It was a pillowcase, but it was white, and it made the room feel somehow festive. Someone lit a few candles and we sat, about six of us, feeling calm, almost blissful for the moment, denying what we all believed—that this was our last day alive. We had already heard that in other Lazaretts it had not gone well. Even in hospitals, the nurses were all raped and murdered. Why would our fate be any different?

  Someone pulled out a bottle of red wine she had bought with her blood-donation money. We passed around some glasses. God only knows where they came from. We toasted to what we believed would be our last night on earth. “To a better place. Wherever that may be …” Someone made a silly comment. It was about the nuns. “Well, at least they finally got some!” And we fell silent. We knew it was in poor taste.

  I pulled out the twenty-Reichsmark bill I had just earned for donating blood and held it over the candle’s flame. We watched as it fizzled away. What good would that money do any of us now?

  Then the real onslaught came. It was sudden, and within an hour everything was in turmoil. They were shooting from everywhere, tanks were rumbling down the streets, men were shouting.

  Most fearsome were the Stalin Organs. Nothing as dreadful had ever been seen in Berlin. Katyushas is what the Russians called them. They looked like long bullets that were mounted on the back of trucks. These trucks would drive through our neighborhoods and shoot right into the homes, right at eye level, and, of course, they fired into our Lazarett. The building shook. The entire top floor, the Gymnasium, disappeared. There was now a huge hole in the hallway that separated the severely wounded from those who were awaiting their operations. Everything lay in debris. Plaster and glass everywhere. A few of our soldiers died in that moment, just from the blast, possibly from a heart attack, and one of our nurses was killed.

  Russian katyushas, the “Stalin Organs,” positioned in the streets of Berlin.

  “Nothing as dreadful had ever been seen in Berlin.” (akg-images/RIA Novosti)

  From that day on, a handwritten sign hung in front of our doorway, telling us where to look first, which direction the shooting might come from. “Achtung. The enemy is to your right,” or “Achtung. Look to your left. Take great care.”

  The Lazarett filled to double its capacity. The heavy fighting lasted several days, and during this time I worried tremendously about Mutti. I was able to phone her once things had settled down in our neighborhood. She said that there was still fighting in our street but that the Reichskanslei had been secured. She was working hard to help the wounded men in the street.

  When the fighting had subsided somewhat, we were allowed to leave the Lazarett again. The Russians had occupied the abandoned homes around us, to use as outposts. We could leave only in groups of twenty or more, and only if we were accompanied by men—either soldiers who were not so badly wounded, perhaps on crutches, or the Sanis.

  Our orders were to be back at the Lazarett no later than six o’clock. That was when the Russians would begin to drink. Not a good time to be out, and not a good time to be a woman. We would make our plan: We’ll walk to the Heerstrasse station, drop off Trudi, then on to the Theodor-Heuss-Platz and drop off Ria, and so on, until we were all home. Then we’d make the same plan for our return.

  Outside, we no longer feared bombers, but now there were tanks. And drunk Russians. The only airplanes we saw in the sky were the rickety Russian ones we couldn’t help but call “sewing machines.” How they even flew, we had no idea. The Russians might be good at ground battle—they had good panzer troops and infantry, and gruesome artillery, and soldiers who were persistent and brave and had endured incredible hardships—but their airplanes were laughable.

  One word we heard a lot from the Russians was Uhri. In a weird way, it reminded me of my father, Werner, when he was already so far gone after his brain operation and wanted to talk to me about his watch. These Russian soldiers wanted our wristwatches more than anything. Strange. I saw soldiers with as many as seven or eight watches on one arm. What for?

  II.

  The yard behind the Lazarett had two big pits. One was the place where we buried our dead. The other was there to collect water in case the building caught fire. During the last battle, the city waterlines broke and we had no running water, so we took water from this pit, boiled it, and then gave it to our soldiers to drink—we had nothing else. And we used it to wash bandages. I sometimes worried there might be a corpse down in there somewhere—a woman, perhaps, who had decided to take her life. These things happened, you know, much more often than you would think.

  Our lines were still broken, and the pit water was so foul, I asked Dr. von Lutzky if I could leave to fetch some. I had seen a water pump in a yard just down the street. “No, no. It’s far too risky,” he said. “They’re still shooting out in the streets.” But what were we to do? We needed clean bandages and the soldiers were crying out for something to drink. So I ran, anyway, believing that the Red Cross patch on my blouse would protect me.

  I was shot at. Red Cross patch or not, I was a target for the Russians. But I had to get that water! I reached the pump and very quickly filled my two buckets. Then, hiding as well as I could behind hedges while the soldiers kept shooting, I ran back to the Lazarett. All of a sudden, to my left, I heard a child’s voice from inside a bush. I turned to look. Two boys were standing there with large, frightened eyes. Their pants were way too long, and their jacket sleeves hung below their hands. One of them kept pushing his much-too-large helmet back up.

  “Do you know where our captain is?” he asked. “We can’t find him. Have you seen him?” His voice had not even changed yet.

  I had to ask then, “But how old are you, young man?”

  They both replied, “Sixteen!”

  It made me laugh, and I said, “No. I haven’t seen a captain. But stay safe, the two of you.” I wished them well with all my heart, and I made myself forget about them. I had wounded men who needed the water, and I ran on.

  Those young, young boys. They always came to us with the worst wounds. Their extremities missing, wounds so bad they’d never heal. They would lie on their cots, waiting for death, and cry for their Muttis. My heart bled for them. They really had no idea what they were doing.

  One night, as the other sisters and I sat in our Zigaretten Klosett, a few of the soldiers who were on night watch came to us.

  “You can put that cigarette out. You can rest now. You can do as you choose—sit or leave. It is over. Hitler committed suicide last night. They say, ‘He died an honorable death, as a soldier.’ We don’t need to believe that anymore. We all know that’s bunk. He was a coward. An insane coward. And he’s now dead.”

  We simply stared at him. Not one of us put out our cigarettes, but we didn’t smoke them either. We simply stared. Our mouths open.

  He continued, “Eva Braun is dead, too. Goebbels and his wife killed themselves, and they even killed the children.”

  Could anyone have written such a strange story? What had become of us?

  And what would become of us now?

  We were suddenly frightened. We all held each other’s hands and we wept. All the nurses, the men too. We had no idea what would come next.

  Things changed dramatically after Hitler’s death. At the front door there had always hung a picture of the Führer, the first thing you would see as you entere
d, and suddenly it was gone. In its place now were all kinds of religious things. A cross. A picture of Mary with the baby Jesus. Flowers. Many, many flowers. It seemed necessary now to go out and find them, pick them, and put them on our altar. Tulips and pansies and the Flieder were just beginning to bloom. The aroma of lilacs permeated the entire hospital.

  On May 8 an announcement came over the radio. The peace agreement had been signed. All the higher generals, including Dönitz, had met in Reims and signed an agreement to complete the final capitulation. The peace agreement was also signed by representatives of the Oberkommando from the Wehrmacht and representatives for the British, American, and Soviet high command. How things would go forward was not yet clear, but we knew that Germany had surrendered and it was unconditional.

  That evening the German radio broadcast was just as it always was. The announcer was his usual controlled, straightforward self. He presented the news as always. Then, on a last note, out of the blue, he said, “So, jetzt können Sie mich mal am Arsch lecken.” And with that he signed off. This dry man had for years told lies, and known they were lies, but that was his job. Now the war was over, and as a last hurrah he announced, just as dryly as ever, “Well, thank you and good night. And now you can all kiss my ass.”

  But it was over. The war was done.

  17

  IT’S OVER

  I.

  Dieter’s last letter had asked us to pick up a lens for his telescope at Wolfram, a well-known camera equipment store, and, if we would be so kind, to have a photo enlarged at Porstfoto on the Kaiser-Friedrich-Strasse. It was dated February 27, 1945. Did he know those shops no longer existed?

  II.

  Papa? There was no word.

  III.

  The streets were now quiet, and that was a welcome change, but they held secrets. Women passed each other wondering, Has it happened to you? Other women looked like they were asking for it with their vulgar behavior—hanging on Russian arms, talking and laughing with them.