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

by Kerstin Lieff

  IV.

  Mutti and I were left to ourselves. Above all else, we wanted out. Berlin was to become a “dead city,” anyway.

  I still trundled off to the Lazarett until I was let go, while Mutti busied herself, with what, I don’t know.

  On one of her busier days, I know she did this: She visited Pastor Jentsch from the Swedish Church. The church had been badly damaged, but his spirit was whole. He told Mutti a secret about a man by the name of Raoul Wallenberg, a Swede, who even during the war had managed to provide refugees with passports to leave Germany.24 Mutti asked if there was still a chance for that, and he told her about a train that Mr. Wallenberg was organizing to help get Swedish citizens out of Germany. Because Mutti had relatives in Sweden, he thought he might be able to get her on it.

  Mutti’s head must’ve been spinning. He gave her all the specifics he knew. It would be leaving that night, late. Midnight or so. She should pack only what she would need for two weeks, no more than that. It would be a train of only Scandinavians, traveling first through Finland, then on to Stockholm. He encouraged her. It was such an opportunity. And who knew when something like that would come again?

  “What is to become of the people in Berlin, anyway?” Pastor Jentsch was very persuasive. Even in his sermons, he had always been so.

  It was decided. Mutti hurried home and in a flurry told me all about it. “Grete. We’re going to leave.”

  I only said, “When?”

  And she said, “Tonight.”

  Part III

  JOURNEY TO A NEW LIFE

  1945–1949

  18

  A SHARP TURN

  By early afternoon we were packed. It was only a light suitcase for me. I had nothing much I wanted to bring. Only me and my dreams of freedom in a land with no war. I brought my wool coat, a hat I had knit for myself, a scarf, a bar of soap and a facecloth, a hairbrush, needles for mending, a book, and a photo of Dieter. At the last minute I decided to pack my Red Cross uniform as well, the white blouse with its Red Cross patch. It might help when crossing the borders, I thought, although I had no idea if this was true. There was nothing more I needed. I was on my way to a new life, which if all went as promised, would be just two weeks away.

  Mutti? She had other ideas. We needed to bring the silver, she decided. All of it. There were forks and large soupspoons, the kind that can hardly fit into your mouth, and knives, twenty-four of each, heavy and all with the initials of her maiden name engraved on the handles: HD for Helga Dahlberg. A set of tiny mocha teaspoons as well, twenty-four of them, ornately enameled with the Swedish colors, blue and yellow. All this she wrapped into a green cloth shoe bag. She then carefully ripped open the bottom of my stepfather Karl’s Seesack, the bag he had carried with him at sea during the Great War, and hid the shoe bag with the silver, her pearl necklace, and a gold locket she had received as a wedding gift underneath the top flap. This she worked on all day, sewing and resewing it until the seam was undetectable.

  “But why are you doing all this, Mutti?” I pleaded. “We’ll be in Sweden soon where we’ll have a new life. We can always buy new silver once we’ve arrived.” We never spoke of money in our family, but what I did know was that my grandfather—her father—had advised her to send as much money as she could for safekeeping to Sweden when Hitler first declared war. Many people who had the means did the same—sent their money abroad. With all the horrible memories of the Great Inflation and the Depression only a few years earlier, she said it was one of the few smart things she ever did. I should have appreciated her foresight, but now she just seemed possessive and petty. I continued to plead, already realizing she’d expect me to carry her bag if it got too heavy for her, but she was not to be persuaded. “If we can’t have our things, no one will,” she insisted, looking incredulous that I didn’t understand, and then continued her work.

  She didn’t want them—whoever they would be—to have our oil paintings either. So the few that could be bundled and carried for the next two weeks needed to come with us as well. “But where will you put them?” I asked. “How will you carry them?” But she was finished discussing any of it, and the answer was clear. The job was to be mine. Six oil paintings, including one Albrecht Dürer, were carefully wrapped in blankets and tied with twine and those two packages I was to carry, one under each arm. They were heavy and awkward and I was so angry with her. My arms were not even long enough to reach to the bottom. Just try to carry a package like that!

  We were to arrive at the Swedish Church on the Kielerstrasse, near the Invaliden U-Bahn station.25 It was not far from our house, and we were to be there by eleven o’clock that night. We left our home in good time. The night was still and starless. There were no bombs anymore, and no cars or Russian soldiers. We hurried along to the S-Bahn, which would take us to the church. From there we were told we would be transported to the train station from which we would depart for Sweden.

  It was summer by now; it should have been warm, but I shivered the whole way. Perhaps it was excitement, but there was sadness and fear, too. We were headed to a completely new life, one I could only imagine. We were leaving so much behind—our entire lives, not least our dear Dieter. And how would Papa Spaeth find us? But Mutti had an answer for that too: “Of course they’ll find us!”

  We got off the S-Bahn at the proper station and walked to where the church should have been. It was once the very church Dieter and I attended on Sundays, when later we would talk all day about God and all those things that Pastor Jentsch had said. Now the entire block lay in ruins, and when we came to the church, all that was left standing were two bare walls, the interior open to the black night. It must have been a Sprengbombe that hit the church, because those bombs would fall to the bottom of the building and destroy everything inside but often leave the walls still standing.

  The Russians were not to know about us, Mutti had been told earlier that day by the woman who had helped her at the Swedish embassy. “They may not let you leave,” she had warned, and heeding this advice, we managed to stay very still. By eleven o’clock there were about fifty of us in all, all of us suddenly “Swedish,” although it turned out many did not know a word of the Swedish language. How can you blame them? They, like everyone, just wanted to get out.

  All night we sat. Darkness and dampness, whispering voices and my pounding heart are how I remember this night. And of course the waiting. No transport came, and finally daylight broke. We continued to sit, worried and anxious by now. Some of us had brought sandwiches—bread and cheese—and people ate and moved around a bit. The day passed, and sometime late in the night, transport finally arrived. Was it a lorry? A bus? I cannot remember, but we were brought to the train station in Lichtenberg, on the outskirts of Berlin, where we were told we would need to wait a while longer. I tried to breathe slowly; I tried to stay calm. Things will be all right very soon, I kept thinking, hoping to console myself. I wanted so badly to leave Berlin and Germany behind. I wanted no more blackened, broken walls, no more rubble, no more death. But no train came.

  It was after midnight when a hefty woman with hard eyes and an accent approached and advised us that we should make sure our papers were in order and readily available. We would be asked to present them upon boarding. She would be our guide for the journey. She said her name was Therese, but her accent said something else. Her German was not fluent—she was probably from the east somewhere. She was not kind; I could not tell whether she was with the Partei, but then I thought, Of course that cannot be. We are refugees and she is here to help us. A Partei member would have locked us up. She then told us we would be in Stockholm in no more than two weeks, and that was all I wanted to hear.

  “The train will arrive soon and you will know because it’s a Swedish train, not a filthy one like those we have here in Germany,” Therese informed us.

  Yes, well, now we also have that to live with: filthy trains. It was never so, but of course we have the war to blame, I thought.

  W
hen no train came, we lay on the benches and did what we could to make ourselves comfortable. I fell asleep. So did Mutti.

  Early the next morning, on the fifteenth of June, a train finally came. The grimy gray cars with greasy windows were a picture darker than Therese had painted for us. But the train was here, nonetheless, and we wanted now only to find our seats.

  Mutti, of course, pushed her way to the front of the crowd and was first to board. She was determined that we would have a sleeping berth and managed to maneuver through every car all the way to the front of the train and then back again.

  She found no sleeping cars. She was disappointed but managed to organize two bench seats, one facing the other. They were wooden benches that folded down. A skimpy straw mattress and two thin blankets had been laid out on each of them.

  Mutti’s bag with its concealed silver and the oil paintings were hoisted by a fellow passenger onto the rack above our heads; I kept my sack at my side. This man would become a friend to me, someone to talk to other than Mutti. He told me he had worked for the Swedish embassy before the war and he spoke Swedish fluently. “God morgon, God morgon,” we greeted each other the next day and every day after. Because of a head wound, he could no longer see so well, he told me, and he had been sent home from the front. Which front, I almost asked, but didn’t. I didn’t want to hear about war anymore. We were on our way to our new home.

  Herr Koch was his name, or Knecht, I don’t remember exactly. He offered me a cake he had wrapped in his satchel, but I said no. “You are kind, but no.” I wanted food, of course, I was hungry as always, but I told myself I would not eat until I knew we were well on our way. Finally, that evening, the train began to roll. I pulled my sack up under my head and was dead asleep before I could even take one last look at the land I was about to leave behind forever.

  The first rays of daylight poked through the windows before I became conscious of where I was, and the idea that I was on my way to freedom filled me with euphoria, the kind I had not felt since I was a student in Jena. We were somewhere east of Berlin by now, it was easy to see. Wide stretches of farmland lay to either side of us, the morning light still painting the fields lavender. Here and there were dense patches of forest, and farmhouses dotted the clearings. All of them, I noticed, were abandoned; all had broken windows. Now and again I’d see a lace curtain flying through an open hole. Where did the people flee to? Were any of them among those I saw flooding the train stations in Berlin, “the refugees from the east”?

  A woman and her sister sat just behind Herr Koch, and they had brought a map with them. They were surmising that we must be near Posen. If this was true, we were coming close to the town where I was born, Beuthen, in Silesia. Of course I wanted very much to see what this city looked like and rushed to the window on their side of the car to see.

  My heart fell into my stomach. It was no different from everywhere else. Broken walls with no buildings behind them. Vehicles lying askew off in the ditches. I saw no people. Dead streets and everything black and burned.

  Therese entered our car with a tray of breakfast food. It was that dreadful Muckefuck we’d had for the last six years, Ersatzkaffee, and dark bread. But she gave us butter and jam made from real gooseberries, which was delicious. I had not tasted gooseberry jam in such a very long time. With our breakfast, we sat in our seats and watched with anticipation where we would be going next. The train took us farther east, through Kutno, then Warsaw—we were now in Poland, according to the train station signs.

  Late that evening, Therese came to our car again. She did not come to bring us food this time, but to inform us of a change in route. We would be headed for Leningrad in northern Russia. It was necessary, she said, because there was so much destruction from the war that the train could not go directly. However, “From there we will begin to head west for Finland,” she said. “You still have German papers, you know, and Germany is no longer a country. In fact, Moscow is now your capital.”

  We had lost the war, and it seemed that meant we had lost our identity, too. We would need to get Russian papers, she said, as those were the only ones that would be accepted from now on. The trip to Leningrad would take another five days.

  “The passage to Finland will of course cost money as well,” Therese continued. Mutti and I were startled. No one had told us anything about money. “What money are you talking about?” Mutti interrupted.

  “Yes,” Therese continued, ignoring my mother. “The passage will cost one thousand Reichsmarks—each,” she snapped and glared at Mutti.

  “Who on this train has a thousand marks? Who? We cannot do this! This is nonsense. No one has money. We’ve been in a war!” Mutti said, flustered, and then looked like she was about to cry. I was dumbfounded. We had come this far; we were not about to lose this, our only hope.

  “Yes, Frau Spaeth, I understand. But you do have your gold and silver sewn inside that Seesack of yours, I would imagine?”

  With that, and the look on Therese’s face, Mutti shut up and we merely looked at each other, wondering what to do next. Did she really know about the silver? Or was she just bluffing? Mutti stayed still and we did as the others did: We began to rummage through our belongings, looking for, or pretending to look for, what we could give in barter for our transport.

  I quickly decided I wouldn’t need my coat. My lovely warm wool coat. It’s summer, I thought. And in only a few days we’ll be in Sweden. I can live without it. At the last minute, I gave Therese my hat as well, hoping, I suppose, to be on her good side, and with that the transport for both Mutti and me was paid for. Therese was satisfied. The train rumbled on.

  Minsk. In Cyrillic lettering on a sign at a train station we passed. Someone on the train must have known how to read it, because we knew where we were: deep inside Russia. Herr Koch and I continued to have interesting conversations. He had lived in Sweden for many years, and he told me of his days with his wife, who now was dead—he did not say how, but one never did in those days. He told me of the long bicycle rides they would take through the countryside.

  “We would ride and see the sea off in the distance, with a beach that looked to be deserted. We would lean our bicycles up against a fence and walk with our sacks of bread, herring, and a bottle of aquavit or a bottle of wine, and sit in the stillness for hours, listening to the wind whispering through the grasses. It would be dark before we thought to ride home again, and our bicycles were always still there against the fence. No one would have taken them; no one would even have thought of taking them. That’s how it was in Sweden.”

  His stories made me dream about how my life would be soon. Such peaceful days as he described, with no worries, and my grandmother and cousins … Oh, I was so excited!

  The next station platform held the sign Smolensk, and the train stopped here. We did not know why or for how long it would stop. No one dared to venture outside, though. We could miss the train if it were to take off again, and, anyway, everything we could see from our windows looked to be destroyed.

  Smolensk. We all knew this name. The battle there was supposed to have been the turning point in the war. “Final victory is only weeks away,” the radio propaganda told us back then, again and again, during the first year. Now we saw it with our own eyes, and, like so much of our own country, it too lay in ruin. Just like Berlin, just like Kutno and Posen and Minsk, and like everywhere we’d been. We were witnessing, firsthand, the result of all the fighting and of Hitler’s “scorched earth” policy. Ruins, everything deserted and dead.

  People from somewhere nearby came up to the train with things they wanted to trade. Women held something wrapped in their long aprons, shriveled carrots, a tomato, a few eggs. We, of course, traded whatever we had. A pair of scissors, stockings, all the things we thought we could do without for the next two weeks.

  A woman with her young boy approached us and knocked on my window. She was very pretty but dressed in shabby clothing. There were holes in the elbows of her sweater, and her boy ba
shfully hid behind her skirt. She could not speak German well, but we could see from her gestures and smiles that she wanted to tell us that her son had a German father. Perhaps she was hoping we knew where the father was, or maybe she just wanted to trade with us, but we never learned because just then the train began to roll away.

  Endless rocking, and endless countryside with endless farmhouses, abandoned. I felt sadness, a deep sadness for this land that now looked so barren. At station after station, as we rolled through, I saw mountains of goods lying in piles as if these things had been simply thrown there, like heaps of garbage. As we passed I could see what the piles were made up of: sewing machines and radios; ironing boards and irons; a china cabinet long missing its china, its doors broken; blankets and down pillows, soggy and useless; eggbeaters, chairs, a broken piano bench. Later, in a village an hour or so farther along, the piano that must have belonged to the earlier bench appeared at the top of a pile. The legs were missing. Rolltop desks, more sewing machines, more radios. Lamps. Many, many lamps, and once a large pile of lightbulbs. Only lightbulbs, nothing else. Many of the Russian soldiers, people had whispered back in Berlin, had never seen lightbulbs before, and for them they seemed to possess some sort of magic. They stole all they could find.

  There were bicycles too on these mounds, hundreds of them. All lay rusting away in the sun and the rain and the weather, never to be used again. Mutti surmised it was plunder from our once lovely homes in Berlin.

  The train stopped more frequently now. We had been traveling for four days, but it seemed like weeks. It was June, and the heat was unbearable. Some of our people were very sick, and we did what we could to help them. Someone had aspirin that was shared, but that was all the help we could give. I think even someone died, but I cannot be sure of this. My memory isn’t clear.

  Therese brought us Ersatzkaffee to drink and the dark bread with butter each morning. And in the evenings we were given soup, this too with bread. We were grateful. We were hungry.