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

by Kerstin Lieff

  But I never saw Willi again. The translator informed me through the fence a few days later that Willi had been “called up” in the night and had been shot. It was the fate of many men on his side. They were suspected of talking, suspected of having been a Nazi, suspected of conspiracy, or suspected of nothing, but meant to die anyway.

  And that was Willi Hohorst. Maybe he was a spy. Maybe he was an informer. Maybe he wasn’t anything. Just a man caught in the wrong place at the wrong time.

  While we were here in this place I no longer had a definition for, we would need to work. “It is the way of Communism,” Therese told us one day. It was July now, and some of us were to work on the collective farms, some on a construction site. For me it would be out in a field. I was to plant trees, and so was Mutti. We would begin today after our soup, we were told.

  Trees, lorries full of them, all pine, stacked one behind the other—along with me, Mutti, another woman about my age who was very shy, and several men—were driven out to an empty field, and here we were to spend our day. The trees were dumped by the side of the road, where all around us was nothing but wide-open fields, and we were left standing with shovels, along with our supervisor, a Russian woman who spoke no German. She seemed less interested in us than in her dirty fingernails, which she looked at, and picked at, nearly all day.

  “Dig holes in rows five feet apart. Make them deep enough to plant each tree. This is to be a forest for the next generation. We will have furniture from this wood and it will feed our fires. Now work,” she said, and picked some more.

  I befriended the shy girl. I don’t remember her name, but I remember it was my birthday, July 10. I was twenty-one now, and I told myself it was to be a good day. I showed her how to do it. I said, “We’ll plant the trees upside down. Just like this. Watch me.” I dug my hole. Thankfully the soil was soft from the weeks of rain we’d had. Muddy, actually, but I didn’t mind. Not the dirt, not the work. I was happy at my discovery of how to let them—these people who were keeping me from my new homeland—know who they were dealing with.

  I took my first pine tree and planted it pointy side down into the dirt and then proceeded to fill in the hole so that the tree stood straight up, like it was supposed to be there, just like that, all along. My friend giggled from behind her hair, and we both continued on our mission. Together we planted trees, row by row, all with the root balls sticking up high to the sky. What a wonderful birthday it was! Mutti thought it was terribly funny too and wished she had thought of it herself. We returned to our wooden house that evening content and tired.

  Days dragged on into weeks. The heat of July became the heat of August, and we were still waiting for our papers. Some of us had work; others didn’t. I was, at the moment, one of the latter. It was the seventh of August, an otherwise uneventful day. Boredom had long ago set in. Hot as I was, I walked to the latrine for something to do, then decided to sit for a while on a bench and lean my back against the rough wooden wall. Some flies were sitting on a stain next to my hand. I let them sit. I closed my eyes, wanting to dream, to envision my home, how it would be once we were in Sweden. How my room would look and where I would put my books and my photo of Dieter. My dear brother—I still had no idea where he was or if he was alive.

  A man sat down next to me then and wanted to talk, interrupting my quiet daydream. By his accent I could tell he was Bavarian, and he seemed anxious to speak. “Have you heard?” he asked, and continued without pausing for an answer. I hoped what he was about to say was something good. Some news about a call for transport. A reason to believe we were about to head for Finland. But no. He said this instead: “The Americans dropped a bomb on Japan yesterday. I heard this from one of the Russian guards. Although he didn’t speak German well, he seemed to be quite knowledgeable and wanted me to know all about it. He seemed excited. But not in a good way. He said one bomb destroyed the entire city. One bomb!”

  He looked at me intently. I returned his gaze, unable to fathom what I had just heard. Already, war had been shifted so far to the back of my memory that it seemed impossible to still be going on. What this man said could not be true.

  I had no words for him. The clouds seemed to darken in that moment against the white sky, the same sky that also looked upon this city in Japan, one I had never heard of, Hiroshima. My head hurt suddenly, something fierce. And I felt sick. I stood up and managed to walk to the edge of the path and vomited.

  He and I never spoke again. I don’t know who he was or what happened to him. Perhaps he was sent someplace else. But the news he gave me that day I did not repeat. It was too horrible, too terrible to imagine. I wanted nothing more to do with bombs. When, oh when, will it all end?

  The time for interrogations began. These were frightful times. It happened suddenly, and only in the middle of the night, when all was black and no one could see or hear, when all were asleep. Guards would come to your bed and wake you up, rudely. “Get up. Don’t bother with your things; you’ll be back before daylight. Now!” they ordered.

  We would only know about it the next day, when we noticed an empty bed and would ask, “Where is Peter?” “Where is Stefan?” Those who slept next to Peter or Stefan, or whoever was missing, would report what had happened at night, each of us happy they hadn’t come for us. Sometimes Peter or Stefan would be in his bed again, back in fetal sleep the next morning, and we would imagine it had been just a bad dream.

  The few Jews who were in our camp had it the worst of all of us. This was true. It was believed that if they survived the Nazis, they must have been spies, informers for the SS. How else did they manage to still be alive? There was a family I remember, a man and his wife and daughter from somewhere in the east. They spoke German well. Their name was Schmidt. Somehow we knew they were Jewish. They were among us Swedes but could not speak a word of Swedish. When guards weren’t around, we jokingly called them the Juden-Schmidts. The daughter—I became quite good friends with her—had the name Gisela on her passport, although I knew her only as Rebecca.

  I felt so sorry for this family. One day they were gone, just gone, and I would never see “Gisela” again. We all speculated that they had been sent to another camp, or possibly—and this thought frightened us terribly—they had been shot. This family, this quiet, reserved family, I am afraid to say, might have been suspected of conspiring with the Nazis. I think they ended up in the Lubyanka. I cannot say for sure. They were just gone one day, and all their belongings too. No one ever asked about them or mentioned their names again. They were simply gone.

  Then it happened to me. I was called in the middle of one night, my turn for an interrogation. I could not imagine what they would want from me. I was just a girl, I had only just turned twenty-one. What did I know? What was I to say? That I had worked as a Red Cross nurse and bandaged German soldiers? Helped to operate on war-wounded men, but they had been German? That I had been in Berlin and seen with my own eyes the brutal treatment our women received from their own kind, the Russian soldiers? Was that what I would be accused of?

  My interrogator was a Jewish man. His name was Stern and he spoke fluent German. He was not very tall but he was handsomely dressed in his blue uniform, and on his head was a blue hat. He asked me kindly to sit, which I did. He himself sat and then asked about my past—about my involvement with the Red Cross, about my Abitur, and what my hopes were for the future. Chitchat, really, my date and place of birth, that sort of thing. He asked if I’d seen any Russian workers, the Fremdarbeiter, when I was still in Germany.

  “Of course I did, sir,” I said. And then, like a fool, I added, “I could always tell they were Russians, because their clothes were always so ragged. I felt sorry for them. But now that I’m here, I see that everyone dresses just like them.”

  Immediately I knew I’d said too much and felt ashamed, but it seemed not to have fazed him. Instead he folded his hands in front of him and I felt the heat of the bare lightbulb above my head. What now? I thought.

  “You
have been quite friendly with the soldiers in this camp, have you not?”

  “Yes. I’ve met some of them, sir.”

  “And you know we have generals from Germany here too, do you not?”

  “Yes, sir. I do know that.”

  “Have you been introduced to any of them? Perhaps you would like to meet some?”

  Something I had taught myself long ago from my first encounters with the SS: Do not say yes. Do not say no. Stay small.

  “I have only spoken to a few men on the other side. And I have made one friend.” I was alluding to my translator. For a fleeting moment I thought of mentioning Willi and how happy I had been to see him, thinking that by talking about a friend like this, I might endear myself to this man, help him to see me more as a person. But I stopped myself. Suppose Willi actually had done something or said something, and now, because of our friendship, I could be implicated. I said nothing more. Stay small.

  “But people speak, they talk, you know,” the short man with the blue cap continued. Yes, I knew this. And I knew too that “walls have ears.” Often we suspected one another and were always careful of what we said and to whom we spoke. A friendly man, someone with cigarettes, sometimes real coffee or chocolate—something no one else ever had—often came to our barracks, just to talk. Of course we suspected him most of all. He was Finnish, but, really, all were suspected, and all were suspicious. So again, I simply said nothing.

  “You would like to leave soon, no?”

  “Yes, sir. Yes, I would, very much. And my mother, too.”

  “We know about your mother. And both of you can leave here much sooner than otherwise if you can help us out a bit.”

  “I would be happy to help,” I said, suddenly relaxing, thinking, if all this talk was only to ask me to work more, of course I could do that. I could even plant trees right side up, I thought, laughing to myself.

  As the interrogation went on, however, it was clear we were not communicating. He thought, he fully believed, that I was a Partei member. He believed that I knew about the concentration camps in the east, the camps where the Jews had been interned.

  “I knew nothing of those camps, sir. I only first heard about them toward the very end of the war, and then not again until I came here. I was horrified, actually—and I must tell you, I was never a member of the Partei!”

  With this, he stood so fast his chair fell over backwards, his face so close to mine that I could see the outline of his irises. “You lie! You lie! Just like all the rest of you. Of course you were a member of the Partei! All Germans were in the Partei. All of you. You all lie!”

  I took such a deep breath that I felt lightheaded. “Sir! I was not! I’m sorry. I am so sorry for the horror of it all—” And again he would not let me finish. His face was red with anger, but I remained unmoving in my chair. What is to become of me now? I thought. Will I be imprisoned for this lie, that I was a Partei member?

  Suddenly he became calm again. He picked up his chair and sat once more, acting again as though we were friends. He reached across the desk for my hands, which were folded in front of me. “We only want some information,” he said. “Perhaps you could help us. When you are with the men, the German soldiers, perhaps you could keep your ears open. Perhaps you could listen a bit. You seem to be good at that.”

  With this, I felt I had an out. “Yes, sir. I can listen. But all I ever hear is what the men wish for once they are home again. Their wives, their lovers, their fiancées. Is this what you are looking for?”

  He stared at me. He must have thought he’d never seen such a stupid cow before in his life. We had been talking for more than an hour, and my head was aching. He shut his file and stood up. “Danke, Fräulein,” he said in his most polite German, and ushered me to the door. The interrogation was over, and I never saw him again.

  Never again did they come to my room at night, but there was a time after that when I felt the others mistrusted me even more than usual. Women looked at me with suspicion. Why had they taken me to the interrogation room? What had I said? What had I agreed to? The same night as my interrogation, a Greek diplomat was taken away as well, and he never returned. They came for his clothes in the morning, and that was the last that was seen of him. Did the others suspect me of implicating him? I don’t know. It was all too difficult to understand.

  I do remember that a young mother with her baby and its grandmother, an old babushka, arrived some time later. I learned that they were the wife, daughter, and mother of this diplomat from Greece. They spoke Russian well, and the young mother spoke some German too. They were with us for a few weeks, and at one point the babushka decided to wash our windows. I’d never seen anything like this! She filled her mouth with water and then squirted it at the windows. With an old rag she had managed to scrounge up from somewhere, she then wiped the windows clean.

  This poor family, too, soon disappeared. I heard them screaming, the mother picked up first, the baby and her grandmother left behind until the following night, when it was their turn. They were all sent to the Lubyanka, we were told, as punishment for conspiring with the SS.

  20

  SNOW

  Five months and we were still here. The nights became longer, the days became cold, and often it would snow, a drizzly snow, sometimes turning to rain. I longed for the coat I had so hastily given away. An eternity had passed, and Sweden now seemed so far away.

  An announcement came on the thirteenth of December that we were to line up early, before dawn, the next morning. Our names would be called, and we would be boarding for transport “home,” as we now referred to our Scandinavian destinations. At five a.m. we lined up outside with all our belongings, once again daring to hope. There were important-looking Russian men in uniforms, some more distinguished than others, standing around us, and their presence made our new orders seem official. Some of the Russians among us suggested they might be Cheka. I never quite knew what it meant; I thought it was an endearment of sorts. Instead it was the term for the secret police, the NKWD.

  After we had stood in line for most of the day, the program was suddenly called off. There was no train, and we were to return to our barracks.

  The next day was the same. Again, the important-looking men. Again, no train. Again, disappointment.

  The day after that was a Sunday and a week before Christmas. Again, we lined up for roll call at five o’clock in the morning, but this time there was a train waiting. All of us, with the exception of one Chinese couple, were ordered to board. Our Cheka were suddenly no longer so friendly. We were pushed up onto the train with rifle butts, our bags thrown up after us, and we began what we thought would be our final journey. It was winter, of course, and the train had no heat, so we tried to huddle together as best we could.

  Dirty wooden benches without mattresses, without blankets this time, lined the sides; only some of us were lucky enough to grab one. Along one side of the car was an iron luggage shelf that ran the length of the car just over the top of our seats. A man was already trying to hoist himself up to use this as his bed. We anticipated a long ride ahead of us, and sleep was the only protection we had in an otherwise miserable situation. The floors were grimy and slick, where men had been spitting on them, it seemed, for years. There were oily blotches on the walls, even on the seats.

  Snow began to fall just as we left Krasnogorsk. At first I thought it might stay behind as we traveled on, but it kept coming down, harder and harder as the hours passed. It was bitter cold, and the darkness never seemed to leave. One of the windows in our car was stuck open. It wouldn’t budge, neither up nor down. The seat below it remained empty. Snow blew in as the train moved, piling up on the window ledge, then filling the seat. All through the night the snow blew in. By the next morning it reached all the way to the top of the bench.

  It was a blizzard such as I had never experienced before in my life. The snow blew so hard and swirled around in complete circles so that it looked like it was snowing up, and the wind was s
o wild, it blurred whatever you were looking at, leaving you without any sense of direction.

  The day passed. We were terribly cold and had no food. The wind continued and night descended. Suddenly the train stopped, and we were ordered to get out. For what? we wondered, but we did as we were told, the snow still falling in sheets, the wind blowing it up into the black sky. We had no idea what to expect next, so we just stood in the middle of the train tracks. It was a desolate spot. Darkness surrounded by darkness.

  It is true. The worst possible things really do come true. We were now told we had to start walking. I only remember this order and that we did it. Then we were ordered to run, and this too we did. Where to and why? We did not know, but my mother fell. Somehow, she lost track of the direction she was going in, stumbled on something, and she was down on the ground, not knowing which way to turn if she got up again. I heard her voice from what seemed like a great distance away, calling my name. “Gretel!” she cried, a name she had used only when I was a small child, and I hated that she said it now.

  But I answered, terrified, “Mutti! Where are you?” The wind took my words away so fast I did not know if she heard me or not. Then I heard it again: “Gretel.” Her voice was close enough that I thought I could reach her by stretching out my hand and waving it, which I did, frantically, while I still could not see her. I had no idea where she was, yet I kept reaching for her, my arm sweeping through the snow in the air around me, her voice crying out to me, “Help!” Finally I found her. She was lying on the ground, not far from where I stood. Had I not helped her then, she would have been trampled to death, or frozen to death, but dead all the same.

  Our run through the storm brought us to a wooden house, much like the barracks we left behind in Krasnogorsk. Women were there who didn’t speak German, but they showed us to some beds. It became clear that they were, in fact, giving us their own beds to sleep in. Why, we wondered, but we had no way of communicating, and we were exhausted. Suddenly a woman, one of the first to enter the bedrooms, screamed out in German, “Watch out! These beds have lice!” And that was the end of it. We did not take their beds, as wonderful as it might have been to lie on a mattress again. We managed to pile our bags all around us and made ourselves comfortable as best we could. Mutti and I lay down on the floor and slept.