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

by Kerstin Lieff

  Morning came, and through the open door I saw what looked to be a gloriously sun-filled day. Still sleepy, I made my way over to the doorway. Outside, the air was so bright I had to squint to see that the snow was as high as my waist in places. Once I could focus, I thought the stars must have fallen during the night and landed just here. Everywhere it looked like diamonds lying on top of the powdery snow.

  I could see from where I stood that the distance we had covered the night before was not that great. The train was still there, although the tracks were now buried. The station, and the very spot where Mutti fell, were only a few hundred feet away. I walked down a path, which had been cleared, to the latrine, as it seemed some of the others were doing as well.

  From out of the brightness, a woman and her older daughter—she was about my age; I had seen them often together in Krasnogorsk—walked toward me, away from the latrines. “You will not believe what we heard in the latrines!” one of them shouted, breathlessly. “The other women here, they’re German, too. They say they’ve been here for many months. And you will not believe this. They say they are prisoners!”

  “Yes,” I said, not quite understanding their point. Had we not seen prisoners in Krasnogorsk already?

  “They told us they have been working in a matchstick factory for months already, and then they said that we were brought here to do the same.”

  Now the message was sinking in and I became frantic. “But this is not possible! It’s just not possible! We’ve not done anything. How can we be prisoners? I was a Red Cross nurse! I did no harm to anyone!” Then I started to scream to no one in particular, “Who here has done anybody harm? No one!”

  “There are other women here, too,” they continued, trying to stay calm. “They have come from coal mines and a collective farm, where they were also forced to work. Many have been treated very badly. ‘Rape’ was a word we heard more than once.” Both women looked directly into my eyes, wanting to make sure I understood. Then, again, “No, no, don’t be mistaken. They said they are prisoners. And that we are, too. And they looked very scared. Dirty, too, and thin.”

  The three of us now stood and stared at one another, unable to speak further. It was true, as Willi had warned me: We were, indeed, prisoners.

  Therese was no longer with us. At some point she’d been replaced by another woman, Anna Iwanowna.28 The respect with which some of the Russian guards in Krasnogorsk used to speak to us was no longer evident. Instead, harsh orders were barked at us, and there were always the NKWD, the dreaded secret police who had so suddenly shown up when we boarded the train in Krasnogorsk. Orders to line up: men here, women over there, children in yet another place. Orders to move. And finally, orders to load onto a waiting lorry, a cattle wagon with metal sides and a roof, but this time with nothing to sit on at all, only a floor covered in straw.

  For three days we huddled in this lorry, frightened and cold. Twice each day we received water and bread, but nothing to put on it. A mother had a baby with her, and she had a terrible time with the diapers. They were, of course, impossible to wash. Even if she were to find water, it would most likely be frozen. The lorry began to smell foul. Dirty diapers, stinking bodies. There was a man, a diplomat from an embassy—maybe Herr Jäger was his name—who became a sort of spiritual leader to all of us, and in this time of desperation, he was a godsend. Time and again he reminded us that we were beyond this misery, that we had dignity.

  “There are differences only you can make for yourself right now. Remember that. They can take away your food, and leave you without a comfortable bed. They can do all kinds of things, but you they cannot take away.” I believe he spoke as much to himself as to the rest of us, but oh, how those words helped. Often I would hear his voice, months later, when it was bitter cold and I was just too hungry.

  When we arrived at our destination this time, every thread of hope had been left behind and the reality of our situation was clear. We were Russian prisoners, and our fate was now in the hands of God. All around us, barbed wire and watchtowers like those I’d seen in Krasnogorsk. Across an empty, wide-open land that stretched to meet a hazy line separating it from the arctic sky, I could see watchtowers and more watchtowers until they disappeared into the horizon.

  The place we were in was called Stalinogorsk, near Tula, along the Don River, and it was a Gulag, which had a sign hanging over the gate written in Cyrillic. It had taken three days to get there, and it just looked like a vast and forsaken desert covered in white. “The middle of nowhere” could not even begin to describe where we were. And yet, I imagined that we must have been close to the home of Count Leo Tolstoy, where he wrote War and Peace.

  We were ordered to run, once again, I with three oil paintings under each arm—the blankets slipping and frayed—tripping on the frozen mud. I ran, hating my mother once again. Far up ahead, she was, as usual, the first to get to what looked like it would be our spot in a barrack, the place we would now call “home.”

  Inside this long wooden building were rows of bunk beds, constructed from rough-hewn wooden planks, lined up head to foot on either side down the full length of the room. In the aisle between the two rows of beds was a table with two benches, one placed on either side. An electrical wire stretched the entire length from which hung a number of naked lightbulbs. At the far end were a wood-burning stove and a window. Here was where Mutti decided we would make our beds.

  “We should sleep up top. That way we’ll have a little extra room and there’ll be fresh air since we’ll be close to the window. We’ll have light, too. And now, with the winter, we’ll be a little warmer, right here next to the stove.” I was grateful for this, and I hugged her, happy that she could have her wits about her enough to be so practical. But I still had to remark, “Mutti, where, tell me, do you think we’ll hang the Dürer?”

  Inside a Gulag barrack. (akg-images/RIA Novosti)

  She only looked at me and then looked away. I felt bad now. Of course, she was not to blame for where we had landed. She had tried only to make the best out of what little we had. And didn’t she think about Dieter too? If he were alive, how would he find us, or know anything about us? And Papa. How would he know what had become of us? People back home would think we were dead, just as we had always thought of anyone who was missing. And perhaps that was to be our fate anyway: that we would die here.

  Our bed near the stove and close to the window proved to be a good choice. We had room to store our things, and I was glad for the window. The first night—oh, it felt so good to finally stretch out—I lay down hoping for a good, long sleep, but that was not to be. All night I tossed and shivered. It was cold, even with the stove right next to me. Cold from above—the blankets were terribly thin—and cold from below, because the mattress, too, was thin.

  At one point I felt Mutti’s arm around my neck. I pushed it away in my sleep and then pushed it again. Over and over I pushed her arm away, but always it returned to the same spot on my neck. Finally I awoke, wanting to shout at her to please keep her arm to herself, and one last time I felt for it with my hand, wanting to give it a good, hard shove back to her side.

  What I felt was furry. And it was warm. I opened my eyes wide then and saw that this arm also had teeth. It was a rat!

  Should I have felt compassion for this creature that only wanted to keep itself warm, as all of us did? And what better place than in the crook of my neck? I tried, but no. Instead I screamed. I probably woke the entire barrack with my scream, and the rat scurried off to who knows where. Maybe inside someone’s boot or under the blanket of some other unsuspecting prisoner. Somewhere else that was warm.

  In the morning, after we were all awake, I told everyone about Mutti’s arm and the rat. Everyone got a good laugh out of it, although, in truth, the whole idea frightened me. Someone asked, “Aren’t you afraid of typhoid? Rats carry typhoid, you know. That ugly thing could have bitten you as easily as sleep with you, and then what? You could be dead!�
�� To make light of it, I decided to name my rat Sergei.

  A girl only two years older than I, Susanne Erichsen, lived in my barrack with me, and over time we became close friends. Each morning, Susanne got out of bed early and decided, first thing, to sweep. “Enough of this dreck,” she said. “If we can’t have a cozy home, at least we can have a clean floor.”29

  Sergei showed up frequently, even in the middle of the day, and with each appearance he became bolder. One morning while it was still dark, the only light coming in from the camp lights outside the window, Susanne told me, “Like this. This is how I would swing the broom if I were to see that old Sergei,” and she demonstrated a wide swoosh, accidentally hitting a large hook on the wall. As she did this, she managed to hit Sergei, who happened to be sitting right there! Whack! Right on his head! And he fell dead, right at her feet, like an offering. Susanne was shocked, I was shocked, and then we all laughed. Susanne was our heroine for the day.

  But only for the day, because Sergei must have been a female, a Sergina. As many as a dozen young rats soon wandered out from the walls, blindly sniffing here, then there. It took all of us now, with brooms and shoes and shovels and anything else we could find, to rid ourselves of those babies. It was a good story to laugh about that night, though, because it was Christmas Eve.

  Someone produced candles that evening, and we spread them across our table. A few of us sat on the benches, others sat on the beds, both on the top and on the bottom, and we sang Christmas songs, all the ones we knew and could remember. Songs from Bavaria and places in eastern Germany. Swedish ones and Finnish and Norwegian, all sounding very much the same. It was Christmas, after all. The room began to feel warm, and the windows fogged. Mutti sang that Swedish song we had sung when we danced around the Christmas tree, that first year when we thought the war was nothing. Then she grabbed the hands of the two people next to her, encouraging them to stand up, and the rest of us did the same. Our little candle-lit table became our Christmas tree, and we danced a circle around it, arm in arm, as she tried to teach the words to the others:

  Nu är det jul igen

  och nu är det jul igen

  och julen varar väl till påska.

  Now it is Yule again,

  And now it is Yule again,

  And Yule will last until it’s Easter.

  Suddenly a whirl of snow blew in, and in the black emptiness of the open doorway stood a man with a rifle at his side. Two leather boots and a Russian voice that shouted, “Nyet!” Stop the noise! No singing! With that, our first Russian Christmas was over.

  The next morning we were issued camp clothing: a padded coat, padded pants, and boots made of felt. We all now looked exactly the same. Gray, like the air that surrounded us. Breakfast was the same as we would receive every morning from now on—a bowl of kasha, or gruel, with some bread that was very black and tasted like cardboard. It had been baked with potatoes, I learned later, which kept it from molding but also made it so hard that you had to be quite creative to figure out how to eat it. Soaking it in the kasha helped.

  A lorry picked us up for work. It was very dark still, maybe six or so in the morning. I wore the clothing I had been given and tied my scarf around my neck. My job was to work in the coal mines. This was what I would do from now on for many more months. Sometime later that morning, somewhere in the deep white, the lorry dropped us off, and we still had to trudge through a forest to get to the mines.

  It was always cold, I was always cold, my hands, my feet, my face. I pulled the hat I was given—it was called a chapka—low onto my forehead and wrapped my thin scarf around my face. Our eyelashes became white with frost and froze shut at the corners. It was too cold to talk. If I tried, it felt as though my mouth would freeze, so I just stayed quiet.

  There were moments when someone had to make a toilet stop as we walked to the mines. It was never a good time, always too cold, but because of the poor food, we all had to go often. Whenever this occurred, the guard soldier would stop the entire trek, and we all squatted just there on the side of the path and pissed in unison. It no longer mattered who squatted next to whom, who saw whom, man or woman. These things didn’t matter any longer. We just squatted and took care of our business, pulled up our pants, and trudged on.

  In the coal mine, my job went like this: There were small open railroad cars that needed to be loaded with coal by the workers down in the mine. I was one of them—one of the workers who climbed a ladder to get below. All of us were women. We would fill the cars with this brown coal—I believe it is called lignite in English30—and then call out to the men above to come push the cars along the rails and out of the mine. These cars did not fit the rails well, and often they fell off, sometimes dumping the entire load on the ground. So what did we women do? We picked up the lumps of coal and reloaded the cars, and the process started all over again.

  It was always wet down there. My felt boots would have been warm had they stayed dry, but they were always soaked. Everything was wet. And we all had to urinate so often. We could not hold our bladders, I don’t know why. The effect of standing in water all day, I suppose, so we just wet ourselves. This just happened. We were wet through and through. Wet from the outside, wet from the inside. And always cold.

  Susanne worked alongside me in the mines. We laughed some, told stories about the guards when we thought no one was listening. Our jokes helped to distract us from our miserable situation. Then one day Susanne fell to the ground, unconscious. She had always said she wanted to find a way to get into the clinic, so she wouldn’t have to stand in this piss-water any longer. “The clinic is warm, I hear,” she had whispered to me one day as we were loading a car. “They have blankets and they feed you food. I mean, real food.”

  “How do you know this?” I was curious, too. What would it take to be admitted to the clinic?

  “Joachim—do you remember? He ran a fever. Only yesterday he returned to work. He was gone for two months. He told me all about it. He said his only regret was that he did not know how to keep the fever high.”

  And now Susanne had fallen. I thought it was a great job of acting on her part. She really did pull off the look of an unconscious person! Her arms fell limp to her sides as the guards tried to revive her. Never once did she move or open her eyes. And they did indeed take her to the clinic—packed her on a horse wagon, on top of straw, wrapped several blankets around her, and drove her away.

  About a week later Anna Iwanowna came to our barrack and, along with a few men who had a horse wagon, loaded Susanne’s belongings. Everything, even the sheets from her bed. “She’s dead,” Anna informed us. “Died of pneumonia.”

  I was sad, very sad, but somehow I could not believe this. One day Susanne was here; now we were told she was gone. I thought it must be a mistake, but Anna Iwanowna told us it was not. Susanne had died the day before. They took her things, and suddenly it was as if Susanne had never existed.

  I am ashamed of this now, but I grabbed her mattress and put it on top of mine, hoping the extra padding would make my bed a bit warmer. This did not last, however. Only a few days later, when a new prisoner was brought to our barrack in the middle of the night, the guards must have lifted me while I slept, taken her mattress back, and placed it on her empty bed for this new man to use. I never felt a thing. I only noticed it was missing when I was cold again the next morning.

  Weeks later, when we arrived home hungry after ten hours of work, a woman who looked like a ghost walked into our barrack. I stared but did not believe my eyes. Who was this, this woman who knew exactly where she was going?

  “Susanne?” I asked, incredulously.

  “Yes. Why do you look at me so stupidly? Of course it’s me.” And then she noticed her bed was occupied. “Where are my things?” she asked.

  “Well, they told us you were dead, Susanne! Your things are all gone! Anna Iwanowna came to get them weeks ago.”

  There Susanne stood, not a thing left to her name. The stylish handbag she had mana
ged to keep, her sweater with the holes she had so meticulously mended, shoes, even her Russian-issued prison clothing—all of it was gone. Anna Iwanowna had taken them all under the pretext that she was dead. Really what she had done was take advantage of the fact that Susanne was sick. She probably secretly hoped, or simply assumed, she would die, so she took her things and sold them on the black market.

  Somehow we managed to find Susanne some clothes and a new bed. Perhaps the guards helped, I cannot remember, but that was Susanne’s life now, a woman with nothing left of her German history.

  We had three very short cigarette breaks during each day that we worked those long hours in the mines. We were given tobacco but no papers to roll it in. Our latrines, however, had scraps of Russian newspaper with which we could wipe our behinds. This paper was very thin, and when we licked it, it would stick to itself. It made perfect rolling paper for cigarettes. It was a trick we learned from our Russian guards, as they did the same. Always it was dark, and always cold, but the cigarettes tasted so good when we could take the time to smoke, and they helped us to forget our hungry stomachs.

  At the end of our working day, we were served a sort of “water soup,” as we called it, differentiating it from cabbage or potato soup, and it was brought to us in huge blue vats, the same Gulaschkanonen we knew from the rationing days in Berlin. There was nothing identifiable in this “soup,” but it was hot, and it felt good to hold the cup and to warm our frozen hands.

  Then the long trek home through the woods in snow and mud. My wet shoes soon froze in the shape of my footsteps, the tips up in the front and the heels up in the back. We called them “rocking horses,” Susanne and I, and we laughed if we could do so without calling attention to ourselves.