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

by Kerstin Lieff

  Once, when all of this was still new and, in a way, somewhat romantic—the crunch of snow beneath my feet, the black sky, the silhouettes of trees all around me—I saw a hut off in the woods. There was light coming from behind a curtain, and I recognized the glitter of a Christmas tree. Just this once, never again, and it was so beautiful! It filled my heart with hope. Yes, it did. One small message standing out there in the free world, a home with a Christmas tree.

  When we returned to the Gulag, we were served our food for the evening: the soup, called kapusta, and bread. I was always so hungry by then, anything tasted good. I learned to soak my bread in my soup and to eat only a small piece of it at a time, to make the soup last longer. But I was always hungry, even after I ate. There was never enough. Five hundred grams of bread—not much more than one slice—and a bowl of kapusta, that’s all. This soup was ladled from the Gulaschkanone into long troughs from which everyone just helped himself. No one gave us spoons, and of course we wouldn’t venture to let anyone know we still had Mutti’s silver hidden at the bottom of her Seesack, so we fashioned our own somehow. For bowls, we used what we could find, and some people shared; others just ate directly from the trough. Mutti hustled off to the camp kitchen promptly the first day we were there and demanded we receive something to put our soup in. She came back to our barrack with two empty tin cans, one for me and one for her, and these were our soup bowls from then on. When you have no choice, it is extraordinary what you will accept as “yours.”

  The soup most often was cabbage “à la chef.” Cabbage water. It had large leaves of cabbage floating in it, often its hard core as well, and very often the cabbage was already rotten. You could tell: it tasted of mold. Sometimes there were potatoes, but more often only potato peels. In that case we called our soup “potato water.” Once in a while a piece of meat appeared, but only those who came first to the trough would get to eat it, so of course we hurried each day, hoping to arrive before anyone else. Sometimes there were globules of fat—that, too, was immediately eaten by those who arrived first.

  About once a month we would find fish heads floating in the soup. The first time I saw this, I looked into that trough and could not bring myself to eat it. The fish’s mouth with its tiny teeth hanging open, its ugly purple eyes staring back at me. I could not eat it. I never could. The rotten cabbage? I did not mind. Not anymore. I was too hungry. I thought I had known hunger in Berlin, but here in Russia it was so much worse.

  I often looked into my tin can of soup and thought of Willi, my friend. How he had said, “They will try to kill you with their food.” I didn’t believe this was true. They wanted us to work, and this food was all they had to give us. Why would they want to kill us? Where would they put our bodies? But then, true to Willi’s warning, one day the salt fish appeared. Perhaps Willi was right, I thought. I remembered his words and, as hungry as I was, I refused to eat it. Let the others die, but not me.

  We had nothing with which to clean ourselves, and with all the dirt, I would have been so happy just to give my nose a good cleaning, but handkerchiefs, of course, did not exist. My hands were dirty, my fingernails were dirty, my face—always dirty. Once a week we each received a small bowl of water. I would place mine behind the stove to warm it a bit, and by morning it was at least lukewarm. With this I would wash first my face and armpits and between my legs, as well as I could, and I would try to wash my hair too, but of course I had no shampoo. Then the underwear and stockings got a dousing in this same water, and everything was hung on hooks and bedposts to dry, looking just as dirty as it had when it first went into the water.

  Once a guard was kind enough to offer me an extra bowl of water. I was thrilled; I was going to use it to wash my hair. It had become long, and it was thick then, and I wanted to really scrub it well. I did notice little white specks floating on the surface, but I dunked my head into the bowl anyway. Before I could even shake my hair loose, my scalp began to itch. Terribly. That guard had played a trick on me. The water had lice in it. Nothing was a gift, I learned. This was something I would have to remember.

  At least I never menstruated in the camp. Not for the entire time I was there. No woman did. It was a gift from God, this. What would we have done to wash? What would we have used as napkins? But women still became pregnant. Avoiding pregnancy was not, apparently, a gift God had granted.31

  Some men from the Russian high commission came to our camp one day and asked why we were so filthy. “Well, because we don’t have any soap!” we told them. We discovered then that soap had indeed been apportioned to our camp, but Anna Iwanowna Ladowitsch, our leader, had stolen it, as she had stolen so many other things, to sell on the black market. Why did she do this? Because she had nothing, just as we had nothing. She was just as much in need as we were. I suppose I would have done the same.

  We had a sauna, a Russian-style one, called a banya. Sometimes there were birch branches we were supposed to use to beat our skin, “to increase circulation,” we were told. Once a month we were to go into the banya. I thought it was so we could bake ourselves clean. The Russian guards watched over our clothes while we all went in naked; no one really cared anymore. We were all so thin, anyway, and there was nothing interesting to look at. Sometimes they then baked our clothes to get rid of lice, which by now were a constant worry, but most often they didn’t. And it was only when our clothes became too ragged to wear that they would be burned and we’d be given new clothes.

  21

  THE SEASONS CHANGED

  SPRING

  It was now the year 1946, and as the months progressed, hope dwindled to despair. Herr Jäger managed to do what he could to keep everyone’s spirits alive. “Exercise,” he would say. “Every morning. Do it. If it’s cold, do it. If it’s snowing, do it. We must keep our wits about us. Stretch. Do a few jumping jacks and sit-ups and touch your toes.”

  Although we worked until we were exhausted, and his constant optimism often irritated me, a few stretches in the morning did help. It made me feel human again, as if I still had some power over myself. I think Herr Jäger was right. Prisoners in other camps did die, some from diseases of filth, like tetanus and cholera, others because they just went crazy. Our little group, for the most part, kept ourselves together.

  I saw some of it, though, even in our camp. It was nearly always old men who would go. Those who lost hope. I saw them scurry to the compost pile behind the kitchen quarters after our evening meal. They would dig through the rot, hoping to find something, anything, more to eat. And there never was anything. What was left had gone into our soup, and that we ate greedily. And what we tried to save for later would almost always be stolen, either by rats or other prisoners, the kitchen staff, or even the guards. I did it too—steal food—whenever I could.

  But these old men, they’d become thinner and thinner, their eyes would disappear, and soon you could see they went mad. Spitting when they talked, fear taking over all that was left of them. Then you’d see the guards carry them off, or you’d see the belongings taken from their barrack and you would know, this man had died.

  We used them, too, these men. If one died—this was much easier in winter—we’d hide the body underneath the bottom bunk, slide a pile of belongings in front of him so the guards wouldn’t notice, and when they came to our barrack at sunrise for a head count for food, we’d prop that man up on his bed. Make him look like just another one of us, ready for his morning soup. His lifeless body would increase the head count, and with that we hoped we might all get just a bit more to eat. Even after his death, he was still working, this time for us, his fellow prisoners.

  One morning I woke up to the sun, and I realized how long she had been gone. And then, as if to make up for her long absence, she blinded us with her light. Everything responded. Carpets of wildflowers spread in all directions. My eyes hurt to look at it all.

  My job was “reorganized” to a new one. I had become so sick in the coal mines. Often it was intestinal—nausea and cramps�
�but more worrisome was a cough I had developed.

  It was spring, and I was moved to the potato fields to work, and because Mutti was my mother, she was moved as well. Oh, but that was glorious! In the fields and in the dirt, out on a farm, how I enjoyed the sun and the sense of freedom—on top of the land and not under it anymore. Mutti took on a new look of health and even seemed to have a new spring to her step. All day we pulled up potatoes and threw them into waiting horse carts. When I could, I would eat one, dirt and all. But, of course, I seldom could. There was always a guard standing there, making sure we continued to work. We did, however, all of us, fill our trousers with potatoes, regularly, and we saw the guards do the same. We all tied our trousers shut at the bottom. Perhaps we stuffed them into our shoes. This detail I cannot recall exactly. We would walk home then, raw potatoes bumping around our ankles, all of us only so happy to know we would have a little extra to eat that night. Sometimes, too, now that we walked home on these country roads, Mutti and I would pick chamomile and dandelion leaves and eat them along the way.

  I walked into the barrack one day and found Mutti standing at our bunk, exasperated. “She stole my riding breeches! My beautiful gabardine riding breeches! I had been saving them. I wanted so dearly to trade them for eggs or for milk from the kulaks.”

  “Don’t tell me it was Anna Iwanowna!” I exclaimed. We had begun to suspect her of everything now. Missing clothing, missing stockings we had hung from the line after washing, cigarettes. And you could not talk with her; she was unreasonable. Not someone you could ever confide in. After that, Anna Iwanowna did not show up for nearly a week. There was no one we could ask, “Have you seen my breeches? Do you know who could have taken them?”

  It had begun with silk stockings, a pair Mutti had managed to save. These she had taken out of her bag and laid on the bed, wanting to simply “rearrange things.” There was not much left that she owned, but the breeches she had kept for that one special trade. The silver and the art, though, were still things that would “under no circumstances” be traded. This Mutti insisted upon. “Not ever!” I left the issue alone, because arguing was of no use. But why the paintings? Here? I could not understand. But there they stayed, wrapped and hidden under her bed, along with the bag of silver. I still don’t know how this was possible, but they were never discovered, the whole time we were there, not by anyone.

  Anna Iwanowna walked in then, just as everything had been laid out in orderly piles, and asked Mutti what she was doing. Mutti replied, “Looking for something,” but, of course, Anna Iwanowna was not interested in the answer. She was much more interested in Mutti’s possessions. “And that’s when she must have seen the breeches,” Mutti said. “Because all I had to do was turn around, go to the latrine, or the soup line, and the next moment they were gone.”

  We hated Anna Iwanowna. We feared her. We wanted only for her not to be around. It was not much later that we learned she had been taken away to the Lubyanka, that filthy, gloomy stone prison in Moscow from which no one returned. A terrible fate, but she deserved it all the same.

  Around our camp was a village. It was not clear to me that people lived around our Gulag until we’d been there for some time. People would come to the fence, wanting to trade, sometimes eggs or whatever they had in exchange for some of the things we had. Silk stockings were the first to go. These women had never before seen them. It always seemed to be the same women who came, all wearing long aprons and headscarves. In time I learned who they were. They were known as the kulaks, the poor ones of Russia, and they lived around the camps, making a living from servicing us.32 We called them the “half frees,” people from the outside, but all the same people who could not leave. They were there because they had to be there. There was nowhere else they were allowed to go, and our camp was their only livelihood.

  A young kulak boy befriended me at one point. He was perhaps fifteen. A bit of fuzz had begun to grow on his lip. He’s going to be handsome soon, I thought. Each day we met at the fence; each day he would have something new to bring me, perhaps an egg or some carrots, and I tried to bring him something of mine—a cigarette, my bread, something. Mostly we exchanged looks and a silent desire for life to be somehow different. I felt more sorry for him than I did for myself. You see, we always believed we would leave here one day. For us, there was somehow still hope. For him, that was not so. He would grow older here, marry a girl from his village, another kulak, and die here, too. So it would be.

  SUMMER

  Summer came, and nothing changed except that we grew thinner and sicker and a number of our people died. I was moved back into the coal mines to work.

  New arrivals came to our camp, and more and more they were Slavs—Poles and Russians. We could not trust them. They did not get along with each other, either; their history was so dark. When they had their little “wars” with one another—and this would go on for weeks—the Poles claimed to be German and tried to buddy up with us and would claim to be from Westphalia. They were people who had worked once in the German industrial sector and could even speak some German. But then, when they became friendly with the Russians again, suddenly they were big-time Poles, the ones who won the war against us, their German enemies. These were people I always made a huge detour around. In truth, they must have had it very, very bad in this camp. They did not know if they were loved or hated, or, if they were ever released, if they would be murdered once they returned to their own country.

  The Russian prisoners hated us Germans equally. They spit into our soup when we weren’t looking, and they stole whatever they could from us. Often your bread would disappear right from your very own lap. The worst of them were the Wolga Deutsch—Germans who had lived in Russia for generations. They would snitch on us, make up stories, do whatever they could to sell us away to the guards, just to gain their own freedom. Perhaps they were jealous, because there was a sense that they would be here for a very long time, while we still hoped one day we would be returned to our homes.

  AUTUM

  My cough became worse; sometimes there was blood. Some nights I lay shivering in my bed with a fever, thinking it would be better just to die. The thought of another cold, dark winter in this place made me wish I were dead. How long now will we be here, dear God? How much more can we take? I had nothing left. I had given away my coat, my scarf was now in rags, and I had no mittens to keep me warm, only the fingerless gloves I’d received from the Russians. And I had to work so hard every day. Mutti scolded me, “Nimm dich mal zusammen!” But orders to “pull myself together” didn’t help. I longed for home; I dreamed of our fatherland. Always in these dreams I saw spring flowers and smelled the summer air. Marigolds, I don’t know why, reminded me of home. We had some growing in the camp, here and there, during the summer months, and I would get so homesick, thinking how they were growing in Germany too, but those flowers lived in freedom.

  WINTER

  Our second Christmas in this desolate land, and no one back home knew where we were. This thought haunted me. No one knew whether we were alive or dead. Papa Spaeth would be so worried, and what about Dieter? Candles, however, turned up—who knew from where? I suspected Herr Jäger had organized them from one of the kulaks. We set them upon our little table, and someone, it must have been Susanne, pulled a bottle of vodka out from under her bed. “Don’t worry where I got this. I got it, that’s all,” she said. She gave a shrug and a giggle as we passed it around. The vodka helped me out of my sullenness, but I was so ill, and we had nothing else.

  Gulag barracks in the snow. “No one knew whether we were alive or dead.” (akg-images/RIA Novosti)

  But we did have stories, that was true, and someone began to tell one. A story of home. Someone else began to sing a song, and we all learned the words to it. Even our guard seemed much less interested in making things difficult for us. He was still young and quite amused by our Christmas mood. We sang, and eventually he joined in. Others came from other barracks
, and soon our little room was full. People were on the beds, on the floor; we put our arms around each other, and tears were on everyone’s face. It seemed we all missed someplace different from where we were, even the guards. They sang then, too, in Russian, and strange as it was, the songs sounded so familiar. It was Christmas, after all, and we wanted so badly to celebrate something.

  Guards, prisoners, Scandinavians, Germans, Slavs, suddenly we were all the same. That evening—I will never forget it—lasted until morning. “Slap-happy,” I think you say in English. “Punch-drunk.” When nothing was funny but it still made you laugh. Some of us danced, even with the guards, and when one of us opened his mouth to speak again, we all fell over laughing; he never even got the story out. The Russians laughed, too, and they couldn’t even understand our language!

  I spat up blood sometimes, my cough was so bad, and I wanted only what I’d been craving off and on through all this misery, for Death to come take me. Mutti was lost in her own thoughts most of the time, and I would sometimes catch her staring into the distance, an unutterable sadness in her face. She would work in the cold fields, come back to the barrack, arrange her bed so it was comfortable, and close her eyes. Rarely did she talk with me, or with anyone else, for that matter. Somehow, she kept her suffering to herself.

  I got up from my bed one night, hand to my mouth, feeling completely forsaken by the universe. I took off my undershirt and pulled on my Russian-issued coat. Then I walked outside. The night was black as coal, nothing but a sliver of the moon and the distant stars in the sky. The winter wind stabbed at me, but even this didn’t stop me. I shuffled toward the latrine, with its frozen-piss floors, in my bare feet. I was finished. Whether I died there in the stench of that shithouse or in my cold, hard bed, it no longer mattered. There I stood, for a long, long time. I held my thin coat open for the winter to take me. The wind whipped around my throat. I begged God to have me now. I stood against the latrine wall, with my coat wide, until I must have fallen asleep. Was that a man walking through that halo of lamplight? I did not know, nor did I care. Let him look. It was a dead woman he was looking at anyway.