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

by Kerstin Lieff

  22

  YOU STILL HAVE HOPE

  1947

  When I regained consciousness, it was daylight, and I was looking into two eyes the color of dark honey. It was a kind-looking face. A deep worry line ran the length of the man’s forehead, under a mop of sandy-colored hair. He wasn’t German. Just beyond his head was a stark ceiling with two rows of lightbulbs, bare and bright, and I couldn’t understand where I was. This man had large hands, and one of them gently brushed my hair back from my face.

  “You must rest. You are very sick, Margarete. You nearly died last night. Do you remember it?”

  I did remember a man walking through the camp light, the wind slicing my skin, and the familiar smell of the latrine, but I did not remember this. How did I get here? The lights and the ceiling were not familiar. I noticed for the first time that I was bundled, like a swaddled infant, inside several blankets. My head lay on a pillow, and the air smelled antiseptic, a fragrance I knew well.

  “The guards brought you here late in the night. It was this morning, actually. I had just arrived for my shift at four when the horse wagon rolled in with a woman on it. She wore only a thin coat, and her feet were bare. She looked to be dead. I was, at first, afraid I would not be able to revive her. Now do you remember?”

  Oh, the disappointment to know where I was! I began to weep. I had hoped for Death, I had prayed for it, and now here I was, once again in this pigsty, this shithole of a place.

  “Oh, sir, please!” I reached for his hand as well as I could. As soon as I moved, I realized how weak I was, and I began to cough again. “Oh, please. I’m finished with this life. Why wasn’t I left where I was? I was happy there. What more do you want from me?” I turned my face toward the wall and let the tears come. I didn’t care what he thought. Would he see this strong German woman—this woman whom Herr Jäger so often used as an example of strength, this woman who could plant trees upside down—would he see her like this now, broken? A woman who wanted only to die?

  “Grete,” he said. He knew my name. “I too am a prisoner here. I know how you feel. My home is in Latvia. But I am a doctor; I am useful to them. You, they will work until they have no more use for you. When your people become too sick or too old, they will let you go, and they will replace you with others to carry on the work. For me? I believe I may never see my family again. It’s even possible they will keep me here until death. You still have hope. You will be released one day, I do believe that. But now, first, you must regain your strength. You must heal.”

  I think he was forty, although he may have been much younger. It was difficult to tell. I too probably looked older than I was. By now we all looked rather “fat.” Years of poor food, and not enough of it, made everything in the body swell up and dulled our eyes.

  He spoke German with an accent, but only slight. His voice was soothing. I learned his name was Janis and then a long last name I have forgotten. It sounded somewhat Scandinavian, ending in something like -sons, or -sens. But I called him Dr. Janis from then on.

  I had tuberculosis, I learned, and Dr. Janis gave me penicillin for it. It was given to anyone who was sick. And he had me lie out in the sun under a blanket. He said it was to get vitamin D. He told me he had let the guards know where I was, and he also said he talked to my Mutti. Mutti! Where was she? Was she concerned? I never once thought of her. I was simply too sick.

  I stayed in this Revier as we called it—the camp clinic—for several weeks. Janis came to me each day, and each day he brought me food. There was soup that first morning, cooked with real chicken. There was even chicken fat floating on the surface and a few bits of meat in it. “Eat,” he said to me always, and all the while he stroked my hair. I felt so weak. My hands were gray and swollen, my eyelids felt heavy, my belly so hungry. He brought me bread with butter, and he brought me tea. The tea had a strong aroma, different from what I knew at home. It was dark, but there was always a little milk and some sugar in it. It was, I believe, this cup of tea each day and Dr. Janis’s gentle hands that slowly brought back my will to live.

  He sat with me and we talked, when we could, for long hours. He told me that his parents still spoke a North German dialect, Baltisch-Deutsch. He told me too about his homeland in the beautiful area of Wenden in the north of his country. He said his family was Protestant, not Catholic as many Latvians were.

  Then he told me, “I still believe in a God.” He seemed to struggle with his thoughts for a moment. “I believe in a God, I do. But not this one. This one has allowed my eyes to see what I should never have seen.” To this I could only nod. Yes. If there even is a God here, he has been hiding for a very long time.

  One day Dr. Janis came to me and said he could not keep me in that lovely warm Revier any longer. I needed to go back to work. “But don’t lose hope again, dear Grete. Don’t do that.” He was a kind man. “I wish the best for you,” he said, and he had genuine tears in his dark-honey eyes.

  Things did not go well for me. I was simply too weak to work so soon, and again I was sent to the Revier only a week later. This time I learned I had malaria. It was only March. How could I have malaria? There were no mosquitoes, but I ran a very high fever, every day the same fever, and I was weak. My legs were swollen, my ankles so big I could not put them into my felt boots. My feet hurt; I could not walk. My eyes hurt; it was difficult to see. Again Dr. Janis was gentle with me. Again he sat with me.

  When I felt somewhat better, I told him about my brother and how much I missed the German landscape with its gentle forests and rolling farmlands, its farmhouses with their thatched roofs, a sky so different from here, an overcast one, but one I had known since I was a child. How much I wanted to go home. He said he understood. He touched my face often when he spoke, but he was a gentleman, and often, too, his eyes welled up with tears. “I wish I could change things for you, Grete. I truly wish that. If I could, I would help you.” Then, after a pause, in a voice no louder than a whisper, he said, “Maybe I can.” But then he said no more.

  Many new prisoners arrived. Many of them now were Russians, not so many Germans or Poles, trainload after trainload. One train came when I was still in the Revier, and it was full of doctors who had been taken as prisoners from Eastern Europe. Some were Polish, others Ukrainian, and others from the Balkans. Some could speak German quite well, and I was already feeling much better, so I tried to speak with them. I asked where they were from. One told me he was sent here as a doctor. He had come from Moscow, but he was Wolga Deutsch, a German.

  “And what do you think they gave us for work?” he continued. “A shitpile of syringes to sort through! For that I was taken prisoner. As a doctor! We stand over piles of goods, stolen from the lands the Russians now occupy, mostly from Germany, and we are ordered to sort through them. Bandages, all wet and useless; medicines with no labels and surely gone bad by now; surgical masks and hats; medicine chests, empty of course; and Gibs-Material—the plaster we use to make casts. That too is useless, as it has become wet and hard, something merely to throw away. But of course the Russians won’t hear of it, so we just put it into a pile labeled ‘For Broken Bones.’ Do you want to know the truth? We made up the labels. Who would care? ‘For Diphtheria,’ ‘For Cholera,’ ‘For Tetanus,’ we wrote. None of the items would ever be used anyway, but we did have some fun sorting through this rot.” He gave me a quiet smile that we both understood.

  A week later I was released again from the Revier. Back to the barracks. Back to work. I did what I could to remain hopeful, as Dr. Janis had encouraged me to do, but even joking with Mutti and my friends, Susanne and the others, no longer helped.

  Anna Iwanowna busied herself in our barracks more often than before. Apparently there was a train, she said, that would leave soon, taking refugees back to Germany. Who is she kidding? After all this time, working here as slaves? And we are still considered refugees?

  “The camp is to be cleared out for others,” she huffed at us in her thick voice. It was the fourteen
th of March—I remember because war was expected to break out. This is what she told us. We needed to be released in order to make room for incoming prisoners. From what war, I did not know. Russia, I assumed, was about to make war with America, but I had no idea whether this was true or not, and neither did anyone else. But the fourteenth of March came and went with no transport trains to take anyone anywhere.

  More trainloads of prisoners arrived, and they were always loaded with Russians. More and more we heard only Russian being spoken, and the people who were delivered to us seemed much more like countryfolk, no longer ambassadors and doctors like those who had come before. There were men as well as women, and children too. The women were dressed like those we saw along the train tracks when we first came—babushkas with headscarves.

  We did not speak to one another. What should we say? Hadn’t the news of these dreadful Gulags reached them? Should we tell them that we were happy to give them our beds, because perhaps that meant we would soon be leaving? No, no. We said nothing. We only renewed a hope that had long been buried. Spring was here. The snow was turning to mud, and soon little white flowers would appear along the dirt paths again.

  There were a few other German girls I met at this time. They were all about my age. They lived in another barrack that had mostly women prisoners from East Prussia. One was the girl who, with her mother, had heard the news that we were to become prisoners that first snowy morning when I walked to the latrine. Brigitte Martins was her name. I remember it well, because we remained friends long after our time together in the Gulag. Then there was another girl who was from the island of Rügen in the Baltic Sea. She had long thick braids like the ones I wore when I was young. How I remember her name, I don’t know, but I liked the way it rolled off my tongue, so I always called her by her full name: Felicitas Jahn.

  The day I came back from the Revier, the second time, Felicitas Jahn pulled me to the side and whispered the latest gossip: Anna Iwanowna had been sent to the Lubyanka. We would never see her again. Sorry I was not, but to be sent there? The place that tortured its prisoners, the place you could never leave? For a fleeting moment I wondered if she was wearing Mutti’s riding breeches when she was captured, but then I realized what a terrible thought that was. The Lubyanka was a fate I would not wish on even her.

  A new leader had been assigned to us. I had already met her when she was brought on tour through the Revier. Katarina was her name. Felicitas Jahn told me she was even worse than Anna Iwanowna. “Katarina die Grosse,” Catherine the Great, was her name when she was out of earshot. “She wants everything! Everything!” my friend said, and then did her best impersonation: “If you want to eat, yes, you can eat. I can get cheese and I can get butter. I can even write you a day off from work. But first your pullover!”

  A month went by and it was April when Katarina came to our barrack in the early morning. She had “good news” to announce. Mutti whispered in my ear, “What? That we are now also allowed to give her our underpants?” Even in my weakness, I managed to answer with a giggle. No matter how dreadful things were, Mutti always seemed to maintain a sense of humor. I did appreciate this about her.

  “Every worker who has worked on the collective farms is to be released,” she barked, standing “at attention” with her heels together and arms rigid at her sides.

  Her announcement, of course, turned out not to be true. I was one of those who had been working on the collective farm, but by the middle of May at least a hundred of us, including Mutti, Brigitte Martins, and Felicitas Jahn, were still there. June came. July. There were no more transport trains arriving. And we continued to work.

  “Tenner” was a word we learned from the first Russian arrivals. It meant a ten-year prison sentence, which many of them soon discovered they had. But now some even had sentences of twenty-five years. I did not learn why, but I was frightened of these people. I did not want to become too friendly with any of them. To worry I could be sentenced just like them? Oh God, no! No, no, that was just not going to be.

  Then one morning I could not get out of my bed. The sun outside was already baking, and as soon as I stood, I had to retch and then retch some more. I was running a fever, I could tell, my head was hot and my legs felt weak. Once again I was taken to the Revier.

  Dr. Janis once again was gracious and warm. Again he took the time to find me during the day; he would arrive with his milk tea. He was kinder to me than he needed to be. Perhaps he was falling in love, but we both knew he still had a wife at home in Latvia, and a daughter. I was grateful, and I was kind in return.

  He worked to bring my fever down; he fed me; he sat with me for long hours while he put compresses on my forehead. I told him more stories about my brother Dieter and how I had worked for the Red Cross in Berlin. How I had bandaged so many wounded soldiers and how I had hoped to become a doctor one day. I then even told him something I never said to anyone, but I felt I could trust him, this man from Latvia.

  I told him how frightening it had been those last days when the Russians marched into Berlin and how terrified we women were, how many of us had been raped and even murdered. After one of these conversations, I told him the German saying we had said so often when one of our Landser went off to the front. It was something we nurses also said to each other at the day’s end. It was, in a way, a sort of prayer, like I hope I’ll see you tomorrow, but, really, we knew nothing was certain. “We would squeeze our thumbs, like this,” and I showed him how, pressing each thumb tight with my fingers, “and then we would say, ‘I wish you all the luck of the soldier.’ It was to mean everything.” He smiled softly when I told him this, and I knew he understood.

  The summer was beginning to wane as hopelessness crept deeper into my veins. No trains came, no trains ever came anymore, and soon another winter would descend upon us. One evening I sat on a rock I had claimed for my own when I needed just to sit and cry. So many people had been released already. Over and over we heard names called up, names of prisoners whose turn it was to leave. Never me, never Mutti, and I felt so desperate. Dieter was long gone. So much time had passed and we knew nothing of his whereabouts. Sweden was now nothing but a lost dream, and surely Papa Spaeth would have made a new life for himself by now.

  A man walked over to where I sat on my rock and took a seat next to me. I could feel the warmth of his body, but I did not look up. I was ashamed of my tears. Who was I to cry? We were all in the same mess. I was no one special. I turned and saw two honey-brown eyes gazing at me. Quietly he pulled a handkerchief out of his pocket—a rare item, something I had not seen since I left Germany—and he wiped my tears from my cheeks.

  The things that mattered most were the things we felt inside: hope, trust, compassion. In this moment, I can say, I knew all three. Janis waited before he said anything more. And then, hardly moving his mouth, he whispered, “I have a way to help you. Don’t speak right now. Don’t even look surprised, but take this,” and he took my hand in both of his. He was pressing a piece of paper into my palm. “It’s for you and your Mutti.” He squeezed my hand shut. Then we both went on sitting in silence. My heart pounded. I could only imagine what he had done.

  It was a medical script he had written, indicating we were too sick to remain in the camp and giving us orders to be returned to Germany. We would be taken on an invalid transport, he informed me, when he could whisper again and we knew no one would hear. He said, perhaps that would mean it would be better than the cattle cars we had seen taking the other prisoners away. Perhaps there would even be real beds, and good food, too. “I have permission to send prisoners home once every year. It’s for those who are too sick and those who are too old to work anymore. This is how I was able to write this script for you.”

  “You are a dear friend, Janis,” I said, addressing him for the first time with the familiar du, no longer Sie. This was a true act of friendship, and it was clearly time to end the formality. “How were you able to do this? We’re not even that sick. I only have this silly int
estinal ailment. And Mutti? She’s mostly grumpy, that’s all. There are others who need it so much more desperately than we,” I said quietly, turning my lips to his ear. Wouldn’t he be in grave danger if the wrong ears were to hear? And then, even more quietly, I added, “Janis. I have nothing with which to repay you.”

  “Dear Margarete, if there is anything I can live to feel proud of, it would be to help you get home. Me? I will remain here until I am no longer useful. You? You have a whole life yet ahead of you. One day you’ll fall in love, you’ll be married and have children. This is what I hope for you and what would make me happy—to know what had become of you.”

  I could not even open my mouth, let alone know what to say, but from the sigh that came from deep within me, I let him know he had done a very good thing.

  I told no one. I couldn’t. Then I told Mutti.

  It was true. It was the first of September. The air still felt like a furnace when Katarina announced, “There will be an invalid train in the morning. It has been ordered.” We mustered up hope once again.

  We were anxious. It was almost too good to be true, this idea—a train—but we prepared ourselves nonetheless. Mutti and I packed what little we still owned, then waited. All morning and all day we waited. Still no train. That we were not sent out to work made it appear as though we might actually be going home, or at least somewhere other than here. New prisoners had arrived; their lorries now stood empty in the afternoon light. Our beds were given away. All good signs. “Perhaps tomorrow … It could very well be tomorrow,” Mutti and I whispered to one another, and we made ourselves look busy.

  I decided I needed to visit my “hairdresser.” Something special had to be made of this day, and it was all I could think to do to lessen my anxiety. This hairdresser was a large tub behind the kitchen that one of the cooks sometimes let me use. It was dark in that yard, no lights, and it smelled foul—a place most prisoners would not go, but a place, too, where there were no guards. Here I would come sometimes, after I had eaten and the sun was beginning to hide behind the clouds that always hung so low on the horizon, when I wanted to bathe, just to wash my face and hands. On this night I found my cook standing in the yard with a cigarette, and begged again for my tub. “It may be the last time I come to pester you,” I said, and he laughed. He motioned the back of his hand in the direction of the stinking yard, pulled the butt of his cigarette from his mouth with three fingers, and turned back to the kitchen.