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

by Kerstin Lieff

  I hid in the shadows, and shortly thereafter he came, carrying a large tub of cold water. He said something in Russian I did not understand, but his face broke out in a toothy grin. I thought he was wishing me well—Go. Enjoy. Perhaps this. Then he simply turned and went back to his duties. The tub full, the darkness hiding anything that may have been floating in it, I held my breath and quickly put my head into the water. I made sure to drench all my hair, and I swished it around, wishing all the Gulag filth to dissolve away one last time. After my “shampoo,” I did my best to shake it loose and then tied it up in a knot, wet as it was.

  Back at the barracks, it was dark already, and everyone was in a festive mood. I think we all believed something was about to happen. Someone—one of the guards?—produced an instrument, like a mandolin but with only three strings. The Russians call it a balalaika. We began to sing. We sang German songs, and then Russian ones. One of the guards got silly and got up to show us his kasotsky dance, even holding himself with one hand on the ground as the opposite leg kicked up in the air. We tried it too, and fell, of course.

  Janis appeared late in the evening after his work shift was over. The mood had become more sedate. The music was more melancholic and our voices were more hushed. He stood beside me. We talked some. He talked with the others, Brigitte and Felicitas Jahn, and then he took my hand and we danced. He pulled me close. Others too were dancing in this way. We moved to the outer circle. I could smell his aroma. It reminded me of the Revier, but then something else too, something like autumn. We—the two of us, as well as all the others in our barrack—danced into the early hours of the morning. The guards on this night were part of us. There was no Katarina, no heavy boots, and with the last dance, when it was already becoming light out, Janis kissed me.

  It was a gentle kiss, and we held each other a long time. He whispered then, softly into my ear, “I wish you all the luck of the soldier. And I will squeeze my thumbs for you until you are all the way home.” My throat had a lump in it so big I could not speak. I knew we would never see each other again, and this thought made me terribly sad.

  23

  THE WIDE-OPEN NOTHINGNESS

  Late the next afternoon we stood at the entrance to the camp with our suitcases—at the gate with the sign in Cyrillic over it. I never learned what the letters stood for. It was Mutti and me and a handful of others who had been told the same—that they’d be going home. Some of these others had danced with us the night before.

  Finally a lorry pulled up and we were motioned to get in; some guards pushed us to make more room. Standing tight, one body against another, we drove off. That was it. It was nothing like I thought it would be. I had no tears. I just went along as everyone did. Our fate was still at the mercy of our captors, and we all knew this.

  We arrived at yet one more camp. Here we saw people we recognized: some Finns and a couple from Switzerland. We hugged and laughed. None of us had any idea what was to come next, but for today, life seemed to hold some promise.

  Mutti and I were quartered in a tent with seventy or more other women, and this was where we were to sleep—for how long we did not know. We were each given a cot and a blanket, and there we sat and waited. I remember there was a rip in the roof above my cot, and I hoped it wouldn’t rain. Many of us were sick; some even died during the two weeks that we were here. For me, the days became eternity, each day longer than the one before it. There was no work, so with the long days and nothing to do, it was easy to become anxious. Is it true, or are we just waiting for another disappointment, another labor site to work at?

  Then it came. A call to line up. It was four a.m. Moscow time, and the sky was the twilight gray of night, but a train was waiting. “Na transporta, na transporta!” a guard was shouting in Russian. Whether it was an invalid train or just a regular train, I never quite knew, but we ran, because we were being told to board.

  It was a sweltering day, the way it can be on the steppe of Siberia, where the sun refuses to set. Our train moved, then it didn’t move. It moved, then it didn’t. Sometimes it was necessary for it to move backwards in order to switch tracks, and this maneuver often took hours. Back and forth, and men on both sides yelling Russian words I did not understand.

  We had been told it would be about four days to Moscow, but five passed before we saw the station that someone recognized. Moscow! Oh, how I remembered those months when we languished in Krasnogorsk, not far from here, believing in lies, thinking it was the Swedish embassy that was keeping us there!

  We passed Smolensk, and of course we remembered that city, the one that was so terribly devastated in the war, and we passed so many of the villages we recognized from before, too. Then suddenly the train stopped and we were ordered to get off. All of us, sick or not, wounded or not, we all needed to get off. And once we were all on the platform, the train reversed and slowly took off, back in the direction we came from, leaving us alone on the platform in the sun, somewhere in the wide-open nothingness of Russia.33 “A new train will arrive soon,” we had been told. Our train, apparently, was going back for more prisoners.

  The wind blew heat into our faces, and there was nothing to eat, not even water, and we were terribly thirsty. The entire day we sat while fear crept through our veins. What is to become of us now? No train, no leader, no guards even, and in a desolate land we did not know.

  As night descended, many spread their belongings out on the platform and lay down to sleep. Mutti and I? We couldn’t. So we sat on top of our bags, holding each other’s hands. We stayed silent with our thoughts of home.

  Another day and nothing. Nothing but flat plains in sight, the wind blowing, a few flies, ants, and dust.

  Finally, off in the distance, we could hear the rattling sound of a slow-moving train. At first we thought we were fooling ourselves, but the sound was unmistakable. Yes, it was a train coming, but we could not see it yet. Closer it came, then we heard its whistle.

  Looking like a toy on the horizon, then like a gigantic beast, it pulled into the station, all as if in slow motion. When it stopped, nothing happened for a long, long time. Slowly, maneuvers took place, back and forth, and then a conductor mysteriously emerged from the engineer’s car and announced what I intuitively already knew: It was going back to the Gulag. We were all so desperately hungry, so many of us were sick, and a good number of our group decided they would rather return to the Gulag than die here in this desolate land. For Mutti and me it was not even a question: We would rather die than return, and so we prepared to sleep on the platform yet one more night.

  Still no water, still no food, but we were in the open and no longer in the Gulag. If I must die here, at least I’ll know I died under the stars, and I died a German woman, a free German woman, no longer a prisoner. I was thinking this as I fell into a deep sleep.

  I awoke before sunlight the following day to Mutti shaking my shoulder. “Wake up, Grete, wake up. A train has arrived.”

  Yes, there was a train. And it was pointed toward Germany.

  I jumped up from the stone floor I had been sleeping on. I looked around the station platform. Everything was in movement. A train was indeed standing in front of us with its doors open. A conductor was waving his hand and calling out in Russian, ordering us to board. I rubbed my eyes awake and felt the growling in my stomach. After four days without food or water, I felt I might fall over with weakness. Of course, Mutti too felt terribly weak, but there she stood with her Seesack over her shoulder, and there were the paintings leaning up against a post, ready for me to carry. Then I noticed it: My suitcase was gone, stolen while I slept. Well, that too now.

  The train conductor was looking at me intently, and Mutti was pulling on my sleeve to hurry along. With or without my suitcase, my only thought was, Skoro domoi, that Russian term I had learned to say—We’re going home! Carrying both bundles of oil paintings, still wrapped in their original blankets, I stepped up onto the train platform, Mutti right behind me. My first surprise came as I looked up:
It was a German train. I could see this. The signs for the washroom and for the locks on the doors were written in German. It was an older train, but noticeably cleaner than what we had been traveling in. There were seats with leather upholstery, some of it torn, but I saw the floors had been washed, no black spots where men had spit.

  We settled into a bench seat, packed tight as the train was quite full, and I turned to look out the window to see what I was leaving behind. From where I was sitting, I could see a wagon was being loaded with produce: onions, potatoes, cabbage, I don’t know what else. And then, with a jolt, the train began to move in the direction of Germany.

  I tried not to think about food. I just leaned my head back and watched the gray sky and the flat horizon pass slowly by. Everything seemed as if in a fog. Is this a dream? I kept thinking. Or was that a dream, the life we left behind?

  It was the twenty-second of September. Suddenly I thought of my father, the man who died when I was young. He would have had his fifty-second birthday soon. I missed him terribly, suddenly, wondering how he would feel, knowing what had become of us. And what had become of his country—how gruesomely right he had been about the Communists, although, in truth, it ended up being the Nazis who were “the undoing of German industry.” What an understatement that had been!

  For another four days the train lumbered onward through various checkpoints, and on the twenty-fifth of September, around four or five o’clock in the afternoon, the train finally rolled into Frankfurt an der Oder.

  We had entered Germany. My heart skipped a beat. Germany! And Frankfurt an der Oder. How long had it been since Dieter had been here? And Dieter? Would we see him again? Would it be soon?

  I was shaken out of my reverie by a command shouted in my mother tongue: “Raus! Alle raus!” We were to get off the train. Although all we saw was the interior of a train station and we could not leave, it was the very first sight of Germany since that fateful July of 1945, and my heart felt like it could burst through my rib cage. No one around me spoke—everyone seemed shell-shocked. We just moved to where we were told to move and stood, obediently, awaiting our next orders.

  We were soon shuffled off to a hall, a holding station of sorts, and were told we would need to wait there for our release papers. Once again we sat and waited all afternoon and into the night. Sometime around two or three o’clock in the morning, shivering and sleepy, we were discharged to an interim “release camp.” It was just outside the station, and because it was dark, my first vision of German land was difficult to make out. This camp was full of other refugees from God knows where, and we were shown to some cots, all lined up, row upon row and side by side, where we gladly lay down to sleep.

  The next day, for the first time in forever, we were able to bathe. We were shown a large room that held a number of open showers and rows of sinks and latrines. There was still no soap, but to stand under a shower, and to feel the water running over my back, to put my face up into the warm stream and feel it soak my hair, to know I could stand here for as long as I wanted and no one would come to order me to move along—oh, it was heavenly!

  Each of us was handed new clothing by the Red Cross. It was used, probably donated, and by early morning we were ushered to the check line in order to finally be released. What if we were, for some unthinkable reason, refused? We all stood there holding our breath, anxious to know what would come next.

  Suddenly we realized something we had not thought about in all this time we were gone. We were in Germany again, and surely we would need to identify ourselves, the way it used to be. Nervously Mutti and I pulled out the Ahnenpässe, the old passports we had to carry with us that certified our non-Jewish genealogy. O Gott, I heard Mutti say under her breath. O Gott. A cousin, or someone else, had been in a marriage that was not clear. Was she Jewish or was she not Jewish? And that page in her Ahnenpass had never been stamped certified. I saw the fear in Mutti’s eyes. It was not possible, not even conceivable, that she would let us be sent back to the Gulag for having the wrong papers. Not now, of all times, when we could already see our German soil.

  Helga’s Ahnenpass.

  The ragged line across the middle of the page indicates where Helga tore out the bottom half.

  Mutti and I both took our places at the rear, fearful, watching to see what was going on around us. Then I noticed what Mutti was doing. Slowly and meticulously, so that there would be no evidence, she tore out the second page of her Ahnenpass, the page that included the name of a woman I did not know, the page with no official stamp on it. When she had cleanly detached it from her book, she quietly stuffed it into her mouth. And she ate it.

  All of our names had been recorded on index cards—this seemed so odd, having just returned from a country where our existence was measured only by roll call—and systematically, as each person approached, the card was pulled up and that person was free to move to the next line in order to wait some more. As Mutti and I approached the desk, we realized that none of the papers we were prepared to show, our Ahnenpässe, even mattered. The woman behind the desk, a Russian, found our index cards, shoved a piece of paper at us, and motioned us to sign it. In broken German, and with misspelled words, the statement said something like “I hereby swear, upon oath, never to speak about the time I visited Russia.” Below this was some sort of threat, like “Doing so will be immediate cause for imprisonment.”

  We signed. Of course we signed. This would be the last thing I cared to talk about. Then we were motioned to move on to the next desk, where we were given certificates with our prison numbers on them, stamped, saying that we had been officially released from imprisonment.

  “From the High Command of the Red Army, Dos, Margarete Werner, is released from punishment and is free to return to her place of origin, Berlin.” My prison number was 61948 and was written clearly at the bottom of the form. Did this mean I was the 61,948th prisoner? I don’t know. I think so. The woman had quite a bit of trouble with Mutti’s name. She tried three times to spell and respell the name Helga in Cyrillic. Funny, we thought later, it must not be a common Russian name, but then what about Olga?

  Gladly we signed all the papers. We were only so happy to be coming home. We were then loaded into a waiting freight truck along with many other prisoners and were driven a few kilometers away. It was to the German release camp, Gronenfelde.34 Much later I would learn this was a momentous day for Gronenfelde, the twenty-sixth of September. One hundred and twenty thousand German prisoners had been released from Russian Gulags just the day before, and I believe there could have been an equal number of us there that day.

  Gronenfelde near Frankfurt an der Oder. Former prisoners of war returning home. (Bundesarchiv Bild 183-S78949)

  Here we were met by the German Red Cross, all women, and tears of pride and exhaustion welled from my eyes. This, I thought, is what I would be doing now, too, had I remained in Germany. I would now be standing here, helping these very refugees returning from their ordeal in Russia. The women were all in their uniforms, the same one I had been so proud to wear, although the swastika was no longer a visible patch on their blouses. We were each handed enough provisions to last for three days—bread, a little butter and cheese, and a small bit of sausage. I had seen onions and even a few tomatoes, but they were long gone by the time we came to the front of the line.

  We were able to sit at tables then and write letters and telegrams. I wrote to my brother: “Dear Dieter. We are home! We are home. Where are you, my brother? How was it, the end for you? How did you get home?” Oh do tell me you’re safe, but this last line I could not write.

  I was in conversation with some of the other released prisoners at that writing table, and it was here that I learned for the first time what had become of our country while we were in the Gulag: Germany had been cut into quarters. Some of it was in French hands now, some in American, some in British, but much of it had gone to the Russians.

/>   The same fate was meted out to our capital, Berlin. It had not become, as we had been told at the war’s end, “a dead city.” It was quite alive, in fact, but it too was quartered, Russia owning all of what was in the east, including what was once the Reichstag and the now very damaged Brandenburg Gate. I wondered how it would be in Berlin now with the Russians as administrators. And what of the eastern sector where the Opera House was, and the many museums? But then, was there even an Opera House? Were there even museums? Or was everything still in ruins? Charlottenburg, we came to understand, was apparently in British hands. If this were true, we felt grateful. At least the British would treat us in a gentlemanly manner. This is what we believed.

  The day dragged on into night, and Mutti and I slept in our seats. Suddenly we were awakened to shouting. It was four o’clock in the morning. “Up, up, up!” There would be a train soon that would bring us into Berlin. Quickly we grabbed our things and ran to line up for it. Three hours later, we still stood and nothing had come to pass. Mutti muttered, “So this is what we have to thank our victors for? That our trains, too, are impossibly late?” But I had no desire to complain. We were about to be free.