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

by Kerstin Lieff

  Schlesischer Bahnhof.35 It was large, one of the largest in Berlin. It stood in near total ruin, but the trains seemed to be running, even if not quite on time. We were finally in Berlin, and for the first time in more than two years I laid eyes on my city, the one I had left believing it would be for good.

  Timidly the two of us walked out into the daylight. It was morning, and people were rushing around. Were they rushing to work? I had no idea. Everything felt so new to me. The fear of bombs falling from the sky was no longer there. The rubble, much of it, had been swept away, but half walls and half buildings still loomed like beheaded monoliths all around us. People, I noticed, were dressed nicely, much better than we had been used to.

  I sheepishly approached an older gentleman, a man walking with a cane. I asked if he knew if there was an office or a station for returning refugees so that we could get information—about S-Bahn cards and finding work and, well, about our house. He only eyed me up and down, wrinkled his nose, and, under his breath, I believe I heard the word pfui. A word you use only for shit or pigs.

  I stood in my tracks and stared after the retreating man, completely bewildered. Well, this is Berlin, after all. We never had a reputation for having good manners, I told myself. But, at the very least, humor was something Berliners nearly always offered one another, even if it was done in a rude manner. This “pfui” was not even that—it was pure disgust—and as I looked around at all the rushing people and saw that no one seemed even to notice us, I realized how very alone we were, and how much we both stank. Our clothes, given to us by the Red Cross, were hand-me-downs and didn’t even fit properly, and we had not had a real bath in more than two years.

  I again gathered up my courage. This was not the time for self-pity, and I approached another person, this time a woman. I tried to explain our predicament—that we had just returned from Russia, from the prison camps there, and we only needed a little help, some information. She too seemed less than willing to listen. She only said, “Ja, ja, everyone has a story,” and with that she walked off in the opposite direction from the one she had been going in. I understand this now. Millions of Germans had to flee the east. Millions more came to West Germany from Poland and Czechoslovakia—sixteen million in all, I believe—and then there was us, the returning prisoners. No one wanted to know.

  Alone, we managed to find our way to the S-Bahn, which was noticeably clean. Somehow we were able to board, and we took it to Charlottenburg. I don’t know how we paid our fare. Perhaps we didn’t; perhaps we sneaked on, as I am sure we had no money.

  It was an indescribable moment, when we saw our station up ahead: the Sophie-Charlotte-Platz, just near the Windscheidstrasse, the very same station I had waited at for so many years, each morning before school. The walls of the station were broken, but the bricks that once lay in piles were now neatly moved to the side to give automobiles (though I saw none) room. The street was swept clean. Still, everywhere I saw walls standing singly and with no purpose, a bathtub still hanging from two pipes, a stairwell that led to emptiness.

  I felt I was inside a dream. Closer and closer we came, yet our walk from the station could not go fast enough; it seemed to take place inside a slow-motion filmstrip, as if the air itself were thick gum. Everything was so familiar and yet so not. Then I noticed it, something new: slips of paper, fluttering in the breeze, stuffed here and there between the bricks of walls and door frames, even those door frames where doors no longer were. I walked over and pulled on one, curious to see what these papers were. This is what I read: “Dear Wolfgang, we are at Tante Luise’s.” And I read the next one: “Papa, if you are to return, call on Heidemarie. We have gone to Hamburg.” All around me, the same was true. At every door, slips of hope: “We are here,” “We have left the country for America,” “We are there,” “We have not found our brother/our father/our son. Please send information to such-and-such address.” I became filled with my own hope—a vision that we might also see such a note at our own door. I could not speak, and Mutti, I know, shared these same thoughts. Oh Dieter, Dieter. Say you have been here and have left us some news.

  Our home on the Windscheidstrasse was exactly as I remembered it—three floors, the fourth and fifth still missing. The tavern across the street was indeed open again, and there were even tables out in the garden. We arrived at our doorstep. There was only the door frame, no door, and, worse, I saw it had no slip of paper. It would be the first of our many homecoming disappointments.

  We entered the main floor and carried our bags up the two flights of stairs, the same ones that Mutti and I had so meticulously strewn with chairs and iceboxes in our effort to save her from drunken Russian soldiers. The door to our apartment felt strange. There was a new lock on it. Perhaps, we thought, the manager wanted to make sure the little we had left behind was kept safe. We stood on the landing a long time, staring at that door, wondering what to do next. Suddenly it opened, as if by itself, and a strange woman appeared, blocking the entryway I knew so well. I spotted our Garderobe and umbrella stand just behind her.

  “What can I do for you?” she asked, a scowl on her face and her fists set firmly on her bony hips.

  “This is our home. Who are you?” Mutti said, bewildered, not sure to whom she was speaking, and careful this time not to mention that we were returning prisoners.

  “I’m afraid that’s no longer true. This is now our home. Schade”—too bad—and with that she slammed the door shut. For a minute we had been able to peek inside our house, view the Persian rug we once owned and, off in the parlor, the marble-topped table at which we used to sit for our evening meals. Now we could only stand with our mouths agape, staring at the door.

  There was nothing to do but find the Schulzes. From what we remembered, they lived, after having been bombed out and having lost their kitty, just one flight below us. When we found her, Frau Schulz greeted us with warmth and, it seemed, pity. “My God! I thought you were dead!” she exclaimed again and again. Hugs and tears, and from some deep place inside her, an air of reserve.

  I had remembered Frau Schulz as a plump woman. Her stocky body was once made of two halves, the top an overly large and soft bosom, and the bottom, two Krautstampfer—what we called the legs of women who stomped around in a tub full of cabbage and brine to make our beloved sauerkraut. Those had been the legs of Frau Schulz. And her bosom—at all times covered by an apron with tiny roses and green leaves—was used as a brace for cutting her bread. It would be a large round of brown-crusted bread, and she would use her serrated knife to cut each slice clean through, pushing the last bit of crust against the knife with her thumb. Each slice of her bread was cut as perfectly as the one before.

  Now she stood in her doorway looking as thin as everyone else in Berlin. Even her full, rose-printed apron couldn’t conceal the boniness of her hips, and her bosom was empty. Frau Schulz took our bags and our coats and led us back to the kitchen she now shared with two other families.

  She was sorry, she said, about our Wohnung. There was nothing she could have done. With the new administrative government, this was how it was. Homes were needed to house the many, many wandering people who had lost their homes in the bombings and all the refugees coming from the east. Each family, she explained, was allotted only one room; kitchens and bathrooms were to be communal. All homes, in all of Germany, in fact, even homes that weren’t destroyed and still housed the original families, had strangers living with them.

  Four families, we learned, were already occupying our home. There was, quite possibly, Frau Schulz tentatively implied, no more room for us, even though it technically was our home. Again she said there was nothing she could have done. “We all thought you were dead!” Over and over she said this, shaking her head, as if even now her eyes were deceiving her. Apparently no one else in our family had returned either, and as much as this posed a question, neither Mutti nor I dared ask it.

  “Na ja. But do come in,” and with that we entered her own communal kitchen. “
Sit. Make yourselves comfortable. Let me make some tea.” I looked around, trying to orient myself to the fact that this, this home of hers, and the one up a flight of stairs with four new families in it, was in fact the free world. The wallpaper, once with a floral pattern, had torn long ago. The wall beneath it was smeared. A small shelf had been attached to the wall above my head, and it held a few plates and a jar half full of sugar. Herr Schulz, she said as she filled the teakettle, was missing, and without looking up: “He is probably dead.

  “I keep my hopes up, though. One has to. Just the other day, Frau Berne said her husband had returned. After walking all the way from an internment camp in Italy. The last she had heard from him, he had written her from the front …” And then she stopped. I knew she was trying her best not to cry. “Ach, this is the fate of so many of us. Of course we must go on. And now you are here! There is, truly, always hope!”

  Frau Schulz handed us each a cup of tea and sat down with us. She told us then about the terrible starvation still going on even though the war was over. “There is no food to be found anywhere, nothing to buy, not even to barter for, not anything. Scrounging in cellars and potato fields for food scraps and rummaging through the forests in hopes of finding mushrooms and firewood. This has been our life.”

  She told us how it was when the city was split: One lived here, the other there, friends suddenly became enemies, and people in different sectors were not allowed to visit one another. “It sounds no different from where we were!” Mutti laughed. “Just another prison camp!”

  “Exactly!” Frau Schulz exclaimed. “Suddenly we need papers to travel to the eastern side of our own city. My Mutti lives there, and it is nearly impossible to visit her. Sometimes I do, but not often.

  “The British and the Americans, well, they are quite reasonable. Amusing, even. It is difficult to look at them, at times, and see such healthy young men when all of ours are so thin. They laugh and tell jokes often, which I never can understand, and they try out their German with us. And the Americans are always eating something they call chewing gum. But on the other side of Berlin, those streets that go east to Malchow, Friedrichsfelde, even to the Opera House, have roadblocks with armed Russian guards who will order you to stop and will allow you to go no further. They want us to have special papers to travel there, and of course these are impossible to obtain. Then, let me tell you about the rest of Germany! My God, just try to go to Frankfurt or Kassel! Impossible!”

  She paused for a long moment, and the silence became the reason to hear what we were so desperately waiting for. The question we had been holding inside all the while we were in Russia, and the question that followed us all the way home. She said she knew the answer and was so sorry to be the first one to say this: Dieter was dead.

  “I heard this, Helga, from your cousin, when she came some months back to see if we had heard anything from you. Ach Gott, I’m so sorry. We all have so much sorrow …” Frau Schulz stopped. What else was there to say?

  I could not think for myself; I only looked to Mutti. She sat still in her chair. Nothing moved, only large, large tears spilling from her eyes. Her face looked so sad, it was as if nothing in the world would ever bring her happiness again. “O Gott,” Mutti whispered into her hands, her body convulsing with sobs. It was the purest sadness I had ever seen.

  24

  MUTTI WAS STOIC

  Suddenly the truth of all my fears was now a fact. No home, no brother, and my city torn into pieces. I left Frau Schulz’s kitchen to go outdoors. Mutti and she could finish the stories without me. Dieter, my Dieter, you are gone. Out on the broken curb, the same one where we both used to sit for hours as children, throwing stones into the rain gutter, I now sat with my head in my hands, and I wept. They were bitter tears. What now? What now? Nothing felt a part of me. My body was boneless. I cried until I was empty.

  When I returned to her kitchen, Frau Schulz and Mutti were still in quiet conversation. She had nothing much in the way of food to offer, she said, but she could make room for us in her home. About my stepfather she knew only that he’d been taken prisoner by the Americans, but where he was she did not know. I was sure that realization would hit Mutti very soon, but we did not dwell on it. “Your Papa is safe,” she always said while we were in the Gulag, and I was not about to bring up any other possibilities. Not now.

  “Stay here with me. And stay as long as you need,” Frau Schulz said, looking over to me, seeing my tear-streaked face. “Aber selbstverständlich,” she added. No question. Of course we could stay with her. She said she would help us get in touch with the Red Cross, and “things will work out, you’ll see.” It was not a solution. I knew this. It was just another step in the direction we were going. She showed us the only other room in her home. It was a hallway of sorts, long and dark, but she pushed some mattresses up against a wall and told us to make ourselves comfortable. “Tomorrow we’ll go together to the British Red Cross station. I’ll take you. I know exactly where it is. But first, tonight, we’ll have something very special to eat.” Her smile was large. At least we knew we had one friend.

  Frau Schulz had managed to acquire six tins of fish, and she told us she had been deliberating on them for so long: How many to open? Should it be one every day? Or all of them at once? “Eat until I’m full? No, no. That would just never do! I would have to eat fish conserves an entire month long! So. I’ve saved them here on my shelf, and I know now why I did that. I kept them so that they could be shared with you!”

  Over our dinner of six tins of delicious herring smothered in mustard sauce, we heard how things had gone in Berlin. Not well. Frau Schulz told us of the returning children from the Kinderlandverschickung—those who had been sent off to the east to stay safe during the war. Many had landed in concentration camps and stayed there for years, as there were no homes left available to them.

  “This went on for all those years. For some, it was their entire school life, six years, some eight. Many of them seem never to have learned to write or read. And now they come back to us, their families are dead, their homes are gone … and they are still so young! Sixteen! It’s a travesty.” But then Frau Schulz shook her head and said, “Na ja.” What we all learned to say—Oh well.

  The Red Cross was not friendly. In fact, no one in Berlin was friendly. No one cared; no one wanted to hear our story. We could move back into our home, we learned, but we would need to share it with the four other families already living there. And yet, to even do that, we needed our birth certificates. Both Mutti and I had been born in what was now East Germany, and all those papers, if we ever had them, were either burned or buried underneath rubble, but in no case available.

  “No birth certificate? Well, then, you’ll need a residence identification card,” we were told. But of course we weren’t residents, we were refugees! So, no residence identification card. Oh, such a runaround, and all the while we still had our diarrhea that never quit. Poor food, stress, dirt, the Gulag—I don’t know. Maybe even hunger caused it, but we just had diarrhea. I cannot remember how it all went or how we finally received permission to move back into our own home. I only remember how difficult it was when each office that was supposed to help us turned out to be at a different location in the city. How could we get to them without money and always needing a toilet?

  We finally managed to reenter our home, however unwelcome we were. In fact, we were scolded—a woman quite yelled at us to get out of her house! These were her plates, she said, and her chair and her cutting board, when, really, most of it had been ours. But who cared anymore? Why such a fuss? We needed a bed, a place to come home to. Take the plates, take the chairs, and we settled into a mutual distance. We learned to tolerate each other, but we never spoke.

  Mutti and I were relegated to the back porch. It had been a laundry room for us once, where we used to wash and mend and iron our clothing. We noticed that much of what we had left in this home had somehow disappeared. A wooden stool, for example—I remember it was gr
een and it had always fit so nicely under the washbasin. The stool was one thing, but what mattered most were the memories that were stolen. Never again would I be able to look out of our parlor window the way I did once; never again would I walk down the long corridor from the kitchen to the front room, happily singing and tiptoeing over the Persian runner in the hallway; never again would I sink into the oversized bath I knew as a child. All this was now shared, occupied, or gone.

  Mutti did somehow scrounge together some of our belongings, the things “they” no longer wanted. My violin, for example; Dieter’s bookshelf; the book of Grimm’s fairy tales that Mutti had bound in leather and gold leaf. Dieter loved Goethe, Rainer Maria Rilke, Schiller, as did I. We had this in common, our love of literature. I took these books, the ones we used to share, and organized them carefully on a little shelf. I told him, as I still spoke to him often, This is for you. Finally now, you have your very own shelf, dear brother, with all your books arranged so nicely. Just until you come home. My violin sat there where Mutti had put it, and I took it into my arms and cradled it against my chest. Oh, dear Dieter. I want to tell you something. It made me so mad. Mutti wanted to throw out your curtains! That was out of the question, I told her. You’ll see, dear brother, I will have everything nice for you when you finally come back to me …

  After those tears in Frau Schultz’s kitchen, my mother was stoic and she was Mutti. Once we were “home,” she decided she should immediately go out to find what might be left of our hidden things, those that had been stashed in the military bunker on the outskirts of Berlin—mostly our Persian rugs. They were authentic Persian rugs, hand woven, and we had original oil paintings stored in that bunker as well. That she would be upset when she returned empty-handed that day, we should have guessed before she even left.

  “Of course the first thing that was robbed when the Allies marched into Berlin was the military bunkers. Of course!” she said, shaking her head and clasping her hands in exasperation. “Why would I have believed otherwise?”