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

by Kerstin Lieff

  He walked me home that night, as a gentleman, and then asked if he could see me again. Could we see a film together, perhaps, the next time?

  Jürgen and I went together to see that film he had promised, one we’d been hearing about, even though, with our limited money, it was an extravagance. The film, Die Mörder Sind Unter Uns (The Murderers Are Among Us), upset us both terribly. It made me feel a shame I had never experienced before. It was a love story, and a very popular film, but there was a scene—one that haunted the main character, and it certainly haunted me—in which women, old men, and children, hundreds of them, were purposely shot. It was an SS officer who gave the orders for the murders. I couldn’t believe this. I asked Jürgen if he, as a military man, had known any of this to be true. He said he did now.

  When he was in Canada, the Canadians had shown him and his comrades photos of piles of decaying skeletal bodies and mass graves, but they hadn’t believed them. “Germans would never do such a thing” was what they said, and then dismissed the entire thing as just a bunch of enemy propaganda. “We never gave it another thought,” Jürgen continued. “Such a thing was impossible. Things like that would never happen in Germany!”

  Erschüttert. There is no proper English translation for that word. “Shaken to the core” might come close. I was so unnerved by this film, it made me feel sick. The two of us walked home without conversation. I think Jürgen was erschüttert too. I had never seen him so quiet before. We didn’t even kiss good night. After all that, I thought. To have lived with that tyrant, to have survived starvation and destruction and persecution and want, and now to be handed this. It was an insult: I was suddenly one of the guilty ones, and, more than ever, I was determined to leave Germany.

  It was September. I was to start my third semester at the university. One day a phone call came from Mutti. She was in Sweden! With the help of our relatives Johan and Emma and Gurli, she had arrived, and I too was about to realize a dream I’d had since the first time she and I left Berlin.

  Mutti had found work as a housemaid. This didn’t last long, but it gave her the papers to leave Germany and immigrate to Stockholm. She never complained about her job, but oh, how I knew it bothered her. She who had employed maids all her life! Who had worn silk dresses and long pearl necklaces and pinned her hair up with an ivory comb. She was now forty-eight, but she did not complain. She had work, and it was her salvation. She was away from Germany and we could begin new.

  The day came when I held my immigration papers in my hand as well, October 26, 1949. Never more than on this day and this night did I know I was standing in the middle of history—my own history, for once. I was sad to leave Jürgen, “the older gentleman,” as Professor Barckmann referred to him. And yet.

  “Jürgen, I’ll find work for you. I will, and when I do, you’ll come!”

  He only smiled as if he’d been expecting this proposal all along. “After all,” he said, “why did I go to all the trouble to learn Swedish?”

  “We’ll have a good life together in Sweden. I have no doubt. Trust me. Somehow I’ll find a way for you to come, Jürgen.” I had tears in my eyes, but they weren’t tears of sadness, and then we both did something we hadn’t intended—we both burst into laughter. We laughed so hard, all our fears and trepidations about the future fell away with the wind. I had a future ahead of me suddenly, and I saw only what was bright and what was good, and surely, I thought, Jürgen would be a part of that future too.

  The time for my departure came. Jürgen visited me that last evening, that Sunday night, and his kisses had never meant so much. Three times it happened. Three times he asked for a kiss. I kissed his lips and he kissed me back. But this time was different …

  Jürgen brought me to the ship that would take me to Stockholm the next morning. It was a brisk, clear day. The ship was a large pleasure ship, and for a moment we remembered the refugees who had boarded a ship just like this one only five years ago. The thousands of refugees who had not made it because they were killed when the ship was bombed and sunk. What a different world that was! What a different time!

  It was with tears and gladness and many, many embraces that I embarked. I had just one suitcase. One suitcase, and my freedom, and I could not help but wonder whether Mutti had remembered to take those paintings with her to Sweden. The ones I carried through Brest and Smolensk and Moscow.

  Jürgen stood on the pier and I saw genuine sadness in his eyes as he waved a handkerchief at me. It would not be long. I knew this. A new feeling was growing in me: We would be together, Jürgen and I. It was to be a new life, and a good life, and we would have it together.

  Sweden was so blue! The sky was bright, the sidewalks so clean. People weren’t friendly, but they weren’t unkind either. They had their own soft way of smiling and then walking on. Of course, they didn’t want to know about a German girl who had been there in the midst of it all. No one wanted to know about me. But I was here! In Sweden!

  Mutti was at the pier to greet me, and she too looked Swedish! She had cut her hair short; her skirt was short, to the knees. She had on a white shirt and smart shoes. She was beaming. She was in Sweden and she had a job, and I was here too.

  “Onkel Johan has organized an apartment for us,” she told me immediately in an excited voice. “It’s not large. Very small, actually. There’s only one room, but to the side is a small cooking area. I have bought an electric teapot, a few blankets, and an electric fan. And I found a paper screen that can serve as our dressing room. You’ll see! It’s such a sweet little Wohnung. Can I call it that? Of course! It’s ours! Our home. It has a small sofa, where I will sleep, and a bed, where you can sleep. And on Monday, in a week, you are to go to the Karolinska Institute. Uncle Johan, the dear, organized an interview for you there.”

  I couldn’t remember when I had seen Mutti so happy and so enthusiastic, so full of life. Perhaps it was in Swinemünde, the last time she smiled like this. She looked young—her cheeks glowed, and she had even gained weight. Her hair was dark and shiny again. Her eyes were no longer full of dread. She had been to Göttingen, where Papa Spaeth was living in a small room in a house with a family. They had spent a week together, and he wanted her to be sure to tell me how happy he was about my decision to study medicine. They decided Karl would finish his studies and I should pursue mine. He would stay in Göttingen until he was a doctor, and then join us in Sweden.

  The first thing I did was contact Brigitte Martins, my friend from the Gulag. She was not difficult to find. She was in Stockholm, working where I hoped to work, at the Karolinska Institute. “Hugs and tears” can’t begin to describe the joy of seeing each other that first day. When once you’ve experienced the absence of food, of kindness, of soap and clothes and toothpaste, and you reunite in a place so blue and bountiful, there are no words for this. She told me that she and most of the others had been released from the Gulag shortly after I was. She too hoped to become a doctor, to build a brand new life.

  After a week Jürgen’s first letter arrived. How easy it is to forget! How quickly I had left Germany behind! He was sad, he said. He missed me. I missed him too. Somewhat.

  I am so sorry I’ve not written sooner. I should be ashamed of myself. That’s what my Mutti told me. I have such a lovely girlfriend and I don’t even know how to write to her. I am ashamed.

  I have gained some weight, though! You won’t even recognize me! I can really say, without pushing out my stomach, my ribs hardly show anymore. Yesterday I ate eel for the first time. It was smoked. I bought it at the pier. And I had some whipped cream! Oh, that was good!

  If you remember that little reindeer we were looking at? The one on the tapestry in the tavern in Kiel? Do you remember? Do you remember, too, how I said, “I believe he’s crying because he can’t find his beloved?” That’s me, now, crying for you.

  I miss you terribly.

  Your man, Jürgen

  I had no doubt he would come. But first I had to find work, which I did at the Karoli
nska Institute, as a lab assistant. I’m sure Brigitte had something to do with that. Uncle Johan too. The stars were working in my favor. My boss was such a friendly fellow, and he liked the two of us so well. He often brought us Swedish cakes with raisins in them that his wife had baked. He said his mission was to “make us fat,” like him.

  Brigitte and I talked all the while we worked. It was as if we had not lost a single day. If it wasn’t funny, we’d laugh anyway.We were together and we had freedom and it was 1949, a world away from where we’d been. We felt as if, together, we could own the world.

  In my thoughts there was Jürgen, too, of course. Sometimes he seemed far away, sometimes very close, but always he was back in Kiel and I was here in Stockholm. Sometimes we visited one another, and I still loved him. I think he loved me back.

  CODA

  SWEDEN

  1952

  27

  THE LAKE

  It was the summer, and times were easy. I had work, I had made some money, and I had friends. It was a warm, sunny day when Brigitte invited a whole group of us who worked at the Karolinska Institute for a long weekend at her family’s hut, a stüga, on a lake not far from Stockholm. Would I like to come for a long weekend, she asked me one Tuesday afternoon as we were taking our tea break. She would invite our whole clique. There were quite a few of us by now. There was Dagmar and Inga, Anny and Kerstin, and we would have so much fun, she said. Her Papa, her fader, had given her the keys and said, “Enjoy yourselves, you young ones!” Of course, we all said yes.

  A stüga in Tumba, Sweden.

  Kerstin Jurke was a woman who could make you laugh at everything. Everything! I mean, all we had to do was go for Swedish Brötchen in the market and already we were laughing. I don’t know at what. The goofy blue hat the ferryman wore with the ribbons on it? The boy who picked pansies and threw them into the water? Was that the funny thing she told us about? Oh, she could make us laugh.

  So we went, six of us. We packed our food, fish, plenty of it, bread, cheese, and of course bottles of wine. Plenty of wine. The stüga was just there on the lakeshore. It had a small back door with a screen that slammed over and over because it had no latch. We had a small rowboat, and loons on the lake called all night. A full moon showed itself to us twice—once in the sky, once on the water.

  On our first night, we were rather melancholic as we exchanged stories about the war. Of course we talked about the war. Even now, so many years later, the wounds still ached and we had to talk to say something about where we were when it all happened. Because I was from Berlin, the others were particularly interested in how I had managed. Sure, I wanted to tell them, but too much had happened, too much was still too raw. I said only, “We got along. Like everyone got along.”

  Then Kerstin Jurke took out some newspaper clippings she had cut from the Dagens Nyheter, the daily newspaper in Stockholm, and asked if I had seen them. Kerstin was the one who made us laugh at everything, but this wasn’t funny.

  I stared at them in shock. They were photos that must have been taken from above, maybe by some American or British bomber. It must have been ’44 or ’45.

  “That? That is my city! That is what they did to us! Look! Do you see those ruins? Do you see where there is nowhere for anyone to go? Can you see that? That’s me down there! Yes, that’s where we lived! Inside those ruins!” And I wept. Oh, how I wept tears I hadn’t known since I lived those terrible years, and Kerstin held me and said, “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.”

  And, in that moment, she became my best friend.

  I had crocheted myself a swimsuit that I hoped to wear once Jürgen came for his visit. It was quite sexy, a two-piece suit, nothing like what I used to wear or Mutti used to wear at the Wannsee. It was light orange, almost a pink color, which at that time was a color only prostitutes wore. Quite scandalous, and Mutti knew nothing about it.

  I strutted around one evening, all full of wine, modeling my suit for the girls. I wanted their approval. Would it work? Would it make him love me more?

  “Do you know what you look like when you talk about him?”

  “I’ll tell you what you look like. You look crazy! Like you haven’t got your feet on the ground anymore!”

  “I’d say she’s in love.” That came from Kerstin.

  She then kneeled before me and made the sign of the cross, only in a Swedish, Protestant sort of way. I think she did it backwards. And we laughed all night.

  Each morning we sat at the shore with our coffees and watched as the sun came red over the edge of the lake. Then we would swim, Kerstin and I, as it yellowed over our heads. We swam in silence except for the sound of our arms as they stroked through the green lake. We swam across the bay, and when we made it to the other shore, we sat on the sand, still and pensive, and when the time was right, we’d slip back into the water. Sometimes not a word would have been said, and we would swim back home to the stüga for another coffee, this time with a little schnapps in it.

  Kerstin and I came out of the water on one of those mornings after our swim across the lake. It was a lovely morning. No bugs yet. No heat. Only pleasant air and a perfect sunrise. I came out onto the shore in my new suit, the sexy thing I had spent months crocheting, and as I rose up from the dark lake, my swimsuit bottom stretched down to the sand. The wool that I had used apparently didn’t like water, and suddenly I had swim pants half a meter long! Oh, how we laughed over that! And my bottom was right there for all the world to see.

  “O ja! That is exactly what he’ll like, that man of yours! O ja!” Brigitte took great pains to make fun of that new man of mine, Jürgen, the “old one,” the one who couldn’t button his shirt right. She brought me a towel, a large one to cover myself with, and we all sat and had our second breakfast of the day. Which lasted until dinner. Which lasted into the night. We sat at the lakeshore and gossiped until the sun sank to the water’s edge, while the loons sang their sad, sad song.

  Kerstin and I became filled with quietness as we watched the moon’s reflection stretch across the lake. We told the others of our swim that morning, how it had been so beautiful, so red and soft, and the shore on the other side, how it was full of birch trees standing in perfect alignment, no houses, and a wide strip of beige sand. How we had sat there for a long time and said very little. It must have been clear to the others how much our friendship meant to each other.

  During the war, Kerstin had not seen what I had seen, but she felt what I had felt. This I could tell. She had empathy. She was a woman who understood. She had lived through those years, and she knew there was trouble, but she never judged us because we were German. She was a true friend.

  Brigitte started to talk about the Gulag. Not the bad stuff. No, no. We never talked about the bad stuff. It was about Christmas, and how we had celebrated with the Russian guards and how they said nothing when we sang and how we had all danced together. How much fun my mother had been that night, singing “Nu är det Jul Igen” in Swedish to all the other people there. And the Latvian doctor, Janis. Oh, Janis. My eyes welled up to think of him. I was sure he was still there.

  Kerstin, my dear friend who had never been to the Gulag, who had never experienced the war the way we had, asked Brigitte and me, “Did you two look into each other’s eyes sometimes? Sometimes when it was so difficult? Did you look and see? Did you know you’d be here one day together?”

  Brigitte and I looked at each other across the room, her eyes so gray, and I thought, Yes, you did save me. You were there. You saw it all. You experienced it too, and now we are here, you and I.

  Across from us sat Kerstin, like an angel, smiling as if she had known all along we would have been saved, no matter what. She smiled a smile that was not of this world, and at that moment I remembered my angel. The one who appeared to me in the street in Berlin when I believed no one else was alive. The one whose wing brushed my arm so softly, who whispered this to me: You shall have a child.

  It had been my se
cret, a secret promise I had carried with me ever since, and now I knew it would come true. I told the others then. I said, “I’m going to have a child.” I blurted it out, because I had no idea how else to say it.

  Of course, all the other girls simply stared at me, not knowing what to answer and expecting me to say something else.

  So I did. This time, I knew what it would be. I had been thinking of it for days. I said, “I hope she’ll be a girl. Because if she is, her name shall be Kerstin.”

  Letters to My Beloved Franzel

  DURING THE SIEGE OF BERLIN

  19 April 1945

  My dearest Peter,

  It’s been only a few days since I last spoke with you on the telephone. Was it to be the last time? My memory of that conversation is so sweet. I’m so sorry, though, that I wasn’t able to see you in person. My dear Peter, we will now be completely separated until we see each other once again. The mail is no longer being delivered; telephone service no longer works. We can’t give up, though, not yet. And we must trust in God and believe in Fate. Maybe it will still turn out well. Maybe we will yet outlive this dreadful end. It’s so inconceivable that the enemy has been able to come this deep into the very heart of our country.

  The military fronts do seem to be holding them back. Last Saturday and Sunday, there was such an upsetting rumor traveling around Berlin. Supposedly, the Americans had already penetrated beyond Brandenburg. In fact, they were to have arrived in Treuenbriezen and Beelitz. Indeed their airborne troops did land in Wittenberge.

  So, every day, we wait, anticipating their arrival in Berlin. Even though the insult of losing the war has been so unthinkable and so shameful, most of us are breathing easier with this thought in mind: the bombings and the senseless murders will finally cease.

  The American soldier is of course a much more humane person than the Russian. Of the two evils, this would be the better one.

  Suddenly, on Sunday morning, the huge Eastern Offensive began fighting all over again. Patients who had taken the weekend to go home to eastern Berlin (Strausberg and Grünau) heard, from early on in the morning, a constant, endless thundering of gunfire.