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

by Kerstin Lieff

  When at times the noise was too unbearable and the bombs were dropping right close by, we too ran for shelter. Most of the time, though, it was somewhat calmer. We only really fled to the stairwells when it was most dire, as we waited until the very last moment to run.

  But I don’t want to give myself too much praise for having had senseless courage. I only know that I feel 100 percent sure that nothing will happen to me. Besides none of this was nearly as bad as the American carpet bombings. Those bombs used to fall straight through to the cellar. If you were caught in one of those, you could only hope to die quickly. There was nowhere you could be safe from them. How terrible the fears in those cellars were back then. I always panicked so dreadfully when they fell. But, even then, God protected us.

  What we have now is small in comparison. Russian bombs fell, there were small tremors, and a few windowpanes broke—nothing more. A grenade blew a hole into a wall. It would be really tough luck at this point if you were to receive the blessing of one of those attacks. But everything does have a very personal and very local impression. I mean, you could run down the street and, in three minutes’ time, know nothing of what’s going on here. You could take refuge behind a garden wall or hide in some basement and feel assured “Nothing will happen to me here.”

  On that 24th of April, we worked until late into the night, because we kept receiving more admissions. We had no lights. So, out of necessity, we muddled through, using candles. At night, around ten, the first wounded soldiers arrived from Spandau. One of them told us that the Russians would surely be here tomorrow, as they had been successful in breaking through the lines there.

  As it was late, I decided to stay at the Lazarett. Mutti still phoned me that night. The next morning our head nurse gave a very beautiful devotional prayer. We all knew what we were up against. One of our nurses came to us with the news that Russians had been seen at the Reichssportfeld. The Reichssportfeld is ten minutes away from us.

  I asked for permission to run home quickly to bring Mutti my two pieces of bread and two boxes of sausage that I had received for donating blood. The head nurse gave me permission. I ran home as if I were being chased by a pack of mongrel dogs. Everywhere I ran I saw artillery stationed along the roads in preparation for battle, because the Russians had been expected since 4:00 that morning. With heavy hearts, Mutti and I parted. At first she wanted to come with me, but then decided to stay home, which proved to be the better decision.

  At the Lazarett, only the most ghastly wounds were attended to; bandages were replaced. Everything had such a strange atmosphere. At times grim humor erupted, followed only by a flood of tears as soon as we became aware of our wretched situation. Then we’d hold each other’s hands as if we’d never let them go, and we promised each other never to abandon one another.

  I phoned your relatives once more and spoke with Frau Steffens.44 I wonder how she has managed to survive? As soon as I am well enough, I will go out to visit her.

  In the tea kitchen at my station, we hurriedly distributed the remainder of our contraband. The Landser received cigars and cigarettes. Whatever one had was distributed. We nurses permitted ourselves the last few lovely puffs of our last cigarettes. Understandably, we weren’t allowed to smoke openly in front of our patients, but now that didn’t matter anyway. It could be that we were just acting like children during our last moments of calm before the storm.

  Again, new arrivals came to our hospital. Just as we began to open their bandages, frightful shooting began right outside our walls. The Landser dashed off, and our short-lived peace was gone. The shooting became more frantic. Debris and the smell of gunpowder were all around us. Everyone flitted down the stairwells to the basement.

  Russian tanks broke through the panzer barriers at Heerstrasse and shot into our Lazarett as they rolled by on the one side that, unfortunately, was the side that did not have the Red Cross sign on it. And, of all places, they shot right into the auditorium and into the station where the most severely wounded soldiers lay. Sadly, one of our nurses was killed.

  Soldiers with whole-body casts and soldiers who were in such tremendous pain that they would not allow us to touch them now stood in the stairway in mortal terror, barefoot, with their tiny nightshirts, deathly fear on their faces, and couldn’t go any further. The picture is impossible to describe. In the bunkers, in the mattress storage rooms, in the hallways, in the cellar, between the beds—everywhere there were wounded and severely wounded soldiers, taking cover.

  The artillery fired; the house shook. Instinctively we shrugged our heads down into our shoulders. The wounded men screamed for us not to leave them alone. When the shooting began, everyone ran off. Those in such pain who could not even move ran!

  We had nothing to drink or to eat. It wasn’t even funny anymore to say, “Just bite your teeth together.”

  “Of course, we have nothing. They are fighting outside, you know, and the little bit of water we have is for cooking and for those who are much needier than you.”

  We waited for the backup infantry. Everything we did was in preparation to surrender the Lazarett to the Russians. We were considered neutral territory. Over and over again, it was pressed upon us that no soldier was to enter the Lazarett with weapons. Every wounded soldier was to surrender all weapons and ammunition. We knew, above all, in those Lazaretts where they found weapons, the staff was badly abused or driven off to who knows where.

  All around us, the civilian homes are filled with wounded soldiers. Our building is considered a neutral Lazarett building. The soldiers understood—and it was respected—that no one shall use this Lazarett building as an outpost.

  In time, we noticed that the later artillery, meaning the direction of the shooting, was being directed to the left or to the right of the Lazarett. Now, only the occasional stray bullet hit us directly. But really, that was plenty!

  Yesterday we were still called the Reserve Lazarett, but we were in part already a War Lazarett as well. Today we are called the Field Lazarett as well as the HVP. Constantly they bring men with the most horrible wounds: torn-off limbs, or limbs that are only attached by a thin thread of skin. They come completely covered in blood. The soldiers that fought nearby in the Heerstrasse are mostly just young Hitler Youth draftees. They fight like wild lions, and they received the most dreadful wounds. Not infrequently, we have to just leave them, unoperated and unbandaged—I mean not even a new bandage on their wounds—we leave them to lie there, because they really only have a few hours of life left. Because they are such poor young boys, just children really, I felt so very sorry for them. Often they cry for their Muttis. Now I understand why they only allow the Sanis to work at the HVP. Women just could never withstand such horror.

  Seven hundred patients is our maximum capacity, even in the direst of circumstances. We are now accommodating seventeen hundred. Even if they end up in civilian homes elsewhere in the neighborhood, we still need to tend to them and provide for them. Our bandages and medicines ran out, and especially our food supplies, and above all—water.

  Through the night of the 25th and 26th of April, I was appointed as the watch person. The evening syringes were prepared. Some of the patients were asleep. But, in truth, the night was rather unquiet. There was the occasional shooting outside, but what remained within these walls was the terror from the previous day. Some of the patients began hallucinating, fantasizing all sorts of things. The little ones cried because of their pain, many called for their Muttis. The severely wounded men who were lying on the hallway floors cried to us to please not leave them alone.

  If I sat for a few minutes with one of them, from another corner came another pitiful voice calling, “Schwester!”

  There were two of us working my floor. That is, we were in charge of this floor as well as the patient-laden entryway and the surrounding floors that contained soldiers lying on mattresses without sheets or on the gurneys they arrived on. They stayed lying on their gurneys because the OP45 was right next to the bunke
r.

  At one point I heard the heart-wrenching cry of a soldier screaming, “Sister!” It came from the long corridor just behind the OP. I recognized him from earlier, a beautiful boy, strong, maybe twenty-five years old. He was freezing and had only one blanket. I was puzzled about this. He had been lying here since morning. He knew he was going to die. I talked to him, or, better said, I tried to give him hope. He was from the Sudetenland. I gave him morphine to lighten his pain.

  I wondered about him having only one blanket, even though he was so cold. I looked at the neighboring gurney and saw also just one blanket. Then at a third and saw that all he had was a jacket to cover his face. I felt for his pulse. There was nothing. His hand fell heavy upon his stomach. I removed the jacket from his face. I found it to be so irreverent that a dying man had to take care of himself like this. Actually, I have to say, I didn’t really think at all. Mostly I felt an overwhelming compassion for these men.

  I then removed the blanket: dead. His face was horribly disfigured. I removed the next man’s blanket: dead. The same picture! Another man, just to his left, was waving his hands spastically in the air. I went to him and took his hands in mine, and told him to try to lie very still. He peered at me with two large dark and insane-looking eyes, sunk deep into his sockets. Although his face was by now terribly gaunt, and his eyes looked so terribly confused, I recognized him immediately. He had been one of our old patients on Station III; his name was Kückelmann.

  I was so incredibly shocked to see him. I still remembered this Kückelmann from before he had his meningitis, when all he had was an inflammation to the knee joint, then later he got tuberculosis. He had been a German literature major, about twenty-two years old, and a very handsome and intelligent young man. Later he was moved to the first floor, the floor that bedded only the most infectious and most severely wounded patients. I had not seen him since his meningitis.

  Now, of all times, in this most sinister of nights, he was the one man I had to encounter. I was irrationally frightened. I tried to compose myself and made every effort to speak to him with compassion and kindness, and to this he responded. He even remembered that I was Schwester Margarete from Station III, and he remembered the conversation we had had back then. It was about Homo sapiens, which we had discussed at length.

  But then I just couldn’t take it any longer. Through our broken windows I could see the flares of the artillery. The building shook. At times the shooting seemed farther away; at other times it was nearby again. Debris flew in from all directions … I simply could not take it any longer. I’m not a coward—not by any means. But the impressions of this night of horror just took every last bit of courage from me and threw me right to the floor.

  I went to visit the patient with the gunshot wound to the stomach and stayed with him a few minutes. I stroked his face gently and ran my hands through his hair, caressed his hands softly and told him he surely will recover—he could trust me in this—but he needed to try now to find some sleep. I noticed that he began to relax. I then left him and went to sit with the other Schwester in my ward and told her about what I had just experienced. Still, many of the patients on our floor called for me, but I could not bring myself to go to them anymore. I was finished. Truthfully, I was really just horribly frightened.

  Later I went down into the bunker. I was so exhausted I could have fallen over just as I stood there. We were all so fatigued from sleep deprivation that at times we would even fall asleep in the middle of doing our work. We wanted to take turns going into the bunker to sleep, but nothing came of this idea.

  Outside at the police station, all night long and nearly every hour, there was a police watchman who, with only seven men to help him, held back the enemy from the Heerstrasse train station. The colonel had abandoned his station. His soldiers, of course, did as well. The police watchman tried desperately to call for reinforcements to relieve them via telephone.

  It was nightfall and relatively quiet. But our Landser said that the Russians would make their assault at around four or five the next morning. As the morning approached we began to fear that the soldiers at the train station had been unsuccessful in holding out against the enemy through the night.

  We sat in our bunker. Suddenly the Schwester who had been tending to the patients who were in the stairwell came running to inform us, “The Russians are here!” She had heard their cries out in the streets, “Urrä-urrä!”46

  As if we were statues made of stone, bound together solidly by our fear, not one of us moved. We wanted to tend to those who had recently been operated on, as all of them were lying right at the entrance to the hospital. But not one of us had the courage to move. None of us knew whether the Russians wouldn’t simply shoot us. Then, not even the most courageous willpower could save us.

  We woke a doctor who was sleeping next door to us in the OP bunker. Through the crack between the curtains we could see a horse-drawn wagon full of soldiers drive by. They were Russians!!! Our nerves were electrified down to the very last cell. Within one instant we had become reconciled to our fate. Now, whatever will come, will come.

  We crept to the front entrance … there was a Red Cross wagon with wounded soldiers and a few Sanis who were to be dropped off with us. It was already daylight. We began to fix the patients’ beds and take their temperatures.

  I ran into the doctor who had been sleeping in the OP and asked him what was to become of the patients who were lying in the hallway. The one in particular had been lying there a long time with a bullet wound to his stomach. He told me to give him as much morphine as I wanted to. And in fact, he added, I could do so with all the patients. “They are hopeless cases anyway,” he said. I would simply be making their last hours a bit easier.

  As it was beginning to be daylight outside, I walked along the corridor and gave my first morphine to a sixteen-year-old who had a wound to his head; and he had been shot in the lung, one arm had been shot off so badly that it just hung by a scrap of skin, and he had a wounded leg. Oh, how deeply I felt his misery! There were more wounded soldiers lying there, but for now they have escaped my memory. I gave half the ampoule of morphine to the one with the stomach wound, and he soon began to sleep. He kept saying to me, “Schwester, today I must die.” Of course I knew he would die.

  We had moved him to the front of the hospital the night before, because at the time he didn’t appear to be that close to death. How good it was, though, that he was lying among the dead now. How good it was, too, that none of the dying soldiers knew that they were lying among the dead ones, because that was all they had left to look forward to anyway—their own death.

  But when this soldier announced to me it was his time to die, this very same man whom I had tried to convince that he would live, it struck me at the deepest place inside my soul.

  I asked where his home was, while fighting my own tears back. He was such a good-looking man, and strong, and his love for life still shone bright in his face. I finally ran off to cry. The tears became convulsive sobs.

  Someone very kindly prepared a bed for me. I wept with the most heart-wrenching sobs. Over and over, I saw in my mind the man with the stomach wound, then the eyes of Kückelmann, and finally that little sixteen-year-old boy. Everything that had been stored inside of me let loose and left through the flood of those tears. I felt so ashamed of myself. But I could do no more.

  This was the most difficult experience I have ever gone through! I cannot describe it any better than this. So much of this is something I will never be able to tell anyone else and have him really understand, because no one is I. And then, it doesn’t even matter anymore, because we have already lived through the worst of it. Things will never be that bad again.

  Often our destiny is perceived so much differently in our memories. And I am only writing these things down because I want to actually tell them to you one day as I have remembered them—some day when there is a time for that. But even as a mere memory, I must write it into my diary so that it will never b
e forgotten.

  The man with the stomach wound died soon. He had inadvertently been brought to the sterile OP where they really only “butchered around.” Then he lost his place in the lineup and ended up between the most severely wounded and the hopeless cases. We finally pulled him out of the line. The next morning he received his operation in the OP, but it was too late. There had already been too much internal bleeding.

  That men of war must die in this way! That they all look so bloodied and shot to pieces before their death! I had never thought about it before. Whenever we, in the past, had seen a corpse, it was tidied up and beautifully laid to rest inside white sheets and adorned with flowers—one hardly noticed they were dead. But war casualties! How gruesome! No corpse can make an impression on me anymore. And still I walk up to everyone who is dying among us and approach him with a tender heart. I try to be reserved around the surrounding patients. They should not be so aware of it when men are dying.

  Often, when a soldier dies, I think he will go to that place where we all will follow one day. Why, then, do we have fear about this? Today, death seems so far away, and yet it is so very near. Right here, next to this patient is where Death is standing. He becomes aware of Him, and he already becomes a calmer person. Then, not long thereafter, he leaves us. Now, just a useless piece of flesh is all that is left, something that could perhaps have some biological value, but a soul will never enter it again.

  What is Death? What is this Life? Death is the survival of the soul. You can understand this logically: we are created from that which is dead; Death lives within our Soul; and in the third phase, this Soul then leaves the body and lives on with God.