A Woman in Berlin

Towards noon our boss rigged up a kind of dining room in front of the building, consisting of a crate and two overturned drawers. He asked us to sit down and served us a large pot of the rich stew – always with the same friendly but deadpan expression. We sat in the sun and took our time eating, enjoying the meal greatly. Both my fellow washers gave evasive answers to my usual question about how often it had happened to them. The older of the two, a spirited woman with bad teeth but humour very much intact, said that it was all the same to her – as long as her husband didn’t find out about it when he came back from the western front. Apart from that she subscribes to the saying, ‘Better a Russki on top than a Yank overhead.’ She’s in a position to know, too; her building was hit head on and she and the other residents who had retreated to the basement were buried in rubble. Several people were wounded and one was killed. It took two hours for help to arrive and dig them out. She became very agitated when she started speaking about the person killed, an old woman. ‘She was sitting by the wall, right in front of a mirror.’ The builders had hung the mirrors low because the basement was originally intended as a shelter for the children from the kindergarten housed in the ramshackle building next door. When children were evacuated from Berlin, the kindergarten was dosed and the basement was freed up for the people in the building. ‘The mirror exploded into a thousand pieces, which flew right into the old woman’s back and neck and head. And in the dark and with all the to-do, no one noticed she was quietly bleeding to death.’ Still outraged, she waved her soup spoon in the air. ‘Fancy that, a mirror.’

An amazing death, no doubt about it. Presumably the children for whom the basement shelter was designed were supposed to comb their little locks in front of the mirrors each morning after the nightly air raid – a luxury clearly installed back when the raids first started, back when the shelters still offered a measure of comfort as well as confidence.

We scrubbed the afternoon away, rubbing tunics, trousers and caps with our wrinkled, swollen hands. Around 7 p.m. we were able to sneak out onto the street through a side gate. A wonderful feeling of freedom – a combination of finally getting off work and playing truant.

At home the widow, Herr Pauli, and I drank what was left of the burgundy I’d stolen from the police barracks. Tomorrow is Sunday, but not for me. The Viennese gave a little speech today, the gist of which was that if we didn’t show up for work tomorrow, they would come to our apartments and take us to the factory by force.

SUNDAY, 27 MAY 1945

A long, bleak and weary day, the longest Sunday of my life. We worked without stopping in the factory yard from eight in the morning until eight in the evening. No laundry today. Our Russians have the day off. We stood in a chain across the yard, passing zinc ingots and sharp jagged bits from hand to hand while the sun beat down us without mercy. Our chain, which spanned about a hundred yards, was stretched thin, so that you always had to carry the heavy metal two or three steps to hand it to the next woman. My head was soon aching from the sun. On top of that my back hurt and my hands were still raw from all the washing.

At first there was just stupid gossiping and bickering on all sides, until finally a kind of singing started up, more like a droning, the same verse over and over: ‘Shine on, dear sun, we don’t give a whit, the mayor is sitting and taking a sh— Shine on, dear sun…’ And on and on. That’s how the women vented their anger over their stolen Sunday.

Every now and then a tall bony woman would reach into some cranny of her undergarments, fish out a wristwatch wrapped in a handkerchief and announce the time. The hours crept by, interrupted only by a hasty serving of gruel.

Back into the shadeless blaze. Zinc, more zinc, and no end in sight. By around 4 p.m. we had filled the first freight wagon until it was gleaming silver. Then with a ‘heave-ho’ we shoved the wagon a way up the track, and rolled the next one into place, a French wagon from Bordeaux with the SNCF lettering I knew so well. It gave off a horrible stench – the men had used it as a latrine. The women laughed. One of them called out, ‘Looks like the shit’s being freighted to Moscow as well.’