A Woman in Berlin

On my way to Steglitz I passed long chains of women, all dressed in blue and grey, stretched out across the mountains of rubble. Buckets were going from hand to hand. A regression to the time of the pyramids, except we’re hauling material away instead of constructing something.

The building was still standing, but looked blown out and bare. The walls inside the apartment were full of cracks and you could still see signs of fire. The wallpaper was in tatters, but in her little room Hilde had flowers in all her vases. She seemed strangely quiet, so I babbled away, trying to think of something to amuse her, just to make her laugh. Finally she started talking on her own, and I fell into an embarrassed silence.

She was wearing a dark blue dress because she doesn’t have a black one. On 26 April she lost her only brother – seventeen years old. While she and her mother stayed behind in the basement, he went up to see what was going on, and a piece of shrapnel tore through his temple. His body was looted – by Germans. Then his undressed corpse was carried into a nearby cinema. Hilde searched all over but it took her two days before she finally found him. She and her mother put him in a cart and wheeled him off to the Volkspark, where they used a spade to scratch out a shallow grave. They buried him in his rain jacket. He’s still there: Hilde’s mother had just left to take some lilacs to the grave.

Both mother and daughter managed to escape the Russians. They were protected by the four flights of stairs, and by the fact that the third-floor landing is damaged, so that it seemed as though no one was living on the higher floors. Hilde reported that a twelve-year-old girl in the basement, who was tall for her age, got dragged off in all the commotion and ‘used up’ by the Russians along with some other women. Luckily there was a doctor on hand who was able to help her afterwards. One Russian who came roaring through accidentally left a woman in the building a dirty handkerchief with all kinds of jewellery knotted up inside, a treasure that spawned fabulous rumours about its value.

Hilde related all this without emotion. Her face has changed; she looks as if she’s been singed. She has been marked for life.

I took a detour on my way back to see my friend Gisela. She’s still putting up the two forsaken ex-students from Breslau. All three of them were pretty grimy – they’d had to pass rubble down a chain for several hours that morning. Blonde Hertha was lying on the sofa, her face flushed and hot – the lady doctor next door diagnosed an inflammation of the ovaries. On top of that she’s most likely pregnant. She throws up the little bit of dry bread she gets for breakfast. The Mongol who forced her open had her four times in a row.

For their midday meal the three women served a thin flour soup. I had to eat as well, so as not to offend them and I was very hungry. Gisela snipped a few nettles. They’re growing wild in the flowerboxes on her balcony.

Then it was back home and up the stairs to my attic. A snapshot from along the way: a black coffin, smelling strongly of tar, tied to a cart with string, pushed by a man and a woman, with a child perched on top. Another snapshot: a Berlin municipal dustcart, six coffins on top, one of them serving as the driver’s bench. The men were eating their breakfast as they drove, passing around a bottle of beer and taking turns drinking.

SATURDAY, 2 JUNE 1945

I called on one of the roofers and when he opened the door I came right out and told him that I’d come for the radio that had disappeared from my apartment. At first the good man acted as if he had no idea what I was talking about: he didn’t know anything about any radio, I must be mistaken.

Then I played a dirty trick. I showed him my old paper from the town hall, assigning me as an interpreter to the local commandant, and told him that I could get a Russian to conduct a house search any time I wanted. At that the man immediately recovered his memory: oh, right, it was possible that his colleague, who happened to live in the same building, might have taken the radio, which had been sitting unattended, back home for safekeeping. The roofer asked me to wait, then he climbed up a flight of stairs and came back three minutes later with the radio – still packed in paper and tied with string. I see they took the packing paper from the apartment as well.

Authority as a means of applying pressure. And here I was, using a little piece of paper to pretend I had authority. The trick produced prompt results, too. I’m convinced that otherwise I would have never got the radio back. Still, it left me feeling grubby. However it appears that most of life’s mechanisms rely on little tricks like that – marriages, companies, nation-states, armies.