A Woman in Berlin : Eight Weeks in the Conquered City: A Diary (6 page)

Gisela told me she's exactly as old as her father was when he fell at Verdun in the first world war – almost to the day. She never saw her father. Now she says that she can't stop thinking about him, she talks with him in spirit, as if her time were coming, as if she was going to meet him soon. We never spoke about such things before, we would have been embarrassed to bare our hearts like that. Now the deepest layers are pushing to the surf ace. Farewell, Gisela. We've each lived our thirty years or so. Maybe we'll see each other again someday, safe and sound.

Back in the cave, Monday, 8p.m. Today the first artillery hit our comer. Whizzing, hissing, howling: uuueee. Flames flashing up. Terrified shouts in the courtyard. Stumbling downstairs, I could hear the shells landing right outside the cinema. The enemy is shooting at us. Incidentally, people say the Russians are sticking to the smaller guns. And we're beginning to feel a little less terrified about the American carpet–bombing, since at least here in Berlin they'd wind up hitting Russians as well.

A new rumour floats around the basement, which the wife of the liquor distiller heard from a reliable, very secret source and announces with a heaving bosom: the Yanks and Tommies have quarreled with Ivan and are thinking of joining with us to chase Ivan out of the country. Scornful laughter and heated discussion. The woman is offended and gets so angry she slips into her native Saxon dialect. She just returned yesterday to her apartment – and our basement – from their (somewhat small) distillery behind Moritzplatz, where she and her husband had been spending the nights, so she could hold the fort at home. Her husband stayed with the bottles and vats – and a redhead named Elvira, as everyone in the basement knows.

People are still taking care of business. Just before the shops closed I managed to get another 150 grams of coarse grain. Suddenly I heard excited screams around the comer, and the sound of running feet: a wagon was being unloaded near Bolle's, barrels of butter – all rancid – were being carried into the building for distribution. One pound per person, and – here's what's frightening – for free! All you have to do is get your card stamped. Is this the first sign of panic or is it the voice of reason speaking from beyond the bureaucratic flies? Right away people started crowding outside the shop door, pounding one another with umbrellas and fists. I joined in the pushing, too, for a few minutes, and in the process overheard talk of reserves, reinforcements and German tanks from some where – one woman claimed to have picked up something like that last night over the radio detector. Then I decided to let butter be butter, I didn't want to get into a fistfight over it, at least not today. But maybe I'll have to learn how soon.

Silent night. Distant pounding. Not a peep from the cave dwellers, not a word – they're too exhausted. Only snoring and the short shallow breaths of the children.

TUESDAY, 24 APRIL 1945, AROUND NOON

No news. We’re completely cut off. Some gas but no water. Looking out of the window I see throngs of people outside the stores. They’re still fighting over the rancid butter – they’re still giving it away, but now it’s down to a quarter of a pound per ration card. The Schutzpolizei are just now getting things under control – I see four of them. And on top of that it’s raining.

At the moment I’m sitting on the window seat in the widow’s apartment. She just stormed in, all worked up. A shell hit outside Hefter’s meat market, right in the middle of the queue. Three dead and ten wounded, but they’re already queuing up again. The widow demonstrated how people were using their sleeves to wipe the blood off their meat coupons. Anyway ‘only three people died,’ she said. ‘What’s that compared to an air raid?’ No question about it: we’re spoiled, all right.

Still, I’m astounded at how the sight of a few beef quarters and hog jowls is enough to get the frailest grandmother to hold her ground. The same people who used to run for shelter if three fighter planes were spotted somewhere over central Germany are now standing in the meat line as solid as walls. At most they’ll plop a bucket on their head or perhaps a helmet. Queuing is a family business, with every member on shift for a couple of hours before being relieved. But the line for meat is too long for me, I’m not yet ready to give it a go. Besides, meat has to be eaten right away, it won’t keep for more than a meal. I think they’re all dreaming of eating their fill one last time, a final meal before the execution.

2p.m. Just caught a glimpse of the sun. Without giving it a second thought, I strolled out to the balcony overlooking the courtyard and sat down in my wicker chair, basking in the sun – until a formation of bombers whizzed by overhead and one explosion merged into the next. I’d actually for gotten there was a war on. As it is, my head is oddly empty – just now I jerked up from my writing, something fell close by, and I heard the clink of shattering glass. Once again I’m having hunger pangs on a full stomach. I feel the need to gnaw on something. What’s the baby who’s still nursing supposed to live off now, the baby who can’t get any milk? Yesterday the people queuing up were talking about children dying. One old lady suggested that a piece of bread chewed up and full of saliva might help the little ones when they can’t get milk.

An infant in the city is a sorry thing indeed, when its elaborately constructed supply of milk has been disrupted. Even if the mother manages to find something for herself and get halfway nourished, the source is bound to run dry soon enough, given what is approaching us so mercilessly. Fortunately the youngest child in our basement is already eighteen months old. Yesterday I saw someone slip the mother a couple of biscuits for the baby – in what was likely the only recent act of giving. Mostly people squirrel away whatever they have and nobody thinks about sharing anything with anybody.

Back in the basement, 9p.m. Towards evening a woman we didn’t know showed up and asked the widow and me to go with her to help in the field hospital.

Smoke and red skies on the horizon. The east is all ablaze. They say the Russians have already reached Braunauer Strasse – ironic, considering that it was in Braunau that Adolf first saw the light of day. That reminds me of a quip I heard yesterday in the basement: Just think how much better off we’d be if his old lady’ d had a miscarriage.’

When we reached the hospital, the whole place was filled with smoke. Men were running about wildly, screaming and hollering: An ambulance driver: ‘Hey, we’ve got a shot lung with an impacted bullet!’

‘Move, go away, didn’t you hear? We don’t have a single bed left.’

The ambulance driver is fuming: ‘This is where they told me to go.’

‘Go away or else!’ The sergeant threatens with his fists. The driver storms off, cursing.

Lightly wounded men go slinking through the corridor, one barefoot, his bleeding hand wrapped in his socks. Another, also barefoot, leaves bloody footprints as he walks, the soles of his feet squelch as he lifts them off the ground. Waxy yellow faces peek out of head bandages, with rapidly spreading stains of red. We look into two or three other rooms.

It’s very stuffy, a smell of men, bivouacs, nervous apprehension. One man snarls at us: ‘What do you want?’

The woman who’d come to get us answers shyly that a man in a truck had driven by shouting that the field hospital needed women to help.

‘That’s nonsense. We don’t have anything for you to do here. Go back home.’

So they don’t want female help, but what a peculiar tone, so dismissive, disdainful. As if we wanted to get our hands on the guns, or play at being soldiers. Here, too, I have to relearn everything I’ve been taught about women in war. Once our role was to play the ministering angel. Scraping up lint for bandages. A cool hand on a man’s hot brow. At a healthy distance from the shooting. Now there’s no difference between a regular hospital and a field hospital. The front is everywhere.

Admittedly this particular hospital is trying to remain a kind of island in the midst of the storm. The roof is painted with gigantic crosses, and white sheets have been spread out in the form of a cross on the yard in front of the building. But aerial missiles are impartial, and the carpet of bombs is tightly woven, with no holes for compassion. Which they know in the field hospital – otherwise they wouldn’t have crammed every one down in the basement the way they have. Men’s faces peer out of every barred window.

Back in the shelter, the cave dwellers are feverish with excitement, agitated, nervous. The woman from Hamburg tells me with her sharp ‘s’ that they’ve managed to phone some friends on Mullerstrasse in north Berlin. ‘We’re already Russian,’ her friend shouted into the telephone. ‘The tanks just rolled in down below. Masses of people are lining the streets, the Ivans are all laughing and waving and holding up babies.’ It could be true – that’s an old Communist district, known as Red Wedding. Her story immediately sets off a heated argument. Some people wonder whether our propaganda has simply made fools of us. So ‘they’ aren’t as bad as we thought, after all? But then the refugee from East Prussia, who otherwise never says a word, starts yelling in her dialect. Broken sentences – she can’t find the right words. She flails her arms and screams, ‘They’ll find out all right,’ and then goes silent once again. As does the entire basement.

The distiller’s wife is peddling yet another rumour: von Ribbentrop and von Papen have just flown to Washington to negotiate with the Americans in person. No one answers her.

The basement is full of gloom. The kerosene lantern is smouldering. The phosphor rings painted at eye height on the beams so no one bumps into them in the dark give off a greenish glow. Our clan has increased: the book dealers have brought their canary. The cage is hanging off a joist, covered with a towel. Shelling outside and silence within. All dozing or asleep.

WEDNESDAY, 25 APRIL 1945, AFTERNOON

To recapitulate: around 1a.m. I left the basement again to go up to the first floor and throw myself on the couch. All of a sudden there was a fierce air raid, the flak started raging. I simply lay there and waited, too sleepy to care. The window pane is already broken and the wind is blowing in, along with the stench of fires. I felt an idiotic sense of security under the bedcovers, as if the sheets and blankets were made of iron –though they say bedding is extremely dangerous. Dr H. once told me how he’d had to treat a woman who’d been hit in bed, the bits of feather had lodged so deeply in her wounds he could barely remove them. But there comes a time when you’re so mortally tired you stop being afraid. That’s probably how soldiers sleep on the front, amid all the filth.

I got up at 7a.m. and the day began with quaking walls. Now the fighting is moving in our direction. No more water, no gas. I waited for a minute that was halfway calm and raced up the four flights of stairs to my attic apartment. Like an animal backing into his lair I crept into one room at a time, always on the lookout, ready to beat a hasty retreat. I grabbed some bedclothes and toiletries and fled back downstairs to the first floor, to the widow. We get along well. These days you come to know people quickly.

Buckets in hand, I made my way to the pump, through the garden plots, which were in full bloom. The sun was beating down, very warm. A long line at the pump, everyone pulling for himself – the lever was squeaky and difficult to move. Then the fifteen–minutes walk back with splashing buckets. ‘We are all of us fine sumpter asses and she–asses.’ (Nietzsche, I think.) Outside Bolle’s they’re still shoving one another on account of the free butter. And in front of Meyer’s there’s an endless dark queue, all men, they’re selling liquor there, half a litre per ID card, anything they have.

Right away I turned round and made a second trip for more water. A sudden air raid on my way home, a column of smoke and dust rising over the patch of grass outside the cinema. Two men threw themselves flat on the ground, right in the gutter. Some women bolted for the nearest entranceway and ran down any stairs they could find, with me at their heels, into a completely unfamiliar basement that didn’t have a trace of light. And all the time I couldn’t let go of those buckets, othewise they’d be stolen. A crowd inside the pitch–dark room, startled, very eerie. I heard a woman’s voice moaning: ‘My God, my God... ‘ And then things went quiet again.

Was she praying? I remember an event from about two years ago, see myself back in that hole, the most pitiful basement imaginable, under a one–storey cottage. A village of 3000, a place of no significance, but conveniently located on the way to the Ruhr Valley. A candle was burning in the dark, and the women (there were hardly any men) were reciting the rosary, the sorrowful mysteries, I can still hear their droning: ‘and for us was cruelly scourged... ‘ And then more: the Lord’s Prayer, the Ave Maria, monotonous, muted, soothing, freeing, just like I imagine the ‘Om mani padme hum’ of the Tibetan prayer wheels. Only broken by the occasional hum of motors, and once by a series of bombs that set the candle flame shivering. And then they went on: ‘and for us carried his heavy cross.’ Back then I could literally feel the prayer spreading its coat of oil over the troubled faces, helping make things better. Since that time I haven’t been inside another shelter where people prayed. Here in Berlin, in this mortley mix of five–storey tenements, you’d be hard–pressed to find a group of people willing to come together and say the Lord’s Prayer. Of course, people whisper prayers, perhaps more than it seems. And people do moan ‘My God, my God... ‘ But the woman moaning probably doesn’t understand what she’s really saying, she’s only grasping at empty phrases, repeating the words by rote, without meaning.

I never liked the proverb ‘Need teaches prayer’ – it sounds so haughty, like ‘Need teaches begging’. Prayers extorted by fear and need from the lips of people who never prayed when times were good are nothing more than pitiful begging.

There is no proverb that says ‘Happiness teaches prayer’, but a genuine prayer of thanksgiving ought to rise as high and as freely as fragrant incense. But this is all speculation. The fact that our German word for praying –
beten
– is so close to our word for begging –
betteln
– obviously means something. After all, there was a time when beggars were as much a fixture at the church door as the handle, as legitimate as the king himself and every bit as graced by God, so that the king would have his exact opposite here on earth, and so that whoever prayed to God in supplication would have someone to whom he in turn could extend divinely sanctioned charity. But I never will find out whether the moaning in the dark basement really was a prayer. One thing is certain: it’s a blessing to be able to pray easily and unabatedly, amid the oppression and torture, in all our despair and fear. People who can do it are lucky. I can’t, not yet, I’m still resisting.