A Woman in Berlin : Eight Weeks in the Conquered City: A Diary (29 page)

The steps outside the Rathaus were filled with women pushing and shoving one another - the men were few and far between. With a great deal of shouting and gesticulating, a youth took down our names. The patch of street outside the town hall looked like an extremely busy construction site. The trench in the middle of the boulevard, which was carved out for mysterious military purposes by a handful of Germans and several Russian girls in quilted jackets - forced labour - is now being filled in again, this time solely by Germans. This has a certain logic for me. Women are pushing the carts loaded with sand, brick rubble and fire-blackened debris up to the edge and tipping the contents into the trench. Bucket brigades have been lined up on all the side streets, and bucket after bucket is being passed up to the carts. I’m supposed to join in tomorrow morning at 8a.m. I have nothing against that.

I looked for the widow among the women working, but didn’t see her. At one point a car with a loudspeaker pulled up, blaring the latest news in Russian-accented German. Nothing I hadn’t heard before.

This evening we had bread with canned meat. The widow still hadn’t come back- it was 9p.m. before we saw her red hat down on the street. She was absolutely exhausted, drained, done in. A few short, unintelligible angry sounds were all we got out of her - she refused to tell us what had happened. Finally, after an endless amount of time washing up, she managed to utter a few sentences, from which it was clear that there had been no asparagus. A Russian truck had transported the women to a machine works, where the widow and some two hundred others spent the whole day packing parts in crates, then unpacking them, repacking them and wrapping them up - all under the eyes of stern Russian overseers. The widow had been jostled and shoved constantly; all they’d given her to eat was a crust of dry bread for lunch.

And they call that organization!’ She was indignant. ‘What a muddle, what a mess!’

Then she told us some more: ‘We pointed out to them right away that the iron parts were too heavy and would break the bottoms of the crates. And they just yelled at us to shut up and, “
Rabota, rabota
!” - Work, work! So when the first crate broke into pieces as soon as it was lifted, they really laid into us, and of course it was all our fault!’ Shaking her head, she added, ‘It’s a puzzle to me how these people managed to win the war. Any German schoolchild has more sense than they do.’ And she went on listing other examples of poor planning and stubborn insistence on the part of the Russians, to the point where she couldn’t calm down. She’d had to come home on foot - which took a whole hour and a half - since they hadn’t provided a truck to transport the women back after work. As a result she has a blister on her toe; she yammers on about that and about our fate and the German defeat. Nothing can console her, not even the hammer, the pliers, the dust rag or the tin cup she smuggled out of the factory under her dress.

WEDNESDAY, 23 MAY 1945

Fitted out with bucket and dustpan, I marched off to the Rathaus in the grey morning rain. Before I got there it was coming down in sheets; I could feel my knit dress soaking up the water.

The rain kept coming- now a light drizzle, now a substantial downpour. Nonetheless we kept on scooping and shovelling, filling bucket after bucket with dirt so there wouldn’t be a break in the chain of hands. There were about a hundred women of all types. Some proved sluggish and lazy and didn’t move a muscle unless one of our two German overseers was looking. (It’s always the men who get to do the supervising.) Others went at it like avid housewives, with dogged determination. ‘Well, the work has to get done,’ said one woman with great conviction. Once a cart was loaded, four of us shoved it up to the trench. I learned how to operate a swivel plate. We worked until the heavy rain forced us to take a break.

We stood under a balcony, huddled close like animals, our wet clothes sticking to our bodies. The women shuddered and shivered. We took advantage of the opportunity to eat our wet bread as it was, with nothing on it. One woman muttered in a thick Berlin accent, ‘Never ate the likes of this under Adolf.’

She was challenged on all sides. ‘It’s thanks to your Adolf we’re eating this.’

Embarrassed, the woman said, ‘That’s not how I meant it.’

We stood like that for over an hour in the pelting rain. When it began to taper off, our supervisor - a man with a Czech-sounding name and a Viennese accent -sent us back to the carts. We called these carts ‘lorries’ -which sounded like a girl’s name, and christened one the ‘Laughing Laurie’ and the other the ‘Weeping Laurie’. But someone scratched out ‘Weeping’ and wrote ‘Smirking’ instead.

Around 3p.m. our Viennese overseer finally checked our names off his list and let us go home. On the way back I was swinging my bucket gaily, in the spirit of ‘what doesn’t kill me makes me stronger’.

At home I found the widow all keyed up. She confessed that for the past few days she’d been feeling ‘this itching and burning’, so she’d consulted the encyclopedia under ‘ syphilis ‘ and ‘gonorrhoea’. As a pharmacist’s wife she’d learned a great deal about human ailments, but this was one particular area where she lacked the necessary experience. ‘I have these little bumps,· she declared, very sure of herself. According to the encyclopedia, little bumps like that are symptomatic of early syphilis, breaking out three to four weeks after infection. The widow calculates that it was exactly four weeks ago that her stairwell rapist, that little beardless boy, had his way with her.

‘What? Vanya? That child?’ I can’t believe it. ‘You mean you think that he-?

‘Why not? Exactly, a stupid little boy like that. Besides, I’m not sure if that really was Vanya. How could I know? And then that Pole!’

The widow starts sobbing miserably. What am I supposed to do? There’s no point in my taking a look, since I don’t know a thing about it. And she fiercely dismisses my suggestion that she ask Herr Pauli. So all that’s left is to wait till tomorrow and get to the hospital as early as possible, to the spedal clinic that’s been set up for women who’ve been raped. Then I remember how my ears started to ache back in school when we were studying the human ear with the help of oversized anatomical models. It’s likely that the widow’s symptoms flared up when she read the description in the encyclopedia. We’ll just have to wait until tomorrow. I may have to go and get examined myself soon. I’m one day late.

THURSDAY, 24 MAY 1945

The alarm jangled - time to get up for shovelling. Today I dressed in my blue training trousers and tied on a kitchen apron. Once again the sky was overcast. It was drizzling when we arrive d. We shovelled diligently. There were two men shovelling alongside us, at least when the supervisor was watching - otherwise they didn’t do a thing. All of a sudden around ten o’clock we heard some shouting and a Russian voice, ‘Woman, come! Woman, come!’ A command that’s been all too popular. In a flash all the women disappeared, hiding behind doors, crawling under carts and piles of rubble, squatting to make themselves as small as possible. But after a moment most of them, including me, re-emerged. ‘Surely they’re not going to... ? At least not here, in the middle of the street. Besides there’s only one of them.’

And he now went into action. A lieutenant, evidently equipped with orders, rounded up the remaining women and herded us together. We trudged along behind him, in front of him, while he raced around us like a sheepdog, brandishing his rifle. We cut across the garden plots and finally wound up in front of a machine-tool factory.

The large halls lay empty, the hundreds of workbenches deserted. A German shout of ‘Heave-ho!’ came echoing off the walls - a team of German men under Russian command were using cranes to hoist a disassembled forging press onto some train wagons. The parts were bigger than they were. Everywhere you looked you saw men unscrewing things, turning switches off, oiling machines, hauling parts away. The siding outside the factory was lined up with one freight wagon after the other; several already piled high with machine parts.

What were we women supposed to do here? We loitered about, not knowing where to go. We realized right away we couldn’t leave, since all the gates were guarded by soldiers.

Finally we were ordered to the assembly hall, where we were told to collect all the brass and other ‘bright metal’ we could find and haul it, in crates, to the freight wagons.

Together with another woman who stubbornly refused to respond to my attempts to strike up a conversation, I dragged out a box and went around picking up shiny bits of metal - copper thread, brass ingots -just like a magpie. I rummaged through the workers’ lockers, finding pipes, crumpled handkerchiefs, neatly folded sandwich paper - all as if they’d just finished yesterday. Then we tossed our magpie booty onto the floor of a train wagon, where two women were clambering about, sorting the metal like housewives, nicely according to size.

At noon we were ordered into a different hall, a kind of storage shed, with high shelves holding metal bars of every type, threading and bolts and nuts as big as a fist. We spent an eternity passing them all from hand to hand. The woman at the end of the line stacked everything in crates, as ordered.

I thought about what the widow had experienced yesterday, and waited in some suspense for the bottoms to break when the crates were moved. But it never came to that. As soon as they started to lift the first crate, it was clear that it was too heavy. Not even our slave-driver, a squint-eyed NCO with a chest like a cupboard, could make it budge. There were no wheelbarrows or anything of that nature. The man muttered a few crude curses and ordered everything taken out of the crates and passed hand-to-hand all the way to the freight wagons. In that way a minimal amount of work was accomplished with maximum of effort.

New labour details showed up, mostly young women but with quite a few older ones as well. Word went round that we were to be fed. And indeed after 3p.m. they ordered us into the factory canteen, where we found some steaming thick bread soup. But there was a shortage of tin plates and spoons, so that each woman had to wait for the woman next to her to finish. Hardly any of the women ran up to use the tap; most just gave their spoons a quick swipe on their skirts or aprons and then took the plates from the person before them.

Back to work!
Rabota
! There was a considerable draught in the shed. This time we spent hours passing zinc fittings down the line. Finally, it must have been around 8p.m., our squint-eyed task master showed up and shouted, ‘Woman - go home!’ and started shooing us out with his arms, as if we were a flock of chickens. A happy cry of relief. Then we went to the canteen, where were given another 100 grams of bread. After that a cask was rolled in, with a thick white liquid streaming out of it - some kind of syrup. We queued up. ‘Tastes great,’ the first women to try it reassured us. I didn’t know how to handle it until one woman gave me a piece of bilious green paper she’d found in the shed that I could fold and use as a container. The green comes off, the woman said, but claimed that it wasn’t poisonous.

I showed up at the widow’s around 10p.m. and proudly displayed my booty. I scraped the gluey liquid off the green paper and the widow merely shook her head. I took a spoon and licked it and wound up with a mouth full of paper. No matter - it tasted sweet. Only after a while did I remember about the encyclopedia and the widow’s ‘little bumps’.

‘Oh, it’s nothing,’ she said, in answer to my question. ‘The doctor told me I’m all right.’

I drilled her a bit more, wanting to know what it was like at the clinic.

‘There were two other women there apart from me,’ the widow reported. ‘The doctor was a cheery sort. He fiddled around a bit and then said, “Green light, track’s all clear!”‘ She shook herself. ‘No, I’m through with that.’ Incidentally an official expression has been invented to describe the whole business of raping: ‘forced intercourse’. Maybe they ought to include the phrase next time they print up the soldiers’ phrase book.

FRIDAY, 25 MAY 1945

Up again early and off to work in the clear morning. Women marching in from all directions. Today most brought their own dishes; I too had a soldier’s mess kit dangling from my belt. We lined up as ordered, first in rows of three, then four - after which they spent an interminable time counting, sorting and registering us. Our supervisor was the same Viennese man who had been in charge at the carts; they say he’s a musician. It took him nearly an hour to list all of us. Some women were new recruits. ‘Well, we have to work one way or the other,’ I heard one of them say. 1least here we’ll get something to eat.’

Sure enough, we started off with some thick barley soup. Then we crossed over the railway embankment to the work halls, where we saw German prisoners slaving away - old men in shabby clothes, probably Volkssturm. They groaned as they lifted heavy gear wheel flanges onto the trains. They milled about alongside us, eyeing us intently. I didn’t catch on, but some others did, and slipped them bits of bread on the sly. That’s not all owed. but the Russian guard looked steadfastly the other way. The men were unshaven and emaciated, with the gaping eyes of wretched dogs. They didn’t look like Germans at all to me. They resembled the Russian POWs we used to see while the fighting was still on, the ones forced to clear rubble from the ruins. This, too, is a logical reversal.

Back in the hall. Our first task was to haul unwieldy iron bars, in groups of two or three, after that we passed rods and pieces of plate metal down the chain out to the freight wagon. A Russian came in, looked us over, waved two women aside and then a third. The third was me. We trotted after him. Where to? One of us speculated, ‘Maybe to peel potatoes?’ They’d already taken a dozen women to do exactly that out by the railway embankment where the Russian trailers with those fancy curtains are located.

No, he was taking us someplace else, over to a dilapidated shack and down a dreary corridor where the faecal stench grew more and more unbearable. One woman decided to take off; she simply bolted back, cutting across the landing. After that the Russian made the two of us who were left march in front of him. He led us into a room with a stone floor. We saw a boiler, tubs, washboards, buckets. He pointed at the equipment and made a gesture of washing laundry.