Nightmare in Berlin

  And then he of all people had gone and boasted to the neighbours that he was going to meet the Russians at the door of his house and welcome them as liberators. Instead of reflecting on what his wife had said that afternoon and taking it as a warning, he had simply seen it as an affirmation of his own blind and foolish attitude. Truly he had not learned a single thing these last twelve years, however firmly he had believed otherwise in many a time of suffering!

  The Russians had been right to look upon him as a vicious and contemptible little creature, this fellow with his clumsy attempts to ingratiate himself, who seriously imagined that a friendly grin and a barely comprehensible word of Russian would suffice to wipe out everything the Germans had done to the world in the last twelve years.

  He, Doll, was a German, and he knew, at least in theory, that ever since the Nazi seizure of power and the persecutions of the Jews, the name ‘German’, already badly damaged by the First World War, had become progressively more reviled and despised from week to week and month to month. How often had he said to himself: ‘We will never be forgiven for this!’ Or: ‘One day we’ll all have to pay for this!’

  And although he knew this perfectly well, knew that the word ‘German’ had become a term of abuse throughout the world, he had still put himself forward like that in the fatuous hope of showing them that there were ‘still some decent Germans’.

  All his long-cherished hopes for the post-war future lay in ruins, crushed under the withering gaze of the three Russian soldiers. He was a German, and so belonged to the most hated and despised nation on earth, a nation lower than the most primitive tribe of the African interior, which could never visit so much destruction, bloodshed, tears, and misery on the planet as the German people had done. Doll suddenly realised that he would probably not live long enough to see the day when the German name would be washed clean in the eyes of the world, and that perhaps his own children and grandchildren would still be bearing the burden of their fathers’ guilt. And the illusion that they could persuade people of other nations by a simple word or look that not all Germans were complicit — that illusion, too, was now shattered.

  This feeling of utterly helpless shame, which frequently gave way to extended periods of profound apathy, did not diminish with the passing months, but instead was intensified by a hundred little things that happened. Later on, when the war criminals were put on trial in Nuremberg, when thousands of shocking details gradually emerged to reveal the full extent of Germany’s crimes, his heart wanted to rebel, unwilling to bear any more, and he refused to let himself be pushed down deeper into the mire. No! he said to himself — I didn’t know that! I had no idea it was that bad! I’m not to blame for any of that!

  But then came the moment — always — when he reflected more deeply. He was determined not to fall prey a second time to a craven delusion, not to end up standing — again — in his own parlour as a spurned host, rightly despised. It’s true! he said to himself then. I saw it coming with the persecution of the Jews. Later I often heard things about the way they treated Russian prisoners of war. I was appalled by all this, yes, but I never actually did anything about it. Had I known then what I know today about all these horrors, I probably still wouldn’t have done anything — beyond feeling this powerless hatred …

  This was the other thing that Doll had to come to terms with entirely on his own: that he bore his share of guilt, had made himself complicit, and had no right, as a German, to feel that he should be treated like people from any other nation. A man despised, a figure of contempt — when he had always been proud of himself, and had children furthermore, four of them, all still unprovided for, all not yet able to think for themselves, but all expecting a great deal from this life — and now to be facing a life such as this!

  Doll understood only too well whenever he heard or read that a large part of the German population had lapsed into a state of total apathy. There must have been many people who were feeling just like him. He hoped that they, and he, would find the strength to bear the burden that had been laid upon them.

  CHAPTER THREE

  The deserted house

  Outwardly, the life of the Dolls changed dramatically in the first few days after the entry of the victorious Red Army. They had always kept themselves to themselves, living quietly at home and going about their business; but now, following a public proclamation, they were forced to report for work duty like everyone else in order to earn bread — a very small piece of bread initially. Shortly after seven in the morning, the two of them had to make their way to the designated assembly area in the town. On the way they were often joined by neighbours, but usually they managed to shake them off and be on their own, as they had been accustomed throughout their married life.

  They walked side by side in the fresh May morning, Doll normally deep in thought and only half listening to the chatter of his wife, who was quite content with the occasional interjection of ‘Yes, quite’ or ‘I see’. His wife’s ability to carry on talking endlessly had prompted Doll to dub her his ‘sea surf’. He said she reminded him of long walks he had taken earlier along the beach, accompanied by the constant rush and roar of the sea next to him.

  When they reached the assembly area — the school yard — the togetherness they were used to, and the sea surf, came to an abrupt end: men and women were lined up separately, counted, registered, and assigned to all kinds of different work duties. If they were lucky, they could at least call out to each other as they were leaving and tell each other what kind of work they’d been given, so that each would know what the other was doing all the time they were apart. ‘I’m going cleaning!’ she might call to him. And he would reply: ‘Stacking sacks!’ Later on, both were given a fixed job: he was sent to mind the cows, while she was put to work carrying sacks.

  They often didn’t see each other again until the late evening, both of them exhausted by the unaccustomed physical labour, but both doing their best not to let the other know. Then he would talk derisively of his labours as a cowherd, where a herd of over a thousand cows, which were not from the same farm and therefore had no sense of solidarity, had to be kept together and prevented from getting into the cornfields. There were eight cowherds on the job, but his colleagues were inclined to stand around in the same place and pass the time chatting. It was the usual men’s talk: how long would things go on like this, and the meagre ration of bread they got wasn’t enough to feed a single man, let alone an entire family, and peacetime had not turned out quite how they had imagined, and the Nazis were up to their old tricks again, making sure they landed all the cushy jobs — it was all just hot air from start to finish, and it bored Doll stiff.

  Meanwhile the herd of cows was scattering far and wide, straying from the fields of vetch into the barley crop, while Doll charged about like a madman, trying to herd a thousand cows on his own, throwing stones at them, beating them with his stick, and finally sitting down on a stone, utterly exhausted and out of breath, nursing feelings of despair, anger, and dejection. At that very moment, a Russian horseman would often turn up to check on the work of the cowherds. The other cowherds, who had wisely positioned themselves while they chatted so that they could see the rider approaching from afar, were now busy about their work, while the exhausted Doll was given a dressing-down for being lazy. But he could never bring himself to behave like the others. This whole way of carrying on — only working when the people in charge were looking, and in actual fact doing nothing at all — he found abhorrent, and typical of the hated soldiering life, where of course ‘cushy numbers’ are highly prized.

  The only good thing about this cow-minding job was that when the cows had been driven in for the evening, cowherds and gasbags alike could stand in line with a jug — big or small, it could be any size — and they would get it filled to the brim with milk by the Ukrainian milkers. Thanks to this, the Doll family in those days could enjoy a bowl of soup for supper, which did them all good, you
ng and old alike.

  When it came to this kind of thing — getting hold of supplies — Alma Doll’s efforts were a good deal more successful than her husband’s, and she was more ingenious, too. Along with thirty or forty other women and girls, she had been given the job of clearing the remaining supplies from a hut camp formerly occupied by the SS, and transferring them to a large shed by the railway line. It was quite a distance, and the sacks that the women had to carry were often filled with heavy goods, so that the weight was sometimes too much for them.

  What really made them angry, though, was the fact that all these preserved meats, these tins of butter, cheese, milk, and sardines, these cans of ground coffee, these packs of premium pressed leaf tea, these cartons filled with powdered chocolate (not to mention the racks of bottles containing wine and cognac and countless packs of tobacco goods) — what really made the women’s blood boil as they lugged all this stuff about was the thought that all this abundance had been withheld for years from starving women and children, including many children who had never tasted chocolate in their lives, only to be crammed into the greedy mouths of swaggering SS bully boys, who were directly responsible for much of Germany’s misfortune.

  Ever since the children, bottles of wine in hand, had got drunk outside the largest hotel in the town, most of the local population had taken a new line on property ownership: these were all goods to which they were actually entitled. The selfishness and greed of the merchants had kept these things from them — so it was only right that people should now take whatever they could get their hands on! It was a long way from the SS hut camp to the railway sheds, and the sacks were a heavy load to carry: every so often, a woman would disappear into the bushes that lined the path, and when she emerged again to join the tail end of the long, straggling column, having just now been at its head, her sack was only three-quarters full, and in the bushes was a nice little stash of supplies to be picked up that evening.

  Alma Doll was no more scrupulous than the other women; like most of them, she had children at home who were not getting enough fats in their diet, and who would also like to find out what a cup of hot chocolate tasted like. Like the other women, she stockpiled supplies in the bushes, and when she discovered that these supplies were being plundered before the end of the working day, either by her fellow workers or by other people watching from a distance, she became even bolder. Hidden in the bushes, she waited until the tail end of the column had gone by. As soon as the last woman was out of sight, she hurried with her sack to a nearby house occupied by friends of hers, and left everything there, to be shared with them later. When it was time for the column to pass the spot again on its way back, she would get back into the bushes and then slip out, her empty sack over her arm, to rejoin the others.

  Her absence had not gone unnoticed by the other women, of course, and they made free with their barbed remarks and innuendos; but as they were all doing more or less the same thing themselves, she had nothing worse to fear. As for the Russian sentries who marched at the head and tail end of the column, they either saw nothing of what was going on or chose not to see. More likely the latter: they doubtless all knew what real hunger felt like, and they behaved magnanimously, even towards a hated nation that had let the wives and children of those sentries starve to death without mercy.

  In the evening, Alma would then sit with her husband, while their supper of milk soup heated up on the little makeshift stove, and the young wife would show him her latest acquisitions by candlelight — because the electricity had been cut off. They all ate tinned sardines on bread to start with, and then powdered chocolate was sprinkled into the milk soup. They didn’t just eat the food — they devoured it, gorging themselves until they were fit to burst, all of them, from the five-year-old Petta to the old and virtually immobilised grandmother. They didn’t care about overfilling their stomachs, or the effect this would have on their already disturbed night’s sleep, nor did they ever think about keeping something back for the next day. They’d said goodbye to all such thoughts during the years of sustained aerial bombing. They had become children again, who live only for today, without a thought for the morrow; but they had nothing of the innocence of children any more. They were uprooted, the pair of them, this herder of cows and this carrier of sacks; the past had slipped away from them, and their future was too uncertain to be worth troubling their minds about it. They drifted along aimlessly on the tide of life — what was the point of living, really?

  When Doll went to work with his young wife in the early morning, and when he hurried home on his own in the evening after tending the cows all day, his route took him past a large grey house with all its windows shut up, giving it a gloomy and forbidding air. On the door of the house was a very old brass plate, tarnished through neglect and stained with verdigris where the brass had been dented. Engraved on the plate were the words: ‘Dr. Wilhelm — Veterinarian’.

  When Doll and his wife walked past this gloomy house for the first time after the end of the war, she had said: ‘He’s topped himself, too — did you hear?’

  ‘Yes …’, Doll had replied, in a tone of voice intended to indicate to his wife that he did not wish to pursue the subject.

  But Alma had ploughed on regardless, exclaiming angrily: ‘Well, I’m glad the old boy’s dead! If ever I hated anyone, it was him — in fact I hate him still …’

  ‘Fine, fine’, Doll had interrupted. ‘He’s dead, let’s forget him. Don’t let’s talk about him again.’

  And they didn’t talk about him again. Whenever Dr. Doll approached the house, he fixed his gaze studiously on the other side of the street, while his wife kept on eyeing the house with a resentful or scornful look. Neither reaction suggested they had succeeded in forgetting, as Doll had wished, and they both knew — although they said nothing — that they neither could forget nor wanted to forget. The dead veterinarian Wilhelm had caused them too much heartache for that.

  He called himself a veterinarian on his brass plate, but in truth he was such a coward that he had hardly ever dared to go near a sick horse or cow. The local farmers knew this so well that they only ever called him out to give injections to pigs with erysipelas, which is why he was known far and wide as ‘Piglet Willem’. He was a big, heavily built man in his sixties, with a grey, sallow face that was twisted into a permanent grimace, as if he had the taste of bile in his mouth.

  There was absolutely nothing about this vet to set him apart from the common run of men, except for one thing: he was a connoisseur of fine wine. He drank schnaps and beer as well, but only for its alcohol content, because he had been for a long time what one might term a ‘moderate drinker’; he needed a certain amount of alcohol every day, but his intake could not be called excessive. Wine was his real passion, though, and the better the wine, the happier he was. At such times, the bilious wrinkles in his face would soften, and he was seen to smile. For a man of his means, it was a somewhat expensive passion, but he usually found a way to indulge it.

  Shortly before five in the afternoon, nothing would keep him at home a moment longer, and not even the most urgent phone call could get him to attend a sick animal. He picked up his stick, put on his little Tyrolean hat with its badger-hair plume, and strolled sedately along the street, dressed invariably in knee breeches, and walking with his feet splayed out to the sides.

  Dr. Wilhelm — Piglet Willem — was just a short walk away from his destination, a small hotel where at one time he had effectively had his own private supply of wine on tap. That was when the landlord was still alive, a man who dearly liked a drink himself. After his death, the establishment was run by his widow and then increasingly by their youngest daughter, a girl of mercurial temperament and fierce dislikes, one of which — and not the least of them — was the vet, Dr. Wilhelm.

  To his profound dismay, the vet found that the daughter of the house now frequently refused to bring him the bottle of wine he had ordered, only bringing h
im a glass instead, though other tables were still getting their bottles often enough. If he then complained, speaking with his characteristic slow and measured delivery through that caustic, nutcracker mouth of his, she would cut him off as soon as he started with her quick, sharp tongue: ‘You expect your wine every day. The others just come in occasionally — that’s the difference! You’d drink us dry if I let you!’

  Other times, she would not even deign to reply. Or else she would reach quickly for his glass and say: ‘If you don’t want the glass, I’ll be happy to take it back again. You don’t have to drink it!’ In short, she took care to remind him every day that he was entirely dependent on her whims for the satisfaction of his drinking desires. He had to put up with her insults and her diminishing servings of wine with a grumpy sigh, but still he came back every day for more, without dignity or shame.

  From the little hotel, the vet would then process sedately, with his curiously splay-footed gait, halfway across the town to the little railway station, where he generally entered the second-class waiting room shortly before six o’clock. Here he often had the good fortune to find the town’s wealthy corn merchant sitting at the table reserved for regulars, where he himself had a seat, and this gentleman was always happy to share his wine with him. Sometimes the corn merchant would be sitting at a separate table with one or more of his customers, in which case the vet would go up to them, inquire gravely ‘May I?’, and was generally invited to join them. For here Dr. Wilhelm was able to trade on another side of his character: he had quite a repertoire of bawdy country jokes and stories, which he could recite in the authentic local dialect. His stories were frequently met with gales of laughter, their effect heightened by the fact that his sour expression didn’t change at all — which put the corn merchant’s customers in a sweeter mood.