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
After I came back from getting water, the widow sent me to the meat queue to find out what’s going on. People were cursing; evidently they keep postponing the deliveries of meat and sausage, which maddens these women more than the entire war. That’s our strength – we women always focus on the task at hand. We’re happy whenever we can flee into the present to escape worrying about the future. And for these women the task at hand is sausage, and the thought of sausage alters their perspective on things that may be much more important but are nevertheless much further away.
Back in the cellar, around 6 p.m. I couldn’t lie down upstairs any longer – there were some hits dose by and I got scared when thick pieces of plaster started falling on my blanket. I dozed down here until Henni came from the baker’s and reported that a bomb had landed right on the pharmacist’s next to the cinema. The owner was killed on the spot, though it was impossible to say whether by shrapnel, the blast or a heart attack. According to Henni he didn’t bleed. One of the three elderly pudding sisters got up and asked, with elegantly pursed lips: ‘If you don’t mind – how did he get finished off?’ That’s the way we talk these days, that’s how far we’ve fallen. The word ‘shit’ rolls easily off the tongue. It’s even spoken with satisfaction, as if by saying it we could expel our inner refuse. We are debasing our language in expectation of the impending humiliation.
THURSDAY, 26 APRIL 1945, 11 A.M.
My fingers are shaking as I write this. Thirty minutes ago we took a direct hit on the fourth floor. We’re still breathing the dust from the plaster. I’m out of breath, having just raced back down from my apartment in the attic. The place looks like a dump, full of shattered plaster and splinters and broken glass. Farewell, my fleeting bit of home; I hardly had a chance to know you. For the moment you’ve been rendered uninhabitable.
I grabbed what I could: a pot, some towels, some gauze for bandages – things we need. My throat is parched, still burning from the dust. I don’t have anything to drink down here. And countless gallons of water have just drained out of the radiators upstairs. We spent—
Wait, first I want to recount everything that’s happened – there’s been so much it’s so long since I last wrote. It all started yesterday around 7 p.m. when someone came to our basement and announced that they were selling pudding powder at the corner store. I went along with everyone else and queued up. Then, out of the blue, Russian bombs. At first the queue merely regrouped in the ruins of the building next door, as if the broken walls would protect us from the bombs. Smoke and flames were coming from Berliner Strasse. Another series of bombs exploded closer by. I gave up on the pudding powder and hurried across the street and back to the basement. A man called out to me, ‘Stick to the wall!’ Rattling gunfire, flying debris. Back in the shelter at last, pudding or no pudding. The wife of the concierge started wailing that her daughter was still at the corner store; she probably hadn’t felt it was safe to cross the street under fire.
She showed up half an hour later, also without any pudding powder. She was pretty damn lucky, as she put it, having just managed to squeeze into the shop’s basement when a bomb fell right outside. A teenage boy who hadn’t made it inside caught a fragment in his skull. She had to step over his body on her way out. She pointed to her temple and showed us how the wound was gushing white and red. Tomorrow they’re supposed to resume selling the powder. Evidently the store has plenty left.
The cave dwellers went to sleep around 9 p.m. The widow has made a sort of bed for me as well, in the front area of the basement, since there isn’t any space left dose to the support timbers, but it’s soft and warm. I slept until the bombs woke me up. My hand was dangling over my bed and I felt something licking it – Foxel, our absent landlord’s terrier. There, Foxel, good dog, don’t be afraid. We’re alone here in this front room. There’s no support structure, but the air is cleaner, and nobody bothers us with snores and groans.
Up early the next morning, to fetch water at the pump. I read my first printed text in days, hot off the press, too. A newspaper called the Armoured Bear. Someone pasted one next to the baker’s display window. It had Tuesday’s official Wehrmacht report, which meant it was two days old. According to a report: a) the enemy was pushing ahead and b) German reinforcements were on the way. The Bear also said that Adolf and Goebbels were still in Berlin and would stay. One very smug piece told of a soldier named Höhne who had deserted and was now dangling from a rope at the Schöneberg station for all to see.
Breakfast in the basement. Everyone is trying as best they can to recreate some semblance of family life. A genteel morning meal served on trunks, crates and chairs, with paper napkins and little tablecloths. Pots of hot drinks cooked over wood fires or spirit stoves are lifted out of their cosies. You see butter dishes, sugar bowls, jam servers, silver spoons, everything. The widow conjured up some real coffee and cooked it on a fire made of broken champagne crates – that did us good. But people are fidgety, cranky, getting on one another’s nerves.
A little before 10 a.m. a trunk-sized bomb landed on the roof of our building. A terrible jolt, screams. The concierge’s wife staggered in, pale as a sheet, bracing herself against one of the support beams. Then came eighteen-year-old Stinchen with the Hamburg ‘s’, leaning on her mother. Her hair was grey with plaster dust, completely tangled, and covering her young face which was streaked with trickles of blood – she’d been hit while crossing the courtyard. Even the canary in its cage felt the general agitation, which was zigzagging back and forth as it cheeped away.