So today I played housewife and cooked some pea-flour soup for Herr Pauli and myself. At around 2 p.m. we heard loud shouting from down on the street outside our house – a kind of official town-crier, exactly like a thousand years ago. He’d planted himself under the maple tree and was rattling off information from a piece of paper: all men and women between fifteen and fifty-five years of age capable of work and currently unemployed should report to the Rathaus at once for labour duty.
That set off a great debate in the stairwelclass="underline" to go or not to go? The bookselling wife cast her vote for; she was afraid that otherwise they’d come and take us by force. I joined her, and together we set off. I asked her if she knew what was going on with their bookshop. a burned down at the end of April,’ she answered tersely. Nevertheless she is pretty optimistic about the future, and told me about a huge crate of books in the basement that she managed to keep safe throughout the Third Reich – mostly ‘forbidden’ literature, that is, works that were banned in our country after 1933. At first this meant texts by Jews and emigrants, later by opponents of the war. ‘People have a craving for these things right now,’ she claims. ‘We’re going to wall off a corner of the shop and start a lending library – with a stiff deposit on the books, of course, or else they’ll be gone in no time.’ I told her I’d be the first to sign up; I have a lot of catching up to do.
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 8 a.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 9 p.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 dear 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 the 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 3 p.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 special 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.