Inferno - Max Hastings [394]
A terrible quiet, the quiet of the dead and damned, fell upon the city. “No sound of man or beast, no car, radio or tram …,” wrote a Berlin woman. “Nothing but an oppressive silence broken only by our footsteps. If there are people inside the buildings watching us, they are doing so in secret.” She added a week later: “Everywhere there’s filth and horse manure and children playing—if that’s what it can be called. They loiter about, stare at us, whisper to one another. The only loud voices you hear belong to Russians … Their songs strike our ears as raw, defiant.”
Everywhere the Soviet victors held sway, they embarked upon an orgy of celebration, rape and destruction on a scale such as Europe had not witnessed since the seventeenth century. “The baker comes stumbling towards me down the hall,” wrote a Berlin woman about one of her neighbours, “white as his flour, holding out his hands: ‘They have my wife …’ His voice breaks. For a second I feel I’m acting in a play. A middle-class baker can’t possibly move like that, can’t speak with such emotion, put so much feeling into his voice, bare his soul that way, his heart so torn. I’ve never seen anyone but great actors do that.”
A German lawyer, who had miraculously preserved his Jewish wife through the Nazi years, now sought to protect her from Russian soldiers. One shot him in the hip. As he lay dying, he saw three men rape her as she screamed out her Jewish identity. The anonymous Berlin woman diarist who recorded the episode wrote: “No one could invent a story like this: it’s life at its most cruel—mad blind circumstance.” An elderly Berliner moaned, “If only it were over, this poor bit of life.” The diarist, who was herself repeatedly raped, wrote of experiencing a sense of detachment from her own physical being, “a means of escape—my true self simply leaving my body behind, my poor, besmirched, abused body. Breaking away and floating off, unblemished, into a white beyond. It can’t be me that this is happening to, so I’m expelling it all from me.”
A Soviet soldier wrote to a friend about German women. “They do not speak a word of Russian, but that makes it easier. You don’t have to persuade them. You just point a Nagan [pistol] and tell them to lie down. Then you do your stuff and go away.” In one place, the bodies of a group of raped and mutilated women were found, each with a bottle stuffed up her vagina. Vasily Grossman was dismayed to see that the men of the Red Army made no distinction among their victims: “Horrifying things are happening to German women … Soviet girls liberated from the camps are suffering a lot now.” Alexander Solzenhitsyn, serving with Rokossovsky as a gunner officer, wrote an ironically indulgent poem about what he witnessed as his people sealed their victory:
The conquerors of Europe swarm,
Russians scurrying everywhere.
Vacuum cleaners, wine, and candles,
Skirts and picture frames, and pipes
Brooches and medallions, blouses, buckles
Typewriters (not of a Russian type)
Rings of sausages and cheeses.
A moment later the cry of a girl,
Somewhere from behind a wall,
“I’m not a German. I’m not a German.
No! I’m—Polish. I’m a Pole.”
Grabbing what comes handy, those
Like-minded lads get in and start—
And lo, what heart
Could well oppose?
When the former Jewish hospital at Wedding was overrun on 24 April, Russian soldiers found 800 Jews, most in desperate physical condition, whom the Nazi killing machine had miraculously overlooked. A disbelieving Soviet soldier said in broken German, “Nichts Juden. Juden kaput.” The Russians raped the female inmates anyway: “Frau ist frau.” A further 1,400 Berlin Jews emerged from