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201 D Chapter Fifty-Nine d surViVing in berlin As time went by, little by little I learned what had happened one day in early May of 1945. Among the first RedArmy soldiers invading our house after the fall of Berlin,there had been an officer who could speak and read German. After examining my father’s release documents from Nazi prison,he posted a notice in Cyrillic letters on the front door,declaring the house off-limits for Soviet soldiers. This did not mean that looting would stop altogether, because some of the roaming warriors in search of treasures were illiterate. Yet in spite of the monumental destruction,there seemed to be a silver lining,promising a new future.My parents were optimistic—no more Gestapo ransacking the house,dragging them to jail.No more fear of atrocities, a twelve-year nightmare had ended. Nothing that lay ahead could possibly equal the terror they had experienced. This elation at having survived was cut short when, a few days later, a Russian soldier went door to door, announcing that all able-bodied men were to clean up the debris in front of their houses. My father, almost enthusiastically, took the broom and went to work. To him,this cleansing procedure was a symbolic act of finally sweeping away the evil spirits of the past. While he was still busy, a Soviet military vehicle came to a halt in front of the house, from which two officers with green hats, a trademark of the NKVD, emerged. With them was a man from our neighborhood in a state of hysteria, explaining to my father that he had been picked up in the street in front of his own house.Having lost all his papers,and thus unable to identify himself, he was arrested. He had persuaded his captors to take him to our house, where my father would certainly confirm he was not a Nazi on the run. The officers politely suggested that my father accompany them to the Kommandantur. and sign a written statement. Of course they would bring him back before nightfall, in a few hours. Since it was a cool spring day, my mother ran into the house and came back with a coat, so her husband,who was still recuperating from nine months of extreme hardship,would not catch cold. In the open car, he turned around, smiling and waving at her; that would be the last gesture she remembered, because he vanished without a trace. The problems of basic survival confronting us each new day left little time to dwell on my father’s fate.We were both relieved and grateful that Friwi was safe in Haseldorf and did not have to endure the hardships that life in the leveled city of Berlin imposed on all those who had defied death and now refused to leave. Our thoughts circled around the next slice of bread, a piece of coal or wood to feed the little stove in Anna’s former room, which, over Part two 202 the next winter, kept my mother and me from freezing to death. Being hungry was bad enough, but being cold was something else. For months to come, long lines of very young girls and very old women formed in front of a house on our street where the only neighborhood gynecologist, a raving Nazi, performed abortions assembly-line style, and tried to cure hitherto unknown venereal diseases , unwanted souvenirs of the victorious Red Army, without the benefit of penicillin. Of all the damages inflicted on the battered house, the missing roof tiles created the worst problem,allowing cascades of rain and snow to penetrate the ceilings from the second to the first floor,ultimately seeping through to the cellar.Central heating was a luxury of the past, not only for lack of coal, but because the pipes were frozen solid, eventually bursting when spring came. My mother’s pride, the once beautiful garden, now covered with debris, presented a deplorable sight. The disadvantage of growing our own vegetables, like potatoes , was that any possible crop had to be watched day and night or it just disappeared, so we soon gave up all efforts. Besides, we had no potatoes to spare for planting. The last days of the war claimed a lot of lives in our neighborhood.A number of people were felled by shells in their own gardens. Entire families had preferred suicide over falling into the hands of Red soldiers...

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