The Dancing Bear

by Frances Faviell

  I read of the arrival of the attacking troops, of the looting of every watch and piece of jewellery, of the removal of every male as a prisoner, of the appalling carnage in the streets, of the mass of flesh and pieces of bodies lying all over the place, of the fires and the smoke that hung like a pall over the dying city.

  The diary continued, growing in horror as it described the raping of Lotte and thousands of women—even old women of sixty-five, by the filthy Mongol troops. They were not raped once but time after time—women with their children clinging in terror to their skirts, and young women held by one man while another took his pleasure. The conquerors were drunk with spirits and with victory, and the accounts of these outrages were so revolting that I was forced to remind myself that this was a girl’s diary, a diary for the year 1945. It didn’t seem possible, but it was true. Every date and detail was set down in pencil—she had written it by the light of her torch—the murders of those who had tried to protect the old women: the apology of the Russian officer who had found the bodies, his promise that the murderers would be punished, and his explanation to Lotte that the troops were mad with victory after weeks of bloody fighting and had been given forty-eight hours Plunderfreiheit. She had set it all down, the atrocities and the kindnesses, without comment of any kind. Just a diary. The last entry which I read was dated May 12th and said, “Today we got our first bread for weeks, baked by order of the Russians ... for which we gladly queued.”

  It was one of the most horrible documents I had ever read, and I felt icy cold as I put it down. Some of it was quite unprintable but I was glad that I had read it, for I felt that I understood this proud and patriotic girl better now. I appreciated her first nervousness and apprehension of me. Outwardly calm and unmoved, like thousands of other women who had been raped with appalling brutality, she was now a perfectly trained and disciplined member of my household. No one looking at her attractive face could imagine that she had endured such horrors.

  I called her to me and asked if I might copy her diary. She assented, and I did so. Even as she related further horrors which she had not recorded, her face paled and she trembled violently. When I tried to comfort her, telling her that although she could never forget such an experience, time would help to take away its poignancy, she shook her head and said bitterly,

  “What does it matter what happened to me—we have lost the war!”

  We were looking out of the window on to the ruins of the Hohenzollerndamm. The few houses left standing were a mass of holes from the street fighting. Hardly anywhere in Berlin had a house escaped this baptism of fire.

  I could now understand the strange game played by the Berlin children in the streets, which I had found our own children copying. The boys would pounce upon the girls and attempt to tear off their clothes shouting, “Komm, Frau.”

  Dr. Annemarie, my friend at the Wilmersdorf Children’s Hospital, had confirmed that it was a reconstruction of what these children had seen happen to their own mothers and womenfolk during the sack of Berlin.

  VII

  THE weather was rapidly becoming colder and accelerating the terrible hunger in the city. The thing which gripped one after the ruins was this appalling stark hunger. I had seen it in India and China, but amidst this devastation and this bitter climate it compelled one’s attention more forcibly.

  Children could be seen fighting viciously over the filthy scraps they managed to scavenge from the Allied dustbins. The bell was rung all day by beggars—mostly old men and women, some of them scarcely able to stand—begging for a piece of bread. It was forbidden to beg from Allied houses, but hunger made the beggars sly, and they soon knew when our Hausmeister was not about. Our Army rations delivered daily in lorries, although larger than those in England, we stretched to breaking-point trying to help some of these as well as our own staff, for whom we received no rations.

  German ration cards were of five varieties according to the work done by the owner. Most women and girls, and all old people, got the “Death card”, which the Germans called card number 5. The women employed in Allied households got a mid-day meal at canteens, and this induced many of them to take up household chores no matter what their former work or upbringing. Practically all women were forced to earn cigarettes to buy food on the black market. The younger and prettier the women the easier it was to earn them. Frau Altmann told me of young daughters of really good old families who slept with British and American officers for a bar of chocolate or a packet of cigarettes. She was horrified. What German man would look at them after that? she said. There were no German men for them at present. One was struck by the absence of German males between the age of nineteen and fifty-five. Hundreds of thousands were prisoners of war and millions were dead.

  I commented on this and said that there was perhaps some excuse for the women. Frau Altmann looked at me as if she could not believe what I had said. There was no excuse, she said firmly. “All this new talk of sex and the teachings of Freud have done permanent harm to our womenfolk!”

  “And the Nazi party?” I asked. “What has their influence been?”

  She set her lips and replied that she would rather not talk about the subject, but that the harm which the Nazi party had done, not only to the women, but to the men and above all to the children, could never be remedied until God and the teachings of God were set again on their proper level in the world.

  Unlike the Americans who were already on friendly terms with the Germans, we British were forbidden to be friends with them. They were not allowed in our homes, in any of our buildings, clubs, or messes. Nearly every British family had come out with introductions to German families who had relatives in England, and some of them had relatives in Berlin themselves, so that this rule was frequently broken; but its continual insistence in the mass of notices and the sheafs of rules and regulations with which we were bombarded daily made an unpleasant situation. The Americans showed much more sense in their realization that human beings cannot be kept apart by such matters as race or war.

  Frau Altmann’s was not the first German home I had visited since my arrival in Berlin. I frequently went to Dr Annemarie and her mother’s. Dr Annemarie was on the staff of one of the largest hospitals in Berlin and through her I was able to see how terribly the children were suffering from cold and malnutrition. Besides visiting this hospital regularly, she allowed me to accompany her to the Fürsorge or Welfare Clinic for out-patients.

  Her own home was always open to me and her delightful twin boy and girl and her husband all became friends of ours. She had suffered very much herself from the Nazi régime under which she had been prevented from taking her final medical degree. The advent of the Allies had opened the door to her final examinations and this post at the Children’s Hospital.

  Amongst the people to whom we had been given introductions from home were a couple who had been very well known and important in the Nazi world. Dr von R. had been a lawyer, and his wife a well-known hostess to the Nazi party. He was friendly and always delighted to see us when we called on them at Gatow in what had formerly been their week-end bathing hut when they had owned a yacht and spent week-ends by the lake. Frau von R. remained very stiff and formal. Keeping my promise to my friends in London, I frequently took her small parcels, for she was very ill and dying slowly of cancer. She never acknowledged the parcels but placed them on a table. If she offered us coffee, it was always ersatz stuff of her own. If she offered us cakes they were ones she had baked, and sugarless. She never thanked me for anything except the visit, and she was without exception the most bitter woman I had ever met—and yet I liked her. She was honest and made no secret of her regret that the Nazi days had gone. Her husband was trying to get his de-nazification through—he had been one of the first thousand members and so would have to pay an exceptionally large fine. They were horribly poor with no income whatever; but he was utterly charming to his bitter, resentful wife.

  Frau Altmann had known this couple before the war, in which Frau vo
n R. had lost both her sons. This, combined with the shattering of her whole life, the loss of everything they possessed except the hut by the lake, and the terrible illness from which she was suffering, had all combined to make her what she now was.

  “There is nothing you can do for her,” Frau Altmann told me when I consulted her; “she lives in the past, longing only for the return of the Nazi glories. Her husband is more sensible, he is completely disillusioned, as he was long before the final collapse.”

  Whenever we went out to Gatow, where we British had a very attractive club, we passed endless queues of people trailing out to look for potatoes in the Russian Zone. There were plenty of potatoes there that winter—and in the British Zone there were none.

  The Tageblatt recorded daily the number of deaths from hunger and cold as the winter approached. There were queues everywhere, for bread, for milk, for potatoes, for cigarettes, for cinemas, buses and trams which often never ran. We were forbidden to give lifts to Germans, but nearly everyone picked up some of these miserable starving wretches who had been waiting for hours.

  There had already been food riots in Hamburg and other places in October when people had eaten thirty days’ bread ration in twenty, and Sir Brian Robertson had gone there himself and ordered the ration to be increased.

  At the Fürsorge I seldom saw a well-nourished child, and with the weather getting colder and colder the children’s arms and legs were chapped and frost-bitten from lack of woollen clothing.

  The children of school age did better. The Allies allotted them a daily ration of extra food which was distributed at the schools.

  But if Berlin was a tragic city by day, at night it became a whirl of revelry. The Allies entertained on a scale which was extraordinary in a starving town, and if one went down the Kurfürstendamm or the Kaiserdamm at night every café and night club was packed with revellers. Here in these night clubs newly sprung up, Allied men and German women danced to the latest tunes from England and America as well as to contemporary German ones. All the cigarette girls came out at night. In vain did the U.S. authorities put up large posters displaying a seductive looking girl looking over her shoulder in invitation, with the caption, ‘V.D. lurks in the streets’; and the British issued less blatant ones with threats of punishment to its troops—the wards of the Military Hospitals were filled with syphilis cases.

  Stampie took me to some of these night clubs one evening while we were waiting for my husband who was at a stag dinner. At one of the most popular clubs, run by a woman called Sophie, we encountered Fritz and Ursula. I was astonished to see them there. Stampie said that they often came here now that street corners were too cold for the carrying on of their black market activities. They were either here or at the large café on the Reichskanzlerecke.

  They were sitting in a far corner with a number of young people. I wondered what Frau Altmann would have thought if she could have seen them now. Fritz was flushed with wine. He had clearly had several drinks too many—there were bottles all over their table. His two companions, long-haired youths like himself, were arguing loudly with him, and Ursula was intervening angrily and obviously refusing something. She saw us suddenly, and swept over to our table. Stampie pulled out a chair.

  “May I?” she asked me. She seemed as surprised to see me in such a place as I had been to see her.

  “Well, what do you think of our night life?” she asked, refusing a drink from Stampie. It was obligatory to drink, and I had chosen wine because Stampie had said that it would be the safest: the beer was undrinkable and the spirits suspect. He had paid for the wine with a roll of Reichmarks which had made me stare.

  “Want some?” he asked grinning. I shook my head.

  “Can’t get rid of ’em—and that’s a fact!” he said glumly.

  I knew better than to ask him how he had acquired them. The new Military money was fetching huge prices on the black market, as were gin, brandy and all spirits bought so cheaply at the Naafi.

  The band was playing “Tico, Tico” and the dancers, hot and happy in the close air, were encoring it enthusiastically.

  “Take a look at that girl over there” said Ursula. “She’s a man!”

  The tall, dark-haired woman in the clinging white dress showed no signs whatsoever that “she” was a man. I shook my head in disbelief.

  “It’s a fact!” said Stampie. “Just as that pretty girl over there in the pink dress is a man too.”

  Ursula looked to me as if she had also been drinking too much. Her cheeks had red flags in them and her eyes were too bright. They were extraordinary eyes and fascinated me. Two young Servicemen came in with a strapping German girl. I recognized her as the model for the nude who posed for the art class with which I helped at the Study Centre. She introduced one of the boys as her fiancé and said shyly that they were soon to be married.

  I found this place quite fascinating and enjoyed it far more than the Allied receptions and dinners or the endless cocktail parties at which one met the same people every time. Stampie, however, had protested against bringing me here, insisting that the Boss’d kill him if he found out.

  Ursula made no move to return to her table, and when we got up to leave I asked if we could drop her at her home. She said she would be grateful. She loathed the two youths with Fritz, she said. I asked if she were not running a terrible risk mixing with a gang of black marketeers, as she was doing. She seemed astonished and said that everyone was a gangster or a smuggler or a contact nowadays. How else did I think they could live?

  She explained that her parents had no income whatsoever now, that Lilli earned just enough to keep herself alive, and that her own wages were not enough to keep the home going unless she could supplement them somehow.

  There was no comment to be made. It was a moot point which was the more immoral—the black market or getting cigarettes in the way most girls got them. Ursula was apparently doing both. I remarked that Lilli looked very frail, and that when she came to pose for me she had admitted to being terribly weary. She was a delightful model and had flitted across my huge salon in a hundred lovely poses for me. I was grateful to her for having broken the evil spell which had prevented me from drawing or painting in Berlin. When she was in the room one forgot the ruins and the misery and was conscious only of transient beauty and the tantalizing inability to express it on canvas or paper.

  “Lilli? She’s in love,” said Ursula unexpectedly. She asserted that she knew the signs and there was no doubt about it.

  I said Lilli could not have much time for love. She had to dance five nights a week and rehearse most mornings.

  “There are the afternoons,” insisted Ursula, adding that Lilli had been coming home very late at night. There were sometimes as many as fifteen curtain-calls after the opera, so that it was natural that she should be late, but Ursula was positive that Lilli was in love—and what is more that she wasn’t happy about it.

  We dropped her near their ruined house. The sky was dark and stormy. There wasn’t a glimmer of light from the house—and we watched her put her key in the latch and wave to us as she disappeared inside.

  “Stampie,” I said, “that family has got a packet of trouble coming to it.”

  “You’ve said it,” he agreed, “but there isn’t a darned thing we can do about it.”

  VIII

  AT the end of November we accompanied my husband to Brussels to an International Allied Reparations Agency Conference. Stampie drove us, and I was glad for John to have his terror of the Russians, due to the Germans’ many horrific tales, completely dispersed by the charming Soviet officer at the Helmstedt checkpoint, who asked him gravely whether the toy dog he was clutching had a pass—and solemnly made one out for him. This was our first introduction to the autobahn—the Russian corridor which was later on to cause so much trouble.

  In Brussels I managed to get some shoes for our staff, who were literally walking on the ground, and some ballet shoes for Lilli.

  On the day after our ret
urn Stampie informed me that the Altmanns were in trouble. They had been anxiously awaiting my return as Fritz was in prison. He had got mixed up in some kind of police fracas at the Brandenburger Tor and had been in prison since the previous evening. He had gone there to meet some of his black marketeering gang and had got mixed up in a Social Democrat and Communist Meeting. The Russians having succeeded in uniting these parties, they often held demonstrations near the Tor. Fritz had somehow got arrested with a lot of other youths—and the family were terribly anxious. I said that sooner or later Fritz had been bound to get into trouble. Frau Altmann, said Stampie, was frantic. She was certain that it was all a mistake, and wanted her son got out of prison.

  “And,” finished Stampie, “I really believe so too—the young fool was probably listening to those smooth-mouthed speakers—not looking out for himself at all—and got caught up in the crowd.”

  There was nothing I could do about it until the afternoon, when I was to see the Major. I told him what had happened and asked what the procedure was about people being put in prison. He said it was a Military Government matter and gave me the names of two acquaintances at Military Government House. They were, he assured me, very helpful and extremely nice.

  The major whom I saw there was non-committal, but hopeful that Fritz would be released provided that he hadn’t actively resisted the police. He said he would try and find out for me, and, without promising anything, said he would do all he could.