Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: HISTORY / Military / World War II
ISBN: 9781784382827
Publisher: Greenhill Books
Published: 2018-03-30T00:00:00+00:00

Lodging for the Night

Looking for somewhere to stay late in the evening of 3 May, we found ourselves in the Berlin outskirts. As we were walking down a dark, unfamiliar street, I suddenly heard a nightingale.

Now, when I write about it, I find it hard to explain why I found that so surprising. It had seemed that here in Berlin not only all living things, but even the stones of the city had been drawn into the war and were subject to its laws. But then, all of a sudden – a nightingale, in complete disregard of everything, was irrepressibly getting on with what nightingales get on with. After everything that had happened here, the call of the nightingale in this hushed Berlin street was an amazing reaffirmation that life goes on.

We went into a building and climbed dark stairs. We knocked and, feeling fairly awkward, went into the home of people who had just lived through the disaster of the capitulation of their city. It was a modest apartment. Its owners, an elderly couple in quilted dressing gowns, alarmed by our unexpected arrival, put two rooms at our disposal, but evidently had difficulty for a long time in getting back to sleep themselves: we heard their quiet footsteps in the corridor. I lay down on a divan, and was immersed in the stifling smell of mothballs and laurel leaves, which I had quite forgotten during the war. Four years … When the war began, I was studying literature at university.

There was no curtain on the window, and through it I could see pink sky, lit by the glow of the subsiding fires. After all the days of incessant fighting, the stillness was a blessing, but so unwonted it chilled your heart. Through the strain of those days, the thought that we were in Berlin kept breaking through and banishing sleep.

It was fairly light. A deer’s antlers protruded from the wall opposite. There were freshly cut flowers in a vase on the table. Using a pocket torch, I read a framed saying on the wall: ‘Der Himmel bewahre uns vor Regen und Wind, und vor Kameraden, die keine sind.’ May heaven protect us from wind and from rain, and from friends who are false and bring nothing but pain.

The wall was covered with photographs of a boy: here he was clambering onto a rocking horse, here lying on the beach, his head resting on the outstretched legs of a girl in a striped bathing costume. Here he was, already a soldier, standing in a new, well fitting uniform and holding a heavy combat helmet. Here he was in the group photo of a cheery bunch of soldiers. In the centre of the photo was a bottle. Someone had put a helmet on his bayonet. The caption was, ‘Prosit!’ Your health!

And on the desk, under the glass top, was the sad announcement that Kurt Bremer was missing without trace on the Eastern Front.

In search of water, I wandered into the kitchen. Our hostess was sitting by the window.

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