Review - A Woman In Berlin : Eight Weeks In the Conquered City by Marta Hillers

A Woman in Berlin: Eight Weeks in the Conquered City by Marta Hillers
Publisher: Henry Holt 2005
Hardback 261 pages


For six weeks in 1945, as the city of Berlin fell to the advancing Russian army, a young woman, alone in the city, kept a dairy. In it she recorded her and her neighbors degradations, the deterioration of humanity as resources became scarce and finally ran out.

The anonymous diarist, then a 34-year-old journalist, began writing in April 1945, just as the Russians were invading Berlin. At the time, the city of Berlin was populated mostly by women and children, with only a few men who were unable to flee or fight in the German Army. As the Russian soldiers advanced on Berlin, the mostly female population took refuge in cellars to wait out the bombing and hide from the advancing soldiers waiting to plunder whatever they could from the war torn city. Soon the Russians were everywhere. Inebriated from victory and the copious amounts of cheap alcohol they were given, Russian soldiers raped the women of Berlin indiscriminately. After being raped herself, Anonymous decided to "find a single wolf to keep away the pack." Through the words of Anonymous, we see how many women survived in this way, subjugating themselves to one soldier in order to save themselves from the brutal gang rapes that were common place during the first weeks of the occupation.

Her story illustrates the horror that war on the home front brings to the lives of women. The author tells this story in a powerful, uncompromising voice, and her book should become a standard of war literature. First published in 1954, the book was largely ignored by a German society still not ready to confront the suffering of its people. Now more than a half century later, the story of this lone woman in Berlin is finally making its way into the public eye.