If there is one word you would catch from the numerous clips from the ongoing Russia-Ukraine war, it is "Dawai!" Even though it sounds like Hindi for medicine, it simply means "Move!" in Russian. In the videos the soldiers and civilians are urging people to try and get away from the gruesome, drone-dominated warfare that had hits soldiers and civilians in both countries.
This word turned up time and again in a book I just finished reading - "A Woman in Berlin". Written by a then anonymous young lady in Germany, it records the last days of the Third Reich. A time when the tide of war had turned. Hitlers armies that had spread out all over Europe and North Africa have all stalled. In Eastern Europe, a full retreat is in progress with the Russians rolling back the invaders, taking back their lands from the ruins of Stalingrad (now Volgograd), across the vast steppes, all the way to the nerve centre of Germany's war effort - Berlin.
It was a difficult time for the civilians in the city - especially for its women. For years they have been hearing the exploits of their own soldiers returning from the conquered lands. Stories of cities and towns bombed into submission, of women raped and children orphaned. Rumours of concentrations camps into which millions of jews, gypsies and PoWs disappeared. Now, in Berlin, the shoe is on the other foot. Russians are all over the city, and they are settling scores.
This book gives us a glimpse of the horrors faced by women in war-zones. The author - now we know her as Marta Hillers - who was an educated, well travelled young lady whose boyfriend was away on some battlefront. She had been staying alone in a bombed out neighbourhood, scouring around for food and water.
The constant forecasts of death by starvation, of complete physical annihilation by the enemy were so pervasive that we're stunned by every piece of bread, every indication that we will still be provided for. In that respect Goebbels did a great advance job for the conquerers: any crust of bread from their hands seems like a present to us.
Homo homini lupus (Man is a wolf to man)...It's true everywhere and always, these days even among blood relatives...Hunger brings the wolf out in us.
It's a blessing to be able to pray easily and unabatedly; amid the oppression and torture, in all our despair and fear...
The most bitter thing in the life of a single woman is that every time she enters some kind of family life, after a while she ends up causing trouble: she's one too many; someone doesn't like her because someone else does, and in the end they kick her out to preserve the precious peace.
Marta gets raped time and again until she figures that be best way to deal with the situation is to get 'protection' from senior officers. These connections not only help her fend off other soldiers but also improve her access to food, books, and work opportunities, first as a translator, and then at a laundry.
The high-level connections also give her the confidence (Nicht haben Angst - Not to be afraid) to deal with petty thievery, and the mindspace to dwell on larger issues ;)
It turns out that Russian men, too, are 'only men' - i.e. presumably they're as susceptible as other men to feminine wiles, so it's possible to keep them in check, to distract them, to shake them off...
Recovering a stolen radio by pretending to be well connected as a translator - "However it appears that most of life's mechanisms rely on little tricks like that - marriages, companies, nation-states, armies.
It is at the laundry that we hear the now familiar words -
'Davai, pustai, rabota, skoreye!' = 'Move, get on with it, work, faster!'...On the way back I was swinging my bucket gaily, in the spirit of 'what doesn't kill me makes me stronger'!.
Over period 20 April and 22 June 1945, martial law comes into effect. Some semblance of order is restored bringing with it rations, water and electricity supply.
The memoir ends rather abruptly. The book did not find any takers in Germany and was first published in USA in the mid 1950s. It is only in 2003 that a new generation emerged to look back at the war with a fresh perspective.
This makes you wonder about the condition of women and children in today's war-zones - Sudan, Gaza, Syria, Myanmar, DR Congo, Ukraine and Russia - and the decades it will take for the wounds to heal..
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