Russian Women Discussion

For six weeks in 1945, as Berlin fell to the Russian army, a young lady, alone in the city, kept a day-to-day record of her and her neighbors’ experiences, determined to describe the common lot of millions.

Purged of all self-pity but with laser-sharp observation and bracing humor, the anonymous writer conjures up a ravaged apartment creating and its little group of residents struggling to get by in the rubble without having meals, heat, or water. Clear-eyed and unsentimental, she depicts her fellow Berliners in all their humanity as well as their cravenness, corrupted very first by hunger and then by the Russians. And with shocking and vivid detail, she tells of the shameful indignities to which females in a conquered city are always topic: the mass rape suffered by all, irrespective of age or infirmity. By means of this ordeal, she maintains her resilience, decency, and fierce will to come by way of her city’s trial, until finally normalcy and safety return.

At once an crucial record and a operate of wonderful literature, A Lady in Berlin not only reveals a genuine heroine, positive to join other enduring figures of the twentieth century, but also gives voice to the hardly ever heard victims of war: the females.