I read this book a couple of years ago, and I’ll never forget it. It is a diary kept for about eight weeks by a young woman in Berlin in 1945 after the German forces surrendered. Beginning just before Russian forces moved into the city, the bulk of this diary records a brutal Russian occupation. I want to point to just a few of the arresting facets of this woman’s experience.

The most obvious, of course, is the violent and atrocious reality of rape that is committed repeatedly by many of the Russian soldiers. You feel a tension as the Russians enter the city and gather, and you feel the tension growing as they start to drink, become loud and obnoxious, and then very quiet. Soon, when the assaults begin, you know one of the worst sides of humanity is alive. It is a chilling moment.

The woman’s descriptions of the many rapes she and others suffer over these several weeks are made more stunning by virtue of how she addresses them. We hear no moralizing from her, no sense of shame, no pleas for pity; rather, she allows these acts to speak for themselves, and the horror is more truly felt because these blunt, straight-forward descriptions are delivered without commentary.

As the diary continues, two things become apparent: one, not all of the Russians rape; and, two, the level of brutality among those who do rape varies. The fact that there are these different types of Russian soldiers keeps us from saying “those Russians” did this or that, but their range of actions do make them representative of the different types of men one will see during wartime. We can see, then, that these violent acts against women are equally representative, and they have no doubt occurred countless times, after countless conflicts, wherever people live and die.

Mike C.

A Woman in Berlin: Eight Weeks in the Conquered City: A Diary (Paperback)

By Philip Boehm

$15.00

ISBN-13: 9780312426118
Availability: On Our Shelves Now
Published: Picador, 07/01/2006

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