This disturbing chronicle of the eight-week period spanning April and May of 1945, during the Russian invasion of Berlin, was first published in 1953 and then promptly vanished, not re-surfacing again until it was re-published in Germany some fifty years later. The author was a thirty-four year old journalist who went to great lengths to keep her identity a secret. She spoke a little Russian, seemed well-educated and had a liberal outlook. It is so powerful because the author takes no sides; she is skeptical of both the Russian and the German governments and although both come off rather badly to the reader, war itself is actually the aspect of the book that receives the strongest indictment.
The reason the author's identity is mysterious yet not pivotal is because the events that are accounted are so terrifying and chilling that her identity is largely irrelevant. Each day for eight weeks she kept a record of life in her Berlin apartment building. Her neighbors are both corrupt, and at the same time possess the capacity for enormous kindness. Eventually circumstances overtake even the nicest of her fellow Berliners as they are unavoidably changed by hunger and then by the invading Russians who do as all occupying armies have done and probably always will do; they systematically raped the women of Berlin because they could and subjected them to untold numbers of further indignities. Age and infirmity were no barrier to the shameful acts of violence against women detailed in the diary. After being raped herself the anonymous woman decides to find a protective "wolf" to keep all other horrors from the door and develops for herself a small but reliable network of Russian officers who offered food and protection.
The author was revealed to be Marta Hilliers, and she passed away in 2002. Today her voice - at the time, a lone but powerful whisper - is even more powerful because unlike the post-war 1950s audience who did not receive it well on its first publication, today the world is horrifically aware of the atrocities perpetrated on women as a side-effect of war from Bosnia to Darfur to Afghanistan. The Second World War-weary public were in no mood to receive news of more atrocity and as usual crimes against women were pitifully low down in the litany of atrocities people concerned themselves with after the full scope of the Nazi's atrocities had been revealed. When re-published in 2003, a year after Hilliers' death, the book received wide critical acclaim and remained on the bestseller list for eighteen weeks. The book was adapted into a movie in 2008 in Germany and was released in the United States as A Woman in Berlin.
