Museum
Born January 24, 1927, Berlin, Germany
TEDIUM! »
31 Minutes »
The Final Days »
“The roof tiles are here, take your places on the steps.” Oh not again we thought; why all this nonsense? We work all day to get the heavy brick tiles up to the roof of the apartment building, and tomorrow morning, after an air raid, they probably will all be in small pieces on the ground. But we had to do it.
This time I got a place on the steps between the third and fourth floor, and soon it began. Grab two tiles from the fellow below you, turn half a circle and pass them to the next in line. Grab, turn, pass; grab, turn, pass. So it went for hours and hours ad infinitum. We started to sing: “tedium, tedium you my great pleasure, tedium, tedium you my great joy; were there no tedium there would be no pleasure, were there no tedium there would be no joy.” Once in a while one of us had to leave for a short time creating a gap in the line, but this hardly affected our rhythm. Those next to the gap simply had to take a few steps when receiving or passing the tiles. To carry on a coherent conversation was next to impossible, since one constantly had to swivel from side to side.
Some of the older ones among us imagined what they would like to eat after the war and began to recite elaborate menus. Ragout fin, tenderloin Chateaubriand, beef Wellington; we younger ones had never even heard of such dishes. Our minds were set more on generous portions of things like hamburgers, fried potatoes, or macaroni and cheese. And the various varieties of wines that were mentioned were complete enigmas to us. The only wine we had tasted so far was the ones used for Sabbath and holiday blessings.
Through all the tedium you had to be alert, since you did not want to drop the tiles on your toes and certainly not on the toes of the ones next to you. At times work was interrupted by an air raid warning, followed about half of the time by an actual air raid. We rushed down to the basement hoping -- it seems almost grotesque in retrospect -- that some bombs falling into the neighborhood would undo everything we had just accomplished.
Passing of roof tiles, while certainly mind-numbing, was actually not a bad assignment. Thanks to a decent overseer -- a petty criminal before the war -- the pace was sensible, and the work as such was physically less demanding and far less dangerous than some of the other tasks we had performed.
©2002, Fritz Gluckstein. The text, images, and audio and video clips on this Web site are available for limited non-commercial, educational, and personal use only, or for fair use as defined in the United States copyright laws.
Berlin fall 1944, the Americans and British are approaching the Rhine, and the Russians are on German soil. Our group of Jewish husbands and sons of mixed marriages was doing its usual work, demolishing ruins and cleaning up after air raids, when suddenly we were “detached to special duty.” The special duty meant laying the foundation of a building complex for a “new Berlin” to be completed after the final victory. Actually this was not an unwelcome change, since for once we were building rather than tearing down. But after two weeks our building experience came to a permanent end -- we were detached again; this time to the southern outskirts of the city to set up antitank obstacles protecting a bridge over the Teltow canal.
At the new work site we were greeted by a large sign; it read “An die Arbeit Schanzer, Tod dem Soviet Panzer,” in English meaning something like, “On to work, no shirking; death to the Soviet Panzers lurking.” We dug trenches and sank iron beams halfway into the ground in a 45-degree angle. About midnight we were loaded into a moving van and transported to a social hall for some soup. An hour later we had the almost nightly air raid warning and marched to a nearby shelter. We did not stay very long; this time the bombs fell into the northern part of the city. At noon the next day we were told that enough had been accomplished to stop the Russian tanks.
Before leaving we looked at our handiwork and wondered how long it would hold up the tanks -- 31 minutes we decided. The tanks would come to the obstacles, stop, their crews would laugh for 30 minutes and then it would take them one minutes to get through. Actually that is probably pretty close to what happened. Marshal Koniev’s forces entered the city so fast that no effective resistance could be mounted, and fanatic Nazis had no time “to get” the remaining Jews. I feel that my fellow-workers and I had a tiny part in the liberation of Berlin -- we did not do a very good job with those antitank obstacles.
©2002, Fritz Gluckstein. The text, images, and audio and video clips on this Web site are available for limited non-commercial, educational, and personal use only, or for fair use as defined in the United States copyright laws.
In April 1945, the demolition crew to which my father and I belonged was working near an SS facility when a line of military trucks moved slowly down the street, pushed—we hardly could believe our eyes—by a group of SS men. It was an exhilarating sight, pure unalloyed schadenfreude. Surely, if even the SS nolonger had gasoline, the demise of the Third Reich could not be far off. “Look at this,” a fellow worker said, “It’s getting on toward Ne’ilah,” referring to the final prayer service of the Day of Atonement.
Soon the sound of artillery fire could be heard, first in the eastern part of the city and then in all of Berlin. Public transportation ceased to function, keeping people from going to work, and artillery shells were hitting buildings or were exploding in the streets. But Joseph Goebbels, the Minister of Propaganda and Public Enlightenment, did not give up. He managed to distribute a tabloid-size sheet of greenish paper called the Panzer Baer—alluding to the bear in Berlin’s coat of arms—which proclaimed in large letters: “At the gates of Berlin the enemy will meet his doom, just as Napoleon at the gates of Moscow. Be assured the inferior Russian soldiers are no match for our heroic fighting force.”
My parents and I were living in the western part of Berlin, sharing an apartment with two intermarried couples. We slept fully dressed on blanket-covered beds. Whenever the shelling became too intense, we went down to the cellar, often four or five times during 24 hours. Once, we had to leave the house for several hours until an unexploded shell in the building next to ours could be defused. However, we were fortunate indeed, because there was no street fighting close to us.
There was, of course, no electricity, gas, or running water. Since Berlin still had a sizable number of horse-drawn vehicles, many hand-operated water pumps continued to function in the streets. To get water from these pumps was now a risky undertaking. One waited for a lull in the shelling and then ran full speed with a pair of buckets towards the pump, hoping that not too many people would already be there. At times, because of incoming shells, one had to hit the ground. When this happened on the way to the house, all or most of the hard-gotten water would be spilled, meaning a return trip to the pump. On one of my water forays, I observed a group of Asian soldiers in German uniforms moving along pressed against the housing fronts. They truly looked scared, not perhaps so much because of the shelling but because they realized their fate should the Russians get hold of them.
One day, a neighbor and I were hovering in the doorway ready to rush to the pump at the next break in the bombardment when a shell burst in the street. Once again, luck was with me; I remained unhurt, but my neighbor was next to me on the ground, fatally injured.
Food had become very scarce, but shopkeepers began to give away whatever they had left without asking for ration coupons or money. It all happened in an orderly fashion; I recall no one pushing ahead or trying to get more than anyone else.
We had no more bread, and so I cautiously made my way to a baker two blocks down the street. Of course, I had taken off my yellow star. No Jew was wearing the star anymore. When I returned with a small loaf, Russian soldiers from Marshal Koniev’s army (as we later learned) had entered the house. We immediately tried to make it clear to them that we were Jews, and above all that I was not a German soldier. At first, they were skeptical, drawing a finger across their throats indicating that they believed all Jews had been killed. We showed them our stars and our identification papers with the large imprinted J, and fortunately, one of the men sharing our apartment knew enough Russian to explain our situation. It took some days for the reality to sink in before we could give in to our feeling of relief.
For us, it was over; we had survived. We had outlasted Hitler's Third Reich.
©2004, Fritz Gluckstein. The text, images, and audio and video clips on this Web site are available for limited non-commercial, educational, and personal use only, or for fair use as defined in the United States copyright laws.
