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‘Tis easy to be a friend to the prosperous, for it pays; ’tis not hard to be a friend to the poor, for ye get puffed up by gratitude and have your picture printed standing in front of a tenement with a scuttle of coal and an orphan in each hand. But it strains the art of friendship to be true friend to a born fool.
- Tobin’s Palm, P.12 in The Four Million by O.Henry
Last night, as we were poring over recent foreign releases on Netflix Instant Play our eyes fell on the German film A Woman in Berlin.
Based on the eponymous book by an anonymous woman diarist, the movie is set in Berlin at the end of World War II.
What was touted as The Thousand Year Reich lay in ruins and in extremis after a mere dozen years.
Under constant bombing and shelling, a lot of Berlin was reduced to rubble.
With little food and no money, the surviving Berliners, proud racist Aryan acolytes of Der Führer not too long ago, are reduced to a wretched state.
Nasty and Brutish
And Stalin’s victorious and tired Red Army, comprised like most armies of the nasty, oafish and brutish elements, marches into Berlin setting the stage for this movie.
As even the schmuck students of history or human nature know, to the victors go the spoils of war.
Including, of course, the women.
So to the vocabulary of Berlin women’s precarious existence is added a new word and ordeal – Rape.
Endless rape by the coarse, wild, beastly elements of the Red Army.
Into the dark alleys, into the bombed-out crumbling apartments and into the dirty cellars, German women of all ages are dragged by the strong arms of their Russian captors.
To experience the ultimate defilement.
Our anonymous young woman of this film is one of countless such victims in Berlin. She is also the narrator of this story. Continue reading »
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