I want to end the introductions to the characters in "Cold Victory" with this collective introduction to "Georgina's Girls." Georgina Moran, familiar to many of my readers from "Moral Fibre," has come to Berlin to teach at the British School. In addition to her official duties, she organizes a joint British-German school choir and then offers sewing classes to girls who want to learn. The American nurse Anna volunteers to give the girls a medical check-up because many have had no access to medical care in years.
The girls represent the tens of thousands of teenage girls in Berlin at this time.
“But what if you didn’t have a choice?” Petra asked in a strained voice that made Georgina look over at her in concern. Petra rarely spoke up. Usually, she just trailed unhappily in Dietlinde, Gisela and Ulrike’s wake.
“A choice about what?” Anna asked, having lost the thread of the conversation.
“About having sex,” Petra burst out, her face flushing.
A hush fell over the whole room and Georgina’s instinct was to change the subject, but Anna confronted the question head-on. “Especially when you didn’t have a choice, Petra. A man can force you to have sex with him, but he can’t force you not to go to school, or not to get job training, or not to work.”
“The f**king bastards don’t care what our names are, much less give a f**king damn what we do with our lives after they’ve got what they paid for!” Gisela erupted with an explosion of unexpected fury, adding bitterly, “It’s the rest of society that won’t give us a chance!”
Dietlinde said something to her in German which triggered an even more violent reaction. With a sharp push, Gisela thrust Dietlinde away and screamed at her in German.
Ulrike and Hannah tried to intervene, but that only made things worse. Gisela shouted and screamed in German, eliciting equally vociferous answers from Ulrike, Dietlinde and Hannah. Like a mini cyclone, emotions spiralled out of control.
After recovering from their shock, Georgina and Anna tried to intervene, but Gisela swung on them, shouting in English, “My father wanted me to shoot myself! He gave me his pistol — butt-first. He didn’t even give me time to pull up my panties! I was trembling and bleeding and I wanted to be sick, and he just jabbed a pistol butt in my face!”
Georgina stopped breathing and Anna froze.
Gisela continued, “My mother shoved him aside and bundled me out of the house — but he shouted after me not to come back. He said I was dead to him — whether I had the ‘decency’ to kill myself or not!” She turned and focused on Anna, who had had the temerity to suggest she had control over her fate. “I live with my aunt now, but she has three children and no job. She’ d have nothing if I didn’t earn enough cigarettes and chocolate for her to trade on the black market. At least she’s thankful for it.”
Like puss pouring from a punctured boil, the other stories followed.
“My mother says I don’t belong in school,” Ulrike announced, her teeth clamped. “She says I’d earn more money working all week rather than just on the weekends. But why should I put out for four or five GIs every day so she can buy herself gin? She steals half the nylons they give me anyway, and the cigarettes, of course. But she’s a ‘lady,’ and I’m just a whore!” She grabbed a cigarette and lit up, a grim expression on her face.
“After the Ivans had me, the concierge cornered me and forced himself on me as well. He said since no decent man would ever marry me, I had no right to ‘put on airs’ and ‘pretend to be a nice girl,’” Beate lashed out.
“German men are the worst bastards of all!” Hannah concurred bitterly. “First, they let the Ivans do what they liked with us, and then they call us traitors for sleeping with ‘the enemy’!”
“They didn’t all abandon us!” Petra protested, surprising the others. “My father tried to stop the Ivans. He stood up to them, but they shot him three times in the stomach. Then they raped me while he writhed in pain and bled to death.” Petra burst into tears as she cried out, "Maybe if I hadn’t resisted, he’d still be alive!”
Georgina recoiled in horror; she could identify with this story more than the others because she could easily imagine her father trying to protect her. The horror of his pain and death on top of the violence of gang rape was unfathomable. She took Petra into her arms and tried to comfort her.
But Dietlinde wasn’t finished, “All good German men were dead!” she declared. “The ones left alive either surrendered or ran away!”
“They surrendered to the Ivans but still think they have a right to our bodies for free because the victors have already had them,” Ulrike spat out contemptuously, and her words were greeted by a flurry of agreement that tapered off into silence. Petra gently pulled herself out of Georgina’s arms, wiping the tears away from her face with her hands.
The short but intense outburst of confessions, like a violent thunderstorm, ended as suddenly as it started. But instead of clearing the air, Georgina felt the tension simmering. She knew that her nerves were too frayed to cope with any more revelations. She was going to need to reflect on what she’d learnt today for many hours and days to come, and she wanted her father’s advice too. She looked toward the clock and announced in relief, “Look at the time! We must pack away our things and lock up.”
With exaggerated alacrity to cover their embarrassment, the girls busied themselves putting their unfinished sewing into the lockers at the back of the class and donning their old over-clothes. Meanwhile, Georgina rubbed out the blackboard, and Anna wrapped herself in her cape. When the last of the girls had filed out, Georgina switched off the lights and followed them down the stairs. Outside they waved goodbye “until tomorrow,” and the girls walked in a group toward the nearest underground station, while Georgina and Anna climbed into the headmaster’s car, which he had put at Georgina’s disposal.
After a few moments of silence, Georgina remarked, “Well, that was educational.”
“And sobering,” Anna agreed. She paused before adding, “There’s something else you ought to know.” Georgina waited, warned by Anna’s tone to expect something unpleasant. “First, Silvie is more than four months pregnant. Second, Gertrud, who was nine when the city fell to the Reds, is the only virgin, and finally, seven of the girls have VD.”
Georgina caught her breath. She thought back to when she had been their age, attending an Anglican boarding school for girls. If even one of them had not been a virgin, it would have been a scandal, and she’d never heard of VD. She thought back, too, to her first encounter with Herr Dr Altenheyn. He’d emphasised that the Kaiser Wilhelm School was an ‘elite’ school. The parents of these pupils, he’d claimed, were bureaucrats, professionals and academics. Perhaps that was the reason they were so incapable of coping with their daughters’ fall from grace?
She shook her head and admitted, “I heard about the Russian rapes before I came, but everyone talked about them as though they were history. It was something terrible that had happened ‘in the war,’ rather like the bombing and the concentration camps. No one seemed to understand that those rapes are still warping lives. It must be the same all across the city.”
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