1943. The worst year of my life. Jurgen's death, the raids, people rendered homeless by bombings, so that the Germans now wander around as homeless as the Jews, loaded down with the same kinds of sacks and bundles . . . .
3 January, 1944
. . . This is our housing situation at the moment: Our battered house is still standing, but those opposite, next door and at the back, are total ruins . . . . Outside the front door is the bomb crater, very sketchily filled in . . . . Great heaps of rubble and broken glass make it dangerous to walk at night. Near the back door there is a burned-out grand piano with a tiny occasional table perched upon it and a harvest-festival wreath blows about dismally in the wind. We don't need surrealist painters any more . . . .
. . . Dr. Meier . . . is half Jewish and he has a girl friend whom, of course, he is not allowed to marry. She is expecting a baby and is all alone . . . . Dr. Meier said that when the war was over we would be horribly punished and that the Allies would resort to measures which would affect every one of us.
. . . Out at the front the best of us are giving their lives for a victory which I dread, because if Hitler wins we are done for. And supposing he does not win? Shall we then become a nation of helots? I don't know what one ought to wish for.
3 February, 1944
. . . I feel a growing sense of wild vitality within myself, and of sorrow too. Is that what the British are trying to achieve by attacking civilians? At any rate they are not softening us up. Everyone is concerned with his own affairs. Is my house still standing? . . . Where is the safest shelter? This disaster, which hits Nazis and anti-Nazis alike, is welding the people together . . . . If the British think that they are going to undermine our morale they are barking up the wrong tree."
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Used with the permission from Ursula Von Kardoff,
"Diary of a Nightmare," (New York: The John Day Company), p. 89-92.
