German
“I Spit on Berlin, the Defeated!”
The young Red Army soldier Vladimir Gelfand wrote these words in his diary in 1945—before he came to love the city and its people.
What was it like sixty years ago, when Berlin lay in ruins and the victors marched through a defeated country?
Now one of those victors speaks: a young Jew from Ukraine who entered Berlin with the Red Army in 1945 and remained in Germany for another year and a half.
That soldier was Vladimir Gelfand. His son, forty-one-year-old Vitaly, has now published his father’s diary. “Notes of a Red Army Soldier” has been released by Aufbau Verlag (€22.90).
Vladimir Gelfand arrived in Berlin as both a communist and a victor, full of contempt and hatred for the Germans. On the walls of the ruined Reichstag he left the inscription: “I spit on Berlin, the defeated!”
But he soon came to love this city of the vanquished. Here he bought the first bicycle of his life—and was indignant at comrades who simply stole bicycles. At the black market near Alexanderplatz he acquired a camera. He also won girls’ hearts with his charm. They wrote him love letters and poems, and he carefully recorded every blown kiss in his diary.
23 December 1945:
“During the war I learned what love and desire were. But I truly knew a woman for the first time only after the war, in Berlin—and even then only because I offered myself. Since then there have been five on my list, three of them in Berlin...”
Other Red Army soldiers simply took whatever they wanted—objects, women, lives. Gelfand protested against violence, making himself unpopular with some of his comrades.
When one soldier tried to smash busts of Schiller and Goethe, Gelfand intervened, took them away and declared: “Geniuses must not share the fate of barbarians.” At Gusow Castle he saved several busts and took them with him.
After 1946 Vladimir Gelfand became a teacher. He dreamed of a book he would one day create from his diaries.
“But he died at sixty,” his son says. “So I had to do it.”