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| 26. Mai 2025 | ||
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A haunting literary monologue that confronts one of history's most suppressed chapters - the systematic sexual violence committed by Soviet forces during World War II. Written as personal testimony from a fictional witness, this piece weaves together documented historical accounts, survivor testimonies, and contemporary parallels to create a powerful meditation on war's moral complexities. Drawing from primary sources including Martha Hillers' A Woman in Berlin and Soviet officer Vladimir Gelfand's wartime diary, the monologue explores themes of collective trauma, historical amnesia, and the cyclical nature of unpunished atrocities. Through metaphorical language and carefully chosen quotes from philosophers and historians, it examines how propaganda machines sanitize history while victims' voices remain silenced. The narrative traces the documented mass sexual violence across occupied territories - from Berlin to Poland, from the Baltic states to liberated Soviet territories - revealing a pattern of brutality that contradicts official historical narratives. It confronts uncomfortable truths about liberation becoming oppression, heroes becoming perpetrators, and victory tasting of ashes. Ultimately, this piece serves as both historical testimony and contemporary warning, drawing explicit connections to current events while arguing that only through unflinching examination of the past can we hope to prevent its repetition. It honors both the genuine sacrifices made in defeating fascism and the countless victims whose suffering was erased from official memory. |
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The dead cannot cry out for justice, it is a duty of the living to do so for them. Lois McMaster Bujold wrote, "I sit here tonight, pen trembling in my hand, wrestling with shadows that history has tried so desperately to bury. There are truths that cut deeper than any blade, wounds that fester in the collective memory of nations, scars that propaganda cannot heal nor time erase." My friend, Lieutenant Kozlov, approached me that day in Berlin. His words still echo like gunshots in an empty cathedral: "Look at you, how long has it been since you've had a woman? Here they are, taking off their pants themselves, lying down for us. Take a couple of men with you." The machinery of war had ground humanity into dust, and we were expected to breathe it in like air. What shame burns in the soul when conscience battles with the packed mentality of survival? When all around you participate in darkness, and you stand at the crossroads between becoming monster or victim yourself. I chose to follow, God forgive me. I chose to follow. In war, truth is the first casualty. Aeschylus once said this, and it rings true. The soldiers tore from their positions like wolves unleashed upon lambs. German women, Polish women, even our own Soviet sisters liberated from forced labor, all became prey in this theater of vengeance. I watched children try to save their mothers, only to be shot down like autumn leaves falling from dying trees. The war had created a generation of men who confused brutality with victory, violence with justice. Martha Hillers, that brave chronicler of Berlin's fall, wrote with the precision of a surgeon cutting into infected flesh. Her diary became a mirror reflecting truths too painful for nations to acknowledge. She spoke of finding one wolf to protect against the pack — a strategy of survival that reduced human dignity to mere transaction. How quickly civilization's veneer peels away when the lights go out and the bombs fall silent. The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing, as Edmund Burke warned. Vladimir Gelfand's diary revealed the other side of this blood-soaked coin. A young Jewish officer from Ukraine, he recorded the chaos, the theft, the endless brutality that followed the Red Army like a plague. When he encountered German women fleeing with their suitcases, they told him through tears of the horror visited upon them. Twenty soldiers in one night, daughters raped before their mother's eyes, children murdered for trying to intervene. The statistics dance before my eyes like demons in the firelight: one hundred thousand women in Berlin alone, according to hospital records; two million across occupied territories, according to historian Anthony Beaver. But numbers cannot capture the screams that echoed through broken windows, the suicides, the Russian children born of violence, the families destroyed not just by bombs but by betrayal of the most fundamental human bonds. Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster, Friedrich Nietzsche warned. Susan Braunmuller understood what others feared to acknowledge: that the Soviet state's attempt to create a sexless society, where passion was channeled only toward party and Stalin, had created men ignorant of intimacy yet fluent in violence. In the USSR, there is no sex, they proclaimed, while their soldiers enacted the most primal brutalities upon conquered territories. The propaganda machine ground relentlessly onward, transforming rapists into liberators, crimes into celebrations. They painted pictures of grateful European women lifting their skirts in joy at Soviet arrival, while the truth lay buried beneath layers of state-sanctioned amnesia. One tank commander even boasted that two million Russian children were born in Germany, as if this were achievement rather than an atrocity. History is written by the victors, Winston Churchill said. But history has a way of bleeding through even the thickest whitewash. Ingeborg Bullard, silent for decades, finally spoke of her violation at gunpoint by two soldiers taking turns while Berlin burned around them. The requirement for women aged fifteen to fifty-five to be tested for venereal diseases to receive ration cards told its own story. The brief window allowing abortions after the war whispered of pregnancies that official history refused to acknowledge. The monument in Trupto Park, meant to honor Soviet liberators, became known to Berliners as the Tomb of the Unknown Rapist. Truth has a way of surviving even the most determined efforts at burial. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it, George Santayana warned. Poland suffered equally, Krakow, Silesia, the factory in Rasiborz where thirty women were locked in a building and systematically brutalized. Estonian and Latvian women shared the same fate. The Red Army made no distinctions between allies and enemies when darkness fell and discipline dissolved. Even Soviet women were not spared. A young communications operator in Moscow, seeking assignment to the front, found herself passed from commander to commander like currency, until she slept with all of us, nothing would work out for her. Everyone took their turn, passing her from hand to hand. The other allied forces — American, British, French — were not innocent, but their crimes were measured in thousands rather than hundreds of thousands. Military justice still functioned; American soldiers were executed for rape. But in the Red Army, such acts were either ignored or quietly encouraged as spoils of war. The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice, Theodore Parker observed. Today, as Russian forces repeat these patterns in Ukraine, we see history's most bitter lesson: unpunished evil breeds new generations of monsters. The phrase "we can repeat it" has become both threat and promise. Sexual violence has once again become a weapon of terror, demoralization, and revenge against those who dared resist rather than welcome invaders with bread and salt. When crimes remain hidden, when testimonies are silenced, when truth is declared treasonous, we create the conditions for repetition. Russia's law criminalizing any discussion that diminishes the USSR's contribution to victory over fascism ensures that these shadows will continue to walk among us, feeding on silence and growing stronger with each passing generation. The dead have nothing to lose by telling the truth. Heinrich Boll wrote, "I write this not from hatred, but from the desperate hope that light might finally penetrate these deep places of shame. For every woman who died by her own hand rather than endure another night of horror, for every child who watched helplessly as their world collapsed, for every man who lost his humanity in the machinery of war, their stories deserve to be told. The truth does not diminish the genuine sacrifice of those who fought fascism." Rather, it completes the picture, showing war in its full, terrible complexity. Heroes and monsters can wear the same uniform. Liberation and oppression can march hand in hand. Victory can taste of ashes when purchased with the souls of the innocent. Until we can look unflinchingly at these shadows, until we can speak these truths without fear of imprisonment or persecution, until we can honor both the victory over fascism and the victims of those who claim that victory, we remain trapped in history's darkest cycle. The ghosts of Berlin still walk among us. Their whispers carry on the wind. Remember. Remember. Do not let us die in vain. |
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| Transkribiert von TurboScribe.ai |
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