Susan in NC’s Reviews > The Dancing Bear > Status Update

“Planes droned over day and night—Skymasters, B.E.A. liners, Dakotas, Lancasters, Tudors—and the air was noisy with their engines as they brought in more and more food and fuel to the blockaded city. Fear lent strength to the Berliners in their determination to resist the Russian campaign. They minded the new food shortage less because everyone was in the same boat…”

“Frau Altmann was upset and agitated one day at receiving a letter from her youngest sister in Breslau... This letter…told Frau Altmann that her brother-in-law had been taken away from his home for “work for the Soviet Five Year Plan,” and that she and the two children were in a pretty poor way. The brother-in-law was a scientist, apparently a very useful one to the Russians.”

“The Berliners, although outwardly calm, were now brought up with a shock to realize what the closing of the corridor connecting them with Western Germany could mean. They were thrust into further despair. The last year had shown a slow improvement in many things.”

“I was ordered to go to the Soviet Embassy in London and get the new visa. Without it I could not return to Berlin through the Marienborn checkpoint. At the Soviet Embassy I was told that the visa would take from ten to eleven months to grant. I had been obliged to fly back to Berlin to avoid the checkpoint, and found it in a turmoil at the beginning of April, all rail traffic having been cancelled...”

“The blockade of Berlin by the Russians was now assuming ugly proportions. The tension had been growing ever since Sokolovsky had walked out of the A.C.A. quadripartite meeting on March 20th, after accusing the other three Powers of trying to make the Control Council’s position impossible.”

“IT was on my return from an eventful journey to London that I noticed how frail Frau Altmann had become. It was as if I saw her with new eyes. She was not an old woman in actual years, but she had endured a great deal recently and it was telling on her. There had been no news of Fritz since that one letter. He may have been a bad son to her, but he was her youngest—her baby.”

““If there were no politicians there would be no wars,” she [Frau Altmann] always insisted. “People understand each other very well; it is the political parties that make all the problems.” “We have no leader. If only we had a leader,” Max would say. Lotte frequently said the same thing. “We Germans are no use without a leader. Hitler did unite us. Without a leader we are lost.””

“We would have endless discussions. He was puzzled…He could not understand that the free speech, thought and political views encouraged at home in Britain were not allowed here under the Occupation. “We were never allowed any of these things under Hitler,” he insisted, “and did not expect them, but if you are going to force your way of life on to us, then surely we can have your freedom of speech and press too.””

“He was alive, intelligent and not yet disillusioned; it was going to be interesting to see what he would make of life in this shambles of what was once Berlin. Max had said that he received a great shock when he saw Berlin and its devastation; but in the eighteen months since I had first seen it on that lovely autumn morning it had changed its face a little for the better.”

Ret. POW views on Britain: ““They talk of nothing but Trade Unions,” he said; “but your Government, excuse me saying so, are making a race of very lazy people. Here our labourers and farm hands have to work very long hours and very hard for their wages, which are much lower than yours, and now I hear that you are going to revive all the trade unions in Germany.”