Author: Marta Hillers

Marta Hillers was a Berlin journalist in her thirties when the Red Army reached the city in April 1945, and the diary she kept over the next eight weeks became a book the German post-war fought over. It records the cellar, the queue at the pump, the hunger, and above all what Soviet soldiers did to the women of the district, including to her, set down flatly and with no appeal for sympathy. Kurt Marek helped her place it in English in America in 1954, on the condition that she stayed anonymous. A German edition followed in 1959 from a Swiss publisher and was received badly at home, where she was accused of dishonouring German women; she refused to allow another while she lived. She died on 16 June 2001. The journalist Jens Bisky named her in 2003, and the reissue that followed was checked against her surviving papers at the Institut für Zeitgeschichte. Max Färberböck filmed the diary in 2008 with Nina Hoss in the central part.