A woman in Berlin

the long version

For eight weeks in 1945, as Berlin fell to the Russian army, a young woman, alone in the city, kept a daily record of her and her neighbours' experiences, determined to describe the common lot of millions. Purged of all self-pity but with laser-sharp observation and bracing humour, the anonymous author conjures up a ravaged apartment building and its little group of residents stuggling to get by in the rubble without food, heat or water. She depicts her fellow Berliners in all their humanity as well as their craveness, corrupted first by hunger and then by the Russians.