Soviet soldiers assault the girls in Berlin

The assault by three Russian soldiers on Jutta and the other girls in a Berlin apartment turns the apparent safety of home into a site of wartime violence. Frau Elena attempts to shield the girls, all of whom are under sixteen, but the soldiers force their way upstairs and assault them. The scene follows the attack through its constrained domestic setting and its aftermath, emphasizing both the girls’ vulnerability and the lasting uncertainty carried by Jutta’s memory.

Setting and Immediate Circumstances

The episode takes place on a cloudless day in May, when three Russians come to the building where Frau Elena and the girls live. They break into the printing company below, apparently looking for liquor. Finding none, they begin damaging the walls. A shot strikes an old dismantled press, and the violence below becomes an immediate threat to the household upstairs.

The girls in the apartment are Jutta, Hannah, Susanne, and Claudia; none is older than sixteen. Frau Elena, their caregiver, is with them. The scene gives no indication that they have a way to resist or escape. Jutta briefly hopes the soldiers will not climb the stairs, but they do. The delay makes the threat present before the intruders enter the apartment: the girls hear them approach, and the possibility of their arrival becomes harder to deny with every moment.

The household’s wartime circumstances are also reflected in Jutta’s earlier letter to Werner. Berlin is cold, fuel is scarce, and people burn whatever materials they can find to stay warm. Jutta works in a laundry with Hannah, Susanne, and Claudia, mending military clothing amid shortages of fabric. This background locates the girls in a strained everyday life of work and scarcity before the attack abruptly makes their domestic space unsafe.

The Soldiers Enter

At the top of the stairs, the soldiers search a closet, knock cleaning implements aside, and send a crate of dictionaries tumbling downstairs. They rattle the apartment door before breaking it open. The sequence moves from sounds and damaged household objects to the forced entry itself, registering the invasion of the home without presenting it as a military engagement. The intruders have come from the street into a private room where the girls had been trying to remain safe.

The three men are markedly different in age and appearance: one is an officer, while the other two appear to be teenagers. Their presence is described as disordered and threatening, though the scene does not make them into a single, uniform figure. One laughs in a way that seems difficult to interpret. The officer stays near the door at first, while Hannah briefly screams and then covers her own mouth. These details show the girls responding in different ways as the situation unfolds; they do not suggest that the girls can control what happens next.

Before the soldiers reach them, Frau Elena tells the girls to stay calm and says she will go first, in the hope that doing so will make what follows less dangerous for them. Her response is an attempt to protect the younger people in her care, not a means of preventing the assault. The soldiers assault Frau Elena and the girls. Claudia responds with moans; Jutta makes no sound. The account presents these as distinct reactions under coercion, not as choices that lessen the violence done to them.

Frau Elena and the Girls

Frau Elena’s actions define the relationship at the center of the scene. She remains with the girls, speaks to them before the soldiers enter, and tries to place herself between them and the danger. Her composure does not mean that she is safe or unaffected. Afterward, she leaves the apartment barefoot and rubs one arm, an understated gesture that shows her trying to recover from the immediate ordeal without explaining it away.

The scene also distinguishes the girls without making their different responses into a ranking of courage or suffering. Hannah cries out briefly and then muffles herself. Claudia makes sounds of distress. Jutta remains silent. Susanne is beside Jutta at the end, breathing quietly rather than sobbing. The narration does not treat silence as consent, calm, or freedom from harm; it records the different ways the girls endure an event imposed on them.

The officer is the last of the soldiers to assault Jutta. He speaks single words, but the scene leaves their meaning unresolved. The uncertainty matters: what Jutta hears is not made into a clear explanation of the officer’s intentions, and the narration does not claim access to what he means. In the moment, the words cannot give Jutta control over the encounter or make it intelligible.

Memory and Aftermath

The soldiers leave after the youngest fires twice into the ceiling. Plaster falls, and the shots echo through the apartment as Susanne listens beside Jutta. The men then go back into the street. Frau Elena puts her striped ski parka back on and rubs her left arm. The account closes on the survivors’ immediate aftermath rather than on any formal remedy or explanation; none is provided in this scene.

Years later, Jutta will hear the officer’s words again in memory: Kirill, Pavel, Afanasy, Valentin. She decides they were the names of dead soldiers, but the account explicitly leaves open the possibility that she is mistaken. The remembered names show how the attack persists beyond the moment itself, returning as fragments whose meaning Jutta cannot establish with certainty. They are not presented as proof of the officer’s identity, motives, or history.

The narrative’s restrained progression—from the damage downstairs, to the footsteps and forced door, to the girls’ separate responses and Jutta’s later recollection—makes the attack legible through its setting, sequence, and consequences rather than through graphic depiction. The apartment’s ordinary objects, including the closet, cleaning implements, dictionary crate, press, and ceiling, register the boundary between everyday life and intrusion. The assault therefore marks both a physical breach of the household and a rupture that survives in memory, especially in Jutta’s unresolved recollection of the words spoken during it.