The Berlin Diaries Of Marie Vassiltchikov Part One

My Folio Society edition as well as several important maps, contains a good assortment of photographs of which I append only a selection.

Here is the title page and frontispiece.

“The author of this diary, Marie (‘Missie’) Vassiltchikov, was born on 11 January 1917 in St Petersburg, and died of leukaemia on 12 August 1978, in London…

“Missie’s [White Russian] family left a Civil War-torn Russia in the spring of 1919 from the (sic) Crimea, aboard a British naval squadron that had come to rescue the surviving members of the Imperial family. She grew up as a homeless refugee – in Germany, in France and in Lithuania……. France, where Missie spent most of her childhood, was in the twenties and thirties the centre of Russian émigré public and cultural life…. all her life and whatever her circumstances, she remained a staunch Russian patriot and a believing Orthodox” (From the foreword of her younger brother George,

who edited the diary from 1940 to 1945, and added linking paragraphs placing the context of the Second World War.)

January to December 1940

Missie’s accounts of the year 1940 show that the experiences of Berliners were not that dissimilar to those of Londoners; both were subject to air raids; both spent time in shelters; basic needs were in short supply. She also speaks of the anti-Nazi groups with whom she was in touch. I have selected a few extracts which I hope will give a flavour of her experience and sense of humour. There are also some of George’s links.

” Tuesday, 12 March Mamma (who is on her way from Silesia to Rome) telephoned from Vienna to say that Georgie has disappeared. When the train stopped at some small station on the way, he went to check their luggage. Without his noticing it, the luggage van was uncoupled from the main body of the train and joined on to another. He is now hurtling towards Warsaw. He has both their tickets, no passport and only five marks to his name. Mamma is waiting for him hopefully in Vienna.”

” Friday, 22 March… I dislike him cordially and am tempted to give him a shove when he leans far out of the [train] window to get a breath of air after one of their rows…..”

” Thursday, 4 April ….. “Nobody in Germany is supposed to know what the rest of the world is up to except what appears in the daily papers and that is not much….”

“The normal method of execution in Nazi Germany was beheading by means of a miniature guillotine. But is some cases ( such as high treason ), Hitler had ordered the reintroduction of the medieval axe.” (George V.)

” Monday, 22 April…. We are fasting rather severely. Our Church allows us to disregard this in wartime, on account of general malnutrition. But we have so little to eat anyhow that we want to save up some coupons for Easter.”

” Sunday, 28 April…… for some time now, our bosses had been complaining about the inexplicable consumption of unaccountable quantities of w.c. paper. At first they concluded that the staff must be suffering from some new form of mass diarrhoea, but as weeks passed and the toll did not diminish, it finally dawned on them that everyone was simply tearing off ten times more that he (or she) needed and smuggling it home…..”

” Tuesday, 7 May ….. We are allowed approximately one jar of jam a month per person and, butter being so scarce, that does not go very far…..”

” At the outbreak of war [P.G.] Wodehouse (a British subject, but a longtime American resident) was living with his wife at their home in Le Touquet, where the Germans caught them just as they were about to escape occupied France. Interned as an enemy alien, he was eventually released at the request of the USA (which was not yet at war). In Berlin the representative of the American Broadcasting System talked him into making five broadcasts for the American public, describing his experience. These broadcasts – witty, slightly ridiculing the Germans – were totally apolitical…….” (George V.)

” When the Soviet troops took over Lithuania, Missie’s father was visiting Vilnius……. The family had remained popular with the local population and in due course guides were found who volunteered to smuggle him across the border into Germany. They happened to be poachers who used to ‘work’ his forests and when he reached German soil and was about to pay them off, they refused, saying: ‘We’ve had our reward many times over….when you still lived here!’ ” (George V.)

“Friday, 12 July……Peter Bielenberg is a lawyer from Hamburg….married to a charming English girl, Christabel….. They have two little boys. The elder one, aged seven, was expelled from his school for having protested when his teacher referred to the English as Schweine…..”

“It was only after the failure of the 20th July coup that Missie learnt about Hasso von Etzdorf’s key role in the anti-Nazi resistance, and that his earlier aloofness when discussing politics was merely elementary caution.” (George V.)

January to June 1941

“Tuesday, 27 May The Bismarck was sunk today. The German Admiral Lutjens went down with her.”

Missie’s note [ September 1945 ]: “From this [June] day on, nearly two years of my diary are missing, even though I kept on writing it almost daily. Some pages I destroyed myself. Others I concealed in the country home of a friend in what is now Eastern Europe, where they may still be to this day; or where, as likely as not, they were discovered and removed to some local archive or, even more likely, burnt as rubbish.

But then in the confusion of the hectic years that followed, it seems a miracle that so much of my diary survived at all.”

INTERLUDE:

July 1941 to July 1943

Missie’s note [ written in the spring of 1978, the year of her death ] “I will try to give a short account of those events that had a lasting impact on our lives and of what happened to me, the family and some of my friends [ between 22 June 1941 and 20 July 1943 ], so that the reader may find it less difficult to go on with the daily account when this resumes.

During this period Missie kept up correspondence with her mother; from these we learn of the deteriorating conditions for residents of Germany while Hitler’s attentions were focussed on the Eastern Front.

“Tatiana married Paul Metternich on 6 September 1941. It was a joyous event except, of course, those who were at the front or who has already been killed or were too badly injured…..

That night Berlin had one of its worst air raids to date……”

Random excerpts from Missie’s diary discovered after her death describe the shocking effects of Allied bombing; of the effect of the battle for Russia on those White Russians living in Germany; and of her diminishing list of friends who had not been killed.

As the tide of the war began to turn “everyday life in Berlin had also changed radically. The USA’s entry into the war has been followed by a mass exodus of …… the last bastions of social life in the capital. And the heavy losses on the Eastern Front, which were beginning to affect every family in Germany, in themselves discouraged frivolity. From now on, the daily efforts of the author and her friends – or rather of those who were not on the fighting fronts – would be focussed essentially on physical but also on ethical survival – against hunger, Allied bombs and, presently worsening political tyranny and persecution.” ( George V. )

(Because of the length of my feature on this important book, I have decided to break it up in order to spare my readers – more will appear in Part Two soon)