The Rape of German Women during WWII | Lisa Slater | Women’s History Month | USC Shoah Foundation

From then on, we lived in the basement-- INT: The basement of-- LS: --in a garden basement. Yes. INT: The basement of whose house?

LS: Of my aunt-- across from her was-- but it was Kreuzberg-- a beautiful kind of-- oh, it was a park. And the caretaker had a huge home there, with garden places. And so we moved in there.

And that's when I saw my first Russian soldier-- we, all. The little Mongolian-- even, we had May-- with their fur caps down, OK? And then they came downstairs, to the basement, putting this cardboard on the table, telling the people in Berlin, [NON-ENGLISH] Stalin gave his troops the right to rape, to steal, to kill, to do whatever they want to do.

And believe me, they did. They came every night, into our basement, to all the basements. They just took their boots, and we were all bedded down-- all the men in the front, the woman in the back.

By then, I was in my nine months' pregnancy. I was close to having my child. And they kicked, with the boot-- 'Frau, komm.

' That's the only German word maybe they knew-- 'Frau, komm. ' And then the person had to get up, the woman. And they didn't take her outside the basement.

They put her against the wall, and they stood in line, with their machine gun pointing at us, and raped the woman. And they were not 18 years or 19 or-- we-- nobody looked good. I mean, you didn't-- didn't want to look good.

There was a lady-- she was in her 60s. And I thought that was old at that time. She had a husband in the basement with her.

And I don't know why, that poor woman was almost taken, every night. And one night her husband was just so frustrated. He got up and thrust forward and kept saying, no, no, please, no.

And what they did-- they turned around, shot him, raped her, and after they finished raping her, shot her. And we were not allowed to take these bodies out of the basement for the whole night. We had to leave the bodies in the basement.

And then the next day some officer came down, and then we were taken out. And then our man, our old man, told us where they taked the bodies out. There were a heap of bodies in that thing.

That went on in Berlin, with the loudspeaker playing Tchaikovsky music on every corner-- beautiful music. And, in between, they tell us, people in Berlin, we make a second Moscow out of you. And the voice over you will be glorious Russia.

And this-- but it-- And we had woman and young-- young children, or jung teenagers, jumping literally off bridges, off everything, just to kill themself, because they didn't want to be raped. And this is what I, I don't think, ever in my life will forget. My-- my-- my mother-- it isn't just that it happened to us or to me.

I was so far advanced with my pregnancy. The humiliation, that I was even pushed against a wall, even though he could-- he was drunk as-- anyway. He-- they couldn't do anything with me.

And I had the gall-- I spat at him. But I-- see, I-- I'm so little, and they were so tall, he didn't even know it. But my sister had already her six-month-old child.

So she took that safety needle from that dirty diaper what she had on and started poking her daughter in her little behind, so she would scream and scream and scream. And that maybe saved me, that they finally decided to leave and [INAUDIBLE] out of there. These are things what maybe are not said.