War-Time Morals and Ethics

I'm currently reading A Woman in Berlin, which is a diary written by a woman living in Berlin at the end of World War II when the Russians invaded.

Apparently this book was published right after WW2 but was so scorned for it's contents that it disappeared for about 50 years. Now it's making a resurgence.

The anonymous author was a 30 year old single woman without friends, family, or many connections in Berlin. She describes the way people banded together out of desperation and need. She tells of starvation, nights spent in bomb shelters, and then of the Russians coming, and how every woman knew that her body would be considered spoils of war.

After the first horrible day of violence and rape she realizes that her best chance of survival is to find one higher-ranking Russian officer to attach herself to, hopefully making herself taboo for the others. She uses her wits and rudimentary knowledge of basic Russian to accomplish this, thus providing herself and those she lives with some measure of protection and provision, all bought with her body.

She discusses her feelings about having traded in being raped at random, to being a whore. (her words, not mine) She is not sure which is worse. All of the lines have blurred, and all she knows is that with the latter option, she is safer and better fed than she's been in months while living on war rations.

This issue reminded me of the movie Paradise Road. Glenn Close stars in it, as one of a group of women who end up in a Japanese concentration camp in World War I. As we watch the lives of these women we see them starving, sick, cold, beaten, terrified. They witness one of their own being burned alive by the Japanese soldiers. They are suffering incredibly.

One day there is a list of women that are to report to a truck. The women get on the truck and are taken to a beautiful house away from the concentration camp. They are ushered into a room with a large dining table spread richly with all manner of foods. These women have no idea why they are there or what the food means, but of course they are hoping they get to eat.

So, what's the catch? They are being offered a job! This place they are at is an officer's club. Any women willing to stay there and work as "hostesses" for the men will get plenty of food, water to wash with, toilets, silk sheets on their beds, and will not have to do manual labor. What a deal!

Many of these women were married, mothers, some of them had husbands fighting in the war. What were they to do? Stay in the work camp and hope not to die there, as they were very likely to do? Take the job at the officer's club and live, but at the cost of knowing they had sold themselves?

Both of these dilemmas are interesting to me. So often we might say, "Oh, I would only do what's right no matter what!" Yet when you use some of your imagination to envision yourself in one of these situations, can you be sure of what you would do? Can you even be sure of what is the "right thing" any more?

I remember telling my husband about Paradise Road. I asked him, "If I were one of those women who had that decision to make, which choice would you want me to make?"

I think I won't tell you his answer, nor my feelings of what I would do. I just think it's an interesting concept to think about and discuss.