When women become spoils of war

Maria Shalneva, a Soviet soldier, in Berlin in 1945 in front of a poster celebrating Labor Day. Yevgeny Khaldei / Cordon press

It would be worth asking those who have invented the euphemism of "domestic violence" how they would define gang rape of women of any age, from minors to the elderly, as a weapon of war.

That is the toad, the first of many that will jump into your mouth, that the Popular Party has swallowed.

These days there is talk of the horror of war, of the typification of its crimes, and as evidence grows stronger that collective rapes are taking place in Ukraine, it is urgent to remember, as the activist lawyer for human rights did this week Almudena Bernabéu, that until 2008 this crime was not classified as a war crime within the cataloging of abuses against civilians in countries in conflict collected by the International Criminal Court.

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One of the most revealing books ever written about this silenced violence is

, a diary written between April and June 1945 by a woman who never wanted to sign it, although over the years it has been revealed that its author was Marta Hillers, a journalist who experienced the fall of her city first-hand and witnessed the trail of women rapes left behind by Soviet soldiers.

She was one of the hundred thousand who suffered this brutality in Berlin, one of the two million in all of Germany.

The book was published in 1959, without having the resonance it deserved, since the idea that narrating it was a humiliation for German women was still prevailing.

Actually, a male imposition, because as Hillers tells in her diary, after the rapes “the women helped each other, but the men wanted to erase it.

We were forbidden to talk about it when the men came back from the war."

The taboo was maintained until the 1980s, when the daughters and granddaughters of the victims instilled the necessary courage in their mothers and grandmothers so that the stories of that suffering came to light.

Marta Hillers was a cosmopolitan, open, thoughtful young woman, and although she had made occasional collaborations with the regime, she did not agree at all with the idea of ​​the supremacy of the Aryan race.

This book is the narration of a victim who rebels against that condition, who furiously appeals to her survival instinct to overcome the pain: "They will not destroy me, no."

There are priceless thoughts about the trail left by war wounds;

The author of the diary reflects on how the myth of the strong man who was the protagonist of Nazi ideology collapsed: “When the war is over, it will take place, along with many other defeats,

the defeat of man in his masculinity”.

With these words, Hillers predicted, without error, that the responsibility for reconstruction would rest on the shoulders of women.

Antony Beevor writes in the foreword that this diary is “one of the most important accounts ever written of the effects of war and defeat”;

he defends without a shadow of a doubt the authorship of Marta Hillers and assumes the guilty silence between the academy and the political authority and the scant effort to clarify the facts.

The fact that the author knew Russian allowed her to get closer to the individual personality of the invaders, to get close to a high-ranking one to protect her from the soldiery.

All told without a trace of self-pity.

For her, rape, in these circumstances, “is a collective experience that has more to do with violence than with sex.

Sometimes, the very humiliation that the soldiers had suffered from their superiors pushed them to take revenge with the easiest objective.”

Reissued in 2003 by Hans Magnus Enzensberger, it was read with new eyes by young people who were not going to stigmatize a sexual victim, who did not believe that their experience could shame a people.

It may seem easy to us now, but it is novel that there is already talk of the need to investigate rape in Ukraine, in the same way as child trafficking at the border.

What is not talked about does not exist, that is the strategy of the parties that seek euphemisms to circumvent the truth.

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