"A German woman's diary tells of an appalling campaign of rape in the conquered Nazi capital:

Berlin, spring 1945: "I am essentially living off my body, trading it for something to eat." An anonymous woman is writing into her diary, questioning whether she should call herself a whore. With that same stunning frankness, she describes the plundering of her neighborhood when Berlin was conquered and Soviet soldiers moved through the city, raping women of all ages, attacking them alone or gang-raping them in stairwells, cellars, on the streets. A Woman in Berlin is an amazing and essential book. Originally written in shorthand, longhand and the author's own code, it is so deeply personal that it becomes universal, evoking not only the rapes of countless German women in 1945 but also the rape of every anonymous woman throughout war history -- the notion of women as booty. The book's focus is not on the Nazi rampage across Europe but on its aftermath, when 1.5 million Red Army soldiers crossed the Oder River and moved westward. More than 100,000 women in Berlin were raped, but many of them would never speak of it. "Each one of us will have to act as if she in particular was spared," Anonymous writes. "Otherwise no man is going to want to touch us anymore.""