The early days were bitter in every way: hunger, cold, and pretty much constant menace. Still, people were as helpful as they could be. There was something like an “emergency humanity.” (I ask her where she got that phrase; she says she made it up, just now.) She took off for western Germany in fairly hazardous circumstances, but she doesn’t go into detail (she doesn’t give me the particulars until a later time). At first, she moved in temporarily with distant relatives in Schleswig-Holstein (in a one-horse town near Preetz: later on we went there to delight in the good people’s astonishment at her elegance). But the narrow-minded, intimidated philistines, in a fever of concern about their meager property (they ran a grocery; at night, behind tightly closed shutters, they devoured the sausages they kept hidden during the day), had been so reluctant to take her in that she left after a short time—all the more hastily since the father had, of course, made a pass at her. She went to Hamburg.

“Within a week, I realized I’d have to wind up in some bed or die in the street,” she tells me calmly. “I’ve never done so much walking in my life—and never in such thin clothes and on such an empty stomach. One day, I ended up on this street. At first, I didn’t know what it was, but the penny dropped soon enough. It was morning, scarcely any clientele. I got to talking to the girls, and they were friendly and nice and understanding. After my country relatives and the railroad policemen who kicked me out of the waiting room when, like hundreds of other people, I tried to warm up there, except that I came several days in a row—after all that, I felt at home here. I asked the girls what things were like for them here, and what you had to do to get into one of the houses, and they all told me to do it; they said I should go to the police and register.”

She explains that the whorehouses are city-owned. They are run like rooming houses, leased as concessions to veterans of the trade who have saved enough money and have impeccable police records. The girls pay rent and get a percentage of the receipts, plus any personal bonuses from the johns. “But most of the girls fritter away their money and start boozing, or else they play cards or snort cocaine or do lesbian stuff and ruin themselves that way—they’re always very over-excited, and they can’t come with the johns . . . The worst thing here is the boredom.”

What does she do about it? I ask.

“I observe,” she says. “I never get bored. Although I used to.”

When was that?

At school, and then later, when she worked for a photographer.

“If you ever want to get out of this someday,” I say, “maybe I can help you find a job. I’ve got movie connections. For a girl with experience in photography, there must be work in the movies: maybe editing; that’s not so boring.”