Further accounts of the wartime horrors, esp on the civilian population, in Serge's Unforgiving Years

The third section of Victor Serge's powerful novel Unforgiving Years (written, 1947 published 1971) takes place near the end of World War II in a German city, unnamed but it must be Berlin, just about leveled from the wartime attacks and with virtually all of the people just barely keeping alive, scrounging for food, squatting in the ruins of bombed-out buildings. The central character is Bridgette (not sure if she played any role in the first 2 sections), and through her experience we get a sense of the struggle for survival at the end of the war - with the country still receiving false reports that everything is in control and that the German army was getting ready for its final assault against the Allies. Nobody believes these lies any longer. The key event in this section is the arrival of a soldier who gives B a packet of mostly uncompleted letters that her boyfriend/fiance had written to her from the front. These fragments of letters describe a retreat (from Russia) during which the German forces wiped out any last vestiges of village inhabitants, Jews in particular. She learns from the man to delivered the letters - whom she later takes on as a lover - that her boyfriend was shot to death by a German firing squad as he neared his return to Germany; apparently, the German army wanted no witnesses or testimony about their barbaric cruelty during the retreat. In these 2 middle sections of the novel, we see vivid accounts of the horrors of war as experienced by the civilians in the occupied or nearly destroyed cities; the connection in section 3 to the initial narrative of this novel - the attempt by Russian spies who have turned against Stalin and his atrocities to escape from their would-be assassins and the flee from Europe - is left by the wayside in these sections, but perhaps will be picked up again the final section of this novel.