Max stood and watched the firestorm, the night still and soft once the aeroplanes had finally gone. Could anyone in Berlin
still be alive? It seemed impossible. Occasional towers of fire exploded into the night air where a building had collapsed,
or a delayed-fuse bomb had gone off. And Mareth was there. He pictured her unconscious, half buried by fallen beams. He pictured
her gasping, screaming as fire consumed her. Finally he looked away, pulled himself back into the train, sat down again with
the wall at his back. His army friend hadn’t moved a muscle through the whole attack. He just stared, his eyes passing through
Max to someplace else.
Without focusing his vacant stare the captain asked, “You have someone there, in Berlin?”
“My fiancée,” Max said, trying to say more, but he couldn’t even speak for long moments. Finally he said, “I went through
a raid myself, but not like this… there are more planes now. I don’t know how we’ll ever…” He stopped. Hands still shaking,
he drew out a cigarette and offered one to the captain. “Have you seen this? What the Allies do to us?”
The captain accepted the cigarette, lit it, took a long inhale. “My family was killed in a raid in Berlin five months ago.”
He finished his cigarette before speaking again. “They send a thousand planes from England—from England! And Dr. Goebbels
told us the English were through. They send a thousand planes over Berlin whenever they like, while the few bombers we have
left are trying to stop the Russians. My wife and children were killed by the incendiaries, burned to death, in the capital
of the Thousand Year Reich.”
Max met the captain’s stare until he finished talking and then Max looked away. That kind of talk could put a man in the hands
of the security police, but the captain could have cared less. What was left for the Gestapo to do to him? Arrest his dead
family? Kill him? He would die soon enough in Russia anyway. Max closed his eyes. Mareth could just as easily be burning as
they spoke.
Toward dawn, the train began to creep forward again, the screeching and banging of the cars loud in the morning stillness.
Most of the passengers had slept after the raid. The few who didn’t sat quietly, shocked into silence by the fury of the attack.
They came awake now and so did Max, who had been passing in and out of a restless sleep from pure exhaustion. He smoked, the
tobacco bitter in his dry mouth. In the daylight he saw the notice that the rail car to his right was a no-smoking car. Yet
another rule made laughable by the war.
No one had bothered to close the metal exit doors. The trains were short on crews, every available man having been drafted
into the army, so railwaymen long retired had been pressed back into service. Closing and latching the exit doors was too
much for them, or maybe they just didn’t care. Who could blame them? Max rose and stood in the open doorway, watching Berlin
as they approached. A smoky red haze hung over the city, eerie in the breaking dawn. As they crept through the outskirts of
town, buildings shot up flames in the distance—toward the center of the city, where Mareth lived and worked.
A year ago when they were training in the Baltic, a young sailor on Max’s boat got his arm caught in a mooring wire as they
were coming in to dock. A sudden jerk caused the wire to tighten and it cut the sailor’s hand clean off. The lad stared in
disbelief at the bleeding stump for the longest time, shocked into numbness. Now Max felt much the same looking out over Berlin
as the train rolled in. Ahead, a Reichsbahn worker signaled with a lantern, directed them onto a new track, heading them north,
skirting the city, making for one of the rail stations on the far eastern edge of Berlin.
In the residential neighborhoods they passed through, most of the houses seemed to have suffered little damage except for
missing windows that had been replaced by cardboard or wood. Maybe one in five had burned, blackened timbers and smashed brickwork
lying abandoned in a scorched yard, often with a sturdy brick chimney standing sentinel over the devastation. As they creaked
along an overpass, Max looked down. A bright red post office van lay on its side. The rear doors had burst open and letters
lay scattered on the street, mixed in with the glass and bricks from a toppled home on the corner. A postal worker picked
through the debris, gathering the letters, occasionally glancing at passersby working their way to their offices in the middle
of all this chaos.
In the distance, a thick tower of smoke rose from the city center, which had been the target of the raid. The bombs had shattered
the water mains; fires would burn for days. Berlin’s Fire Protection Police could rarely access water after severe raids,
excepting small amounts they could pump from the Havel or the Spree or the Landwehrkanal. All they could really do was dynamite
buildings to make firebreaks and try to keep the flames from spreading.
The army captain gave Max a salute when they finally got off the train an hour later. “Good luck and good hunting, Kamerad.”
Max saluted in return. “Keep your eyes open and your ears stiff, old fox.” They would never meet again on this earth.
Max checked his suitcase at the station, went outside, and flagged down a member of the Orpo, the uniformed police, distinctive
in his shako. “How do I get to the Zoo Tower?”
The policeman saluted him. “The 122 tram will take you there, sir, but it is not recommended. Not recommended at all, sir.
They were hit hard last night. The Fire Protection Police are still calling for help—we’ve sent every spare man from this
precinct, and two of the Luftwaffe’s heavy rescue units are being brought in as well. Todt Organization crews, army men, too.
It’s hell down there. Headquarters says it was one of the worst.”
“Doesn’t matter,” Max said. “I have to go.”
The Orpo man pointed to a tram coming down the middle of the street. “That’s the one, sir. It will take you as close as you
can get.”
He was surprised to see a female conductor collecting fares aboard the tram. Were they this short of men? Or were these women
just pushing their way into these jobs to get out of working in a munitions factory? That was the new decree: any woman not
already working was to be sent off to make ammunition. The tram waddled down the tracks, stopping every other block to take
on passengers, the driver slowing where debris was strewn across the pavement, letting the wheels of the streetcar gently
push the flotsam aside. Max wanted to seize the tram at gunpoint and make them go faster.
Closer to the center, the roar of flames became audible. It sounded like seawater rushing into the ballast tanks of the U-boat.
Thin strips of aluminum lay everywhere: in the street, on the sidewalks, scattered over roofs and lawns, caught in the branches
of trees, hanging from the few phone lines that remained. RAF bombers dropped the strips to make false images on German radar
and confound the Luftwaffe controllers who vectored in German night fighters.
Rounding a corner, the driver slammed on the tram’s brakes, throwing up a shower of white sparks. The shells of burnt-out
buses and trams blocked the way ahead. Several buildings had collapsed into mounds of rubble in the street. Policemen armed
with military rifles stood atop the smoking piles to guard them from looters, who now faced summary execution. A typewriter
from one of the toppled office buildings sat upright on the sidewalk as if waiting for a secretary. A row of bodies, mainly
women and children, lay on the opposite sidewalk.
The tram wasn’t going any farther. Max jumped off and began to run, guided by the smoke that spiraled into the sky up ahead.
If he could find the Unter den Linden, he could follow it to the Tiergarten.
The devastation mounted as he ran, forcing him to dodge around heaps of wreckage where offices and homes had stood—splintered
boards, burnt black, broken brick and stone, a bicycle bent and crumpled on the curb. Survivors poked through the wreckage,
cloths knotted around their noses and mouths to protect them from the smoky air. One woman held a lamp she’d found, tears
pouring down her face. Max stopped for a moment to catch his breath, gulping in air and coughing from the smoke. Two men dug
frantically in the remains of a building. Looking for what, he wondered. Their families? Friends? Money? A squad of soldiers
appeared from a side street and their sergeant approached him, went rigid as a lamppost and snapped a salute. “Orders, Herr
Kapitän?”
Max shook his head. “I’m not in command here. Ask him.” He pointed vaguely to a policeman across the road. No army sergeant
would like taking orders from a policeman, but what did it matter? The two of them conferred briefly, without exchanging salutes,
and the sergeant quickly set his men to digging.
Max moved on, walking now, picking his way over the rubble. Everything had been flattened here. Only the odd section of wall
remained standing, whether as a testament to skillful masonry or the vagaries of a bomb blast. The heavy smell of charred
wood was strong in his nose, and beneath it he could make out the rotten-egg stench of natural gas.
He walked and climbed for another hour, twice having to produce his identity papers for the police, before reaching the Unter
den Linden, its broad boulevards littered with overturned automobiles and buses. A Mercedes-Benz had been hurled upside down
against the snapped trunk of a tree. Trams lay crossways on their tracks, windows blown out, advertising posters hanging in
colorful strips that fluttered in the breeze. Occasional explosions sounded in the distance as delayed-fuse bombs went off—designed
to take out the rescuers and onlookers who gathered after a raid.
As he made his way to the Tiergarten, Max recognized the side street he’d used to reach von Woller’s office in January, and
he could see from the corner that the building had been obliterated, reduced to a smoking pile of stone. A group of Luftwaffe
men from one of the special rescue battalions pushed past him and Max followed them down the street. As they approached the
place where the building had been, he realized that the hatless man waving his arms and shouting on the sidewalk was Herr
von Woller.
“Hurry!” he yelled at the Luftwaffe crew. “Hurry! For God’s sake, there are people trapped down there.” He was pointing feverishly
at the ruins of his collapsed office. “Right here, come quickly, quickly, I insist!”
Max seized him by the shoulders. “Is she in there?”
Von Woller stared at him dumbly for a moment. Max wasn’t easy to recognize with his face covered in soot, uniform torn, boots
cut in a dozen places by shards of glass. “The U-boat captain. Brekendorf.”
“Is she in there?” Max was shaking the old Nazi.
Von Woller nodded. “Yes. Under the rubble. The basement was fortified six months ago at the foreign minister’s insistence:
steel, concrete, wooden beams. We received everything we needed, everything because of his priority order. They may have survived
the hit. No incendiaries, just high explosives. But we have to get them out—they might be hurt, or running out of air.”
Max eased his grip on von Woller’s thin shoulders. He looked over at the mass of debris.
“We’re trying to dig a tunnel to the shelter. That’s why I sent for the Luftwaffe rescue men—they’re trained for this.”
Already the air force crew had relieved the office workers and passersby who’d begun the digging. Several of the men pulled
long boards from the rubble and set about cutting them into tunnel supports. Others started in with pickaxes to uncover larger
beams. Four men had long iron poles to pry the beams up so the supports could be placed underneath. In this way a small tunnel
was gradually opened to the building’s first floor. Max fell in line and hauled out chunks of wood and stone being passed
back from the face of the tunnel. He could hear the tunnel leader, flat on his belly, calling out to the people trapped below.
“Hold on, we’re coming, we’re coming.”
For half an hour, then an hour, he called into the silence. No response. But finally a small voice answered. It said, “Vasser.”
“What?” The tunnel leader quieted the men at his back and listened.
“The water is up to our chests!”
The tunnel leader looked around at his crew. A main must have been shattered and begun pouring water into the bomb shelter
through a crack. It happened—happened often. People survived an air raid but rubble blocked the shelter door and everyone
inside drowned. Not in the ocean, not in the lake at Wannsee, but in the basement of their office building, in the middle
of Berlin. “Hold fast,” the tunnel leader said, turning back around, shouting to whoever could hear him. “Just hold fast.”
They had to dig. “Raus! Raus!” The men fell in, moving twice as fast now, the blows of pickaxe blades ringing out against
stone. They worked in a rotation, taking turns at the face of the tunnel, the lead man attacking the debris with all his strength
until he was exhausted and the next man stepped in. Max waited in the queue, seizing the rubble as it was passed back down
the line, flinging it between his legs, his hands bloody and torn, cut to ribbons by the chipped bricks and splintered boards.
“Mareth!” he shouted, moving into the tunnel face for his turn, hefting the leader’s small rock axe. “Mareth! Mareth!” Nothing.
He swung the axe as hard as he could in the tight space, shattering a mass of bricks, part of an interior wall still covered
with taped notices, one of them reading:
FIGHT THE COAL THIEF!
—an exhortation to save electricity. He hammered the wall again and again, the men behind raking out the shards of brick Max
knocked loose. How fast was the water rising?
“Mareth!” he shouted again. “Mareth!”
“Max? Max!”
It was her. He swung with all his strength, breaking through the wall, pushing away some broken boards. Another blow and this
time the axe hit wood—thin wood—and he felt the blade go clean through.
“Hurry, Max—the water’s coming in faster!”
He pried the axe free, pushed bricks between his legs to get more room to swing, then with a fury buried the axe into the
wood again.