like it. But there was nothing else to do. She took the sausage and the bread back to bed, though she had been told never to eat in bed.
She pretended she was a mouse and could only nibble the food with her front teeth—slowly, slowly, slowly; nibble, nibble, nibble. All the while the bombs shattered up above and thudded in the distance, and voices yelled along the corridor.
She slept again, and woke with breakfast. This time she left the door open. It was too lonely with it shut.
People tramped along the corridor, but no one seemed to look inside. No one was interested. Not now.
Suddenly there were louder voices. A man’s voice yelling. A woman’s voice cried more softly underneath, and then the man again. It was a strange yelling—more of a scream than a yell—and it went on and on.
It was her father’s voice.
She hadn’t seen him since they came to Berlin. He was busy. Of course he was busy. She hadn’t even asked where he was.
But he was here.
She slid off the bed, and put the blankets aside. She ran down the corridor towards the voice.
Something shrieked above her. An explosion split the world. Dust fell from the ceiling, or maybe it wasn’t dust at all. The bunker rocked, and then was still. She kept on running.
The screaming voice had stopped. But she knew where it had come from.
The door was open. There were three men inside, talking, arguing, their faces white with strain and with exhaustion and from being underground, and other men, soldiers, to the side of the room.
Another explosion shook the air, the ground, the walls.
‘Father!’ she cried.
It was the first time she had called him father to his face.
The man stopped arguing. He looked at her. His cheeks were sunken. His eyes were dark in darker shadows. There was grey in his moustache.
‘Father?’ she said again.
The man said nothing. He just smiled at her. Not really a smile—an almost smile. Later she thought it was a smile that said, ‘Hello, my daughter. Yes, I love you, too. But, for your sake, now I can never say the words.’
That’s what she hoped, in later years, it might have said.
And then the smile was gone. Maybe there had never really been a smile at all.
‘Who is this girl!’ demanded the Fuhrer.
‘She’s… she’s…’ one of the guards stammered, and then was silent.
‘I have never seen her before,’ said Adolf Hitler. ‘What is she doing here? This is no place for a child!’
‘But…’ The guard swallowed what he was going to say. The rest of the room was silent.
‘Take her away,’ said Adolf Hitler. ‘Now! Do you hear me? Now!’
The guard led her to her room. He shut the door. She sat there trying to listen for her father’s voice, but all she could hear now were the bombs.
An hour later, or more perhaps, the guard came again. ‘Get your suitcase,’ he ordered.
She picked it up. She expected him to carry it for her, but he didn’t.
Along the corridor. The door to the room where her father had been was shut.
Up the stairs, along the next corridor. The noise of shell-fire was louder here.
Another soldier waited by the stairs.
‘Here she is,’ said the first.
The second soldier took her suitcase. He was older, and his eyes looked sad. He hesitated, then he took her hand. ‘Don’t be frightened, Madchen,’ he said softly. ‘You are going to good people. Don’t be afraid.’
The smell was disgusting as they climbed up to the street. Sweet and strong, like a million chamber-pots left too long.
The soldier saw her cover her face with her hand. ‘They hit the sewers,’ he told her. ‘They blew them open.’
But that wasn’t the whole of the smell.
The world was noise and rubble and splinters of rocks that flew through the air. You could smell the blood and hatred just like you could smell the pigs in Frau Leib’s mud.
‘This way,’ said the soldier. He had grey stubble on his cheeks. His voice was tired, and full of tension, but he sounded like he was trying to be kind.
There had once been trees and gardens. Now there was just a battle, too much, too fast to understand.
They ran through the skeleton of the garden, the soldier still holding her hand. Then down some steps, shadowed, down, down, back underground.
Along a tunnel now. The world was quieter, but the ground still shivered under their feet. Along the tunnel, round a corner, along again. There were steps, but they passed them, then more steps, and they climbed those.
It looked like a railway station. She had seen pictures of railway stations. But they hadn’t looked quite like this.
They came out of the station. The soldier smoothed her hair. His hand was cold and rough but he was trying to be kind. ‘They should be here by now. They were supposed to be waiting for you by the…’
There was no noise. Or maybe there had been noise but she couldn’t hear it in the tumult all around. But suddenly the soldier lay beside her. His arm had been blown off, and red pumped onto the ground. The skin around was very white, and so was the bone. How could a bone be white with so much blood?
She touched his face, but he didn’t move.
The world seemed cold and clear and very quiet, in spite of the noise of the bombs.
She had to take her suitcase. She had to leave. She prised it from his hand—his fingers still gripped it even though the arm was half a metre from its body.
Then she began to walk.
She walked for a few seconds, or a few minutes, she didn’t know. Then something exploded behind her and reality closed in. She ran for the protection of a rubble wall and crouched there, her suitcase in front of her like a shield.
For some reason she thought of Fraulein Gelber. If only she had saved some bread as Fraulein Gelber had done.
She began to crawl from one wall to another, trying to shelter as much as she could. With every inch she crawled it seemed she left her old life behind. It was burnt out of her by the shells and smoke and fire.
Duffi’s daughter was gone. The good girl that Fraulein Gelber had tried to make her be was gone. All that was left was Heidi, a small seed deep inside her.
All she had to do was survive, and that seed could grow.
There were bodies, covered in dust and blood, so that they somehow no longer looked like they were people. There was smoke, drifting in thick pillows; at times it seemed almost solid, and at others just like fog was clouding the world.
The smell was strong and harsh and horrid, like something bad had been cooked a long, long time, but after a while you forgot the smell. The smell and the noise was the way the world was now and it seemed to Heidi impossible that it would ever change.
At first she thought it was only smoke and dust thickening the air. Then she realised it was darkness flowing through the rubble, except where the explosions burnt it away.
The noise didn’t stop. Nor did it really get dark. There were fires all around now, or perhaps it had just been harder to see the flames in the daylight. The night was red and orange with strange, sharp streaks of white. The air was full of a new sound, a high-pitched squeaking rolling, and the yellow light of flames.
She kept on walking—running—hiding. She didn’t know why she ran, or where she was going. There was no time to think now. She just knew that she had to keep on going, to get as far away as possible.
There was a tank in front of her. Two tanks. It was the tanks that had been squealing.
She could hear them rolling grinding up the road even over the noise of the shells. The metal squealed as it hit the stones.
