Hans arrived late, swinging his iron leg awkwardly down the stairs. He joined Gretchen and Oskar.
Frau Niedermeyer did the rounds, spreading more stories of rapes and other horrific atrocities committed by the Russian soldiers. Groups with children chased her away. Gretchen tried to ignore her, but she’d heard most of the stories before. Some were too gruesome to contemplate, but the more she heard them, the more she thought they were probably true.
Dora waited until Professor Hepple had left the building before calling Inge to come down from the attic. They took shelter on the ground floor. The building was deserted. They watched as wave after wave of enemy aircraft flew in across the city and the bombs began to drop.
Dora became nervous. She’d never seen an air raid like it. Within 15 minutes she decided she needed to get Inge to safety in a proper shelter.
Avoiding the nearest U-Bahn station, they ran to another one where Dora might not be recognized. It was a hair-raising dash with bombs falling in streets nearby and explosions behind them, but they made it to the safety of the U-Bahn station, found a shadowy corner and settled down to wait out the raid.
The bombing went on and on. Hans covered his ears. The anti-aircraft batteries made more noise than the bombs, but the bombs that fell near the Neu-Westend shelter shook the ground like earthquakes. Children screamed in terror and plaster drifted down like snow from the ceiling.
The air in the shelter grew more and more foul with every passing hour. Babies cried incessantly. A pair of dogs barked, and their owners shouted at them.
Hans was surprised. “I didn’t think there were any dogs left alive in Berlin,” he said.
Gretchen said she was afraid that the noise would disturb Oskar, by awakening bad memories of his wartime experiences. But he slept through the worst of it, and when he was awake, he seemed unaware of what was going on. Hans wondered if he was deaf; he didn’t seem to hear any of the terrible noise.
At midnight a woman gave birth to a healthy baby boy. That lightened everyone’s mood for a few minutes, until the sounds of the bombs and the answering guns resumed.
Three long siren blasts signaled the all-clear at 4:00 a.m. The weary residents of Berlin climbed out of their underground shelters to see what further devastation the Allies had wrought on their city.
Hans struggled going up the stairs. Going down had been much easier. By the time he reached the start of the last flight of stairs, the U-Bahn station was deserted. Looking up through the entrance, all he could see was a red sky, and his nose was filled with smoke.
Berlin was on fire.
27
Whole streets had been demolished by the bombs. Others were ablaze. The KaDeWe
department store on Tauentzienstrasse was a raging inferno. Teams of firefighters were battling the blaze courageously, but Hans could see that their task was impossible; there were just too many other buildings on fire for them to stand any chance. Smoke from a thousand fires rose into the sky and coalesced into one huge plume that hung, roiling overhead. The air was thick with it.
Hans covered his face with his sleeve. His own high-rise apartment block should have been visible from where he stood, but the smoke was too thick to see it, if it was still there. He stumbled toward it, swinging his leg, working his way around piles of broken masonry and massive wooden beams ripped from the houses and blazing on the ground.
The whole of Bolivarallee, his normal route home, was ablaze on both sides, the heat so intense that the tar on the surface of the road was melting. He would have to find a different way home.
It took him an hour to get back to the apartment block. Three other blocks in the Kaiser Wilhelm complex had suffered catastrophic damage and were burning, but block 2 still stood stubbornly, its head shrouded in the cloud of black smoke, many of its windows shattered.
His own windows were gone, a crater the size of a swimming pool right in front of the building. If the bomb had fallen 20 meters further north it would have wiped out the entire block and killed everyone still inside.
Dora and Inge emerged from the underground shelter and headed back through streets devastated by the bombing. They had almost made it home when they turned a corner and ran straight into her neighbor, Professor Hepple.
“Who’s this?” said the professor.
“This is Inge, my niece,” said Dora. “She’s staying with me for a few days.”
Hepple glanced at Inge, raising his eyebrows.
Dora grabbed Inge’s hand and they hurried onward.
Hans swept up the glass fragments scattered around his apartment before heading out toward the allotments. Again, his route was blocked by fallen masonry and raging fires. He made his way around the craters on the golf course, the only nearby open area.
Paradoxically, the allotments were ablaze with cherry blossom. Hans’s plot had received a direct hit. The planted area was now nothing but a huge crater. The cabin was still standing, but the bomb’s shockwave had shaken it badly. What had been an upright rectangular wooden building was now crooked and distorted, and looked like it might fall down at any moment.
The padlock on the door was hanging open, the door firmly wedged in a frame twisted and bent out of shape. If he opened it the whole front wall might collapse. The gable end of the structure lay at a crazy angle, its wooden slats loose. Hans pulled at two of them and they came away in his hands. This created a space wide enough to gain access, but a cross spar blocked his way in. He had to lower himself onto his rear, duck his head and slide in backwards.
Inside was chaos. The
