them.
Once the lights had flickered out, they made their way across the stream and up into the adjoining field. As they began running an excited shout rose up – one of the Russians had seen them. A single rifle cracked, and Paul thought he heard the bullet pass by. A volley of shots followed, with no more effect. They were firing blind.
But someone would be asking for another flare, Paul thought.
There was an explosion behind him. He was looking back when another went off – mortar rounds were landing amongst the Russians.
And then the machine-guns opened up, and Neumaier, twenty metres ahead of him, suddenly stopped in his tracks and toppled to the ground. Paul came up as Hannes turned his friend over – one eye was staring, the other gone. Utermann and Commen were still running, screaming out that they were Germans, when both went down together, as if tripped by the same wire.
Paul crouched there with Hannes for what seemed an age, waiting his turn, almost revelling in the breathtaking absurdity of it all. But the machine-gun had fallen silent – Utermann had obviously been heard, albeit too late to save himself – and voices were calling them forward.
They did as they were told, almost falling into the foremost German trench, but there was no time to rest. Someone gave them each a rifle, shouted something vaguely encouraging, and moved on. Paul stared at the gun for several seconds as if unsure what it was for, shook his head to clear it, and took a position at the parapet. Many Russians were down, but hundreds of others were still charging towards them, screaming at the top of their lungs, the leading echelons no more than fifty metres away. Paul took aim at one, and saw another go down. He took aim again, and his first target went down bellowing.
A few seconds more, and the first Russians were amongst them, some leaping across the trenches, other straight in, rifles firing then swinging, blades glinting and falling. One swung wildly at Paul, and he swung equally wildly back, catching the man across the neck with a sickening crack.
He scrabbled in desperation at the wall of the trench, and managed to haul himself over the edge. All around him, men were heaving, grunting and rasping, like warriors from some ancient battle between Teutons and Romans. In the dark it was hard to distinguish friend from foe, and Paul saw no reason to try. Weaving his way between personal battles, he ran for the next line of trees.
Since the weekend bombing of the ground-level extension above the cells, the latter's capacity had been severely diminished, and the two Jews from the Lubeck train had been allowed to share in the relative freedom of the fourth basement room. Effi had initially thought it prudent to stay away from them, but she badly wanted to know what had happened to their friend, the young man she had once sheltered in the Bismarck Strasse flat. After two days had passed she decided it was safe to make contact.
From the doorway of the furthest room, she could see them sitting against a wall. Their faces still bore the marks of the last interrogation, but they still seemed more animated than most of their fellow-prisoners. Both got warily to their feet as she approached.
The thought crossed Effi's mind that they might suspect her of betraying them. 'Do you remember me?' she asked unnecessarily.
'Yes,' the younger of the two replied. He was about twenty-five, and looked intelligent.
'What happened in Lubeck?' she asked them quietly.
'We don't know,' the young man said after a moment's hesitation. 'We were already on board the ship. We'd been hiding in the hold for a few hours when the roof slid open and there were the Gestapo, shining their torches down at us and killing themselves laughing.'
'They never let slip how they tracked you down?'
'No.'
'What happened to your friend?'
'Willy? He's dead. He made a break for it as they led us off the ship, jumped off the gangplank. There was some sort of stanchion sticking out of the wall, and he landed right on it. He looked dead, but they shot him a few times just to make sure.'
'I'm sorry.'
'He told us he'd met you before, that you'd helped a lot of Jews.'
'Some,' she admitted.
The obvious question must have showed in her face. 'Don't worry,' he told her. 'He didn't tell us your name or anything else about you.' Or we would have told them, went the unspoken coda.
It didn't seem to matter now. 'It's Dagmar. Dagmar Fahrian,' Effi said. There was a hint of guilt in the older man's eyes, she thought. He had probably given the Gestapo her description. She couldn't blame him.
'I'm Hans Heilborn,' the younger one said. 'And this oaf is Bruno Lewinsky.'
'May we meet again in better times,' Effi said simply. 'Have you heard any news of the fighting?'
'Yes,' Lewinsky said, speaking for the first time, 'I heard two of the guards talking.' He had a surprisingly cultured voice.
He'd probably been a university professor, Effi thought. So many academics, scientists and writers had been Jews. How much knowledge and wisdom had the Nazis destroyed?
'The Russians have broken through on the Oder,' Lewinsky was saying. 'They should be in the outskirts by the weekend. And the army defending the Ruhr is surrounded by the British and Americans. It's bigger than the army we lost at Stalingrad.'
Effi noticed the 'we' – after everything that had happened, these two Jews still thought of themselves as Germans – but mostly she was thinking about Paul, and hoping that he'd been taken prisoner. She wasn't sure John would ever forgive himself if his son was killed.
As dawn broke Paul was sitting on a wall in Worin. He was one of around fifty men who had reached the deserted village through the darkened woods. Most of the others were from the misleadingly named 9th Parachute Division – their airborne status had long been merely honorary – along with some stray panzergrenadiers. All were remnants of remnants, of those units once entrusted with the defence of the Seelow Heights.
Paul had not seen Hannes since the hand-to-hand battle with the Russians, and rather doubted he would again – if his friend was still alive, he'd probably been taken prisoner. And if he, Paul, was the unit's only survivor, then God had to be smiling down on him for some strange reason.
Or perhaps not. If all of them were going to die, then someone had to be last.
He bit another chunk off the sausage he had found in one of the abandoned houses, and eyed the growing light with some alarm. Soviet planes would soon be overhead, and a further withdrawal seemed advisable. He assumed that his battalion had been pulled back en masse, probably in the direction of Muncheberg, but heading that way without orders might prove a risky business. The two military policemen on the far side of the village square had already given him – and just about everyone else – suspicious looks, and Paul suspected that their current passivity was well calculated. They would have loved to order everyone back in the Russians' direction, but feared, with ample justification, that they might be shot if they tried. If Paul tried to strike out on his own, they would have no such worries. For him, for the moment, safety lay in numbers.
A panzergrenadier lieutenant seemed to be working his way round the square, talking to men and probably canvassing opinions. He looked like an officer who knew what he was doing, and Paul hoped he was planning a further withdrawal.
More men were trickling in all the time, but Hannes was not among them. Most of the arrivals looked as if they hadn't slept for days, and when a Soviet plane roared across the rooftops only a few bothered to take evasive action. One man raised a weary fist at the sky, but his heart wasn't it. This plane dropped nothing, but more would be back. It was time to move.
A few minutes later the roar of approaching tanks did get men reaching for their rifles. And then, to general amazement, two Tigers rumbled into view. This was good news and bad news, Paul thought. Good because it made the village slightly more defensible, bad because it would encourage the idiots to defend it.
The latter forecast proved distressingly accurate. While village beds were stripped of mattresses to bolster the tanks – a trick learned from Ivan – trenches were started at either end of the single street. But the earth had barely been broken when the familiar roar sent everyone rushing for cover. Paul made a run for the nearest building and threw himself down behind a large wooden horse trough. With hands over head and knees almost up
