Paula turned her face toward me. Her eyes were still closed, and her hand gripped mine. I felt that I might faint. In a fever of emotion, I think I told her I loved her. Then I pulled myself together. I didn’t know whether I had spoken or not. Paula hadn’t moved. I must have been dreaming.
Suddenly, we turned our heads. The air was filled once again with the sinister sound of sirens howling in unison from the airport to the edge of the city. We stared at each other, astounded.
“Can it be another raid?”
This seemed unlikely. At that time, daytime raids near the capital were still extremely rare. However, the sirens were impossible to mistake: they were signaling the start of a raid, and we quickly believed them. Planes were rolling down all the runways, gathering speed.
“The fighters are taking off, Paula! It really is a raid!”
“You’re right! Look down there — all those people running to the shelter!”
“We should get into a shelter too, Paula.”
“But we’re perfectly safe here — it’s the country. They’re going to bomb Berlin again.”
“I guess you’re right. We’re as well off here as in one of those airless holes.”
The German fighters roared over our heads.
“Ten… twelve… thirteen… fourteen,” cried Paula, waving at the Focke-Wulfs boring through the air over our heads. “Good luck to our pilots! Three cheers for them!”
“Go on, boys!” I shouted, to fall in with her mood.
“Go on,” Paula repeated.
“It’s not nighttime now — they’ll be able to see. Twenty-two, twenty-three, twenty-four-how many there are! Hooray!”
Thirty fighters had taken off, and were soaring into the sky. Their tactic was to climb as high as possible, so that they could swoop down on the bombers from above and sting them in the back. The Luftwaffe had perfected the formidable Focke-Wulf 190’s and 195s, which could soar up quickly, for precisely this purpose. We could hear the distant firing of anti-aircraft guns.
“If we catch them that far away, they’ll never even get to Berlin,” Paula said.
“I hope not, Paula.”
I had already forgotten about the damned raid, which had made me drop my girl’s hand. Leaving the fighters to look out for themselves, I was preparing a second attack. I was already quite close to Paula, when the roar of enemy bombers drowned out the sounds of the nearby city, and overwhelmed us.
“Oh, look, Guille,” she said, as always mispronouncing my name. “They’re coming from over there — look!”
With her delicate hand, she pointed to a huge mass of black dots which were steadily growing larger against the pale blue sky.
“How high they are,” she said. “And look — there are others over there.”
I stared at the double apparition bearing down on the city and on us.
“My God, how many there are!” The noise grew louder and louder. “There must be hundreds of them!”
“It’s impossible to count,” Paula said. “They’re still too far away.” I began to feel afraid — for us, for her, for my happiness.
“We’ve got to get away from here, Paula. It could get very dangerous.”
“Oh no,” she said, unconcerned. “What would happen to us here?”
“We could be strafed, Paula. We’ve got to find a shelter.”
I tried to drag her after me.
“Look,” she said, fascinated by the spectacle of danger growing visibly larger. “They’re coming straight at us. And look at the white trails they make. Isn’t it strange!”
Now our flak went into action. On all sides, thousands of guns were spitting steel at the attackers.
“Come quick,” I said to Paula, tugging her hand. “We’ve got to get to a shelter.”
The shelters at the airfield were too far away for us now, so I pulled her toward a hollow in the ground, beside a large tree.
“Where are our fighters?” cried Paula, gasping for breath.
“Perhaps they’ve run away — there are so many enemy planes.”
“You mustn’t say that! German soldiers never run away!”
“But what can they do, Paula? There must be at least a thousand bombers.”
“You have no right to say that about our heroic pilots!”
“Forgive me, Paula — you’re right. I would be astonished if they ran away.”
The thunder of bombs once again filled the air of the martyred city. German soldiers never run away. I, who had run from the Don to Kharkov, knew that perfectly well — although it must be admitted that German soldiers could fight against odds as great as thirty to one as in Russia, for instance. From the hole into which Paula and I had dived, we were able to watch the avalanche which flattened a third of the airfield and ninety percent of Tempelhof.
The daytime raids were always stronger than the ones at night. On that particular day, eleven hundred British and American planes attacked the Berlin region, opposed by roughly sixty fighters. The heavy American losses were caused largely by flak: at least a hundred planes were shot down. The German fighters had not run away: not a single German plane came through undamaged.
I can still see very clearly the whistling clusters of bombs falling seven or eight thousand feet onto Tempelhof and the airfield, and feel the earth trembling under their giant blows. I can see the ground cracking, and houses bursting into flame, and the oil depots near the field spreading the flames over hundreds of yards…. I can see a suburb of 150,000 people blotted out in a blanket of smoke. And with my eyes involuntarily wide from the shock, I can see trees tearing upward from the ground in groups of ten or twelve, and hear them ripping open the earth. I can hear doomed planes roaring their engines, and see them spinning, exploding, falling. And I can see the terror in Paula’s eyes, as she pressed herself against me. Flaming debris was falling all around us, so we made ourselves as small as we could at the bottom of our hole. Paula hid her face between my shoulder and my cheek, and I could feel her trembling, quite apart from the trembling of the earth.
Pressed together like two lost children, we watched helplessly. Long after the planes had gone, delayed-action bombs were exploding in Tempelhof, where the raid had taken twenty-two thousand lives. Berlin had received a battering too, and its rescue services were completely overwhelmed. The streets were still strewn with wreckage from the night raid, Spandau was still burning, and in the southwest quarter of the city delayed-action bombs were still exploding fifteen hours later. Tempelhof was shrieking with pain.
When we stumbled from our hole, haggard with exhaustion, Paula clung to my arm. Her nerves were strained to their utmost, and she couldn’t stop trembling.
“Guille,” she said. “I feel terrible. And look at me — I’m filthy.” She seemed to have lost control of her reason. Her head fell back on my shoulder. Without even thinking, I kissed her on the forehead. She made no effort to stop me.
I was unable to reassemble the thoughts which had obsessed me at the beginning of our walk. I no longer felt any hesitation about kissing my friend: we seemed to have passed beyond the stage of infantile flirting. I kissed her hair as if I were consoling an anxious child, and saw, through her tears, the tears of the child in Magdeburg, shaking with sobs. I thought of Ernst, of all the tears in this war, and all the anguish. I tried to feel pity, and to show it. My happiness was mixed with too much suffering. I couldn’t simply accept it, and forget all the rest. My love for Paula seemed somehow impossible, in this setting of permanent chaos. As long as children were crying in the dust of their crumbled homes, I would never be able to live with my love. Nothing seemed certain. Perhaps nothing would survive this marvelous spring day except my love for Paula — and I didn’t know how to declare it.