I had soaked my handkerchief in a bucket and was holding it over my mouth to go forward; I had also soaked my shoulders and cap. In the Wilhelmstrasse, the wind roared between the ministries and whipped the flames licking the empty windows. Soldiers and firemen were running everywhere, with little result. The Auswärtiges Amt looked severely hit, but the chancellery, a little farther on, had fared better. I was walking on a carpet of broken glass: in the entire street there wasn’t one window left unbroken. On the Wilhelmplatz some bodies had been stretched out near an overturned Luftwaffe truck; frightened civilians were still coming out of the U-Bahn station and looking around, horrified and lost; from time to time a blast could be heard, a delayed-action bomb, or else the muffled roar of a building collapsing. I looked at the bodies: a man without pants, his bloody buttocks grotesquely exposed; a woman with her stockings intact, but without a head. I thought it especially obscene that they were left there like that, but no one seemed to care. A little farther on, guards had been posted in front of the Aviation Ministry: passersbys shouted insults at them or sarcastic remarks about Göring, but didn’t linger, no crowd was forming; I showed my SD card and went through the cordon. I finally arrived at the corner of Prinz-Albrechtstrasse: the SS-Haus had no windows left, but otherwise didn’t seem damaged. In the lobby, troops were sweeping away the debris; officers were hoisting boards or mattresses to cover the gaping windows. In a hallway, I found Brandt giving instructions in a calm, flat voice: he was especially concerned with getting the telephone restored. I saluted him and informed him of the destruction of my offices. He nodded: “Well, we’ll take care of that tomorrow.” Since there didn’t seem to be much to do, I went next door, to the Staatspolizei; they were busy nailing up the doors that had been torn off, as well as they could; some bombs had struck nearby, an enormous crater disfigured the street a little farther on, and water was escaping from a burst pipe. I found Thomas in his office drinking schnapps with three other officers, unbuttoned, black with filth, laughing. “Look at you!” he exclaimed. “You’re a sorry sight. Have a drink. Where were you?” I briefly told him about my experiences at the ministry. “Ha! I was home already, I went down to the basement with the neighbors. A bomb came through the roof and the building caught fire. We had to break down the walls of the neighboring basements, several in a row, to come out at the end of the street. The whole street burned down and half of my building, including my apartment, collapsed. To top it all off, I found my poor convertible under a bus. In short, I’m ruined.” He poured me another glass. “Since misfortune is upon us, let us drink, as my grandmother Ivona used to say.”
In the end I spent the night at the Staatspolizei. Thomas had sandwiches, tea, and soup delivered. He lent me one of his spare uniforms, a little too big for me, but more presentable than my rags; a smiling typist took charge of switching the stripes and insignia. They had set up folding cots in the gymnasium for about fifteen homeless officers; I ran into Eduard Holste there, whom I had briefly known as Leiter IV/V of Group D, at the end of 1942; he had lost everything and was almost crying with bitterness. Unfortunately the showers still didn’t work, and I could wash only my hands and face. My throat hurt, I coughed, but Thomas’s schnapps had cut the taste of ash a little. Outside, we still heard explosions. The wind roared, raging and relentless.
Very early in the morning, without waiting for Piontek, I took the car from the garage and went home. The streets, obstructed by burned or overturned trolleys, fallen trees, rubble, were hard to navigate. A cloud of black, acrid smoke veiled the sky and many passersby were holding wet towels or handkerchiefs over their mouths. It was still drizzling. I passed lines of people pushing strollers or little wagonsful of belongings, or else lugging or dragging suitcases. Everywhere water was escaping from pipes, I had to drive through pools hiding debris that could shred my tires at any moment. Still, many cars were still circulating, most of them without windows and some even missing doors, but full of people: those who had space picked up bombing victims, and I did the same for an exhausted mother with two young children who wanted to go see her parents. I cut through the devastated Tiergarten; the Victory Column, still standing as if out of defiance, rose in the midst of a large lake formed by the water from shattered mains, and I had to make a big detour to skirt round it. I dropped the woman off in the rubble of the Händelallee and went on to my apartment. Everywhere, teams were at work repairing the damage; in front of destroyed buildings, sappers were pumping air into collapsed basements and digging to free survivors, assisted by Italian prisoners—everyone nowadays just called them the Badoglios—with the letters KGF painted in red on their backs. The S-Bahn station in the Brückenallee lay in ruins; I lived a little farther, on Flensburgerstrasse; my building looked miraculously intact: a hundred and fifty meters farther, there was nothing but rubble and gaping façades. The elevator, of course, didn’t work, so I climbed the eight flights, passing my neighbors sweeping the stairway or nailing up their doors as best they could. I found mine torn from its hinges and lying sideways; inside, a thick layer of broken glass and plaster covered everything; there were traces of footsteps and my gramophone had disappeared, but nothing else seemed to have been taken. A cold, biting wind blew through the windows. I quickly filled a suitcase, then went downstairs to arrange with my neighbor, who came from time to time to do housework for me, to come and clean up; I gave her money to have the door repaired that day, and the windows as soon as possible; she promised to contact me at the SS-Haus when the apartment was more or less livable. I went out in search of a hoteclass="underline" above all, I dreamed of a bath. The closest was the Eden Hotel, where I had already stayed for a time. I had luck, the entire Budapesterstrasse seemed razed, but the Eden was still open. The front desk was being taken by storm, rich people who had been left homeless, officers arguing over rooms. When I had mentioned my rank, my medals, my disability, and lied by exaggerating the state of my apartment, the manager, who had recognized me, agreed to give me a bed, provided I share the room. I held out a banknote to the floor waiter so he would bring hot water to my room: finally, around ten o’clock, I was able to run a bath, lukewarm but delectable. The water immediately turned black, but I didn’t care. I was still soaking when they let my roommate in. He excused himself politely through the closed bathroom door and told me he’d wait below until I was ready. As soon as I was dressed I went down to look for him: he was a Georgian aristocrat, very elegant, who had fled his burning hotel with his things and had ended up here.
My colleagues all had the idea to meet at the SS-Haus. I found Piontek there, imperturbable; Fräulein Praxa, prettily dressed, although her wardrobe had gone up in smoke; all cheerful because his neighborhood had been spared, Walser; and, a little shaken up, Isenbeck, whose old neighbor had died of a heart attack right next to him, during the alert, in the dark, without his noticing. Weinrowski had returned some time ago to Oranienburg. As for Asbach, he had sent word: his wife was wounded, he would come as soon as he could. I sent Piontek to tell him to take a few days if he needed to: there wasn’t much chance we could get back to work right away anyway. I sent Fräulein Praxa home, and in the company of Walser and Isenbeck went to the ministry to see what could still be saved. The fire had been contained, but the west wing was still closed; a fireman escorted us through the rubble. Most of the top floor had burned down, as well as the attic: in our offices, only one room, with a file cabinet that had survived the fire, remained, but it had been flooded by the firemen’s hoses. Through a section of collapsed wall you could see part of the ravaged Tiergarten; leaning out, I saw that the Lehrter Bahnhof had also suffered, but the thick smoke that weighed over the city prevented me from seeing farther; in the distance, though, the lines of burned avenues could still be made out. I undertook to move the surviving files with my colleagues, along with a typewriter and a telephone. It was a delicate task, since the fire had burned holes in the floor in places, and the hallways were obstructed with rubble that had to be cleared. When Piontek joined us, we filled the car and I sent him to take everything to the SS-Haus. There I was assigned a temporary storage closet, but nothing more; Brandt was still too overwhelmed to worry about me. Since I had nothing else to do, I dismissed Walser and Isenbeck and had Piontek drop me off at the Eden Hotel, after arranging with him to come pick me up the next morning: without a family, he could just as well sleep in the garage. I went down to the bar and ordered a Cognac. My roommate, the Georgian, wearing a fedora and a white scarf, was playing Mozart on the piano, with a remarkably precise touch. When he stopped, I offered him a drink and chatted a little with him. He was vaguely affiliated with one of those groups of émigrés who were always bustling about the dens of the Auswärtiges Amt and the SS; the name Misha Kedia, when he mentioned it, sounded vaguely familiar. When he learned that I had been in the Caucasus, he leapt up enthusiastically, ordered another round, gave a solemn and interminable toast (although I had never set foot on his side of the mountains), forced me to empty my glass in one swallow, and invited me on the spot to come stay in Tiflis after our forces had freed it, in his ancestral home. Little by little the bar filled up. Around seven o’clock, conversations trailed off, people began to eye the clock over the bar: ten minutes later the sirens started up, then the flak, violent and close. The manager had come to assure us that the bar also served as a shelter; all the hotel clients came downstairs, and soon there was no more room. The ambiance became cheerful and animated: as the first bombs got closer, the Georgian went back to the piano and dove into a jazz tune; women in evening gowns got up to dance, the walls and chandeliers trembled, glasses fell from the bar and shattered, you could scarcely hear the music beneath the explosions, the air pressure became unbearable, I drank, several women, hysterical, laughed, another tried to kiss me, then burst out sobbing. When it was over, the manager handed out a round on the house. I went out: the zoo had been hit, pavilions were burning, again you could see fires pretty much everywhere; I smoked a cigarette, regretting I hadn’t gone to see the animals while there was still time. A section of wall had collapsed; I walked over to it, men were running in every direction, some were carrying shotguns, there was talk of lions and tigers roaming free. Several firebombs had fallen, and beyond the avalanche of bricks, I saw the galleries burning; the large Indian temple had been gutted; inside, a man who was walking next to me explained, they had found the elephants’ corpses torn to pieces by the bombs, as well as a rhinoceros seemingly intact but also dead, maybe from fear. Behind me, most of the buildings on Budapesterstrasse were burning too. I went to lend a hand to the firemen; for hours I helped clear away the rubble; every five minutes a whistle blew, and work stopped so the rescuers could listen for the muffled sounds of trapped people; and we got some of them out alive, wounded or even unhurt. Around midnight I went back to the Eden; the façade was damaged, but the structure had escaped a direct hit; at the bar, the party was still going on. My new Georgian friend forced me to drink several glasses in a row; the uniform Thomas had lent me was covered in filth and soot, but that didn’t prevent women of the highest society from flirting with me; few of them, it seemed, wanted to spend the night alone. The Georgian did so well that I got completely drunk: the next morning, I woke up on my bed, without any memory of climbing up to my room, with my tunic and shirt removed, but not my boots. The Georgian was snoring in the next bed. I cleaned up as well as I could, put on one of my clean uniforms, and gave Thomas’s over to be washed; leaving my sleeping neighbor there, I downed a bad coffee, took an aspirin for my headache, and returned to the Prinz-Albrechtstrasse.