The officers of the Reichsführung all looked a little wild: a number of them hadn’t slept all night; many had ended up homeless, and several had lost someone in their family. In the lobby and the stairways, inmates in striped uniforms, guarded by some Totenkopf-SS, were sweeping the floor, nailing up boards, repainting the walls. Brandt asked me to help some officers draw up an estimation of the damage for the Reichsführer, by contacting the municipal authorities. The work was simple enough: each of us chose a sector—victims, housing, government buildings, infrastructure, industry—and contacted the proper authorities to note down their figures. I was set up with an office that had a telephone and a directory; a few lines still worked, and I put Fräulein Praxa there—she had unearthed a new outfit somewhere—so she could call the hospitals. To get him out from underfoot, I decided to send Isenbeck, with the salvaged files, to join his boss Weinrowski in Oranienburg, and asked Piontek to drive him there. Walser hadn’t come. When Fräulein Praxa managed to reach a hospital, I asked for the number of dead and wounded they had received; when she had made a list of three or four institutions we couldn’t reach by phone, I sent a driver and an orderly to collect the data. Asbach arrived around noon, his features drawn, making a visible effort to look composed. I took him to the mess for sandwiches and tea. Slowly, between mouthfuls, he told me what had happened: The first night, the building where his wife had joined her mother had taken a direct hit and had collapsed onto the shelter, which had only partly held up. Asbach’s mother-in-law had apparently been killed immediately or had at least died quickly; his wife had been buried alive and they hadn’t been able to free her till the next morning, unhurt aside from a broken arm, but incoherent; she had had a miscarriage during the night, and still hadn’t recovered her wits; she went from a childlike babbling to hysterical tears. “I’m going to have to bury her mother without her,” Asbach said sadly as he sipped his tea. “I’d have liked to wait a little, for her to recover, but the morgues are overflowing and the medical authorities are afraid of epidemics. Apparently all the bodies that haven’t been reclaimed in twenty-four hours will be buried in mass graves. It’s terrible.” I tried my best to console him, but, I have to admit, I’m not very good at that sort of thing: my words about his future conjugal happiness must have sounded pretty hollow. Still it seemed to comfort him. I sent him home with a driver from the Reichsführung, promising I’d find him a van for the funeral the next day.
The Tuesday raid, even though it had involved only half as many aircraft as Monday’s, promised to turn out to be even more disastrous. The working-class neighborhoods, especially Wedding, had been hit hard. By the end of the afternoon we had gathered enough information to form a brief report: we counted about 2,000 dead, with hundreds more beneath the rubble; 3,000 buildings burned or destroyed; and 175,000 people homeless, of whom 100,000 had already been able to leave the city, either for surrounding villages or other cities in Germany. Around six o’clock we dismissed all the people who weren’t doing essential work; I stayed a little longer, and was still on the road, with a driver from the garage, when the sirens began to wail again. I decided not to continue on to the Eden: the bar-shelter didn’t inspire much confidence in me, and I preferred to avoid a repetition of the drinking bout of the night before. I ordered the driver to go around the zoo to reach the large bunker. A crowd was pressed at the doors, which were too narrow and too few; cars came and parked at the foot of the concrete façade; in front of them, in a reserved area, dozens of baby carriages stretched out in concentric circles. Inside, soldiers and policemen barked out orders for people to move upstairs; at each floor a crowd formed, no one wanted to go higher up, women were screaming, while their children ran through the crowd playing war games. We were directed to the third floor, but the benches, lined up as in a church, were already crowded, and I went to lean against the concrete wall. My driver had disappeared in the crowd. Soon afterward the .88s on the roof opened fire: the entire immense structure vibrated, pitching like a ship on the high seas. People, thrown against their neighbors, shouted or groaned. The lights dimmed but didn’t go out. In recesses and in the darkness of the spiral staircases leading from floor to floor, teenage couples clung to each other, intertwined; some even seemed to be making love—you could hear through the explosions moans of a different tone from those of panic-stricken housewives; old people protested indignantly, the Schupos bellowed, ordering people to remain seated. I wanted to smoke but it was forbidden. I looked at the woman sitting on the bench in front of me: she kept her head lowered, I could just see her blond, exceptionally thick, shoulder-length hair. A bomb exploded nearby, making the bunker tremble and throwing up a cloud of concrete dust. The young woman raised her head and I recognized her right away: she was the one I met sometimes in the morning, on the trolley. She too recognized me and a gentle smile lit up her face while she held out her white hand to me: “Hello! I was worried about you.”—“Why?” With the flak and the explosions we could barely hear each other, I crouched down and bent toward her. “You weren’t at the pool Sunday,” she said into my ear. “I was afraid something had happened to you.” Sunday was already another life, it seemed to me; but it was only three days ago. “I was in the country. Does the pool still exist?” She smiled again: “I don’t know.” Another powerful explosion shook the structure and she seized my hand and grasped it strongly; when it was over she let it go, excusing herself. Despite the yellowish light and the dust, I had the impression she was blushing slightly. “Forgive me,” I asked her, “what is your name?”—“Helene,” she replied. “Helene Anders.” I introduced myself. She worked at the press agency of the Auswärtiges Amt; her office, like most of the ministry, had been destroyed Monday night, but her parents’ house, in Alt Moabit, where she lived, was still standing. “Before this raid, in any case. And you?” I laughed: “I had offices at the Ministry of the Interior, but they burned down. For now, I’m at the SS-Haus.” We continued chatting till the end of the alert. She had gone on foot to Charlottenburg to comfort a homeless girlfriend; the sirens had caught her on the way back, and she had taken refuge there, in the bunker. “I didn’t think they’d come back a third night in a row,” she said softly.—“To tell the truth, I didn’t either,” I replied, “but I’m happy it’s given us the chance to see each other again.” I said that to be polite; but I realized it wasn’t just to be polite. This time, she blushed visibly; her tone still remained frank and clear: “Me too. Our trolley will probably be out of service for a while.” When the lights came back on, she got up and brushed off her coat. “If you like,” I said, “I can take you home. If I still have a car,” I added, laughing. “Don’t say no. It’s not very far away.”
I found my driver next to his vehicle, looking very upset: it no longer had any windows, and the whole side had been crushed in by the car next to it, propelled by the blast of an explosion. Of the baby carriages, only scattered debris remained on the square. The zoo was burning again, you could hear atrocious sounds, the bellowing, trumpeting, lowing of dying animals. “The poor beasts,” Helene murmured, “they don’t know what’s happening to them.” The driver was only thinking about his car. I went to find some Schupos so they could help us free it. The passenger door was jammed; I had Helene get in the back, then slipped in over the driver’s seat. The ride turned out to be a little complicated, we had to take a detour through the Tiergarten, because of the blocked streets, but I was happy to see, passing by Flensburgerstrasse, that my building had survived. Alt Moabit, aside from a few stray bombs, had been more or less spared, and I dropped Helene off in front of her small building. “Now,” I said as I left her, “I know where you live. If you don’t mind, I’ll come visit when things have calmed down a little.”—“I’d be delighted,” she replied with again that very beautiful, calm smile she had. Then I went back to the Eden Hotel, where I found nothing but a gaping shell in flames. Three bombs had gone through the roof and nothing was left. Fortunately the bar had held up, the hotel residents had escaped with their lives and had been evacuated. My Georgian neighbor was drinking Cognac straight from the bottle with some other now-homeless people; as soon as he saw me, he made me take a swig. “I’ve lost everything! Everything! What I miss most are the shoes. Four new pairs!”—“Do you have a place to go?” He shrugged: “I’ve got some friends not too far away. On Rauchstrasse.”—“Come on, I’ll drive you there.” The house that the Georgian pointed out had no more windows but seemed still inhabited. I waited for a few minutes while he went in to see what he could find out. He returned looking cheerfuclass="underline" “Perfect! They’re going to Marienbad, I’ll leave with them. Will you come in and have a drink?” I refused politely, but he insisted: “Come on! For the pososhok.” I felt drained, exhausted. I wished him good luck and left without further ado. At the Staatspolizei, an Untersturmführer told me that Thomas had found refuge at Schellenberg’s place. I had a bite to eat, had a bed set up for me in the improvised dormitory, and fell asleep.