The Kindly Ones

After this meeting I went back to my offices to work. It was pouring outside, I could barely see the trees of the Tiergarten through the downpour whipping the leaf-stripped branches. Around five o’clock, I let Fräulein Praxa go; Walser and Obersturmführer Elias, another specialist sent by Brandt, left at around six o’clock, with Isenbeck. An hour later I went to find Asbach, who was still working. “Are you coming, Untersturmführer? I’ll buy you a drink.” He looked at his watch: “Don’t you think they’re coming back? It’s almost their time.” I looked out the window: it was dark out and still raining a little. “You think—with this weather?” But in the lobby the porter stopped us: “Luftgefahr

Fifteen, meine Herren,” a serious raid on its way. They must have detected the planes ahead of time. I turned to Asbach and said cheerfully: “You were right, after all. What should we do? Take our chances outside or wait in here?” Asbach looked a little worried: “It’s just that I have my wife…”—“In my opinion, you don’t have time to go home. I would have given you Piontek, but he left already.” I thought. “We’d do better to wait here till it passes, you can go home afterward. Your wife will go to a shelter, she’ll be fine.” He hesitated: “Listen, Sturmbannführer, I’ll go call her. She’s pregnant, I don’t want her to worry.”—“Right. I’ll wait for you.” I went out onto the steps and lit a cigarette. The sirens began to wail, and the passersbys on the Königsplatz hurried along, anxious to find a shelter. I wasn’t worried: this annex of the ministry had an excellent bunker. I finished my cigarette as the flak opened up and returned to the lobby. Asbach was running down the stairs: “It’s fine, she’s going to her mother’s. It’s just next door.”—“Did you open the windows?” I asked him. We went down into the shelter, a block of solid concrete, well lit, with chairs, folding cots, and large casksful of water. Not many people were there: most of the civil servants went home early, because of the lines for shopping and the air raids. In the distance, it was beginning to thunder. Then I heard well-spaced, massive explosions: one by one they came closer, like the mammoth footsteps of a giant. At each impact the pressure of the air increased, pressing painfully on our ears. There was an immense roar, very close, I could feel the bunker’s walls tremble. The lights flickered and then went out all at once, plunging the shelter into darkness. A girl yelped in terror. Someone turned on a flashlight; others scraped matches. “Isn’t there an emergency generator?” another voice began, but was interrupted by a deafening explosion; rubble rained down from the ceiling, people cried out. I smelled smoke, the smell of explosives bit into my nose: the building must have been hit. The explosions drew off; through the ringing in my ears, I could dimly hear the throbbing of the squadrons. A woman was crying; a man’s voice grunted out curses; I lit my lighter and headed for the armored door. With the porter, I tried to open it: it was blocked, the stairway must have been obstructed by debris. Three of us rammed it with our shoulders and managed to open it enough to slip outside. Bricks were piled on the stairs; I climbed up to the ground floor, followed by a civil servant: the main entrance door had been blown off its hinges and hurled into the lobby; flames were licking the paneling and the porter’s lodge. I ran up the staircase, down a hallway cluttered with window frames and ripped-off doors, then up another floor, to my offices: I wanted to try to save the most important files. The iron balustrade on the staircase was bent: the pocket of my tunic caught on a piece of twisted metal and ripped open. Upstairs, the offices were burning and I had to turn back. In the hallway, an employee was carrying a pile of files; another joined us, his face pale beneath the black traces of smoke and dust: “Leave that! The west wing is burning. A bomb came through the roof.” I had thought the attack was over, but again squadrons were rumbling in the sky; a series of explosions approached at a frightening speed, we ran for the basement, a massive explosion lifted me up and threw me into the stairway. I must have stayed there for a bit, stunned; I came to, blinded by a glaring white light that turned out to be a little flashlight; I heard Asbach shouting, “Sturmbannführer! Sturmbannführer!”—“I’m all right,” I muttered, getting up. In the glow from the fire in the entryway, I examined my tunic: the metal point had cut through the cloth, it was ruined. “The ministry is burning,” another voice said. “We have to get out.” With some other men we cleared the entrance to the bunker as well as we could, so everyone could climb out. The sirens were still wailing but the flak had fallen silent, the last planes were flying away. It was 8:30, the raid had lasted an hour. Someone pointed to some buckets and we formed a chain to fight the fire: it was laughable, in twenty minutes we had used up the water stored in the basement. The faucets didn’t work, the bombs must have burst the pipes; the porter tried to call the firemen, but the telephone was cut off. I recovered my overcoat from the shelter and went out into the square to examine the damage. The east wing looked intact, aside from the gaping windows, but part of the west wing had collapsed, and the neighboring windows vomited thick black smoke. Our offices must have been burning too. Asbach joined me, his face covered in blood. “Are you hurt?” I asked.—“It’s nothing. A brick.” I was still deafened, my ears were ringing painfully. I looked at the Tiergarten: the trees, lit up by several fires, had been smashed, broken, toppled—it looked like a wood in Flanders after an attack, in the books I read as a child. “I’m going home,” Asbach said. Anguish twisted his bloodstained face. “I want to find my wife.”—“Go on. Be careful of falling walls.” Two fire trucks arrived and maneuvered into position, but there seemed to be a problem with the water. The ministry employees were leaving, many carrying files that they put down a little farther away, on the sidewalks: for half an hour I helped them carry binders and papers; my own offices were unreachable in any case. A strong wind had arisen, and to the north, the east, and farther to the south, beyond the Tiergarten, the nighttime sky glowed red. An officer came over to tell us that the fires were spreading, but the ministry and the neighboring buildings seemed to me to be protected by the bend in the Spree on one side and the Tiergarten and Königsplatz on the other. The Reichstag, dark and closed, didn’t seem damaged.