The Kindly Ones

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.