Make your present something useful, give a coffin!

The slogan for Christmas 1944. It’s written everywhere on the walls all over Berlin, as well as in the U-Bahn where we’re holed up like rats.

For five months now, we’ve only seen underground Berlin. Only occasionally do we sneak out above ground, where there are fires, mountains of rubble, buildings that have been destroyed or are in ruins. The air is clogged with plaster dust that sticks to your skin, sifts into your mouth and gets encrusted on your teeth. It’s impossible to get rid of and makes you cough and spit. Endless columns of smoke climb into the blazing sky to form dense black clouds that clump together and never dissipate. It’s as if the light itself is dirty, or there’s no more light at all.

The Third Reich was supposed to take us out of darkness. Instead it seems to have thrown us right inside.

When Lukas dragged me out of bed to flee the Napola, and told me we were heading for Berlin, I was thrilled. At last I’d see my country’s capital city. But I couldn’t work out why we were walking in the opposite direction from everyone else; why the Germans were deserting the city, marching night and day, with their suitcases, exhausted, their faces blank, like crazed sleepwalkers; why we’d come across ditches filled with a mess of weapons, kitchenware and horse carcasses. I realised soon enough that it was a massive rout, every man for himself in a terrible debacle.

So it ended up being nothing like the tourist trip I had imagined.

And we had to keep clear of the Volkssturm. Somewhere along the way we came across a group of Jungmannen who were organising their own resistance at the edge of a village. They were piling up tree trunks, hoping it would serve as a blockade against a tank. Their leader, about fifteen (the same age as Lukas), saw we were wearing the Napola uniform and wanted to enlist our help. I would happily have joined his unit. Why not? I still wanted to fight to defend my country, to try to save it.

Lukas stopped me. ‘Come off it, Skullface, forget all the bullshit they’ve indoctrinated you with. Save yourself, that’s all there is left. And cut the crap.’

Then he knocked out the leader of the group and when the others, scarcely older than me, tried to protest—even though they had no weapons—I went up to them. ‘That was a close shave for you lot. He could have decapitated him or stabbed him to death. He’s already killed four Jungmannen, you know. He’s a serial killer!’

I left them standing there, half-hidden under their oversized helmets, their eyes as round as saucers, and ran off to catch up to Lukas.

Since our departure he’s taken his role as big brother very seriously. He decides everything. I prefer him like this to the zombie he was at the Napola over the last few weeks, but I’m pretty sick of him ordering me around.

But I should never have followed him to Berlin. Lukas wants to be there when the Russians arrive. He says they’re his friends, which means they’re my enemies, doesn’t it?

He’s started to call me Skullface again, so I’m getting him back by calling him Lukas, when he’s now insisting on his Polish name, Lucjan.

In the subway. We’re surrounded by women, children and old people, all squashed up together like sardines in a tin. There are mattresses and pillows between the train tracks and coathangers with clothes—suits, dresses, coats—hanging from the train signal cables. It’s giving Lukas the creeps.

‘What the hell are they on about, the Krauts? As for their obsession with hygiene and appearance…What do they think is on the cards—a dinner dance at 8 p.m. tonight?’

He’s right: the coathangers are just taking up precious space. What’s the use of ironed clothes if they’re covered in ash? What’s the use of a change of clothes when you can’t even wash yourself? During the blackouts all those coathangers on the cables look like ghosts, or hanged people swinging above our heads. But, when you think about it, the nicely ironed clothes on hangers help to maintain a bit of dignity around here. Lukas doesn’t get it, of course. And I hate the way he criticises my compatriots.

‘At least the Krauts are clean,’ I snap. ‘Not like the Polish pigs.’

And the proof is that the filth and lack of sanitation doesn’t upset Lukas as much as me. He doesn’t give a damn about having torn, dirty, stinking clothes. He does his business in any old place, even in the disgusting toilets, which are blocked, covered in shit and all manner of matter, liquid and solid, the composition and provenance of which I do not want to know. I still manage to piss okay, but taking a shit is difficult. I’m constipated most of the time. And, if I do manage to push out a tiny turd, I hop around stark naked because there’s no toilet paper and my bum gets so itchy when it’s dirty. In the end it’s probably better we have so little to eat—we don’t have to go through the toilet business if there’s not much to get rid of.

Anyway, so much for Christmas spirit. I couldn’t care less about Christmas. At the Napola, that was when we celebrated the winter solstice and I don’t miss those all-night candle vigils in the snow.

‘Do Jews celebrate Christmas?’ I ask Lukas.

‘They celebrate Hanukkah. They have a lit candle in a candelabra for eight days and at the end of the week the children receive presents.’

Right, so it’s almost the same deal. Candles in a candelabra, or tinsel on a pine tree, plus the presents—it’s six of one, half-a-dozen of the other.

A little girl sitting next to us must have been listening and asks her mother, ‘Will we have roast turkey for dinner? And will Father Christmas come down into the subway?’

With a forced smile, her mother ruffles the girl’s hair. ‘We won’t be having roast turkey, my darling.’

She looks furtively at her suitcase where, under a pile of linen, she’s hidden a loaf of canned bread and a thermos of tea that she managed to grab as she rushed out of her apartment. ‘But Father Christmas will come, I’m sure. Look at all the messages on the walls to show him the way.’

What a lie. Just like outside on the walls of buldings, all the scribblings here in the subway are messages left by families to a brother, a son or a husband returning from the front, so he’ll know where to find them.

Why doesn’t she tell the truth? That this year Father Christmas will look redder than usual, Bolshevik-red, blood-red. That he’ll turn up on a tank, not a sled, that he’ll have weapons in his sack and that he’ll shoot anything that moves?

The little girl has got my mouth watering with all her talk of roast turkey. It’s torture: I’m salivating, I’ve got cramps in my stomach, I can picture that turkey before my eyes, steam coming off it, making my nostrils twitch. I could take revenge on her by spilling the beans about the truth of our situation. I could.

We can speak freely now. There’s no longer any danger of being denounced for your opinions, or your nationality, religion or whatever. Lukas could stand on the tracks and yell through a megaphone that he was Jewish and I don’t think anyone would react. I’m not a hundred per cent sure, but I don’t feel as paranoid about it as before.

On the other hand, I’m having trouble with a few new habits. For example, no one raises their arm to salute anymore. It’s all over. No one says Heil Hitler! That’s actually bad form. Instead, they say, Bleib übrig! Which means ‘Stay alive’. I still sometimes instinctively go to raise my arm. Lukas, who anticipates my reflex even before I move, grabs my wrist and forces me to stay still.

‘Stop acting like a fucking robot!’ he says, glaring at me.

The Berliners don’t have any respect. Their graffiti is making a joke out of everything. They’ve turned the initials LSR, for example, which mean Luftschutzraum (air-raid shelter), into Lernt schnell russisch, ‘Learn Russian fast’.

I’m scared to death.

Before we ended up in the subway, we stayed for a few weeks in the zoo’s bunker. It’s one of the biggest air-raid shelters, a fortress of reinforced concrete with a battery of anti-aircraft defences on the roof. It’s a huge safe haven for countless Berliners.

One day I wanted to get out. After all, we were at the zoo and I’d never visited a zoo. At first Lukas said no, then, as I kept asking, he seemed tempted, too, so up we went. It was a quick visit. Not because of the bombing raids—it was calm for the time being—but because all that was left of the animals were corpses. The cages were broken, smashed, and the monkeys, bears, gorillas were all dead, as if they’d taken part in some violent battle. The corpses of the monkeys were totally butchered. Lukas and I realised that we’d already had our visit to the zoo without knowing it. In our stomachs. The evening before, a woman had shared a big piece of meat with us. We’d feasted on it without wondering where it had come from.

We had to leave the zoo’s bunker because of the toilets. The hygiene was disgusting, but, worse than that, people would go there to commit suicide. That’s where my constipation started. It’s pretty hard to do your business when swinging right in front of your eyes are the feet of someone who has just hanged himself.

Before that we were in the bunker at the Anhalter train station. Made of reinforced concrete, it has three storeys above ground and two underground. The walls are four and a half metres thick. In the beginning it was quite comfortable. There were big benches so people could sit down, like in a dining hall, and a good supply of tinned sardines. But the sardines didn’t last long and the benches were turned into firewood to keep us warm. Then the water supply was cut off and we were all unbearably thirsty.

The zoo’s bunker and the station’s bunker are connected to the U-bahn by five kilometres of tunnels, so you can walk through without danger.

Guess what we found on one of the steps of the station bunker? Sitting there like a Christmas present, or rather a Christmas reject…Manfred. Shrivelled up, wizened, even smaller and frailer than he was at the Napola, his limbs no thicker than a spider’s legs. He was like an old man, his hair, eyebrows and eyelashes covered in white dust, and his skin gouged with wrinkles from the ingrained plaster particles.

Their platoon leader had, of course, abandoned them. While the rest of the kids had managed as best they could, Manfred had just sat down on his step and hadn’t moved. For five months! He didn’t try to go home, find his parents, nothing. He stayed there, immobile, waiting. He had only survived thanks to passing women who gave him food.

He didn’t recognise me. When I went up to him and tapped him on the shoulder, his arms shot up in defence, as if I was going to hit him. Unbelievable, he thought I was a Russian soldier. Once he recognised me, he jumped up and hugged me. ‘Konrad! My Konrad!’ he shouted. ‘Is it really you? I’m saved! I’m saved!’

‘I knew you had a girlfriend, Skullface!’ said Lukas, when he saw the little dickhead clinging to me.

So now we’re stuck with him. Manfred, our ball and chain. As soon as one of us goes anywhere, he starts panicking, shaking all over. But things are also on a more even keel: Lukas orders me around, and I order Manfred around.

What strikes me the most in this devastated Berlin is not the bombing, or the ruins, or the filth, and not even the defeatist attitude, which I find very disappointing.

It’s the women. There are so many of them, everywhere. They’ve taken charge of the city. They’re running it. I’m not used to being surrounded by women. At the Napola, apart from the cooks, whom we scarcely glimpsed, there were only men. I have vague memories of the nurses in Steinhöring, much stronger ones of the Brown Sisters—those bitches—and of the prostitutes of Poznan. The women I have been around more recently, and whom I remember the best, are the warden bitches from hell at Kalish.

But the Berlin women are neither prostitutes nor bitches.

No more three Ks. Now the women have taken over from the men—with confidence, determination, energy and efficiency. They’re not tall and blonde, like we’d been taught in Biology at the Napola. With few exceptions, they are dark, petite, strong—muscular from carrying sacks of coal and heavy suitcases in which they have packed all their belongings before descending into the shelters. And they’re brave. When there’s no more water, they’re the ones who risk their lives outside at the water pumps. They’re not afraid of the bombs. They queue for hours in front of shops for a few grams of margarine.

There’s still a little bit of the three Ks about them: some just can’t help cleaning. Their nickname is the Trümmerfrauen, ‘the women of the rubble’. In between the bombings they form a human chain to clear the rocks and paving stones, which they load into buckets. And they’re always sweeping, sweeping—debris, dust, shit. They’re creating order in a city that is falling to pieces.

The other day one of them caught Manfred and me. She’d got it into her head to wash us. She was suddenly obsessed with the idea. ‘It’s simply unacceptable to be this grubby!’ she exclaimed, nabbing us by the collar, like a lioness grabbing her cubs by the skin of their necks.

With a scrap of cloth that she dipped in a jar of boiling water, she rubbed our faces, hands and armpits. She even tried to take our pants off to wash our bums. Manfred let her, but I gave her a kick and ran off.

Another woman had a go at Lukas in a shelter. Not about washing him; she couldn’t have grabbed a big guy like him. But she’d heard him swearing. Without hesitation, she slapped him across the face. ‘There are children here,’ she snapped. ‘You watch your language, my boy!’

‘I’m sorry, madam,’ Lukas said, his eyes lowered.

The other day, I saw a woman cutting up a horse killed by a mortar shell; she was putting the pieces in jars filled with vinegar. She gave me one. We cooked some of the meat and had three meals in a row from it. Horse is easier to chew and digest than monkey. Less tasty, too.

I’m sick of the subway. Sick of shelters. Sick of being underground. Sick of all these people we don’t know. Sick of following their rules. For once, I’m with Lukas: after Kalish and the Napola, we’ve had enough of communal living. We want to be by ourselves and make our own rules, that is, no rules.

So we decide to leave and set ourselves up in an abandoned house. There are plenty of them. Outside, Berlin is deserted. Who cares if we have to watch out for bombs and mortar shells, as well as the crime squads of the SS and the Military Field Police, who arrest individuals and forcibly enlist them in improvised military units. Nothing like the Hitler Youth groups we passed when we fled the Napola. These guys here are hardcore. They string up anyone who is reluctant from the trees along the road, or from lampposts, and they hang a sign round their necks: ‘I was a coward.’