‘Here’s to the arrival of the Russians and the Americans!’ yells Lukas. After gulping a swig of schnapps, he passes me the bottle.

‘To the victory of the Reich!’ I yell, raising my arm to kill two birds with one stone: to annoy Lukas and pass the bottle to Manfred.

‘To the arrival of the Russians and to the victory of the Reich!’ yells Manfred.

I choke on my schnapps. ‘You’re such an idiot! That’s impossible,’ I spit, and the mouthful of alcohol that went down the wrong way lands on him.

‘What’s impossible?’

‘To toast the arrival of the Russians and the victory of the Reich. It’s one or the other, you have to choose sides!’

‘But…but why do I have to choose? You’re brothers, and if Lukas is for the Russians and you’re for the Reich, that means both are possible at the same time, doesn’t it? You…you’re not on the same side?’ Manfred whines, with that hangdog expression he gets whenever he says or does anything stupid.

He is really thick. Hell, he clearly didn’t understand a word in our History and Politics classes at the Napola. And has no idea about the present situation. (He still thinks we’re brothers because we’re too lazy to tell him the truth. It would take too long to tell him the whole story and he wouldn’t get it anyway.)

‘Shut up!’ interrupts Lukas. ‘You’re both as stupid as each other. And you more that anything,’ he adds, pointing to me. ‘You’re talking shit. When is it finally going to sink into your head, your puny Skullface head, that the victory of the Reich is impossible?’

I’m about to respond but he stops me. He suddenly breaks into a huge smile and proclaims, ‘Come on, we’re not fighting today, it’s a celebration! Happy 1945!’

He’s right. We can have a truce for the 31st of December.

‘Happy 1945!’ I grab the bottle back from Manfred and take another swig of schnapps, which goes down fine this time.

‘Happy 1945,’ repeats Manfred.

Yes, it’s New Year’s Eve, and we’re doing fine. Even if the noise of the bombings is getting louder and louder and we have to shout to be heard over the din. The sky is blazing red. It’s almost as if the explosions had been arranged especially to create a festive atmosphere.

It’s midday, not midnight. We’re having the toast now, because there’s no guarantee we’ll be alive at midnight to see in the new year. We’ve got schnapps, cigarettes and a piece of bacon, a sausage and boiled potatoes. We’re lucky; it’s a good meal, even if the potatoes taste like soap. The schnapps warms us up, the cigarettes stop us from feeling hungry, and we’re so comfortable in an apartment.

Yes, we did find one. When we left the U-Bahn, Lukas asked Manfred, ‘Do you know how to get to your place? Do you remember your address?’

‘Yes! Yes, of course! Number 1, Reichstrasse. It’s this way.’

Manfred’s eyes lit up, as if they were lit by those little Christmas tree candles you see in normal times. As if suddenly the word ‘Mummy’ was twinkling in his left eye, and ‘Daddy’ in his right. For him, going back to his home was like finding his parents. He hadn’t dared do it alone, but with us he felt up to facing the danger. He was imagining that, once we got there, he would see his mummy in the kitchen preparing him a delicious snack, and his daddy in the living room, welcoming him. ‘So, son, how was your last term at school?’

Lukas and I made sure we didn’t tell him that there was absolutely no chance that he’d see his parents again. And probably not his apartment, given how few buildings were still standing. We had first to make sure that he took us there. And that’s what he did.

Of course, the apartment had been bombed, gutted. The glass in the windows was broken and a thick grey layer of plaster dust covered everything, as if a nearby volcano had erupted. But the roof and floors were still intact, only slightly damaged, just a few holes here and there that were easy to mend. There was no more central heating or electricity, but it was good enough for us. At least it was for Lukas and me. Manfred, however, was in shock.

‘I can’t believe it! I can’t believe it!’ he kept saying as he took in the damage.

All his special belongings had disappeared—his toys, his drawings, most of his clothes, the furniture in his room—as well as the crockery, knick-knacks, sheets. There was almost nothing left. The fact that his parents weren’t there didn’t dawn on him until later, which meant we didn’t have to put up with the floods of tears we were dreading. He started looking for a letter, a note, that his mummy and daddy might have left somewhere to tell him where they were. But there was nothing at all. Zilch. To cheer him up, Lukas assured him that the letter must have blown out of one of the broken windows.

Lukas and I checked out the apartment. A kitchen. The cupboards were empty, of course, the hotplates on the stove didn’t work, but the room had potential. After all, the kitchen is where you prepare food. (We just had to find some.) A living room. Two big armchairs, which the looters must have decided were too heavy to carry, still had pride of place. The upholstery had been ripped apart—they probably thought money or jewels were hidden there—but you could sit on them just fine. Our poor bums, sore from the subway tracks and the cement steps of the shelters, were more than happy to make contact with this new softness. Two bedrooms, one for the parents, one for Manfred. And finally, miraculously, wonder of wonders, a toilet! Dusty but clean. And, to top it off, a toilet flush that worked! It felt like a palace.

We argued over who would have the honour to christen the dream toilet. I won. All of a sudden, my gut began to express its suffering. I started farting so loudly that, under attack from such lethal gas, my rivals conceded defeat.

I locked myself in the cosy hideaway for a whole hour, despite Lukas and Manfred screaming and pounding on the door. Then there was another argument when I wanted to wipe my bum with the pages from some of the books I’d found on the collapsed shelves in the living room.

‘Are you kidding?’ shouted Lukas, blocking my way to the toilet. ‘We’re not still at the Napola, in case you hadn’t noticed.’

‘They’re my father’s books,’ protested Manfred.

‘Your father’s books?’ repeated Lukas, suddenly wary.

‘Yes.’

‘What did your father do?’

‘He worked at the Ministry of—’

‘Wait a minute.’ Lukas cut him off, and went to get some of the books. ‘Shit! Shit! And more shit!’ he cursed, as he inspected each one.

He made two piles. He chucked the first pile on the ground in the toilet and the second next to the stove in the living room.

‘There you go, you can wipe your bum with them. They’re Nazi books. Especially that one,’ he added, pointing to the book on top. ‘The rest of them will be fuel for our stove and keep us warm. A little bit of book burning will bring back happy memories, right?’ he said with a nasty smile.

The book on the top of the pile was Mein Kampf.

I hesitated for a while. I couldn’t use that to wipe myself. It was beyond me. I could still hear the voice of the Heimführer, who used to read us extracts in the dining hall. I was frightened the words would peel off the paper and sting me in the bum in retaliation. I sneaked the book to the bottom of the pile, hoping that perhaps we wouldn’t get through the whole supply of paper.

After the fight about the toilet, then about the toilet paper, came the fight about the bedrooms. Claiming the advantage of age, Lukas nabbed the parents’ room. Insisting on having his old room, Manfred suggested I share it with him. No, thank you. I decided that I could stick the two armchairs together to make a fine bed. It was okay to live together in an apartment but sleeping in the same room as Manfred would remind me too much of the Napola.

Except that…once it was dark, and the sirens started wailing, and the bombardments came unremittingly, and the floor trembled, and the ceiling cracked, Manfred and I, without a second thought, fled into Lukas’s room. He didn’t send us away. The three of us cuddled up together in the big bed. Holding hands. Tightly. But there was no way we were going to sleep, and we quickly worked out that we’d be safer in the cellar.

We stay in the apartment during the day, and at night we never leave the cellar. Unfortunately it’s not a private cellar just for us, as we’d assumed by the absence of anyone else on the other floors. The neighbours are well and truly here; they live in the cellar all the time, and the lack of space is a real pain. Here we go again: sardines in a tin, a dormitory where everyone disturbs everyone else and no one sleeps.

Manfred is overjoyed because he’s met up with a woman named Frau Betstein, who is a friend of his parents.

‘My darling Manfred! My sweetheart, you’re alive! What a miracle. How you’ve grown.’

Grown? Wow, he must have been a total dwarf before coming to the Napola.

‘Well, what do you know, your parents gave me a letter for you. Yes, yes, don’t worry, they’re fine. They went to the country while it was still possible. They were going to come and get you, so there must have been a hold-up. But there’s no need to be anxious, I’ll keep an eye on you now.’

So Manfred ended up getting the letter he’d busted a gut looking for. Now he spends the whole time reading it and re-reading it, snuggled up with Frau Betstein, who, as the days pass—the nights, I should say—replaces his mother. She comforts him, looks after him, sorts out his clothes, shares her food rations with him. (The first night, idiot Manfred ate her food right under our noses, but the next day, back at the apartment, Lukas and I sorted him out. Now he knows that he has to hang on to whatever the old lady gives him and share it with us.)

There’s quite a system set up in the cellar now. Everyone has sorted out their own spot, their living space. The most organised among them brought quilts, pillows, chairs. Like Manfred, people pass their time reading letters or looking at photos. Sometimes, when they have paper, they write. Letters? What’s the point? There’s no mail anymore. And they talk, a lot. Apart from one old man, there are only women, so it’s non-stop chatter.

They’re all crazy in this underground crowd. Living down here rots your brain in the end. There is Frau Diesdorf, for example, who keeps a bathtowel on her head all the time. She’s already ugly, but that turban thing stuck on her head like a beehive hairdo doesn’t help.

‘Frau Diesdorf, excuse me,’ asked a suitcase neighbour one day. (‘Suitcase neighbour’ because people use their luggage either as seats or to mark the dividing lines between their personal areas.) ‘Why do you keep that towel on your head? Just so you know that, if it’s because of lice, it’s completely useless, it doesn’t prevent contamination and—’

‘I do not have lice! I’m clean,’ spluttered the offended Frau Diesdorf. ‘Not like some. Let it be known that this towel is protecting me from explosions!’

So they had a fierce argument; who knows what it was about, they got so worked up.

Another woman, Frau Evingen, carries around her son’s artificial leg all the time. She claims it’s her talisman. Don’t even try to understand.

My suitcase neighbour is Herr Hauptman, an old bloke whose breath stinks. ‘If a bomb ever hits you, my boy, don’t forget to lean forward.’

‘Why?’

‘So your lungs don’t explode.’

I’m more likely to die asphyxiated by your bad breath than to get hit by a bomb.

I hate this cellar. But Lukas and Manfred are coping okay. I’ve already explained why that’s the case for Manfred. For Lukas, it’s because his suitcase neighbour is a girl the same age as him. Her name is Ute Oberham. They’ve got the hots for each other and never stop making eyes at one another. They’re always taking advantage of the close quarters to touch each other’s hands, knees, thighs; and then they go as red as beetroots, and look ridiculous. The girl’s mother ended up cottoning on to their goings-on. She’s a huge woman—I don’t see why her fat hasn’t disappeared at the same time the rations have. One night, Frau Oberham swapped places with her daughter. Now Lukas is squashed between her spare tyres and the wall. Serves him right.

One woman is different from the others. She keeps herself apart as much as possible, given the lack of room. She doesn’t speak—or only rarely. She is beautiful. I hardly ever see her standing up, but I can tell she’s tall, blonde, and has beautiful blue eyes. (It’s been a while since I’ve seen all the characteristics of the Nordic race embodied in one person.) Despite her threadbare clothes, she’s elegant. She spends her time looking at a single photo. Sometimes a tear rolls down her cheek. It must be a photo of her husband, who is no doubt dead. Or it’s her brother. It couldn’t be her son; she looks too young to have a son at the front, unlike most of the other old chooks here.

She often stares at me, tries to smile at me, but can’t, and then there are more tears. I have no idea why she looks at me like that. It reminds me of the time when women were all over me because of my angel face. But that’s finished now. I don’t have an angel face any longer. I just have a dirty, pale, tired face. Sometimes I like the blonde woman gazing at me. It makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside. But often it makes me uneasy. Luckily she doesn’t persevere; she ends up returning to her photo.

When the old women try to talk to her, she politely avoids engaging with them, replying only yes or no. The others have finally understood that it’s better to leave her in peace in her corner.

Back in the apartment, we try to get sorted. Manfred does the cleaning. Even though we tell him there’s no point, since the dust comes straight back, he insists. Too bad, if he wants to play at being one of the Trümmerjungen, the ‘rubble kids’. He also washes our clothes when the water isn’t cut off. Lukas burned his Napola uniform in the stove. He was ecstatic that day, dancing around the fire, yelling, ‘Burn, filthy rubbish! Burn!’

He found a pair of pants, a sweater and a shirt among the remaining clothes that belonged to Manfred’s father. They’re too big, but even if they fitted him I reckon he’s less good-looking out of uniform. He’s less good-looking now anyway. It must be adolescence. He’s not as fine-featured: his nose and lips have flattened out, and his jaw has broadened. Since he can’t shave anymore, there are darkish patches of odd whiskers on his cheeks and upper lip. He’s even got a few pimples on his forehead. I bet he’d be rejected if he had to go through the selection process again. Everyone in the cellar would be rejected, except the tall blonde woman.

There’s no change of clothes for me. I don’t fit into Manfred’s clothes. But he’s washed my uniform and darned the holes, so I’m almost presentable. It’s just the lice that are driving me crazy.

Manfred is trying his hand at cooking and doing all right. He knows how to spice up rotten potatoes, preparing them in different ways, depending on what’s around. He also makes some kind of semolina slop and a beetroot soup. When I see him with his little tea-towel tied around his waist like an apron, singing as he prepares our grub, I realise how hard it must have been for him at the Napola.

It’s up to Lukas and me to scavenge for food. It’s quite a process and we have to be strategic. First we have to listen to the neighbours at night in the cellar, to what they’re whispering, so as not to be heard. Some of them know, for example, about such and such a deserted shop or warehouse. In which case, Lukas and I run off first thing in the morning, instead of going back up to the apartment. The deal is: first come, first served. If it’s not too far away, we go by foot. Our training at the Napola means that we run faster than the Berliners. And we know how to fight: manners have gone out the window now; everyone fights to the death for food. When the shop is too far away, we catch the tram. Normally you need a special transport card, so most of the obedient Berliners don’t take the tram unless they have a card. But we couldn’t care less. As if a ticket controller is more dangerous than a mortar shell, a fine more deadly than a bomb!

If we haven’t gleaned any tips from the neighbours, Lukas sets off early in the morning on the lookout for inside information. He listens, watches, spies. If someone is running, it means he’s got a tip-off, so all Lukas has to do is follow him. That’s how he heard that a Luftwaffe freight car had been abandoned with all sorts of food left inside. Lukas brought back tins of jam, coffee—the real stuff, not ersatz coffee—bottles of wine, even loaves of bread and chocolate. He looked like he’d just been in a boxing match, his face all swollen, but he was thrilled and pleased with himself. And rightly so.

What a feast we had that day. We had to make sure we didn’t eat it all at once. We put some of the jam aside and I went out and swapped the wine for margarine and potatoes. I’m in charge of bartering.

In the evening, as soon as the air-raid siren goes off, we lock our precious things in a suitcase and head down to the cellar. Lukas sits on the case so no one steals it. But I still worry and keep an eye out. You never know, part of his flirting with Ute might involve him bribing her fat mother with chocolate.

I must say, sometimes I feel like giving something to the tall blonde woman. She’s so thin. She obviously doesn’t care about getting food, doesn’t give a damn if she dies of hunger or of anything else.

One day Lukas played dress-ups. He put on one of Manfred’s mother’s dresses (a floral dress that hadn’t been stolen). He scrunched up paper into balls to make fake breasts, used coal as eyeliner, and tied up his hair—he has long hair now, like us all. I thought he looked funny, but Manfred was not amused. He burst into tears and made Lukas get changed straightaway. But he didn’t have time because there was an air-raid warning and we had to rush to the cellar.

In the dark, old Hauptman put his hand on Lukas’s bum, mistaking him for a new girl.

In between hunting for food and the long breaks to recover from the sleepless nights in the cellar, time passes strangely. We don’t think about the future. Well…

On the Reichstrasse, and elsewhere in Berlin, it’s chaos. Hundreds of cars are heading off to the west, but their path is often blocked by tarpaulin-covered carts filled with refugees, or else they’re gunned down by Russian fighter bombers.

In the cellars, the rumour is growing: The Russians are coming!