The night of the Russians.

A sleepless night.

We’ve all taken up our positions in the cellar again, except the suitcases aren’t there to mark out our separate spaces. Now we want to feel the physical presence of our neighbours, their warmth, breathing, trembling. The suitcases have been piled up in front of the door like a barricade. A useless barricade. It’s merely psychological, but it makes us feel better all the same.

It’s the 27th of April, 1945, and I keep thinking about turning nine a week ago. My birthday present arrived a week late: the Ruskis.

It’s quiet tonight. Too quiet. Only a few bombs. The walls aren’t shaking, but we are. No chatting, no gossip. Not a word. Everyone has their own idea of what will happen. Frau Diesdorf looks like she’s flat out thinking under her bathtowel. Frau Evingen holds her artificial leg fiercely to her. Frau Betstein keeps patting Manfred’s head over and over. The fat woman and Ute are clutching each other. Although Herr Hauptman is seated, he’s holding himself to attention, as upright as a mortar shell. Lukas won’t stop looking at me, trying to give me an encouraging smile, but it’s more like a grimace. It feels as if he’s more worried about me than Ute. The blonde woman, as usual, won’t take her eyes off her photo.

I think the scenario we’re each imagining for ourselves is not that different: we’re going to die, all of us. Except perhaps Lukas, since he’s not German.

At 5 a.m., the roof suddenly starts to vibrate, waking us from the daze we’d all slipped into. The sound of engines in the street above. They stop, probably parked along the footpath. A strong smell of petrol reaches us. Then silence again.

Frau Diesdorf cracks first. ‘I’m going to see what’s going on!’

She stands up and removes the towel, which is a first. Some sort of coquettish gesture towards the new occupiers? Or is she planning on committing suicide by exposing her bare head to the bombs? She leaves and fifteen minutes later we hear her charging down the staircase in a rush. She shuts the door behind her, pulls the bolt across to lock it, and hastily rebuilds the suitcase barricade.

‘SO?’ ask all the other women together.

‘They’re here! In the next cellar. I think all hell’s broken loose.’

‘What do they look like?’

‘No idea. I only saw two from the back. Big leather jackets, knee-high leather boots…The girl!’ she says suddenly, pointing to Ute. ‘They mustn’t see her! Hide her! Quickly!’

Action stations. The women pull out all the clothes they can from the suitcases and make a big pile against the end wall, where they hide the girl. Frau Oberham sits in front of the pile to form a screen and tells Lukas to sit next to her to double the cover.

And what about us? No need to hide the kids? Why only Ute?

Manfred stares at me, anxious, pleading, as if begging me to intervene and get the women to hide us, too.

Silence again. More waiting. An hour later—or two, or three, unless it was only a minute—footsteps echo on the stairs. Loud banging on the door. The lock doesn’t last long, nor the heap of suitcases. The door gives way, swings open, and a beam of light from a torch scans the cellar, stopping on each of our faces. We blink, blinded, unable to focus, then each of us in turn, as the light moves on to our neighbour, stares at two boots, two knees, a torso—big, like Frau Diesdorf said—and finally a bearded face. Long, curly ginger hair. Red nose and cheeks, crimson. Black eyes. A falcon’s stare.

‘Ouri! Ouri!’ yells the Ruski.

No doubt about it, he’s a Ruski. He is so big that he has to bend down so he doesn’t bump into the roof. He looks like an ogre. He’s going to eat us all.

We look at each other: does anyone happen to speak Russian? Even one word, the one the Ruski keeps repeating, as he gets more and more annoyed by our passive silence. He stretches out his arm, rolls up the sleeve of his jacket and starts up his chant again, hitting his wrist: ‘Ouri! Ouri!’

There’s nothing more effective than sign language. Now we get it. Ouri is a version of Uhr. ‘Watch.’ He wants our watches. Herr Hauptman and the women pull off their watches and throw them in the Ruski’s pouch as he responds vigorously, ‘Ya! Ya!’ He walked past Manfred and me without stopping, no doubt assuming that we were too young to be wearing watches. But he grabs Lukas, the left arm, then the right, pushing up his sleeves to make sure he’s not hiding anything. Then, when he catches sight of the pile of clothes against the wall, he points his torch beam at it.

‘Keine Uhr hier!’ screams Lukas straightaway. ‘Ouri, niet! Niet!’

Hey, that’s odd. Lukas spontaneously spoke in German…Isn’t the Ruski supposed to be his friend, his ally? Wouldn’t it be now or never, the moment to give up the language he’s always hated? Why isn’t Lukas declaring that he’s Polish or, better still, Jewish? Why isn’t he taking advantage of it to get out of this hellhole? Is it because of Ute? Is he so in love with her?

The Ruski doesn’t seem to grasp what Lukas has said. He’s getting more insistent, garbling other Russian words, gesticulating again, pointing to his neck, his ears, his fingers. The women understand now: he wants jewels. One quickly removes her ring, another a bracelet, a necklace. After that, content with the loot in his pouch, he leaves.

Is that it? All he wanted were watches and jewels?

A sigh of relief passes through the cellar. We got off lightly. They didn’t bump us off.

The tension recedes; there are a few smiles. In an attempt at lightheartedness, although her voice still sounds shaky, Frau Betstein announces that it’s time for breakfast. She’s got a loaf of bread in her suitcase that she’ll share with everyone, and perhaps she’ll make some hot tea.

But we rejoiced too soon. The Ruski comes back before Frau Betstein has had a chance to open her suitcase. This time there are two other soldiers with him and he’s holding a revolver.

He points it at the blonde woman and gestures for her to stand up and climb the stairs. The woman obeys. She doesn’t seem surprised. After climbing a few steps, she stops, despite the Ruski sticking the barrel of the gun in her backside. She turns towards me and stares one last time at me, before disappearing. What an odd look. It landed on me. Literally. Even though the blonde woman is no longer there, I can feel her looking at me. As if that look were never going to leave me. Suddenly I’ve got a pain in my stomach. And in my heart, too.

Then the two other soldiers take all the women out in the same way. That leaves Lukas, Manfred, Herr Hauptman, me and Ute, still hidden under the pile of clothes.

Next we hear screaming.

Tonight was the scariest of all. Afterwards, that was it. We soon worked out the Ruskis’ three obsessions.

First of all: ‘Ouri! Ouri!’ It’s like they decided to pinch every single watch in town. Any watches. Even the worthless ones, the cheap junk with watch faces decorated with pictures. Some Ruskis have dozens of watches on each arm, timepieces filling their pockets. Apparently they send them home as presents; apparently they’re a sign of wealth.

The second obsession is the question they ask every single man, systematically, whatever his age: ‘You SS?’ It’s better to reply in the negative or they shoot you. Without warning.

Finally, the third and most important obsession is women. Yes, the ones who really take the rap when the Russians arrive are women.

They get raped. Every single one of them.

Oh, for sure, the Ruskis prefer them young, but the word gets out fast and most of the young girls are hidden. Some, like Ute, under a pile of clothes, others in hiding spaces in attics—alcoves hollowed out of kitchen ceilings, places where suitcases are normally kept. Apparently maids slept there last century. A female doctor fitted out a room in a bomb shelter and stuck a huge sign on the door: ‘Warning! Contamination danger. Typhus patients.’ It’s the most sought-after hideout in Berlin, mothers fight over it for their daughters.

If they can’t flush out the young flesh, the Ruskis make do with whatever they can get. Even fifty-year-old women. Even the ugly ones. They don’t give a shit. In fact they prefer the fat ones. As if the fat ones made them forget all the deprivation they’ve suffered. As if, as well as sex, they symbolise a full pantry. Frau Oberham, the fat woman in our cellar, has to put out more than the others.

Manfred and Lukas were shocked the first time they saw the women from our cellar come back in a hideous state, their eyes red from crying, their stockings down by their ankles, their clothes torn.

‘What’s wrong with them? What did they do to them?’ Manfred called out in panic.

‘I was hoping they wouldn’t do that, not them too,’ Lukas shouted, shaking his head several times, like an old man.

‘What? What did they do to them?’ Manfred kept up, when no one answered him.

The woman who usually sat next to him had gone and hidden in a corner, still sobbing, and twisting around, trying to pull up her underpants.

Manfred started to howl.

‘Nothing! Nothing bad happened to them. I’ll explain it later,’ I muttered, so he’d stop carrying on. ‘You’re too little to understand.’

Herr Hauptman just kept saying, ‘Be brave, ladies. Be brave.’

In the end, I’m the only one not to be shocked. Despite my youth, I’m very experienced when it comes to rape. I have quite precise memories of the rapes I witnessed in Poznan, when the German soldiers laid into the Polish girls.

Rape is the war against women. Now they’re at the frontline.

Anyhow, rape is better than death. Women eventually resign themselves to this fact. They’ve got a saying: ‘It’s better to have a Russian on top of you than an American standing over you.’

And not all the Ruskis are brutal. Not all of them drag the women off at gunpoint. Sometimes they ask nicely, ‘Do you have a man?’

If the woman says no, well…she has to follow the Ruski. If she replies yes, she has to say where her husband is. Given that most of the men haven’t returned from the front, well…she too has to follow the Ruski.

Everyone ends up resigned to the fact.

It’s odd how we get used to things. Before the arrival of the Russians, we were terrified. We imagined them as monsters. Well, they’re just men. (Perhaps, in the end, ‘men’ and ‘monster’ amount to the same thing?) Now the Ruskis are here, we just make do; bit by bit they’re becoming part of the landscape. Among the ruins, the smashed and burnt-out buildings, the rubble, the ash and the smoke from fires, there are now their cars and horses. The buckets that the rubble women used to fill with debris have been turned into drinking troughs. Crates filled with hay and oats pile up on the footpaths. There are turds everywhere. The stench of animals infiltrates the apartments. All of a sudden, just plonked there, on the corner of a street, you’ll come across a towering edifice of Russian anti-aircraft guns. When the Ruskis arrived, the April sun was as hot as the height of summer; now the east wind is gusting, as if the Russians had brought it with them in their kitbags. But when they set little fires on the footpath, using broken chairs and other debris, they let us join them at their bivouacs and we can warm our hands and feet. For the rest, the war continues in the west, artillery fire (the German response), the shrieking of air-raid sirens, and therefore the obligatory trips down into the cellar.

In our cellar, it’s back to normal, especially in the morning. It’s the safest time of day, because the Ruskis have spent the night getting drunk and are now sleeping it off, snoring, scattered all over the place in deserted apartments. So it’s safe for us to go outside. Ute can get out from under her pile of clothes and stretch her legs.

Manfred is no longer petrified when the women return from their Russian ‘soirées’. I ended up explaining to him what they were doing upstairs with the soldiers, just so he’d leave me in peace.

‘Right, this is what happens: they lie down, on a bed, a table, on the ground, wherever, and the Ruskis put their penises in the women’s slit. Because they’re German slits, designed for SS penises, it doesn’t fit right, that’s why the women scream and cry.’

‘That’s disgusting!’ Manfred shouted, his eyes wide.

‘It’s disgusting when slits and penises don’t fit, yeah, but otherwise it’s normal. That’s how babies are made. That’s how your parents made you, don’t you know?’

I moved away to cut short the discussion. Manfred’s ignorance was so annoying. To think that he was raised in a Napola! Good grief, what was he thinking during those Biology classes? They certainly drummed into us how vital it was for people of the same race to be having sex!

Our cellar has, however, changed a bit. One person is missing. The blonde woman. She hasn’t come back since the first night with the Ruskis. It’s odd that no one has remarked on her absence. It’s like she never existed.

I bring it up with Lukas one day.

‘Hmm, well, since, now that you mention it…’ He looks embarrassed. He’s never embarrassed when he talks to me. This is weird.

‘Where is she? Do you know?’

He hesitates, lowers his eyes, looks at his hands and rubs them together one against the other, as if he wanted to get some dirt off them. ‘They found her…’

‘Her what?’ One word at a time, he’s so annoying.

‘Her body. They found her body in the street. The Russians killed her. I’m sorry, Konrad. Really sorry,’ he adds, taking my hand.

Konrad. Am I dreaming or did he just call me by my first name instead of Skullface? He said he was sorry. He held my hand, an affectionate gesture from him…What’s come over him? I don’t get it.

‘Did they kill her because she refused to be raped?’ I ask. That wouldn’t surprise me: she looked like she was brave, proud. Gentle but proud. A real German woman.

‘No, I don’t think they even tried to rape her. They killed her because of her photo. You remember that photo she carried around with her all the time? She should have destroyed it, like Frau Oberham told her. That’s what did her in.’

He pauses and seems more embarrassed than before, even though he ended up spilling the beans. But he can see perfectly well that I haven’t burst into tears. As if that was my style. Right, so the blonde woman is dead. It’s sad, I agree. It’s left an empty space in the cellar. I liked it when she stared at me. Not all the time, sometimes. But there are plenty of dead people—there’ve already been plenty and there’ll be plenty more.

‘So what was in the damn photo?’

That seems to be the right question, or rather the wrong one, from Lukas’s point of view. Precisely the one he wanted to avoid.

‘Come over here,’ he says, after another pause. He drags me aside, onto the bottom steps of the stairs. He puts his hand in his pocket and takes out the photo. Just when I’m about to grab it, he raises his arm and whisks it away. ‘I’ll show it to you quickly, but then we have to burn it, okay? It’s too dangerous for us to be seen with it; we could be killed, like the woman!’ He lowers his arm, still hesitating.

‘Come on, are you going to show it to me or not? Make up your mind, for God’s sake.’

He shows me.

In the photo, the blonde woman is posing with the Führer. The Führer himself! The Russians would definitely not have liked that. The woman looks younger, well dressed, happy. She’s holding a baby in her arms. I wonder who she was? A famous actress? The Führer’s wife? And was the baby the Führer’s child? Impossible. We’d have known if the Führer had had a child. I notice the signature on the bottom right-hand of the photo: Adolf Hitler. An autographed photo! All the more reason to have got bumped off by the Ruskis.

‘Well, she was brave,’ I say to Lukas, handing him back the photo. ‘She must have really loved the Führer; not like the others, who couldn’t care less what happens to him.’

It’s true. All we know is that Hitler is in his bunker, nothing else. And nobody cares anyway. When people refer to him now, they say ‘the other’. We don’t even have a clue how he coped with the arrival of the Ruskis in Berlin, the Russian flag flying from the Reichstag…So the blonde woman should be doubly praised for having stayed loyal to him in spite of everything.

‘You know,’ Lukas continues, ‘I reckon it was not the Führer she loved so much, but rather her baby.’

Perhaps. Yeah. Whatever. I’m getting bored; I can’t see the point of this conversation.

Lukas hesitates again, then carefully turns the photo over. He points to the inscription on the back. Konrad von Kebnersol. Steinhöring. June 1936.

Konrad is crossed out and another name is written over it, in a different handwriting: Max.

I turn the photo over several times, quickly, while my brain attempts to make the necessary connections, to work out the link between the baby in the arms of the blonde woman and the inscription on the back.

The first name. Konrad. My name. The surname. Mine too. The date. My Namensgebung. My christening.

Which means that the baby is me. BBFH. Baptised By the Führer Himself.

As for the name Max. It echoes in my head as I mutter it several times. It sounds a bit like…like a musical note. It reminds me of something, but I don’t know what.

‘I’m pretty sure she was…your mother,’ murmurs

Lukas, his voice quavering. ‘I’m…I’m so sorry for you.’ I think for a minute. Am I sad?

No.

They can all go to hell! All mothers! The ones who raised children, like Lukas and Manfred, and the ones whose children were taken away from them.

Mothers are kaput!

That’s war.