Potsdam Station

Yorck Strasse

April 24 – 26

Soon after dawn Ivan announced himself with an artillery barrage, shattering every window that overlooked the Teltowkanal and blinding several of the divisional lookouts. A katyusha barrage followed, blasting holes in brickwork, cratering towpaths and sending up huge spouts of water. Fires broke out in several buildings, but were all put out with buckets of canal water collected the previous day. A steady stream of wounded disappeared in the direction of the field hospital three streets to the north.

The two nearest bridges had both been destroyed in the night, but there was still no sign of Soviet tanks on the far bank. They’d lose a lot of men getting across, Paul reckoned, but that had never worried their commanders in the past. He wondered if ordinary Russian soldiers were, like their German counterparts, becoming more survival-conscious as the war entered its final days.

Not that it would matter to him. The Russians would fight their way across this canal sooner or later, just as they had every watercourse between the Volga and Berlin. Just as their comrades moving in from the north would fight their way across the Hohenzollernkanal and Spree. And when they all came together the shouts of ‘hurrah’ would ring through the wastes of the ravaged Tiergarten. Nothing could stop them now, so why try?

Paul wasn’t sure he knew. It wasn’t the fear of being hanged as a deserter that stopped him from slinking away, though he realised it was a distinct possibility. Nor was it any great sense of responsibility to his current comrades, most of whom were complete strangers. It was more a case of having nowhere to go. When the war began he’d had two sets of parents, a home, a city and a country. All were broken or gone.

His relief on watch arrived, a boy named Ternath with floppy blonde hair and glasses with one cracked lens. Paul made his way to the back of the building, where the rest of his platoon were gathered in relative safety. Werner was sitting on the wooden floor, his back against the far wall, a ferocious scowl on his face as he tried to make sense of the morning newssheet. Paul found himself hoping that the boy’s mother and sister were still alive. Some people had to be, even in Berlin.

He was halfway across the room when a wind half lifted him up and almost threw him at the opposite wall. As he slowly picked himself up the sound of the explosion was still rippling in his ears.

Another shell exploded, this time further away. ‘Ternath,’ someone shouted, and they all rushed lemming-like across the corridor and into the empty machine room which overlooked the canal. The shell had taken out a large chunk of wall, some ten metres down from the window they’d been using. Ternath had been hit by the blast, and by any number of flying bricks, but his head and limbs were still apparently attached to his body. Blood was pouring from several cuts, but no severed artery was fountaining life away. Even his decent lens was stil in one piece. He’d been lucky, and Paul told him so.

‘I’m alive?’ the boy whispered, in a tone that suggested this might be a mixed blessing.

A stretcher appeared, and Paul, having just completed his watch, was one of the obvious bearers. Werner grabbed the other handles, and they carried the wounded man across the building and down a wrought-iron fire-escape to the roadside yard. The nearest dressing station was two streets away. It had been set up in an infant school basement, but was already overflowing onto the ground floor. Heading for the stairs, they passed two classrooms carpeted with occupied stretchers.

Down in the basement, candles provided most of the lighting. A triage nurse in bloodstained overalls gave Ternath a quick examination, and told them where to leave him. ‘He’ll live,’ she said curtly, and moved on to the next. As he gave the boy a last encouraging look, Paul didn’t feel so sure. The last time he’d seen eyes like that, the man had died an hour later.

Walking back towards the stairs, he saw an amputation underway through an open doorway. Across the table from the saw-wielding surgeon a man was crouched beside a bicycle, pedalling with both hands to power the handlebar light. A moment later the ceiling shook as the first rocket of a katyusha barrage landed somewhere close by. The surgeon glanced upwards, then quickly leant forward to shield the open wound from falling masonry dust.

The barrage continued for about five minutes, but no other rocket fell so close. On the ground floor the two classrooms full of stretchers had miraculously escaped, but several of the immobilised men were now whimpering with fear. Outside, the street was cloaked in swirling dust and smoke. Hurrying back towards the canal, they heard a woman shouting over crackling flames, but couldn’t see a fire.

One or more rockets had hit their building, taking a room-size chunk out of the western end. The team had moved down a few rooms, and was setting up the sandbags by another south-facing window. There was a major looking out over their shoulders, a man that Paul hadn’t seen since the January retreat. His name was Jesek, and he had a good reputation, at least among his subordinates. He was one of the old school, a bit of a stickler for the rules, but someone who cared what happened to the men in his charge.

His eyes now fixed on Werner, first taking in the baby face, then the bloodstained Hitlerjugend uniform. ‘Name?’ he asked without preamble

‘Werner Redlich, sir.’

‘And how old are you?’

Werner hesitated. ‘He’s fourteen,’ Paul volunteered.

‘I’ll be fifteen next week,’ Werner added.

Major Jesek sighed, and stroked two fingers down his left cheek. ‘Are you from Berlin?’

‘Yes, sir. From Schoenberg, sir.’

‘Werner, I don’t want you to take this the wrong way – I’m sure you’ve been a brave soldier – but I don’t believe children belong in battle. I want you to take off that uniform and go home. Do you understand me?’

‘Yes, sir,’ Werner said, his face torn between hope and anxiety.

Once Jesek was gone, he turned to Paul. ‘You won’t think I’m a coward?’

‘Of course not. The major’s right. You go home and look after your family.’

Werner looked down at his uniform. ‘But I have no other clothes.’

‘Go back to the dressing station. They’ll have something you can wear.’

Werner nodded. ‘Can we meet again when this is over?’ he asked.

Paul smiled. ‘What’s your address?’

The boy gave it to him, and they shared a farewell embrace. Werner hoisted up his panzerfaust rocket-launcher out of habit, then gently put it back down. He gave the rest of the men a shy wave and was gone.

Paul sat down with his back against the wall, feeling pleased for the boy but sad for himself. He had enjoyed the company.

Russell’s day went badly from the start. He woke from a nightmare, Varennikov shaking him by the shoulder and shouting his name. He’d been in France, in the trenches, his head swinging left and right like a tennis spectator, watching shells explode on either side, throwing up sprays of blood like waves coming over a promenade wall. And all in perfect silence, except that church bells were tolling in the distance, and he was screaming for them to stop.

‘You were screaming,’ Varennikov told him.

‘I know,’ Russell said. The sense of being yanked back into the present was almost physical. ‘I was back in France, in the First War,’ he explained reluctantly.

‘The trenches,’ Varennikov said carefully in English. ‘I have read about them. It must have been terrible.’

‘It was,’ Russell agreed tersely, eager to change the subject and allow the dream to fade. He asked Varennikov what his parents had done in the First War, and got himself dressed as the Russian told the story of his father’s capture in the Brusilov offensive, and his three years of imprisonment in Hungary. The man had come home a communist, and discovered, much to his astonishment, that his country’s government had undergone a similar transformation.

Before getting to sleep the previous night Russell had decided that there was no choice but simply to turn up at the Alex. He would walk in, wearing his Reichsbahn uniform, and say he had an appointment with Kriminalinspektor Kuzorra. Or that he was an old friend. Or something. There was hardly likely to be anyone around who’d recognise him from three-year-old wanted posters. The only real risk was strolling down firing ranges that used to be streets.

Leissner had no objections, and didn’t even ask where Russell was going. He supplied the usual military bulletin – the Red Army had entered Weissensee and Treptow Park to the north-east and south-east, and had reached the northern S-Bahn defence line and Hohenzollernkanal. They were across the Teltowkanal in the south-west, and advancing into Dahlem. The ring around the city was almost complete.

‘Where do you get your information from?’ Russell asked, purely out of curiosity.

‘The military authorities still use trains to move weapons and ammunition to the front,’ Leissner explained. ‘So they have to tell us where it is.’

Which made some sort of sense, Russell thought, always assuming the overriding insanity of continued resistance. Halfway down a street on the other side of Anhalter Station he came across a message that expressed his own feelings with great simplicity. On the last remaining wall of a gutted house someone had painted the word ‘Nein’ in letters two metres high.

Most of the streets in the city centre were like obstacle courses, and it took him over an hour to reach the river. Travel on the surface resembled a long drawn-out game of Russian roulette, but these were odds that he had to accept – if he waited underground for a break in the shelling he might be there until doomsday. The streets were literally plastered with the flesh of those whose luck had run out, but his continued to hold, at least until he reached the Spree.

He had chosen the Waisenbrücke as the least likely bridge to be guarded, but there was a checkpoint at the western end. It was manned by regular military police, and there seemed a good chance that the Reichsbahn uniform would limit any expression of official disapproval to simple refusal. He decided to risk it, and was amply rewarded – once he told them he was on his way to police headquarters they simply waved him across.

It took him only ten minutes to discover the reason for their benevo-lence. There were SS-manned checkpoints on all the exits from Alexanderplatz, and these were in the business of gathering volunteers. Spotted before he had the chance to gracefully withdraw, Russell reluctantly presented himself for inspection. His claim of urgent business with the police was answered with the gift of a spade and a finger pointing him down Neue König Strasse. An incipient protest died in his throat as he caught sight of the corpse a few metres away. There was a bullet hole in the forehead, and the Russians weren’t that close.

He got a glimpse of a battered but still-standing ‘Alex’ as he crossed the square, but that was all. He spent the morning digging gun emplacements in gardens off Neue König Strasse, the afternoon helping to build a barricade with two trams and several cart-loads of rubble. Apart from a few careless strays like himself, the workforce was made up of Hitlerjugend and Volkssturm, the former painfully enthusiastic, the latter replete with sullen misery. They were reinforced in the afternoon by a posse of Russian women prisoners, all wearing pretty headscarves, all barefoot. It rained most of the time, drenching everyone but the SS supervisors, who strode around holding umbrellas. Their uniforms were astonishingly immaculate, their boots the only shiny footwear left in Berlin, but there was a brittleness in their voices, the hysterical stillness of a trapped animal in their eyes. They were living on borrowed time, and they knew it.

Late in the afternoon a sad-looking horse slowly clip-clopped into view with a mobile canteen in tow. Even the Russian women were given tin cups of soup and a chunk of bread, and Russell noticed one of them surreptitiously feeding the horse. He had no idea what the soup was made of, but it tasted wonderful.

The canteen moved on, and everyone went back to work. An hour or so later, their task completed, Russell’s team stood around awaiting instructions. But the senior SS officers had vanished, and their subordinates seemed uncertain of what came next. Without the noise of their own labours to mask them, the sounds of battle seemed appreciably closer. The machine-gun fire was no more than a kilometre away, the boom of tank cannons maybe even closer.

‘They’ll be giving us rifles soon,’ one of Russell’s fellow-strays remarked. He looked about sixty-five, and far from pleased at the prospect of battle.

‘That would be good news,’ an even older man told him. ‘Most likely they’ll put us with the Volkssturm and tell us to use their guns once they’ve been killed.’

As it began to grow dark, Russell gave serious consideration to walking away. But how far would he get? There were still SS in sight, and no doubt others around the next corner. The corpse by the checkpoint was still vivid in his memory. But waiting for the Red Army with a bunch of rocket-bearing children and a handful of geriatrics armed with First War rifles seemed no less life-threatening. When the light was gone, he told himself. Then he would make a run for it.

It was almost gone when an argument broke out further down the street between SS and army officers. ‘I’m off,’ one of Russel ’s fellow-workers muttered. He stepped out of the emplacement they had dug that morning, and strode calmly off in the direction of the nearest street corner.

No one seemed to notice him, and within seconds the darkness had swallowed him up.

Russell followed his example. No shouts pursued him either, and soon he was jogging down an empty side street towards Prenzlauer Strasse. This was barricaded in the direction of the river, so he continued north-westward, searching for an unguarded route back into the Old Town. Several adjacent houses were burning in one such street, a crowd of people apparently watching. He joined it surreptitiously, and realised that an effort was underway to rescue people trapped in an upper storey. Curiosity kept him watching for a few moments, until he realised he was being stupid. He slipped on down the street, and eventually recognised the silhouette of the elevated S-Bahn. He was just heading under the bridge when he had the idea of climbing up – he still had to get over the river and there wouldn’t be a checkpoint on a railway crossing.

He followed the viaduct until he found a maintenance stairway, managed to scramble over the gate, and laboriously hauled himself up to the tracks. He was two or three hundred metres east of Börse Station. Feeling every one of his forty-five years, he began walking westwards between the two tracks.

It was an eerie experience. Berlin was spread out all around him, a dark field in which a thousand fires seemed to be burning. As Leissner had said, the Soviet encirclement was almost complete – only a small arc to the west seemed free of intermittent explosions and tracer ribbons.

He walked on, through the dark and silent Börse Station, past the stock exchange building after which it was named, and out over the first arm of the Spree. As he stopped in mid-bridge, drawn by the terrible beauty of the fire-lit river, something let loose an unearthly screech in the distance. It sounded like one of the Zoo’s big cats, which it probably was. It would be more of a miracle if their cages were still intact.

A little further on, the railway viaduct had taken a recent hit, and the whole structure seemed to sway alarmingly as he inched his way along one edge. The adjacent museum was also badly damaged, but the barracks on the other side of the river’s second channel seemed simply empty. A few kilometres to the north a fierce night battle seemed to be taking place. The distance and direction suggested the area around Wedding Station, where he’d stepped from the train less than thirty-six hours ago.

Another ten minutes and he was walking across the bridge into Friedrichstrasse Station, his feet crunching through broken glass from the now skeletal roof. Standing alone in the dark and cavernous ruin, he felt, almost for the first time, the enormity of what had been done to his city. Of what was still being done.

He took the glass-strewn steps to street level, then descended further to the noisier realm below ground. Once again he heard music somewhere in the underworld, this time a lone trumpeter blowing the melody of a Billie Holiday song. He wended his way down the crowded platforms and disappeared into the familiar tunnel, the words of the song playing on his lips:

The world was bright when you loved me,

sweet was the touch of your lips;

the world went dark when you left me,

and then there came a total eclipse.

He had escaped a pointless death defending Alexanderplatz from the Russians, but that was all. He had come to find Effi, and in that he had failed. There was no one else to ask for help, nowhere else he could go. It would only take the Red Army a couple more days to roll over the last pockets of resistance, and then he would have to trust to Nikoladze’s gratitude. Some hope.

The hospital trains were still parked in the darkness – where could they go? – but the sounds of lamentation seemed more restrained. There was no nurse sat on a step, but as he walked past he saw one cadaverous face up above him, pressed tight against a window, staring out at the tunnel wall.

Back in the abandoned station, he found Varennikov reading his novel by candlelight. The Russian looked up. ‘Someone came to see you,’ he said. ‘A German comrade named Ströhm. He said he’d come back tomorrow.’

It was five in the morning, and the men in Paul’s unit were readying themselves and their weapons for the expected dawn attack. Some were writing their wills, some last notes to their loved ones, some a combination of the two. Most had done so many times before, littering Russia and Poland with their urgent scribbles.

They all looked depressed, especially those who’d been drinking the night before. Paul had never really taken to alcohol, and imbibing large quantities of the stuff on the eve of battle seemed less than clever – why dull the reflexes that your life might depend on? And he could also hear his father telling him not to ‘turn off’, to live with it, learn from it. If he did survive this, and he ever got to speak to his father again, he would take great pleasure in asking him what more there was to learn from this, once you’d realised that human stupidity was a bottomless pit.

On the previous evening a couple of idiots from the Propaganda Ministry had turned up out of the blue. One had a roll of posters under his arm, the other a hammer and a pocket full of tacks, and between them they had solemnly pinned their boss’s latest message – ‘The darkest hour is just before the dawn’ – to a wall. They had offered the unit a ‘hope-that-helps’ look before moving on in search of another grateful audience.

It was hard to believe, but there was the poster, waiting for a shell to contradict it.

It was all over – any fool could see it. Here they were, waiting to die in defence of the Teltowkanal, when the enemy was already across it in the south-western suburbs. The Russians were in Dahlem, someone had said. Any day now they’d be camping out in his own bedroom.

Would they ever go home again? He supposed they would. Armies always had.

He felt frightened, which was no surprise. At the beginning, first as a flakhelfer and then on the Eastern Front, he had half expected that the fear would diminish, that he would gradually become immune. But it had never happened. Your body just learned to ignore your mind. His first katyusha attack, he had crapped himself almost instantly, and felt terribly ashamed. But no one had laughed at him. They’d all done it, sometime or another. These days he still felt a loosening, but that was all. Progress. You went with the fear rather than under it. He liked that. Maybe he would become a psychiatrist after the war. There’d be quite a demand.

When Stefan Leissner came to see them on the following morning, he brought Gerhard Ströhm with him. Both were wearing Reichsbahn uniforms, but Ströhm’s had none of the braids and fancy epaulettes, only the sewn-on badge below each shoulder, the eagle and swastika motif above ‘RBD Berlin’. His hair was shorter, the moustache gone, and he no longer resembled the young Stalin. He looked ten years older than the man Russell had known four years earlier.

There was no obvious friction between the two German communists, but he sensed that they didn’t have much time for each other. Ströhm deferred to Leissner, who was presumably his Reichsbahn superior, but their relative positions in the Party hierarchy might well be different. From what Russell had seen of them – which admittedly wasn’t much – their different temperaments reflected very different ways of looking at the world. Leissner, he suspected, would have no trouble working with the Soviets, whereas Ströhm probably would.

‘I understand you are an old friend of Comrade Ströhm,’ Leissner said to Russell, sounding less than thrilled. ‘You can catch up on old times in a moment, but first I must give you an update on our advance.’

It was much as Russell expected. The city’s encirclement had been completed on the previous evening, and Soviet forces were pushing steadily in toward the centre from all directions. That morning a battle was raging along the Teltowkanal, only four kilometres away.

‘Tomorrow they should be here,’ Leissner said with barely suppressed excitement. ‘The following day at the latest.’

He departed, leaving Ströhm with them.

‘It’s really good to see you,’ Russell said. ‘I must admit, I assumed you were dead.’

‘Not yet,’ Ströhm said wryly, walking over to embrace him. ‘It’s good to see you too. A welcome surprise. I won’t ask how you got here – or why – I gather it’s not a subject for discussion…’

‘According to Comrade Leissner?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, I wouldn’t want to upset him. But I would like to know how you escaped the Gestapo in 1941. We were told in Stettin that the whole Berlin network had been arrested.’

‘Most, but not all. A few were saved. Like myself.’

‘How?’

‘In the usual way. The Gestapo got careless – in one case they applied too much pressure and the comrade died, in another they gave the comrade a chance to take his own life. And those two deaths cut the only links to several cells, mine included.’

Ströhm’s recitation of tragedy was as matter-of-fact as ever. He had initiated their relationship in 1941, in the hope that Russell, as an American journalist, could somehow get news of the accelerating Holocaust to the outside world. Together they had witnessed the first steps of the process, the trains loading up under cover of darkness, at several different Berlin yards. Ströhm’s passionate concern for the Jews was personal – his Jewish girlfriend had been murdered by stormtroopers – but Russell had always known that the man was a communist, and when he and Effi needed to flee Berlin, Ströhm was the man he had turned to. Ströhm had taken the matter to his comrades, and they had arranged the first leg of his eventually successful escape.

Russell sighed. ‘And now it’s almost over,’ he said, as much to himself as to Ströhm. ‘How are the Russians behaving in the suburbs?’

Now it was Ströhm’s turn to sigh. ‘Not well. There have been many rapes in Weissensee and Lichtenberg. Even comrades have been raped.’

‘I can’t say I’m surprised,’ Russell said. ‘The Soviet papers have been almost inviting the troops to take their revenge,’ he went on. ‘They’ve changed their tune over the last few weeks, but I think the damage has already been done. ’

‘You’re probably right, but I hope not. And not just because the women of Berlin deserve better. If the Red Army behaves badly, it’ll make things so much more difficult for the Party. The people already lean towards the English and Americans, and we need the Red Army to behave better than their allies, not worse.’

Fat chance, Russell thought. ‘Indiscriminate shelling is not going to win the Soviets many post-war friends in Berlin.’

‘No, probably not. But at least there’s some military point to that – the Nazis are still resisting. But raping hundreds of women… there’s no excuse for that.’

‘None,’ Russell agreed, thinking about Effi. ‘Look, I owe you a great deal…’

‘You owe me nothing.’

‘Well, I think I owe you something, but it’s not going to stop me asking another favour.’ He told Ströhm about Effi, how she’d come back to Berlin, and probably become involved with a resistance group. ‘She suddenly disappeared a few weeks ago, and her sister is convinced that she’s been arrested. Is there any way you could check if that’s true, and if it is, find out where she was taken? She’s using the name Erna von Freiwald.’

Ströhm looked up. ‘I’ve heard that name in connection with one of the Jewish escape committees. But I never dreamt it was Effi Koenen. I thought she escaped to Sweden with you.’

Russell explained why Effi had chosen to stay behind.

‘We have men in the police, but I have no idea if any of them are still at work. The area around the Alex is being turned into a strongpoint.’

‘I know,’ Russell said wryly. He told Ströhm about his attempted visit, and the day of hard labour that had resulted.

‘Ah. Well, I will see what I can find out, but don’t get your hopes up – it may well be nothing. But before I go, tell me, the work we were doing in 1941 – did you get the story out?’

‘I did,’ Russell told him. ‘But not in the way we wanted. The big story I had – the gas that Degesch produced for the SS without the usual warning odour – that must have gone into a dozen papers. But no editor was willing to headline it, to put it all together, and tell the whole story for what it was – the attempted murder of an entire people.’

‘Why?’ Ströhm asked, just as Kenyon had in Moscow.

Russell offered him the same guesses, and shrugged. ‘I tried. I made such a pest of myself that one editor actually hid in his cupboard rather than see me. I think that was when I realised I was onto a loser.’

‘That’s a terrible shame,’ Ströhm said quietly. ‘But perhaps we were foolish to expect more.’ His face was lined with sadness, and Russell found himself wondering how Ströhm would make out in a Soviet-dominated Germany. Here was a man who wanted to believe in a better world – who had no hesitation about putting his own life on the line in pursuit of it – but who found it harder and harder to muster the required suspension of disbelief. He had seen through the lie that was Western capitalism, seen through the lie that was fascism. And soon he would see through the lie that was communism. He was too honest for his own good.

They embraced again, and Ströhm disappeared down the staircase, calling out over his shoulder that he’d return with any news.

Varennikov, it seemed, had understood enough of the conversation to form his own judgement. ‘Your friend seems more of a German than a communist,’ he said casually.

‘Maybe,’ Russell said non-committally. Ströhm had actually been born in America, but he doubted whether Varennikov would find that reassuring.

‘It will take many years to rebuild our country,’ Varennikov said, with an air of someone addressing a hostile meeting.

It seemed like a non-sequitur, until Russell realised that his companion was using the German despoliation of western Russia to justify the Red Army’s behaviour in Germany. ‘I’m sure it will,’ he agreed diplomatically.

‘But America has not even been touched,’ the Russian went on, as if Russell had disagreed with him. ‘I know a few English cities have been bombed, but my country has been laid to waste. You must remember – until the Revolution we had no industry, no dams, everything was backward. People worked so hard to build a modern country, and now they must do it all again. And they will. In fifty years the Soviet Union will be the richest country on earth.’

‘Perhaps.’

‘Of course, we must avoid another war. That is why the papers we found are so important – if we have an atomic bomb no one will dare to invade us, and all our socialist achievements will be safe from destruction.’ His earnest face suddenly broke into a grin, making him look about twenty. ‘Who knows? Perhaps we will both be made Heroes of the Soviet Union.’ The battle began badly. The machine-gun was destroyed by only the second shell of the opening barrage, killing two of them. The rest ran for the nearest exit, shells exploding around them like the lashes of a giant whip. Had they emerged at the back, they might have kept running till evening, but a wrongly chosen door led them out into enemy fire, and a choice between death and going to ground. Paul had a ten-metre crawl to reach the nearest communication trench, and it seemed a lot farther.

Once inside, he was little more than a spectator. A hail of shells whooshed over him, provoking a sporadic response from the surviving German machine-guns and artillery. The latter, he assumed, were conserving their ammunition.

Clouds of smoke and brick dust coalesced and spread, until the whole area seemed choked in a brown haze. Around nine o’clock, lines of Soviet infantry came charging out of the fug, singing and shouting like there was no tomorrow. For most of them, there wasn’t – the first wave succumbed almost to a man. Some had been carrying small boats, but only a single soldier reached the edge of the canal, toppling into the oily water with blood pumping from his neck.

The Soviet artillery redoubled their efforts, slowly reducing the buildings around the harbour to their constituent bricks. Planes came swooping out of the smoke on low-level bombing runs, and stretches of the trench system on either side of Paul were plastered with human gore.

More infantry appeared, and this time some succeeded in launching their boats. None got safely across, but the bodies now floating in the water were like marks left by a rising tide. It was all so fucking predictable, Paul, thought. So many pushes, so many corpses, and sooner or later…

Soviet tanks were now firing across the canal, and drawing no response. The next wave would wash over them, Paul realised. And so, apparently, did Major Jesek. As more Soviet infantry loomed on the southern bank, the order was given to pull back.

Paul joined the rush along the trench, clambering over the dead and still groaning, out into a rubble-strewn gap between ruins. Jesek was there, looking in his element, giving each soldier an encouraging smack on the shoulder until his head blossomed blood and his body pitched into the bricks.

Paul stumbled on, out of the industrial area and into residential streets. There were houses missing in all of them, and houses burning in most. Ahead of him, a soldier was frantically shaking his hands, as if he was trying to dry them – catching him up, Paul saw that the man’s mouth was hanging open in a silent scream.

The soldier suddenly sank to his knees.

Paul put a comforting hand on his shoulder, and the man violently shook it off. ‘Go fuck yourself,’ he hissed.

Paul left him where he was. Looking back once, he saw the man still kneeling in the middle of the road, his former comrades passing by on either side, like a stream divided by a fallen rock.

A kilometre to the north, under the S-Bahn bridge by Tempelhof Station, the MPs were waiting for them. They joined the fifty or so men who had already been rounded up, and listened to the sound of the battles still raging while they waited for stragglers. When the road to the south was empty they were marched through the Tempelhof aerodrome gates and delivered to those in charge. There were lots of tanks dug in around the airport buildings, tanks they could have used that morning.

‘Guess why they’re here?’ the Volkssturm man beside him asked, as if he was reading Paul’s mind.

‘Tell me.’

‘Someone special might need a last-minute flight,’ the man replied. The thought seemed to amuse him.

It didn’t amuse Paul, and neither did the prospect of yet more digging. If he’d stayed in one place he’d be in China by now.

The emplacements, as it turned out, had already been dug, and all that remained was the wait for Ivan. It was actually a beautiful day, the sun shining out of a perfect blue sky until just before noon, when a horde of Soviet IL-4 bombers appeared out of nowhere and started blowing holes in the hangars and terminal buildings. They were careful not to damage the runway – mindful, presumably, of their own future needs.

Paul was assigned to one of the PaK41 emplacements in the aerodrome’s north-eastern corner, and had only a distant view of the afternoon’s battle, which raged between the S-Bahn defence line and the aerodrome’s southern perimeter. Every now and then a jeep full of Hitlerjugend armed with panzerfaust would careen away across the tarmac to take on the Soviet armour, and several familiar-sounding explosions would eventually follow. The gun commander claimed he could see several burning hulks through his binoculars, and Paul had no reason to doubt him. But none of the jeeps came back.

Darkness fell with the Soviets still held at arm’s length, but scattered engagements rumbled on by the light of the full moon, and as midnight approached the Russian infantry were still pushing forward. Paul’s own gun was down to eleven shells, which didn’t bode well for the dawn.

It had been a long and so far fruitless day, in which Varennikov had almost driven him mad with his non-stop ramblings. Sometimes Russell could hear the idealism of his own younger years, but mostly it was just the stupidity. There was nothing he really disliked about the young Russian, but Russell wished he would shut up. After a while he simply tuned him out, and focussed his ears on listening for sounds on the stairs.

It was well into evening before he heard them, and Ströhm’s head emerged from the stairwell. ‘You didn’t tell me she was Jewish,’ he said without preamble.

‘Effi? She isn’t.’

‘Well, she was arrested as one. On the 13th of April. She was taken to the detention centre for Jews on Schulstrasse – the old Jewish hospital – do you know it?’

Russell felt something grip his heart. ‘Yes, I went there once… but that’s out beyond the Ringbahn. It’ll be in the Soviet hands by now.’

‘It is. But Erna von Freiwald was released on the 21st. Last Saturday.

It’s in the records – all the remaining prisoners were released that day. I assume the people in charge were trying to earn themselves some credit for the future.’

‘Where did she go?’ Russell asked automatically.

‘I’m sorry, there’s no way of knowing.’

‘No, of course not.’

‘Perhaps she went home,’ Ströhm suggested.

‘No, her sister went to the apartment only two days ago.’

‘Then she’s probably in one of the mass shelters – you know where they are: underneath the flak towers in the Tiergarten, under Pariserplatz. There’s one right next to Anhalter Station. They’re all incredibly overcrowded at the moment. Lots of women are hoping that there’s strength in numbers, that the Red Army will behave better in front of a thousand witnesses.’

After finishing her shift and eating, Effi could stand it no longer. She had to get some fresh air, had to convince herself that the moon and stars still shone. ‘Would you like to go outside, just for a minute?’ she asked Rosa.

The girl thought about it for a moment, then nodded.

‘Then let’s go,’ Effi said, taking her hand.

The rooms beyond the hospital seemed more crowded than ever, the smells of sweat, urine and excrement almost impossibly pungent. There were guards on the bunker entrance, but they had no objection to people taking the air – it was, as one of them said, ‘their funeral’. Perhaps it would be, Effi thought, but she was beyond caring. She stood for a few moments at the bottom of the steps, inhaling the smoke-laden breeze and listening for sounds of explosions close by. In the sky above, a few faint stars glimmered in the murk.

They went up into the Berlin night. The square was not silent, as Effi had expected, nor empty of movement. Several walkers were visible, all keeping close to those walls that remained. Far up Hermann Goering Strasse a lorry was driving away. Berlin still had a heartbeat, albeit a faint one.

They could see no fires, but the sky was a deep shade of orange, and several of the surrounding buildings were silhouetted against areas of bright yellow. Streamers of dark smoke hung in the air, like photographic negatives of the Milky Way. Far in the distance, she could hear the faint rattle of machine-gun fire..

The familiar keening turned into the familiar scream, and for one dreadful second Effi thought she’d managed to kill them both. But the shell hit a building on the far side of the square, starting an avalanche of masonry and igniting a furnace within.

What people had built, people destroyed, and would no doubt build again. She felt weighed down by the utter pointlessness of it all.

She knew they should go back down, but stubbornly put off the moment. One semi-delirious soldier had recognised her that afternoon, but the doctor had cheerfully put him right. Her acceptance as an Effi Koenen look-alike felt rather strange, but everyone knew that fugitive film stars avoided working in underground hospitals.

Rosa snuggled up to her. ‘Is everyone going to die?’ she asked, matter-of-factly.

‘Not in this war,’ Effi told her. ‘Everyone does eventually, but I think you and I are going to have really long lives.’

‘How long is a long life?’

‘Well, according to the Bible, God thinks we should get at least three score years and ten – which is seventy. So let’s add another thirty for good luck, and live to be a hundred.’

Rosa digested that in silence for a few moments. ‘Is God hiding in a shelter until it’s over?’ she asked. ‘Like us?’

It was a long night. A storm raged in the early hours, adding thunder, lightning and pelting rain to the sporadic Soviet artillery fire, but it all passed over, and by five o’clock there was only smoke to blur the heavens, and a huge red moon seeking shelter behind the western horizon. Dawn brought the usual bombardment, but once again the Soviet artillery and air force seemed fixated on the city centre.

Paul was hunkered down in his unit’s emplacement on the north-eastern corner of the Tempelhof field, reading a copy of the Panzerbär newsletter that Goebbels had introduced in place of newspapers, and trying to ignore the bombers droning overhead. ‘We are holding on!’ the headline claimed, but, as an announcement further down the page made obvious, some believed otherwise. Those who hoisted white flags of surrender from their window would be dealt with as traitors, the propaganda minister promised, and so would all the other occupants of their building.

After exactly sixty minutes – the Soviets, sloppy in so many ways, were remarkably precise when it came to timing their bombardments – the artillery barrage abruptly died away. Another ten minutes and they could expect to see the armour creeping forward across the smoke-laden field, supported by the usual hordes of infantry. With only eleven shells remaining, it felt like the Seelow Heights all over again, only this time there seemed no point in destroying the gun – by the time the Soviets lifted it out of its emplacement the war would be over.

There was little point in firing it at all, in Paul’s estimation, but little point in saying so either. He scrambled to his feet just as an SS Hauptsturmführer with one arm in a bloodstained sling loomed over their trench asking for a volunteer. There was a job needed doing on the roof of the terminal building.

‘You go,’ the sergeant ordered Paul.

Cursing inwardly, Paul followed the Hauptsturmführer across the tarmac and around behind the huge concrete edifice. A fire escape zigzagged up the side of the buildings, and Paul spent most of the long climb wondering what the officer needed him for.

He soon found out. Once they reached the huge flat roof, the officer unfolded the map he was carrying, carefully laid it out on the ground, and asked Paul to stand, legs spread, with a foot on each of two corners. He stood on the other two, and began scanning the surrounding city through his binoculars.

Paul resisted the temptation to point out that a couple of chunks of masonry could have done the same job – SS Hauptsturmführers were notoriously unwilling to take criticism. Every now and then his companion would lower the binoculars, fall to one knee, and scrawl lines across the map with a piece of pink chalk. Watching him work, Paul decided he must be plotting the latest Russian advances.

It wasn’t so easy to do. The flash and peal of cannonades and explosions were coming from every direction, but only a few of these could be attributed to actual fire-fights on the ground. Away to the east, on the far side of the aerodrome, one such battle was underway in Neukölln – Paul could hear the distinctive sound of tank fire, and the faint rattle of ma-chine-gun fire. The same was true to the south-west, where a battle was raging on their side of the S-Bahn. On the airfield itself German forces were still dug in to the north of the main runway, but their resistance would serve no purpose if the Soviets bypassed Tempelhof to both east and west.

A loud explosion turned both their heads round. Two kilometres to the east a vast cloud of smoke and dust was rising into the sky. As it cleared, it became apparent that the huge Karstadt department store was no longer there. The SS had done what they promised, and Paul’s companion duly grunted his pleasure.

The view to the north was presumably less to his taste – following the morning air raid most of the centre seemed to be on fire. The blessed Führer was somewhere under that lot, no doubt safe and sound in a concrete bunker. Paul wondered how Hitler’s morning was going. Surely he must realise it was all over – for all his increasingly apparent faults, the man was not stupid. But if he did, then why were they fighting on? Did his own troops’ lives mean nothing to him? That was hard to believe after all they’d been told of his First War experiences, but what other explanation could there be?

‘You can take your feet off now,’ the Hauptsturmführer said, breaking into his reverie. The SS officer folded his map back up, took one last look round, and headed for the fire escape. Paul followed with some reluctance. On the way up he had expected to feel appallingly vulnerable on the flat roof, but no plane had swooped down on them with machine-guns blazing, and a wonderfully deluded sense of being above the fray had slowly come over him. Now, each step down felt a little closer to hell.

It proved an accurate assessment. They were just rounding the corner of the building when incoming katyushas started ploughing a wide path towards them. The Hauptsturmführer ran for the nearest door, and, for want of anything better, Paul followed in his wake. There was nothing to open – the door had already been torn off its hinges – and a down staircase offered sanctuary on the far side of the lobby. By the time the rockets crashed into the front of the terminal Paul was halfway down the stairs, but the Hauptsturmführer, hindered by his wounded arm, had only just reached the top. Thrown over Paul’s head, he hit the wall above the staircase with massive force, and dropped like a stone onto the bottom steps. His map, opened by the blast, fluttered down beside him.

Though he tumbled down the last few steps, Paul sustained nothing worse than bruises. The barrage had rolled over, but he had been through enough katyusha attacks to know that another might plough the same furrow, and after a cursory glance at the dead Hauptsturmführer, he clambered over the body and continued on down the steps, only stopping two floors down when another SS officer told him he could go no further – his men were booby-trapping the building.

He had no objection to Paul waiting out the barrage, and even offered him a cigarette. When Paul declined, he lit his own before delivering a rueful monologue on the evils of smoking. ‘You should hear the Führer on the subject,’ he said. ‘As I was once privileged to do. His hatred of smoking will one day seem prophetic – mark my words!’ He drew deeply on his cigarette and smiled through the smoke he exhaled.

Paul said nothing – the only question seemed to be whether Berlin would be renamed Wonderland before the Russians razed it. After fifteen minutes the katyusha barrages abated for a while, half convincing him that they had stopped. Big guns were now firing somewhere close by. German ones, he hoped.

He went back up. Someone had moved the Hauptsturmführer’s body to the side of the stairs, but had not bothered to close his eyes. Paul did so, and, on impulse, took the binoculars that were still hanging from the man’s neck. The machine pistol might come in useful, so he took that too. Some of Himmler’s officers liked to mark their guns with SS insignia, but this one had not, which was just as well.

The doorway was a lot wider than it had been, and there was now a large crater on the threshold. Smoke and dust obscured most of the field ahead, but there seemed to be a lull in the bombardment. He worked his way round the rim of the crater, and hurried out past the still-standing ‘Welcome to Tempelhof’ sign in the direction of his gun emplacement. A few seconds later the curtain of smoke drew apart, and he could see the long barrel pointing straight up at the sky. He feared the worst, but the emplacement was empty – his comrades had fired their shells and gone. And so, he realised, had everyone else in this sector. While he’d been discussing Hitler’s tobacco-phobia there’d been a general pull-out.

Abandonment was becoming something of a habit. But he wouldn’t be alone for long – the moving shapes in the distance looked like T-34s and their accompanying infantry. Was this the moment to surrender? He thought not. As he’d told Uncle Thomas, surrender was a risky business, best attempted away from the heat of an ongoing battle, when emotions were raw and trigger-fingers itchy.

No, it was time for another retreat. There couldn’t be that many more. If the Soviet forces to the north of the city had breached the Ringbahn defence line, then all that remained in German hands was a corridor about five kilometres wide.

He clambered out of the gun emplacement and started running, only stopping when he reached the sheltered rear of the terminal building. The Soviet artillery had thoughtfully pounded holes in the high wire fence that surrounded the aerodrome, and he had a clear run to the U-Bahn station on Belle Alliance Strasse. He took it at top speed, almost tumbling down the steps as shells exploded further down the road. The booking hall was packed with civilians, most of them women, and none seemed pleased to see him. ‘Either go or get rid of the uniform and gun,’ one old man told him imperiously. Paul could see his point, but still felt like hitting him.

He went back up the stairs. The Landwehrkanal, just over a kilometre to the north, was the next obvious line of defence, and he supposed that should be his destination. He could think of none better.

Out on Belle Alliance Strasse he could see men in the distance, heading in the same direction. Behind him, the battle for Tempelhof seemed to be winding down. The centre of the wide, traffic-free road offered the clearest path, but he kept to the edge for fear of shell-blast, wending and climbing his way along the rubble-choked pavement. The bodies he came across were mostly women’s, though sometimes it was hard to tell.

A single shell exploded a couple of hundred metres up the road, taking the corner off a three-storey block and conjuring flames from within.

As he passed another bombed-out house the Kreuzberg loomed into view, crowning the wooded slopes of Viktoria Park. Why choose blood and stone, he asked himself, when grass and trees were there for the taking? He took the first available turning and worked his way through to the park’s eastern gate, then followed a path up through blossoming trees to the summit. He and his Dad had come there often, catching a tram to the depot at the bottom of the hill, walking up, and sitting on a wooden bench, ice cream in hand, with Berlin spread out before them. On a clear day they could usually see the Hertha grandstand away across the city.

There was no such clarity today, but he could still see enough to be shocked. Myriad fires were burning across the city’s heart, from the Ku’damm away to the west, through the district south of the Tiergarten, to the Old Town and Alexanderplatz in the east. Every few seconds the flash of another explosion would spark in the smoke-leaden gloom, reminding Paul of the matches flaring to life in the Plumpe grandstand as spectators lit their half-time cigarettes.

Turning his head, he caught sight of Soviet tanks. They were crossing Immelmann Strasse and entering the street that ran along the bottom of the park’s western slope. And away to the west, marching up Monumenten Strasse towards him was an absurdly neat formation of infantry. There had to be a couple of hundred men, but there was something odd about them…

Remembering the binoculars, he brought the formation into focus. The ‘something odd’ about them was their size – they were children. Two hundred neatly-turned out Hitlerjugend were marching out to meet the Red Army, panzerfausts at the ready. And they were walking into a trap.

A machine-gun rattled but no one fell down – either the Russians were too drunk to shoot straight, or they were firing warning shots. The column visibly hesitated, but kept on coming, and more warning shots seemed only to encourage whichever heroic nincompoop was in command. The machine-guns opened up in earnest and the front lines went down, exposing those behind them. As bullets scythed through them, the rear echelons broke and fled, dropping their panzerfausts and sprinting back across the railway bridge. Ivan, to his credit, ceased fire.

Other Russians were visible at the southern foot of the hill. It was time to go. Paul strode back down through the empty park, the clashing smells of death and spring mingling in his nostrils. The depot at the bottom had taken several hits, and through the wide-open entrance he could see one tram half raised on the rear of another, like a dog mounting a bitch. He walked round the corner of the building and started up Grossbeeren Strasse, which had lost most of its houses. At the first intersection he found six bloodied female corpses around a standpipe. Two were still clutching the water buckets they’d come to fill.

A little further on a three-legged dog gave him a hopeful look, and started whining piteously once he’d gone past. Paul wanted to cry, but no tears came. Something inside him was irreparably broken, but he had no idea what it was.

A Soviet plane flew low overhead, and opened fire on something behind the houses to his left. He walked on towards Yorck Strasse, where several women were gathered round a prone casualty. There was an air of hopelessness in their postures, and in the way they glanced up the street, as if they were pretending for everyone’s sake that help was on the way. Beyond them, outside the Yorck Strasse police station, another two corpses hung slack-necked from lampposts. Paul walked towards them. The first, a moustachioed man in his forties or fifties, was in army uniform. The second was Werner.

The boy’s mouth was open, his fists clenched, his dead eyes full of terror. A piece of card bearing the message ‘All traitors will die like this one’ had been looped over the second button of his Hitlerjugend shirt.

Paul stood there staring at the boy’s body until his legs suddenly folded beneath him, and a sound he didn’t recognise, a cross between a wail and a high-pitched hum, welled up from his soul and erupted through his lips.

A few moments later he felt a hand on his shoulder. ‘Did you know him?’ a woman’s voice asked.

‘Yes,’ Paul managed to say. ‘He was only fourteen.’

‘He never said. He was a brave little bugger.’

‘You saw this happen?’ Paul asked. He climbed slowly back to his feet. Why hadn’t the boy ditched his uniform?

‘From my window. It was the redhead – we’ve seen him before. He’s an Obersturmführer, I think – I can never remember their uniforms. My husband was in the real army.’

‘By what authority…’

She shrugged. ‘Who knows? He’s a law unto himself. He has a few helpers, but he’s the judge and the executioner.’

Paul looked up at the body. ‘I’m going to cut him down.’

‘It’s your funeral.’

He took out his knife, clambered up onto the police station wall and managed, with a couple of hacks, to slice through the rope. Werner’s corpse dropped to the pavement.

Paul sank to one knee and closed the dead boy’s eyes. He went through his pockets, hoping to find something he could take to Werner’s mother and sister. Inside the Hitlerjugend documentation there was the family photograph that he’d showed Paul when they first met. It seemed like years ago, but was less than a week.

‘Where can I bury him?’ he asked the woman. Two of her neighbours had appeared, and all three of them looked at him as if he was mad.

If there was a reply, he didn’t hear it. There was a sudden whoosh and the briefest sensation of flight. The earth seemed to explode, a hundred hammers seemed to hit him at once, and then all noise was sucked away, leaving only a shimmering silence. He felt a moment of enormous relief, and then nothing at all.