“That must be Magdeburg, getting it in the neck,” said a soldier who had shoved in beside me to look out too.
“Who’s giving it to them?” I asked.
He looked at me curiously. “Those Yankee bastards, of course,” he said, as if he were talking to a simpleton. “Things are just as hot here as they are at the front.”
I couldn’t tear my eyes away from the glow of the burning city. I had thought that we’d left the war far behind us. The train began to move again, only to come to a fresh halt fifteen minutes later. Soldiers ran up the track, calling everybody off. Somebody said that the line had been cut, and that all military personnel, whether on active duty or on leave, had to put themselves at the disposal of the local authorities. Thus I found myself, in my clean uniform and carrying my holiday package, falling into step with about a hundred resigned soldiers.
We walked for about half an hour into the blinding, acrid smoke of countless fires, and began shifting fallen timbers and massive masonry blocks, while delayed-action bombs pulverized what was left of a terrified bourgeois population. Groups of whimpering civilians were impressed into cleanup squads by foul-mouthed officials shouting at the tops of their lungs. Everyone was put to work. Although it was pitch dark, we were able to see: broken gas pipes thrown up onto the torn earth blazed like blow torches, amid the heaps of stones, broken wood, window glass, furniture, arms, and legs.
A gang of territorials handed out picks, and we piled the rest of our equipment beside a fire truck. We had to dig into the ruins with the greatest possible speed: we could hear the groans and cries of people trapped in the cellars. Women and children weeping with terror were carting away bricks and stones to clear some space. Shouted orders overlapped: “Quick! This way!”
“We need help over here!”
“Quick! The water pipes have burst and are flooding the cellars!” Of course, the military were chosen to deal with the most dangerous situations, and sent into places threatened with immediate collapse.
We reached the cellars through the deep airshafts. We attacked a brick wall which seemed to be blocking the entrance to a basement where people were calling for help. My pick sank into something soft: probably the stomach of some poor soul crushed by the debris. And damn it! I was on leave, and all of this was holding me up! An explosion shifted the ground we were standing on: another one of those American bombs which blow up some time after they’ve landed. Nonetheless, our efforts were finally successful. The last brick wall fell beneath our blows, and a bunch of haggard, blackened people surged through the jagged opening, engulfed in a swirling cloud of dust. Several people embraced us, sobbing with relief and recognition. Others were in a state of literal madness. Everyone was somehow hurt or wounded. We had to climb down ourselves to bring out terrified women clutching their children so tightly they were nearly suffocating them.
I pulled out the first child I saw. A kid of about five was tugging at one of my trouser legs so hard that it came right out of my boot. He was trying to drag me to a particular spot, and he was crying so hard that his gasps for breath between each sob were extraordinarily long. He pulled me over to a recess where a crushed wine bin was holding up the base of a vault on the brink of collapse. An inert human form was lying in the jumble of rubble at my feet. The kid was still howling, in a passion of grief that couldn’t be helped.
I shouted as loud as I could: “Licht aus! Schnell!”
Someone came over with a torch, and we saw the body of a woman crushed by the metal of the bottle rack, which had collapsed under the weight of thirty or forty tons of disintegrating masonry. The body of a child was wedged in beside her. Pulling against the stiff, dusty clothes of the corpse, I dragged out the child’s body as if it were just another stone. But maybe the kid was still alive: it seemed to move a little. Dragging the two kids with me, I made for the exit hole, and handed over the child in my arms to some rescue workers. The one who was howling trailed along with me for a short distance, until I abandoned him. He could shift for himself, for God’s sake. In Germany, everyone had to be ready for that — the younger the better. We were already needed for another job.
The sirens were howling again: the Anglo-Americans were faithfully adhering to their practice of coming back with a second dose before we had time to help the victims of the first. The gang chiefs blew their whistles for retreat. Voices were shouting: “Everyone take cover.”
But where? For four hundred yards around us we could see nothing but heaps of rubble. People who knew the district ran in what they hoped were likely directions. Bewildered children were crying. Above us, we could hear the roar of four-engined planes. I was running too, and I knew what I was looking for. The fire truck had disappeared, but our heap of packs remained where we’d left them. Soldiers were turning them over, grabbing the right one, and running off. I recognized mine by the metal eidelweiss I had sewed onto the piece of calfskin which served as a pillow. I pulled it out, along with my gun…. But my gift package… God damn it!
“Hey… you… my package!”
Someone threw me a package across the maelstrom. Everyone was hurrying off.
“Hey… This isn’t it! Wait a minute! God damn it!”
Bombs were beginning to fall at the other end of the city. God damn it to hell!
I ran as fast as I could across an empty space where I narrowly escaped a car in as great a hurry as I. The surface of the road seemed to be rising and falling in ripples, and the sound of thousands of panes shattering simultaneously added a crystalline note to the huge shock produced by bombs of four and five thousand kilos.
The number of people on the street was shrinking rapidly. Only a few fools like myself were still running about looking for shelter. My eyes, stinging from the clouds of acrid dust, could see, in the intermittent flashes of white light, the outline of the houses bordering the street. On one of the buildings I could make out a white poster with black letters: SHELTER: THIRTY PERSONS.
Never mind if there were already a hundred! I ran down a spiral staircase between the only two walls left intact in the building. A dim lamp which some thoughtful soul had hooked to the wall lit the turns in the stair. But after two spirals the way was blocked by a large gray cylinder, which was even taller than I. I tried to squeeze through the narrow gap next to the stair wall, but a closer look at the object made my blood freeze. I was pressing myself against an enormous bomb, whose broken wings indicated that it had crashed through every floor of the building from the roof down. It must have weighed at least four tons, and might explode any minute. I streaked back up the stairs and out the door into the darkness, which flickered unevenly into brilliant light like a huge neon sign. Finally, gasping for breath, I collapsed beside a bench in a square, and lay there for about twenty minutes, until the sirens sounded the all clear. When everything was quiet again, I went back to the job of cleaning up, from which I was released at the end of the morning. Then I was given the most depressing news of all.
I was ready to continue my journey westward. Two days of my leave had already been wasted, and I couldn’t spare another minute. I asked a territorial where I would find the train for Kassel and Frankfurt. He asked for my pass, looked it over, and told me to follow him. He took me to a military police station. I watched through the little window as my pass traveled from hand to hand, keeping my eyes firmly fixed on it. I saw several stamps being added to the scrap of paper I had brought from Akhtyrka. Then it was handed back to me, and I was informed, in an indifferent, administrative tone, that I could not proceed beyond the Magdeburg sector. Given the location of my army corps, I had come to the extreme western limit of permissible travel.