We are standing in a compartment with places for eight people but there are twenty-five of us. Twenty-five in a compartment designed for eight — that means it makes no difference if the heat is shut off. Even before the train starts, sweat begins to run. There is no space for two feet, you have to stand on one foot but you do not fall, you hardly need even one foot for even with both feet off the floor you are held in a vice between other sweaty bodies. It is impossible to make one movement without causing someone pain. The lavatories are also full of people, but that matters little — reaching the lavatory is out of the question anyway.
At last the train moves off, the carriages jerk nervously and already the mere fact of finally getting under way brings a certain relief to back, arms and stomach, to everything caught in the vice. We slowly cross the bombed bridge which has very recently — after eighteen months of peace — been meagrely patched up. This is no propaganda bridge of the kind always being opened in German newsreels in the presence of a representative of the military government, a mayor and a pair of scissors that clips through a string and thus, as all the mayors say, helps to increase understanding between Germany and the Allies. Cynical people claim that it is always the same bridge and the same pair of scissors. But different mayors.
The last lights of the city shine in through the window and there in the passing gleam is Gerhard, who, more adept than I am at boarding German trains, has found a window seat. The gleam shows a whole row of tired grey faces: worn-out housewives on their way to the countryside to hunt for potatoes in the villages, prisoners in their greatcoats who have come from Lyons and who say, when the train crosses the bridge so slowly, that since they have waited five years to come home they can also wait through these few hours. Then there are plenty of people without recognized existences: black-marketeers and others who roam from city to city and only God knows what they live off.
We journey on in the thick darkness, sweaty, furious, still not sufficiently exhausted to have given up being irritated. But in this darkness something strange suddenly happens. In Germany there is a kind of emergency pocket-torch whose bottom you have to press repeatedly in order to produce light, a yellow intermittent gleam, and the torch buzzes like a bee while it reluctantly emits its light. Suddenly one of these torches starts buzzing in the darkness down by a bench, and all those whose position will allow them look in its direction and see that it is shining on the palm of a hand, a young woman’s hand, and in that hand there lies an apple. A large green juicy apple, one of Germany’s biggest. Total silence falls in the compartment, such is the effect of the apple, for apples are rare in Germany. And the apple is simply lying there on the girl’s palm, and then the torch goes out and in the breathless silence of the dark there is heard the terribly distinct sound of a bite: the young woman has taken a bite of her apple. The torch buzzes again and there is the apple as before, clearly illuminated on her palm. She directs the beam carefully at the bite, examines the bite; it is a remarkable bite, one that can make you hungry. And how terribly long does that big apple last, and that breathless silence? The young woman with her good teeth, which the whole compartment can feel, shines her torch on the apple each time she has taken a bite, perhaps to demonstrate how easily matter can be defeated.
But by the time the apple has come to an end, apathy has coiled round us. We hang like dead bodies against one another, lean against unknown shoulders and go numb in this suffocating box stinking of sweat and bad air. To keep themselves awake until they change trains the three POWs talk together quietly but with barely restrained vehemence about a cake, a huge and glorious French gateau one of them had eaten in Paris during the occupation. He tries to recall this cake, how deep the layer of cream was, whether it was cognac or arak in that hole in the middle, whether he ate it with a spoon or with a knife or with both.
Towards the end of the night the train stops in a big, empty, brightly illuminated station. There is not one sound to be heard and not one person to be seen. It is like a dream. But suddenly a booming echo reverberates between the station walls: an order is being thrown at us from a loudspeaker. Passkontrolle. Gepäckkontrolle. Passport check. Baggage check. The passengers must leave the train, taking their luggage with them. When we have waited for a time on this platform in Eichenberg, a station on the frontier between German England and German America, a few tall American soldiers come along. They chew gum and walk about kicking luggage and examining Ausweise. Gerhard is nervous, he has tampered with his passport, contrived to designate himself ‘agricultural worker’ instead of mechanic in order to cheat the Russians, but all goes well.
From here to Hannover we now stand by a window and talk about his life. He says he is glad that the war went the way it did; he no longer has to go out marching with the Hitler Jugend every Sunday, but nevertheless he says that his service in the war was prima, ganz prima. He was a mechanic stationed at an airfield in Holland and he claims he will never forget his days there. But now he wants to get away; ‘You can’t stay in Germany if you’re young.’
Before daylight has properly come we watch some dramatic episodes at various stations where we pause. The train is still just as packed as it was, but at those stations there are waiting crowds of despairing people who have as much right to travel as we have. A desperate woman runs along the train and outside every compartment she screams that she must reach a deathbed, but not even someone trying to reach a deathbed can find a place on this train if she lacks the strength to force her way on. A great, rough fellow pushes into our compartment and exchanges blows with a man already standing in the doorway, and since he is a better boxer he thus gets a place on the train. It is the only way.
After Hannover, when many have left the train, there are people standing along the line with full potato-sacks. They drag their sacks over the feet of those who are standing and they smell of earth and autumn. When they heave their sacks up on the luggage racks earth dribbles out over the heads of those sitting beneath. They dry the sweat from their foreheads, both women and men, and they tell us about a tragedy, a potato tragedy, that has just happened.
A woman from Hamburg, who had travelled to Celle with four empty sacks and a handcart and who after four days of relentless effort had managed to fill those sacks through begging from the farmers around Celle, had then by mustering all her strength succeeded in dragging her sacks to the station. When she arrived there her face was glowing with satisfaction. She dried the sweat from her brow, which was then smeared with good earth instead. She had managed. She had done what few others had the ability or the perseverence to do: she had managed to scrape together a whole winter’s supply of potatoes for her hungry family. So she stands there in the station at Celle and is pleased with herself and her four days and thinks of the joy that will radiate towards her when she arrives home. She does not yet know that she is a Sisyphus who has rolled her stone up to the hilltop; soon it will tip over and vanish far below. True, she has her sacks and her cart and her strong hands, but her chances of getting into a train are nil. With four potato-sacks no one gets on to a German train. With two perhaps if one can fight. She stands all day waiting for the empty train, the one that will have space for all of her fortune, but such a train does not come, and those with experience tell her that such a train will not come any other day either, such a train will never come at all. She becomes more and more desperate. She must get home at any price; she has already been absent much too long and one cannot walk all the way from Celle to Hamburg. She is now somewhere or other on this train, a bitter and hopelessly tired old woman with one sack of potatoes on the luggage-rack and the other three and a precious handcart in the station at Celle.