1944, Berlin.

Air-raid shelter. People thrown together. Ashen faces. The women dressed as if they were about to go sledding in the park: fur coats over coffee-brown track-suit pants; small plaid scarves wound around their curlers like a cross between a turban and a Phrygian cap. Whining kids groggy with sleep. The few men—aged, their faces notched and creased with hunger. The long-drawn-out howling of the all-clear signal releases some of the tension like a valve in a high-pressure boiler. Sighs of relief. People gather up the belongings they have dragged down here. Crawl out between damp walls and support beams. They’re familiar with the whole business. These nighttime interruptions are part of daily life with its obnoxious routines. But still, it gets to you every time. Shouts from outside. A couple of people running along the street. When the basement door is opened, a smell of burning wafts in.

I find myself in a motley group who are viewed here with wry displeasure. It is a small party, given by a young councilor in the government dealing with the war economy. The scent of our cigarettes has drawn notice, but the real provocation is the cloud of good French perfume around the girls, plus the very hard accent of the little Brazilian attaché . . . Luckily, a few aerial mines exploding nearby diverted attention from us. There was pandemonium here for a good half hour. Only now do we feel our nerves quivering.

And the present mood is all the more euphoric. Not cheery, however, but coldly passionate, almost malevolent. We don’t give a good goddamn now about the angry glares of the mothers, herding along their exhausted flocks of kids. We dash up the stairs, three or four steps at a time, to our host’s apartment. Soon champagne corks are popping. And there are rolls with the finest Pomeranian sausage, and fantastic rumba records brought by the Brazilian. One of the girls is already dancing on the table, her skirt pulled up to her crotch. But she doesn’t dance for long. Suddenly, she stops dead, gapes straight ahead, and cries, “My baby!”

It has just struck her that she left her child with her parents in the Motzstrasse. Where the aerial mines came down thickest.

She won’t be held back. She doesn’t even pull on her coat. She simply runs out into the night in her dress. Since I’ve got my eye on her and don’t want her to just vanish into the night, I run after her.

We don’t get far. At the second corner, where a building is on fire, we are thrust into a bucket brigade. An irate air-raid warden, obviously of great authority, waves a pistol in the air. He sticks it under the nose of a man who declares that he is a doctor and could probably be employed more usefully elsewhere rather than here, in this senseless attempt to pour bucketfuls of water on a blaze that no brigade can bring under control. “You will do your duty like everyone else!” screams the air-raid chief. “You know I have the right to shoot you if you resist my orders.”