We take the opportunity to short-circuit the bucket brigade. We sheer out, passing a full bucket to the man in front and an empty bucket to the man in back. Pulling off this stupidly simple trick puts us in a good mood. We hold hands as we run through the smoking streets. But it’s a long way to the Motzstrasse, and we probably won’t get through anyhow. Flames are lighting up the sky over the ruins in the next few blocks.

The girl (she’s so young you wouldn’t guess she had a child; a minor accident, no doubt)—the girl gets tired. Tired and cranky, like the kids in the air-raid shelter. She launches into the same pouty Berlin jargon: “Hey, man, how’re we ever gonna get to Motzstrasse if everything’s cookin’? I’m wreckin’ my shoes—just look!”

She has an insight of stoic grandeur: “Either they managed to get out alive and everything’s fine and dandy or they’re dead. Either way, I can’t do anything.”

We briefly reflect whether we should go back to the party. No, we can scarcely expect it to get any better. My apartment—in another highly respectable family rooming house, different from the one three years ago—is rather far away.

“Well, then, let’s go to my place. It’s right around the next corner.” We hold hands again. You can say what you like, but it’s good to survive.

1945, near Buchholz, on the Lüneburg Heath.

The dawn breaks over the black saw-teeth of the pines. The sky turns cold and smooth like polished stone. A hundred yards ahead, the freight cars that have toppled from the embankment are blazing. The air smells of burning rubber—or something of the kind; the smoky flames inundate the potato field with an eerie brownish red. In the ditch a few patches of March snow are melting rosily. A handful of men are working on the tracks—six or seven, guarded by three others. The workers are convicts from Altona who wear prison uniforms with round, rimless, visorless caps. The guards are policemen. In the cattle cars of the train, which is standing by the pines, mainly women are peering out—but in their condition it is hard to tell their sex; they could just as easily be half-starved men. For three days now, I’m told, such trains have been rolling through here nonstop, supposedly to a big camp near Belsen. The strafers have set a couple of trains on fire. Perhaps some of the people have managed to sneak into the bushes, but it doesn’t matter—they won’t get far. They’re too feeble to survive outdoors, and no one will take them in and hide them—it’s too risky. They’re guarded by a single man here, an old geezer with a gigantic rifle—he looks like a home guardsman from the First World War. He carries the rifle on a strap across his back and he props his arm on the barrel like a huntsman. He only casually notices the few figures who have jumped out of the train to take a shit.