Then a second siren sounds and the ringmaster announces that they are evacuating the big top per the instructions in the program.

No one panics. They are all accustomed to air raids. The deadening return of reality descends, and the audience pushes down the stairs. There is some jockeying to avoid the dog cellar, which smells horrible, but basically everyone goes where directed. Ania, Ania, and their boys are ushered into a damp corner of the scenery storage hall, behind a wooden board painted with a ghoulish gypsy face, the mouth cut into an open cackle, large enough for a man to climb through. I’m glad we missed that act, the other Ania says, gesturing at this. Mama, Pietre says, clutching his mother’s hand, white-faced. I don’t like it. Ania is amazed that a two-dimensional set piece still has the power to frighten him after all the real horrors he has lived through.

The other Ania pulls her son close, stroking his fine hair: What’s not to like about a giant laughing gypsy face? she jokes, and the boy snuggles against her like a much younger child.

From above ground, they hear the tremor and boom of bombs dropping—so this is not simply another false alarm. The screaming whoosh of an incendiary followed by a nearby explosion turns the cellar silent. People look at one another wide-eyed.

From the dog cellar comes a woeful, frightened howl. Ania has not been in an underground air raid shelter since Aunt Gudrun’s flat in Essen. On the road, there were bombings, attacks on bridges and train tracks and other pieces of infrastructure, but no shelters. The atmosphere here is calmer but more claustrophobic. At least on the road there was some illusion of control—how fast you ran, what ditch you dove into, how accurately you gauged where the falling bomb would hit . . . here you were entirely in the hands of fate.

Around eleven P.M. an all clear sounds. Wearily, the audience makes its orderly way out of the subterranean warren. The circus itself has not been hit, but all around them the buildings are on fire. People flushed out of their homes wander the streets, clutching random belongings, and the crackle and rasp of flames is pierced by the cries of frightened animals—circus horses tied to fences and trees, tigers roaring from their cages.

Dresden, the supposedly invincible city, has been hit. It is oddly difficult to process. A building down the street is ablaze, burning curtains stream out the windows on the first floor and fly off into the wind. The top floors are like the head of a candle, a swollen pointed flame.

Across the river in the Altstadt, there is a massive inferno, much more intense than the patches of fire on this side, but Ania and Ania do not know this yet. Ash blows everywhere. Dazed, they try to decide whether it’s best to head for the church basement, where they have secured beds for the night, or to abandon the city and head for the outskirts. Cleanup brigades have begun to emerge, providing the illusion that all this destruction is within the bounds of some plan: a possibility that the authorities have considered and now intend to address.