by Andy Marino
“Gerta!” he whispered as loudly as he dared.
A man’s gruff voice answered, startlingly close: “I’ve been waiting for you!”
Max thought he recognized the voice, but he had no time to think. He groped blindly. It wasn’t until he was practically on top of them that the two figures materialized out of the darkness: a big man holding a girl by the arm while she flailed and kicked.
Franz Siewert and Gerta Hoffmann.
Without hesitating, Max launched himself between the blockwart and his sister. Siewert cried out in surprise. A crushing blow landed across Max’s left shoulder. He hit the ground hard, thankful for his heavy coat. At the same time, Gerta twisted out of the man’s grip and delivered a vicious kick to his left shin. Siewert howled in pain.
“Come on, Max!” she yelled. He scrambled to his feet. His shoulder throbbed. Siewert raised the baton to deliver another blow. Max barely had time to get a forearm up to block his face—
And then the air-raid siren began to wail, splitting the quiet night.
Siewert paused, just long enough for Max to jump out of the way as the baton came whistling past his face.
“This way!” Gerta yelled, and together they ran northwest along Messelpark, boots pounding down the cobblestones. Behind them, Max heard Siewert wheezing and puffing as he struggled to keep up.
“Stop them!” Siewert yelled. “By order of the Dahlem blockwart, detain those criminals!”
Whatever Siewert said next was drowned out by the massive guns of the Humboldthain flak tower. Max glanced up. More searchlights blinked on, and the web of light was beginning to rake the sky.
“Mutti and Papa are awake now for sure!” he said to Gerta.
“We’ve got bigger problems!” she yelled in reply. “We have to get to a shelter!”
They ran faster. The blockwart’s heavy steps faded as the flak hammered the sky.
Papa always told them that if they were ever caught out in the open during a raid, all they had to do was follow the crowd—everybody would be headed to the nearest public shelter.
“There!” Max said. Across the street, people appeared to be milling about. It had to be the other scattered pedestrians, forming a ragged line. They took a sharp left. Max risked a quick glance over his shoulder. The blockwart was nowhere to be seen. Still, he did not feel any measure of relief. Getting away from Siewert now only meant that the Nazi would come for them later. He knew exactly who they were and where they lived.
But Gerta was right. They had bigger problems. First, they had to survive the bombs.
The shelter that Max and Gerta found themselves in was a reinforced train tunnel on the border of Dahlem and the Grunewald forest. It was part of Berlin’s sofortprogramm—emergency program—which resulted in the construction of three flak towers and five hundred public bunkers.
Max had never been inside a public shelter before. He was surprised to find that it was divided up into dozens of rooms, but also relieved—this would make it more difficult for Herr Siewert to track them down. The room they chose to settle in was sparsely furnished with wooden benches and a few bunks, which were already full of small children. There was a toilet in one corner, hidden behind a pair of wooden screens that could be opened and closed for privacy.
Bare electric bulbs were strung from a line of wire that ran the length of the ceiling, and the floors were dabbed with glowing blots of phosphorescent paint. Max thought of his classmate Joseph’s description of the wall of paint that was supposedly bright enough to read by. The walls in this shelter were bare concrete, unpainted except for a slogan above the doorway:
Gehorche den Regeln. Hilfe deinen Nachbarn.
(Obey the rules. Help your neighbors.)
Max and Gerta sat down on the corner of a bench, squeezing into the only available space. All around the room, Berliners were calmly unpacking decks of cards, books, and newspapers. It would be hours before the all clear, and people had learned that it was better to keep busy than to sit and stare at the walls and listen to the bombs, wondering if they were coming closer or if it was just their imaginations.
Max removed his scarf and unbuttoned his coat, wincing at the pain in his shoulder. He was sweaty from the sudden flight from Herr Siewert. The air inside the shelter was musty and close, and he wondered if he ought to start cranking the hand-operated air pump that crouched like a robot from a science-fiction tale in the corner of the room.
The bunker muffled the air-raid siren, but Max could still hear it wailing thinly, like some trapped animal. The flak was a riot of dull bursts that he felt in his stomach.
He glanced at their neighbors on the bench—an elderly couple in pajamas and overcoats, sharing a newspaper.
He whispered to Gerta, “Do you think he followed us in here?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “He wouldn’t want to be outside in a raid any more than we would, so he had to have gone to a shelter somewhere. And this was the closest one.”
Max couldn’t help but stare at the door, half expecting Siewert to burst through at any moment, a pair of Gestapo agents at his side. But there was only a little boy, younger than Max, who peeked in curiously until his mother shooed him along.
Seated on the bench on the opposite wall was a large family—Max counted four young children and two parents, along with a grandfather hunched like a carrion bird over his newspaper. The father dealt cards to each of the children, and Max felt a sudden pang of homesickness. Papa and Mutti would be frantic with worry, and it would probably be several hours before Max and Gerta could make their way home. He closed his eyes and prayed for this raid to be a false alarm. That way, the all clear would come much sooner.
But at that moment, the floor beneath his boots trembled. A quick hush swept across the room. The first bombs had slammed into the city. In the cellar at home, Max was an excellent judge of how far the bombs were falling from their villa. He could read the way the cellar rumbled and shook. It was like counting the seconds between lightning and thunder to pinpoint the distance of the storm. But here, everything was different—the depth of the shelter, the thickness of the walls, the sheer number of Berliners huddled together inside. For all he knew, the bombs could be falling right outside in Messelpark, or far away in Lichtenberg.
So much for a false alarm.
“I don’t like it in here,” Gerta said.
“It’s not so bad,” Max said.
“No, I mean, here—this room. There’s only one door,” she pointed out. “We’re trapped.”
A baby squalled and squirmed in its mother’s arms. Max grimaced as its cries became high-pitched shrieks.
Suddenly, Max felt like he was being throttled by Herr Siewert’s baton all over again. He crashed against Gerta, then swung hard the other way, nearly flinging himself off the bench. Others weren’t so lucky—the old woman next to them was sprawled on the floor. Quickly, Gerta and Max helped her back to her seat.
Dust thickened the air. A pair of teenagers manned the air pump. An uneasy silence fell over the room. No question about it: That bomb had fallen close by. Max wondered if one of the bombers had strayed off course—it was a cloudy, moonless night, after all—or if this neighborhood was being targeted.
A feeling of great helplessness swept over him. He remembered looking out of his bedroom window at the wave of bombers coming across the sky. The hugeness of war—the way it swallowed up millions of lives with its relentless appetite—made him feel like an ant on hot pavement, sizzling under a magnifying glass. There was nothing any of them could do but sit and wait.
The baby wailed like a banshee, the sound drilling into Max’s skull. He closed his eyes.
“We’re going to be okay,” he said aloud, just to hear it spoken, to give it shape and truth.
Gerta put her arms around him and held him tight. “Bombs can’t touch us,” she said. “We’re under the protection of the cave troll.”
Max laughed. “You should have told me the cave troll was good. Then I wouldn’t have been
so scared of him.”
“Where’s the fun in that?”
Next to them, the elderly couple had folded up their newspaper. They were holding hands and staring at the ceiling, as if a stern gaze could ward off the bombs.
Max listened to the flak guns booming ceaselessly and pictured great silver birds cutting deadly swaths across a bloodred sky.
And then the world blinked out, and Max found himself tossed like a ship on a storm-wracked sea. In the darkness, all he knew was noise: screams of panic and the deafening shudder of a massive concrete collapse. Gerta was instantly wrenched away from him, and he flailed blindly, trying to find her hand. He thought he might be upside down—at the very least, he was not on his feet. He had the abrupt sensation of floating weightlessly for a moment, and then the breath whooshed from his lungs as he was mercilessly thrown back to earth.
Bright spots danced in the darkness, then resolved to an unsteady blur. Fire, he thought, but that didn’t make any sense. There was no heat, just a cacophony of shouts and a vague awareness that the room had reshaped itself. He blinked, and the bright blur faded into the darkness. His head felt stuffed with cotton. He moved his limbs one by one and was greatly relieved to find them all intact.
He pushed himself up to his feet and winced at a sharp pain in his chest—a bruised rib, perhaps. All around him, he could make out dim shapes moving through the darkness, some crying out, some silent.
“Gerta!” he yelled, but what came out was a hoarse rasp. The room was thick with swirling dust. He coughed and spit a glob of grit and saliva. “Gerta!” he called again.
But it was no use. She would never hear him over the clamor of an entire shelter crying out for help.
Then he remembered his torch! He reached into his pocket, pulled it out, and clicked it on. The light wavered and then steadied itself, and he swept the beam around the room—or what was left of it. One wall looked like it had been rammed by a truck and caved in. It was now a pile of cracked cinder blocks and jagged chunks of cement. A skinny arm jutted out of the rubble, bent at an impossible angle. Max rushed over, got down on his knees, stuck the torch in his mouth, and began tossing aside bricks, scarcely noticing when a sharp edge sliced into his palm.
“Help!” he called out. “I need some help over here!”
As he worked, his mind spun frantically. The shelter had just been bombed, there was no doubt about that. But the shelter was massive. If this particular room had taken a direct hit, they would have been vaporized instantly, yanked out of existence. The bomb must have struck the opposite end of the shelter. What took down the wall was merely a shock wave, or the domino effect of the shelter’s collapse.
Suddenly, another pair of hands began pulling chunks of cement from the pile. Max turned his head, and the beam of the torch fell upon his sister’s face.
“Gerta!” he yelled, and the torch fell from his mouth. He grabbed it before it got lost in the rubble and aimed the beam at his sister. She was caked in gray dust, and her forehead was smeared with blood. Max didn’t know if it was hers or someone else’s.
“Maxi!” she cried. “I didn’t know that was you. I was afraid …” She trailed off. Together they worked to dislodge a massive piece of cement.
Gerta didn’t have to finish her sentence. He’d had the same thought. I was afraid that was you buried under the rubble.
With all his remaining strength, Max shoved a cinder block off the pile. In the torchlight, an unblinking eye stared up at him, and surrounding the eye was the face of the old woman who had been sitting next to him on the bench. She was dead. There was no sign of her husband.
“Come on,” Gerta said, pulling on his arm. “There’s nothing we can do.”
Max stood up, sweeping the beam across what remained of the room. The mother and father from the card-playing family were supporting the grandfather between them, staggering toward the door. Their children followed calmly, clasping hands—Those kids have been well trained, Max thought. He watched the parade of dusty faces, and his mind began to feel unmoored from his body. He felt like he was drifting through a strange film, where the dead rose and crept out of their underground tombs …
“Maxi,” Gerta said, “we have to get out of these tunnels.”
He snapped back to reality, and together they joined the procession. Outside, the narrow hallway was choked with panicked survivors. Light from a dozen torches danced and spun. There did not appear to be anyone in charge.
“This way!” Max led Gerta down the main corridor. How many rooms had they passed on the way in before they came to theirs? He didn’t know, and anyway, it was impossible to count them. The blast had reduced many of the cement partitions to rubble, and piles of bricks obscured the phosphorescent paint on the floor.
Suddenly, Max felt a hand grab his ankle. A man’s voice came out of the darkness, weak and faint. “Help me.”
Max flicked the torchlight down to his feet. There was a meaty hand wrapped around his ankle, and attached to the hand was the blockwart, Herr Siewert. He was lying on his stomach, pinned underneath an enormous section of fallen wall.
“Max,” Gerta said coldly. “Come on.”
Max stood there, unsure of what to do. The blockwart was a Nazi who had just caught Max and Gerta delivering false papers to the Jewish underground. He was certainly going to turn the entire Hoffmann family over to the Gestapo as soon as he possibly could.
And yet—
By leaving him pinned underground in the ruins of the shelter, Max was condemning him to death. It seemed like it should be an easy choice—and maybe it was, for Gerta. But all Max could think about was that the hand around his ankle belonged to a living person, and he—Max Hoffmann—would be responsible for this living person’s death. He would carry that weight for the rest of his life.
“I am very cold,” Herr Siewert said softly, squinting into the light.
He doesn’t know it’s me, Max thought.
Herr Siewert began to cough and sputter. Blood dripped from his mouth and began to pool beneath him.
“Heil Hitler,” Siewert muttered, and trailed off into nonsense.
“Hold this,” Max said, handing his sister the torch. Then he gripped the massive, oblong chunk of cement and strained to lift it. The cement did not budge. It would take several people working together to dislodge it.
“Max,” Gerta said wearily.
“I can’t just leave him!” Max said. In his mind he saw the dead woman’s eye, staring lifelessly up at him. How many people were lying dead in this shelter? And outside the shelter, in Berlin, how many hundreds or thousands more were dying?
If he could tip the tally of the dead back toward the living, even by one person, then wasn’t it the right thing to do? Even if the person in question was Herr Siewert?
“It’s him or us,” Gerta said calmly.
Ignoring her, Max knelt down. Herr Siewert was muttering something about a uniform, and a march down Unter den Linden. Blood was beginning to pool around his head. Max caught the man’s eye, dull as a pebble.
“I’m going to get help,” Max assured him. “Hang on.”
Suddenly, Siewert’s eye flashed with recognition. Max felt the man’s grip tighten around his ankle.
“You!” Siewert rasped. Then he coughed, and Max turned away to avoid being splashed in the face with blood. Siewert whispered something that Max couldn’t make out.
He’s dying, thought Max.
“What did you say?” Max said. This might be the man’s last words. Even Herr Siewert deserved to have somebody hear them.
“You,” Siewert repeated, and paused to gather the strength to continue, “and your whole family will die in the camps. That is the fate of Jew-lovers and traitors.”
With that, the last bit of light in his eyes blinked out. The grip on Max’s ankle relaxed, and the hand fell away.
Max stood up. “He’s gone.”
“What did he say to you?”
Max shook his head and took back his t
orch. “Nothing. Let’s get out of here.”
The entrance to the shelter had partially collapsed. A human chain of rescue workers and firefighters pulled survivors out of the narrow opening one by one. When Max and Gerta finally emerged, they gulped down crisp night air, which tasted like the purest thing in the whole world after breathing the foul air of the shelter.
The sky glowed red to the east, on the other side of Messelpark, where a fire was burning out of control. To the west, ruins of the Grunewald train station smoldered. So that was what had happened—the station itself had taken a direct hit, and the pressure wave from the blast had rocketed through the tunnels below. Max shuddered to think what would have happened if a fire had raged through the shelter. A wall of flame tearing through the narrow corridors, scorching everything in its path, all those trapped Berliners roasted alive …
Max glanced up. While the searchlights still swept the sky, the flak had gone quiet. The raid was over, the bombers returning to their bases in England.
Blue-tinted electric lanterns had been arranged in a semicircle around the collapsed entrance to the shelter. As the light mingled with the glow from the twin infernos, rescue workers moved grimly through a lavender night. Max and Gerta watched as limp bodies were pulled from the shelter and laid out side by side in the street. Gerta put her arms around her brother and held him tight. Max felt a curious dullness of spirit as the last of his adrenaline burned away. They had survived. Many others had died. There was a randomness to it all that he had not fully appreciated until this moment.
“How come we lived,” Max said, “and the old lady died? She was sitting right next to me. If the wall had come down a little differently …”
“I honestly don’t know,” Gerta said. “Maybe it’s because we still have a job to do.” She patted the pocket of her coat.
Max’s eyes widened. “Siewert didn’t get the documents?”
“No. I crammed ’em down into my pocket as soon as he grabbed me. He didn’t have a chance to search me before you charged him.” She peered into his eyes. In the weird light, the blood on her forehead looked like a dark blob, a total absence of color. “That was very brave, Maxi. I don’t know what would have happened if you hadn’t done that.”
