My colleagues all had the idea to meet at the SS-Haus. I found Piontek there, imperturbable; Fräulein Praxa, prettily dressed, although her wardrobe had gone up in smoke; all cheerful because his neighborhood had been spared, Walser; and, a little shaken up, Isenbeck, whose old neighbor had died of a heart attack right next to him, during the alert, in the dark, without his noticing. Weinrowski had returned some time ago to Oranienburg. As for Asbach, he had sent word: his wife was wounded, he would come as soon as he could. I sent Piontek to tell him to take a few days if he needed to: there wasn’t much chance we could get back to work right away anyway. I sent Fräulein Praxa home, and in the company of Walser and Isenbeck went to the ministry to see what could still be saved. The fire had been contained, but the west wing was still closed; a fireman escorted us through the rubble. Most of the top floor had burned down, as well as the attic: in our offices, only one room, with a file cabinet that had survived the fire, remained, but it had been flooded by the firemen’s hoses. Through a section of collapsed wall you could see part of the ravaged Tiergarten; leaning out, I saw that the Lehrter Bahnhof had also suffered, but the thick smoke that weighed over the city prevented me from seeing farther; in the distance, though, the lines of burned avenues could still be made out. I undertook to move the surviving files with my colleagues, along with a typewriter and a telephone. It was a delicate task, since the fire had burned holes in the floor in places, and the hallways were obstructed with rubble that had to be cleared. When Piontek joined us, we filled the car and I sent him to take everything to the SS-Haus. There I was assigned a temporary storage closet, but nothing more; Brandt was still too overwhelmed to worry about me. Since I had nothing else to do, I dismissed Walser and Isenbeck and had Piontek drop me off at the Eden Hotel, after arranging with him to come pick me up the next morning: without a family, he could just as well sleep in the garage. I went down to the bar and ordered a Cognac. My roommate, the Georgian, wearing a fedora and a white scarf, was playing Mozart on the piano, with a remarkably precise touch. When he stopped, I offered him a drink and chatted a little with him. He was vaguely affiliated with one of those groups of émigrés who were always bustling about the dens of the Auswärtiges Amt and the SS; the name Misha Kedia, when he mentioned it, sounded vaguely familiar. When he learned that I had been in the Caucasus, he leapt up enthusiastically, ordered another round, gave a solemn and interminable toast (although I had never set foot on his side of the mountains), forced me to empty my glass in one swallow, and invited me on the spot to come stay in Tiflis after our forces had freed it, in his ancestral home. Little by little the bar filled up. Around seven o’clock, conversations trailed off, people began to eye the clock over the bar: ten minutes later the sirens started up, then the flak, violent and close. The manager had come to assure us that the bar also served as a shelter; all the hotel clients came downstairs, and soon there was no more room. The ambiance became cheerful and animated: as the first bombs got closer, the Georgian went back to the piano and dove into a jazz tune; women in evening gowns got up to dance, the walls and chandeliers trembled, glasses fell from the bar and shattered, you could scarcely hear the music beneath the explosions, the air pressure became unbearable, I drank, several women, hysterical, laughed, another tried to kiss me, then burst out sobbing. When it was over, the manager handed out a round on the house. I went out: the zoo had been hit, pavilions were burning, again you could see fires pretty much everywhere; I smoked a cigarette, regretting I hadn’t gone to see the animals while there was still time. A section of wall had collapsed; I walked over to it, men were running in every direction, some were carrying shotguns, there was talk of lions and tigers roaming free. Several firebombs had fallen, and beyond the avalanche of bricks, I saw the galleries burning; the large Indian temple had been gutted; inside, a man who was walking next to me explained, they had found the elephants’ corpses torn to pieces by the bombs, as well as a rhinoceros seemingly intact but also dead, maybe from fear. Behind me, most of the buildings on Budapesterstrasse were burning too. I went to lend a hand to the firemen; for hours I helped clear away the rubble; every five minutes a whistle blew, and work stopped so the rescuers could listen for the muffled sounds of trapped people; and we got some of them out alive, wounded or even unhurt. Around midnight I went back to the Eden; the façade was damaged, but the structure had escaped a direct hit; at the bar, the party was still going on. My new Georgian friend forced me to drink several glasses in a row; the uniform Thomas had lent me was covered in filth and soot, but that didn’t prevent women of the highest society from flirting with me; few of them, it seemed, wanted to spend the night alone. The Georgian did so well that I got completely drunk: the next morning, I woke up on my bed, without any memory of climbing up to my room, with my tunic and shirt removed, but not my boots. The Georgian was snoring in the next bed. I cleaned up as well as I could, put on one of my clean uniforms, and gave Thomas’s over to be washed; leaving my sleeping neighbor there, I downed a bad coffee, took an aspirin for my headache, and returned to the Prinz-Albrechtstrasse.

The officers of the Reichsführung all looked a little wild: a number of them hadn’t slept all night; many had ended up homeless, and several had lost someone in their family. In the lobby and the stairways, inmates in striped uniforms, guarded by some Totenkopf-SS, were sweeping the floor, nailing up boards, repainting the walls. Brandt asked me to help some officers draw up an estimation of the damage for the Reichsführer, by contacting the municipal authorities. The work was simple enough: each of us chose a sector—victims, housing, government buildings, infrastructure, industry—and contacted the proper authorities to note down their figures. I was set up with an office that had a telephone and a directory; a few lines still worked, and I put Fräulein Praxa there—she had unearthed a new outfit somewhere—so she could call the hospitals. To get him out from underfoot, I decided to send Isenbeck, with the salvaged files, to join his boss Weinrowski in Oranienburg, and asked Piontek to drive him there. Walser hadn’t come. When Fräulein Praxa managed to reach a hospital, I asked for the number of dead and wounded they had received; when she had made a list of three or four institutions we couldn’t reach by phone, I sent a driver and an orderly to collect the data. Asbach arrived around noon, his features drawn, making a visible effort to look composed. I took him to the mess for sandwiches and tea. Slowly, between mouthfuls, he told me what had happened: The first night, the building where his wife had joined her mother had taken a direct hit and had collapsed onto the shelter, which had only partly held up. Asbach’s mother-in-law had apparently been killed immediately or had at least died quickly; his wife had been buried alive and they hadn’t been able to free her till the next morning, unhurt aside from a broken arm, but incoherent; she had had a miscarriage during the night, and still hadn’t recovered her wits; she went from a childlike babbling to hysterical tears. “I’m going to have to bury her mother without her,” Asbach said sadly as he sipped his tea. “I’d have liked to wait a little, for her to recover, but the morgues are overflowing and the medical authorities are afraid of epidemics. Apparently all the bodies that haven’t been reclaimed in twenty-four hours will be buried in mass graves. It’s terrible.” I tried my best to console him, but, I have to admit, I’m not very good at that sort of thing: my words about his future conjugal happiness must have sounded pretty hollow. Still it seemed to comfort him. I sent him home with a driver from the Reichsführung, promising I’d find him a van for the funeral the next day.