All the Light We Cannot See: a novel

Achtung!
and the boys stand at their benches and Bastian the
commandant waddles in. The boys look down at their food in silence while Bastian walks the
rows, trailing a single index finger across their backs. “Homesick? We mustn’t trouble ourselves
over our homes. In the end we all come home to the führer. What other home matters?”
“No other!” shout the boys.
Every afternoon, no matter the weather, the commandant blows his whistle and the fourteen-
year-olds trot outside and he looms over them with his coat stretched across his belly and his
medals chiming and the rubber hose twirling. “There are two kinds of death,” he says, the clouds
of his breath plunging out into the cold. “You can fight like a lion. Or you can go as easy as lifting a
hair from a cup of milk. The nothings, the nobodies—they die easy.” He sweeps his eyes along the
ranks and swings his hose and widens his eyes dramatically. “How will you boys die?”
One windy afternoon he pulls Helmut Rödel out of line. Helmut is a small, unpromising child
from the south who keeps his hands balled in fists nearly all his waking hours.
“And who is it, Rödel? In. Your. Opinion. Who is the weakest member of the corps?” The
commandant twirls the hose. Helmut Rödel takes no time. “Him, sir.”
Werner feels something heavy fall through him. Rödel is pointing directly at Frederick.
Bastian calls Frederick forward. If fear darkens his friend’s face, Werner cannot see it.
Frederick looks distracted. Almost philosophical. Bastian drapes his hose around his neck and
trudges across the field, snow to his shins, taking his time, until he is little more than a dark lump at
the far edge. Werner tries to make eye contact with Frederick, but his eyes are a mile away.
The commandant raises his right arm and yells, “Ten!” and the wind frays the word across the
long expanse. Frederick blinks several times, as he often does when addressed in class, waiting
for his internal life to catch up with his external one.
“Nine!”
“Run,” hisses Werner.
Frederick is a decent runner, faster than Werner, but the commandant seems to count quickly this
afternoon, and Frederick’s head start has been abbreviated, and the snow hampers him, and he
cannot be over twenty yards away when Bastian raises his left arm.
The boys explode into movement. Werner runs with the others, trying to stay in the back of the
pack, their rifles beating in syncopation against their backs. Already the fastest of the boys seem to
be running faster than usual, as though tired of being outrun.
Frederick runs hard. But the fastest boys are greyhounds, harvested from all over the nation for
their speed and eagerness to obey, and they seem to Werner to be running more fervently, more

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conclusively, than they have before. They are impatient to find out what will happen if someone is
caught.
Frederick is fifteen strides from Bastian when they haul him down.
The group coalesces around the front-runners as Frederick and his pursuers get to their feet, all
of them pasted with snow. Bastian strides up. The cadets encircle their instructor, chests heaving,
many with their hands on their knees. The breath of the boys pulses out before them in a collective
fleeting cloud that is stripped away quickly by the wind. Frederick stands in the middle, panting
and blinking his long eyelashes.
“It usually does not take so long,” says Bastian mildly, almost as if to himself. “For the first to
be caught.”
Frederick squints at the sky.
Bastian says, “Cadet, are you the weakest?”
“I don’t know, sir.”
“You don’t know?” A pause. Into Bastian’s face flows an undercurrent of antagonism. “Look at
me when you speak.”
“Some people are weak in some ways, sir. Others in other ways.”
The commadant’s lips thin and his eyes narrow and an expression of slow and intense malice
rises in his face. As though a cloud has drifted away and for a moment Bastian’s true, deformed
character has come glaring through. He pulls the hose from around his neck and hands it to Rödel.
Rödel blinks up at his bulk. “Go on, then,” prods Bastian. In some other context, he might be
encouraging a reluctant boy to step into cold water. “Do him some good.”
Rödel looks down at the hose: black, three feet long, stiff in the cold. What might be several
seconds pass, though they feel to Werner like hours, and the wind tears through the frosted grass,
sending zephyrs and wisps of snow sirening off across the white, and a sudden nostalgia for
Zollverein rolls through him in a wave: boyhood afternoons wandering the soot-stained warrens,
towing his little sister in the wagon. Muck in the alleys, the hoarse shouts of work crews, the boys
in their dormitory sleeping head to toe while their coats and trousers hang from hooks along the
walls. Frau Elena’s midnight passage among the beds like an angel, murmuring,