All the Light We Cannot See: a novel

What you could be
.
Werner’s body seems to have gone weightless under his blanket, and beyond the flapping tent
doors, the trees dance and the clouds keep up their huge billowing march, and he swings first one
leg and then the other off the edge of the bed.
“Ernst,” says the man beside him. “Ernst.” But there is no Ernst; the men in the cots do not reply;
the American soldier at the door of the tent sleeps. Werner walks past him into the grass.
The wind moves through his undershirt. He is a kite, a balloon.
Once, he and Jutta built a little sailboat from scraps of wood and carried it to the river. Jutta
painted the vessel in ecstatic purples and greens, and she set it on the water with great formality.
But the boat sagged as soon as the current got hold of it. It floated downstream, out of reach, and
the flat black water swallowed it. Jutta blinked at Werner with wet eyes, pulling at the battered
loops of yarn in her sweater.
“It’s all right,” he told her. “Things hardly ever work on the first try. We’ll make another, a

---

better one.”
Did they? He hopes they did. He seems to remember a little boat—a more seaworthy one—
gliding down a river. It sailed around a bend and left them behind. Didn’t it?
The moonlight shines and billows; the broken clouds scud above the trees. Leaves fly
everywhere. But the moonlight stays unmoved by the wind, passing through clouds, through air, in
what seems to Werner like impossibly slow, imperturbable rays. They hang across the buckling
grass.
Why doesn’t the wind move the light?
Across the field, an American watches a boy leave the sick tent and move against the
background of the trees. He sits up. He raises his hand.
“Stop,” he calls.
“Halt,” he calls.
But Werner has crossed the edge of the field, where he steps on a trigger land mine set there by
his own army three months before, and disappears in a fountain of earth.

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Eleven

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1945

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Berlin
I
n January 1945, Frau Elena and the last four girls living at Children’s House—the twins, Hannah
and Susanne Gerlitz, Claudia Förster, and fifteen-year-old Jutta Pfennig—are transported from
Essen to Berlin to work in a machine parts factory.
For ten hours a day, six days a week, they disassemble massive forging presses and stack the
usable metal in crates to be loaded onto train cars. Unscrewing, sawing, hauling. Most days Frau
Elena works close by, wearing a torn ski jacket she has found, mumbling to herself in French or
singing songs from childhood.
They live above a printing company abandoned a month before. Hundreds of crates of
misprinted dictionaries are stacked in the halls, and the girls burn them page by page in the
potbelly stove.
Yesterday 
Dankeswort, Dankesworte, Dankgebet, Dankopfer.
Today 
Frauenverband, Frauenverein, Frauenvorsteher, Frauenwahlrecht.
For meals they have cabbage and barley in the factory canteen at noon, endless ration lines in
the evening. Butter is cut into tiny portions: three times a week, they each get a square half the size
of a sugar cube. Water comes from a spigot two blocks away. Mothers with infants have no baby
clothes, no buggies, and very little cow’s milk. Some tear apart bedsheets for diapers; a few find
newspapers and fold those into triangles and pin them between their babies’ legs.
At least half of the girls working in the factory cannot read or write, so Jutta reads them the
letters that come from boyfriends or brothers or fathers at the front. Sometimes she writes
responses for them: