Werner finds Marie-Laure hiding in the wardrobe

Werner finds Marie-Laure LeBlanc hidden behind the false back of a wardrobe after violence has entered the house. Their rescue begins not with sight or trust, but with sounds each hears through the wood: her breath, his fingernails, and finally his voice. Once she emerges, he gives her water; soon afterward, the two share a can of peaches. The scene converts a radio connection into a face-to-face encounter, while leaving the danger and uncertainty of their circumstances unmistakable.

The Search Through the Wardrobe

A shot abruptly interrupts the voices in the house. Marie-Laure LeBlanc moves down the ladder and presses her ear against the wardrobe’s false back, while hurried footsteps cross the landing and enter Henri LeBlanc’s room. At first, she hears someone moving through the room and opening the wardrobe doors. The footsteps then change: they become lighter and hesitant, stopping as the person searches and thinks. The distinction matters to Marie-Laure LeBlanc, who cannot see who is there and must judge the approaching stranger by sound.

She hears fingers brush along the back panel and tightens her grip on a knife. The gesture establishes that the hidden space protects her but does not make her safe. The person outside has found the place where she is concealed, and she has no way to know his intentions. Her response is alert and defensive, while his careful exploration delays recognition: before either can identify the other, the wardrobe itself separates them and makes listening their only means of contact.

The narration places this intimate search within a wider simultaneity of events, setting the two figures’ near contact against people and actions elsewhere. That enlarged frame makes the room feel like one precarious point in a world still at war. Yet the scene narrows again to the wood between them. Werner Pfennig hears Marie-Laure LeBlanc inhale; she hears him scrape three fingernails across the panel. The small, distinct sounds establish that they are close, only an arm’s reach apart, while remaining unseen to one another.

Recognition by Voice

Werner Pfennig asks whether she is there. Marie-Laure LeBlanc does not immediately emerge; the scene gives the question weight by making it pass through the barrier that has kept her hidden. For Werner Pfennig, the wardrobe is not merely an obstacle to opening a room. It is the boundary between a voice he has heard over the radio and the person who produced it.

He explains, haltingly, that he is not there to kill her, but came because he heard her on the radio. He struggles to put his explanation into words and refers to the song associated with the moonlight. That reference identifies the connection that brought him to her: their relationship began at a distance, through a broadcast, before they knew one another’s faces or names. The radio does not erase the danger surrounding them, but it gives Werner Pfennig a reason to speak rather than treat the concealed girl as an unknown enemy.

Marie-Laure LeBlanc’s response is shaped by what the voice means to her. Through the panel, Werner Pfennig seems to belong to the people she has lost, including her father, Daniel LeBlanc, Madame Manec, and Etienne LeBlanc. The passage presents that association as her impression, not as evidence that the returned stranger is one of them. Its force lies in the contrast between the unfamiliar soldier outside the wardrobe and the voice that, for a moment, seems to answer an absence. Recognition remains incomplete, but the possibility of listening to him changes the encounter.

Out of Hiding

Marie-Laure LeBlanc slides the wardrobe open. Werner Pfennig takes her hand and helps her down, and her feet reach the floor of her grandfather’s room. The action reverses the earlier movement into concealment: where she had descended the ladder to escape danger, she now comes back into the room with another person’s help. The rescue is physical and immediate, but it does not depend on her suddenly knowing everything about him. She accepts his hand after hearing his explanation and connecting it to the radio.

Her first concern is practical: she cannot find her shoes. The detail keeps the scene grounded in the conditions of escape rather than turning the meeting into an uncomplicated reunion. Werner Pfennig, meanwhile, tells her that a cease-fire may begin at noon to allow people to leave the city, and offers to get her out. When she asks whether he knows this is true, he admits that he does not. His offer therefore comes with uncertainty rather than a promise of safety. His uniform, he recognizes, makes him an accomplice in what she hates; the scene does not allow his helpful action to cancel the meaning of that uniform.

He crosses into the next sixth-floor room to retrieve another bucket of water, avoiding the body of Reinhold von Rumpel in Marie-Laure LeBlanc’s bed. She drinks from the bucket, holding it with both arms. Only after that immediate need has been met does she ask Werner Pfennig his name. The order of these actions gives the meeting its cautious rhythm: first his voice makes contact, then his hand helps her out, then water answers thirst, and only then does she seek the name that can make the stranger more knowable.

The Shared Can

The two move from rescue toward tentative company through an ordinary object: a dented, unlabeled tin. Marie-Laure LeBlanc retrieves it from the wardrobe and asks Werner Pfennig what it is. Neither can identify the contents from a label, so they decide to open it and find out. Werner Pfennig punctures the can with a knife; the sweetness of the fruit identifies it as peaches. The object that had been stored in the place of hiding becomes something they can investigate together.

Marie-Laure LeBlanc offers to share the peaches in gratitude for what Werner Pfennig has done. He works the knife into the metal and passes her the opened can carefully. They eat the fruit and drink the syrup, running their fingers around the inside when it is nearly empty. The meal is modest and improvised, not a solution to the danger outside the room. Its significance is instead relational: an act of help receives an answer, and two people who had been separated by a wall now share food from the same container.

The scene’s movement—from an unseen search, through a voice recognized from radio, to a hand extended and food divided—gives the rescue its decisive change. Marie-Laure LeBlanc is no longer alone behind the wardrobe panel, and Werner Pfennig is no longer only a distant voice associated with the broadcast. Yet the meeting remains provisional: he cannot guarantee the cease-fire, she still lacks her shoes, and the consequences of the violence in the house remain present. The shared peaches offer neither certainty nor an escape already secured; they mark the first fragile terms on which the two can act together.