Adrián Kills a Comrade at the Berlin Position and Takes His Papers

On 2 May 1945, as Soviet forces advanced along Unter den Linden, Adrián Gallardo killed the comrade beside him at a Berlin position, took his papers, and burned his own documents. The comrade had been ready to operate the only usable machine gun; after replacing him, Adrián let the first Soviet tank pass without firing. In that pause between taking another man’s identity and resuming the fight, the battle’s meaning changes for Adrián: he no longer wants to die.

The Berlin position

A lone Soviet tank moved slowly along the boulevard toward the Brandenburg Gate. From a corner of Wilhelmstrasse, the position’s two occupants watched it approach. One spoke in Spanish, then Adrián prepared himself. The brief exchange gives the moment its stark, practical rhythm: the tank is in view, the weapon is ready, and the men seem to be waiting for combat to begin.

Yet the position was nearly spent. The comrade was crouched at the only machine gun that still worked, while a fire burned inside a perforated barrel used as a stove. Adrián’s decision unfolds amid these makeshift conditions, with the approaching tank close enough to aim at and the dead man’s papers available to seize. Rather than describe an abstract change of allegiance, the episode makes survival a sequence of actions at a specific Berlin street corner.

The killing and the borrowed identity

Adrián drew the pistol from its holster, checked that it was loaded, aimed at the crouching gunner’s head, and fired. He searched the dead man’s military jacket for identification, burned his own documents in the fire inside the perforated barrel, then moved the body aside and took the gunner’s place. The order of these gestures is decisive: he does not merely acquire papers as a precaution but makes the other man’s death the means by which his own former identity can officially cease to exist. The documents go into his wallet only after his own have been destroyed.

Once in position, Adrián trained his eye on the machine gun’s sight and waited until the Soviet tank was within range. He did not fire. The tank passed without noticing the danger in the improvised barricade of paving stones on Wilhelmstrasse, while Adrián, now its sole occupant, waited for a better chance to enter the battle. Taking the gunner’s place thus carries an immediate tactical consequence, but the episode refuses to equate possession of the weapon with a willingness to use it: Adrián has preserved the possibility of fighting without carrying out this particular attack.

The break with death

The killing is followed by a stark explanation of the choice: Adrián no longer wanted to die and had no reason to do so. The statement does not erase what he has just done. He has saved himself by deliberately shooting a man who was crouched at the machine gun, then using the dead man’s papers to make his own identity disappear. But the motive marks a decisive break with the fatalism that had governed his place in the defense of Berlin. The tank passes; Adrián remains alive, armed, and waiting, though he has not fired. Survival is no longer merely an outcome imposed by circumstance: for this instant, it has become his purpose.

The false identity’s afterlife

The exchange of papers at the Berlin position becomes part of a larger pattern in which an identity depends on documents that can be destroyed, forged, or reassigned. In 1937, Manuel Arroyo Benítez entered Madrid under the fabricated identity of Rafael Cuesta Sánchez, using papers issued through the Republic’s security apparatus. Years later, he passed that identity to Guillermo García Medina, tailoring its particulars to make Guillermo’s own history disappear: the new Rafael was twenty-five, unmarried, resident in Madrid, and unconnected to left-wing parties or unions. The documents were credible because they were made to survive administrative scrutiny, including a copied Burgos seal and a signature imitated from an actual official.

The later scenes show how the same machinery of identification could shelter fugitives as well as resistance. In postwar Madrid, Clara Stauffer’s network fed German escapees, provided them with clothes, and arranged false or supporting records, including baptismal certificates bearing German names. The Allied list of 104 identified Stauffer as a central organizer who supplied false papers and found employment for Germans, but the Francoist authorities did not hand her over: she had been granted Spanish nationality to continue such work. Against that system, Adrián’s abrupt substitution of one dead soldier’s papers for his own is a desperate, immediate version of a recurring struggle over who official records say a person is.

The novel also makes the consequences of that struggle concrete. Guillermo presents Rafael Cuesta Sánchez’s papers at a Madrid police station and is directed to the window where documents from the Nationalist zone are exchanged; the document that once concealed a Republican official’s past can now help another man pass through the victorious regime’s bureaucracy. Adrián, by contrast, takes his comrade’s papers in the ruins of Berlin, with no promise of safety beyond the moment. In both cases, the paper identity is not a simple disguise: it determines what can be recognized, what can be hidden, and whether a person may continue living under a name that is not his own.