How Small a Person Looks

There’s a line from a Berliner Morgenpost night report that I keep returning to: how small a person looks when they’re lying on the ground. Journalists Andreas Gandzior, Uta Keseling, and Martin Nejezchleba had spent a night accompanying the Red Cross Wärmebus—a mobile warming service that drives through Berlin in deep winter looking for people who might not survive until morning. At minus twelve degrees on the Leopoldplatz in Berlin-Wedding, one of the volunteers swept his flashlight across the steps of the Alte Nazarethkirche and found two feet sticking out from under a blanket. He crouched down. Can you hear me? he asked. We’re from the warming bus. Do you need help? Movement under the blanket. Someone was still alive.

The Wärmebus is a simple idea: a vehicle stocked with blankets, hot drinks, and basic supplies that patrols the city on the coldest nights, looking for people the architecture has failed to shelter. Berlin gets brutal in February. The kind of cold that’s dangerous if you’re indoors with a failing radiator; the kind that kills if you’re outside with nowhere to go.

The journalists cut a short documentary from that night and posted it to YouTube. What stayed with me wasn’t the statistics—I knew the statistics, roughly, in the abstract way you hold numbers too large to fully feel. It was the specific image of those feet on the steps of a church that presumably locked its doors after evening service. The building constructed for sanctuary. The doors closed against the cold. The person outside under a blanket, hoping the temperature didn’t finish things before the warming bus came past.

The winter they documented wasn’t exceptional. This is just what winter is. This is just what the city is, in the parts we don’t look at very hard. I don’t think about it as much as I should. I think most people don’t.