This is a very short story, but it has it all, a sympathetic protagonist, an exciting setting, and a challenging situation leading to all kinds of possible plot developments, including a happy ending. And oh yeah, plenty of pathos and poignancy.

The protagonist is born in a dirty back alley in Berlin (the setting) shortly before the end of the war (a dramatic situation). He was then abandoned by his drug-addicted mother (pathos) who wandered off to try to get money from the soldiers by selling her body.

He was taken care of by one of the inhabitants of that back alley, a woman who had recently given birth to twins, but lost one of them, along with her left foot, when the Russians threw a hand grenade into that alley, just in case (poignancy).

Therefore, his name became Twintwo, and none of the inhabitants of that back alley saw any reason to ever change it.

When the Allies came into the city, they found it virtually destroyed. Not much left but rubble. But they still went about dividing it up, part to the Russians, part to the Americans, part to the British, and part to France.

The alley in which Twintwo and his supposed twin brother, Twinone, were hiding just happened to be one of the dividing lines, and when the soldiers came, they herded the alley's inhabitants out of the alley. Twinone's mother, having lost a foot, was unable to keep up. When a Russian soldier came into the alley, he found the woman and asked her—in what little German he knew—if the two boys were hers. She pointed to Twinone.

As a result, she was loaded into a Russian military truck along with her child, Twinone. The other child, Twintwo, was placed, along with the rest of the alley's inhabitants, into an American military truck.

Therefore, Twintwo grew up in an orphanage where he saw it all: the rebuilding of the city, the Berlin wall going up, the start of the Cold War, all from the relative safety of Berlin's American Sector (the happy ending).