Dresden (38 page)
Authors: Frederick Taylor
Often it was only a few hundred yards, but with the firestorm raging, narrow streets blocked by collapsed buildings, and many familiar landmarks obliterated, the journey was often epically, sometimes fatally, tortuous and slow. Berthold Meyer had begun by escaping from a burning building in the Blochmannstrasse, around a third of a mile from the Elbe as the crow flies.
Clutching a briefcase packed with his most important possessionsâhe had already been bombed out of his home in Bremen earlier in the warâand with his free hand holding a plank in front of him to protect himself from burning debris, the twenty-one-year-old had not gotten far when he lost his way and was tempted to give up, to sink into deoxygenated oblivion.
I feel my strength being sappedâmy lungs are tensed to bursting. Breathing in short, panting gasps I stumble and weave through the sea of flameâ¦the hot wind presses so hard against the plank I am holding out in front of me that it feels like I'm pushing a ton's weight. If something doesn't happen soon, I'm finished! Is this the end? I straighten up, summon up my last reserves, and the will to live somehow gives me a giant's strength. There! What should loom up but a steel-walled
pissoir
[lavatory] on the corner of the street. A few people are already crammed in there and taken coverâtruly salvation at a time of great need! It offers a moment to grab a breather, and actually the heat in there is not so bad. Above all, there is some protection from the firestorm and the tornado of sparks.
It was a miraculous place of safety, but the only way to be sure of survival was, as Meyer instinctively knew, to keep moving, heading toward the water:
Even here it is too dangerous to stay for long, for the fire is continuing to spread. Meanwhile I have made inquiries about the way to the Elbe. There are still about 150 meters to go. I am at the Güntzplatz, I hear. I give up my place and go outside, heading in the direction of the river, still with my briefcase and my plank. I lurch down the Sachsenallee and I start to feelâO greatest blessing of my life!âthe
first fresh drafts of air coming from the Elbe. I greedily fill my heaving lungsâwhat a gift!âand I see that I am about ten meters from the Albertbrücke. I must, I think, get down to the river to wash my eyes, for I can scarcely see. Beside the bridge I follow the stream of humanity down to the Elbe, past an unexploded bomb that people warn me about. Then I reach the lifesaving strand of the river. It is so wonderful to breathe this glorious, fresh air. I wade ankle-deep into the water and, taking my dirty handkerchief, which I had used in the shelter to protect my face and eyes, I wash my eyes as best I can. They are swollen and totally covered in filth. Then I lower myself onto a rock. There I sit for about an hour, with the burning city of Dresden in front of me.
Farther to the east, at the Johannstadt hospital, young Günther Kannegiesser and his charges had arrived just as the second raid began. Unable to find the hospital's shelter, he had left the women and children he had led here in a corner of the entrance hall, hoping they would be protected by the heavy staircase, and set off to look for a place of safety. There was none. Günther finally just lay down in the corridor near the porter's lodge, on a landing between the ground and first floors.
Because the explosions went on so long and seemed to get louder all the time, I thought that Russian troops had already arrived, and these were tanks. They had already advanced deep into Silesia.
Finally things got quieter and I heard a child crying. Two of the women and their children were still standing in the main entrance hall. Luckily they had not been injuredâ¦
Their survival was all the more miraculous, considering that parts of the hospital had been completely devastated. Especially the Women's Clinic. According to a later statement by Professor Fischer, a senior gynecologist, an air mine and two high explosives had hit “B” wing of the building. Two delivery rooms, an operating theater, the nursing mothers' department, as well as various wards and sterilization facilities had been destroyed during the raid itself. As staff tried to move patients from the endangered “B” wing to “A” wing, there were fires and explosions everywhere. “A” wing now caught fire. The
patients had to be moved yet again. They were led into the street, where transport was available for the most needy.
Some two hundred nursing mothers, patients, and others still lay beneath the ruins of “B” wing. As staff and fire-fighting teams fought to contain the blaze and reach those underground, a boiler exploded. Within minutes the rescue teams stood knee-deep in water. This was not, they could be thankful, scalding hot, but its dispersal was disastrous in another way. It left no water for the firefighters' hoses. A few women were found beneath shallow rubble and saved, but there seemed no way through to the cellar. The would-be rescuers could only listen helplessly to the victims' faint, desperate cries for aid. Then the walls of the remaining structure began to tremble. The place had to be evacuated, leaving what was left of the building to disintegrate and the trapped women to be buried alive.
Günther Kannegiesser knew nothing of the horrendous scenes in other parts of the hospital. The plucky fourteen-year-old's job was to save himself and his charges, and that was what he did:
We had to press on toward the Elbe! In 1945, at the place where the Fürstenstrasse meets the water meadows by the river, they used to store planks. These had been taken out of the upper floors of buildings to make it easier to combat incendiary bombs. They were nailed together, forming alleyways of planks, ready to be reinstalled after the war. We crawled in among these planks to get a little rest.
A way toward the Elbe, a wooden building was on fire. It was probably the headquarters of the rifle club that met in the Vogelwiese. One of the women kept crying. I promised I would ask my mother if she could come and live with us. Then I fell asleep.
Nora Lang, her little brother, and the determined young woman with the baby had ducked into a cellar on the Dürerstrasse when the bombs began to fall on Dresden once more. Like Günther Kannegiesser, they had been trying to reach the Fürstenstrasse, and via that the Elbe, but the storm proved too much for them. The cellar was dark, with only the occasional flickering of flames visible through the tiny street-level windows, but she could see that it was full of the vulnerable and the old.
That was much more shocking. During the first attack, I still had my parents with me, but now suddenly I was alone with my little brother. And the misery in the basement, I can still feel it. They were mostly elderly people, fragile, sick people and women with children. There was no beginning and no end to the bombing, it seemed, just these endless explosions everywhere.
The noise level grew so loud and so constant that for her, as a child, it felt like the Bible descriptions of the end of the world. At some point toward the end of their ordeal those sheltering in the cellar realized with a sickening certainty that the building on top of them had collapsed. There would be no exit through the door they had used to find refuge from the naked peril of the street.
When the sound of bombs and aircraft finally died away, they decided they had no choice but to use the “breakthrough,” though it was small and narrow. For the older people and the sick, this escape route was not an option.
We slipped through from one cellar into the next. First I had to hand my bags through, then my little brother. But even in the next building there was no way out either. But somehow we succeeded in getting out through some basement or other. How, I couldn't tell you now. Actually I only made it because the young woman with the baby in her arms kept urging me on.
Back out on the Dürerstrasse, they once more did battle with the firestorm, which seemed to have grown even further in intensity. Nora's eyes were now so affected by the rank smoke that she could scarcely see. A few yards short of the Fürstenstrasse, they had to take refuge in the doorway of a shop. This provided a few moments' respite from the maelstrom, but the shop turned out to be a pharmacy, and fellow survivors hurrying past warned them about drums of inflammable chemicals stored there, which could blow up at any moment. Screwing up their courage, they stumbled on: the woman and her baby, thirteen-year-old Nora and her little brother, with their few possessions.
They finally staggered into the Fürstenstrasse. It was a much wider street. Somewhere within the suffocating swirl of smoke and
burning debris there was that life-saving current of fresh air, blowing up from the river. They could breathe almost normally. At last.
A complete matter of luckâ¦that we didn't all die was pure luck. Some houses were still standing. And there was a truck trailer there. We crept under it and just lay down. We were so exhausted. Andâ¦it was so cruelâ¦there was this man there who had gone mad. He just stood there and bawled into the night, over and over again:
Auto! Auto!
[Car! Car!] My brother was five years old at the time. He can't remember much of what happened that night, except for that man's voice, and the
Auto!
He can never forget it. When we had recovered a bit we went on further to the Johannstadt hospital. They had also been hit there, but one building was more or less intact, and there was a big basement. We went in. There were a lot of people inside.
And then, the next morning, we continued our journeyâ¦we went down to the Elbe, and there were so many people on the road that we lost the young woman and her baby. Some people were heading upriver, some down. There was such a turmoil and we went down onto the water meadows by the Elbe because there was such a crush. But I still couldn't see well enough to spot the dead bodies there, and the body parts, and so my brother told me, be careful here, here you have to make a detour, and so onâ¦
Unlike Nora Lang's family, Christoph Adam, his parents, and his small brother had managed to stay together. They too fought their way eastward, away from the center of the city, all the time resisting the burning suck of the firestorm. Between the first and second attacks they made their way into an area that was as yet undamaged and where at last they began to feel safe. As for so many others, that very feeling was treacherous. They were caught in the open by the British bombers.
We experienced the second attack on the Wallotplatzânot far from the Grosser Gartenâwhere at that time nothing had happened. Suddenly the sky lit upâbright as day, in fact. All the houses were closed up, there was nowhere we could take cover.
There was nowhere else to go, so the family just stood there in the square, fully exposed to the bombers, and took their chance. Terrifying
as the experience was, the only near disaster occurred when Christoph suddenly felt “things get hot.” An incendiary had landed right by him, and he was actually on fire. Luckily the quilt he wore wrapped around him was still wet. They managed to smother the bomb in time.
Having survived in the open, on the edge of the area of greatest destruction, Christoph Adam and his family at least faced no struggle to escape from a collapsed building or a burning basement. Still in shock, they stumbled the short distance to the Grosser Garten. The eastern section of the great royal park was somewhat less badly ravaged and also less crowded than its western and central areas, though he recalls that “every five meters or so, something was on fire.” There Christoph fell asleep, among the scattered groups of equally ashencrusted, blister-covered refugees from the city. He was still wrapped in the quilt that had saved him from serious burns or worse.
Sometime toward morning it began to rain.
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HENNY WOLF
and her parents were still in the area of the Hauptbahnhof when they heard a distant alarm siren and sought out the nearest shelter. Someone had a battery-operated radio, so they were able to hear announcements of the incoming attack.
There they sat out the bombs. The shelter, as usual a converted basement, wasâalso as usualâfilled with women and children, plus an illegal German shepherd dog, which howled throughout the entire raid. Herr Wolf, as the solitary fit adult male, took charge of keeping everyone calm. He also quietly noted the location of the emergency exit, which had been fortified with sandbags against bomb blasts. He aimed to get himself and his family out as quickly as possible once the raid was over, before anyone had a chance to ask them questions.
When they hurried from the shelter, Henny said to her parents that they had to seek out fresh air. They must follow other survivors down to the river. This meant going north through the Altstadt.
However, soon we realized that progress was unthinkable. As we passed a narrow street behind the Altmarktâthe Webergasse, I thinkâwe found ourselves pulled into it by a fierce undertow of fire. Suddenly my mother looked like she was flying away. Father said, “We have to get out of here!” We made it to through to the
Zeughausstrasse. The Jewish community house was in flames. We had been due to report there two days later for “transportation.” What an irony that we were now standing in front of the blazing building with that deportation order in our knapsack!
They looked vainly for Henny's friend Werner Lang, a Jew married to an Aryan who had worked at Zeiss-Ikon and at Bauer, but without success. Nearby they saw a wall covered in contact messages, left by those seeking loved ones, but the Wolfs dared not leave any such traces of themselves, for fear of the Gestapo. Discussing their next move, Herr Wolf considered crossing over to Neustadt to see if his property in the Alaunstrasse was still intact, but soon abandoned the idea. Finally they followed thousands of other survivors down to the Elbe water meadows to wait for daylight.
Victor Klemperer and his wife, Eva, had been at the Zeughausstrasse earlier that night. They had lived for some years in one of the “Jew houses” there. They survived the first raid relatively easily. Some bombs had fallen nearby, but they had suffered no direct hit. A couple of incendiaries were found but successfully extinguished. All the same, most of the windows had been blown in, so the house was a mass of broken glass. Sometime after midnight, they took to their bedsâ“Just sleep, we're alive!”âEva Klemperer first having to clear stray splinters from her mattress.