The guides had done their work: more families escorted back onto train platforms, or carefully led through lightless streets to the rectangular outlines of municipal buildings, where they found themselves in halls with makeshift beds, facing other families in identical circumstances, every future moment overcast with uncertainty. Fifteen-year-old Winfried Bielss, in his uniform, had received orders from a Nazi official and had been helping a family of six – ‘women, children and elderly people’1 – who were deposited, bewildered, at the main railway station. They were to be billeted in a school in the Neustadt on the north side of the river; this necessitated a tram trip and he escorted them (helping with the great quantities of luggage that they had managed to hold on to) on this journey which took them across the Albert Bridge and into the elegant nineteenth-century terraces beyond.
For these and other selfless acts, Bielss was given one mark. He and his friend Horst Schaffel ensured that the refugee family were received in the school building that they had been assigned to. The streets of the Neustadt were still busy; in the sharpening late-evening air, Bielss and Schaffel started to think about the prospect of home; for Schaffel, this lay on the other side of the river. They just had a few more refugee arrivals to help.
Despite the bustle and chaos, there had been nothing to provoke unease either in the city’s routine precautions or on the early evening news. Close to where the boys were working was the Sarrasani circus: on this day of carnival, great numbers of Dresden families (some with rural refugee relatives) and soldiers too had queued for admittance to its circular theatre. With all the cinemas now darkened, this was the only form of escapist entertainment left in the city. There was no sense that the circus was threadbare or starved of resources; rather, it was still a brightly lit spectacle of trained tigers, gaudy clowns, elegant performing horses and the newly formed ‘Bob Gerry Troupe’: ‘Aryan’ acrobats who had mastered forming unusually tall human pyramids, as well as other tightrope and flying-trapeze tricks.2 In addition, the refreshment facilities were impressive: there was an underground cafe and an underground bar. These, and an adjoining network of subterranean passages, had been modified so that when the air-raid sirens cried, which they did almost every night, the performance could be halted and the audience calmly directed to safety until the danger passed. The circus was valued by the authorities as it provided amusement and colour for factory and munitions workers who had almost been turned into robots by the nature of their daily tasks. Closing the cinemas – establishments hugely popular with the workers – had been a very serious step, but the Sarrasani name had been associated with Dresden even longer than the lure of film.
Quieter diversions were taking place elsewhere. That evening, the city’s most distinguished medical practitioner, Dr Albert Fromme, was at a small drinks party for a neighbour, Frau Schrell, who had celebrated her birthday the day before. The friends were gathered in an apartment.
Elsewhere, similarly set on seeing friends was the artist Otto Griebel. The last few years had seen Griebel’s fortunes ricochet violently, from the menace and harassment that he had received from the Gestapo in the 1930s to the official condemnation of his art by the authorities to his drafting into the Wehrmacht, bringing technical drawing skills to the eastern front. Griebel’s world must have seemed to him, at times, blackly Dadaist. He had been back in Dresden for several weeks, reunited with his young family in an apartment to the south-east of the city.3 On the evening of 13 February he was on his way to a private party in a tavern in the Altstadt, not far from the Kreuzkirche. He caught a tram from that southern suburb into the city centre, and navigated through the darkened, cobbled maze of tight old streets to find the carefully blacked-out pub. There the artist stepped in through the tavern door to see, among other faces, a musician friend called Scheinpflug. The beer and the schnapps seemed in good supply; but what was also striking was not merely a sense of old friendships withstanding the grim twists of war, but also the sense of this social group enduring in the face of the authorities’ loathing, the knowledge that those same authorities had spied on them in the past and would be minded to do so again in the future.
To the south were more revellers, although rather quieter and more discreet than the tavern drinkers: these were the party guests of Mischka Danos, all standing in his boarding-house bedroom, some enjoying their Kissel. Danos had made imminent plans to depart; to travel to Flensburg and there meet up with his mother, who would have made her own separate way (the idea being that if either of them experienced any difficulties en route, the other would not be pulled into whatever trouble it was). Present in that room was a young woman that Danos recalled knowing simply as ‘the Karl May girl’: because she had a terrific enthusiasm for the ‘cowboys and Indians’ Western novels that the author had written decades earlier.4
In an even smarter suburb in the east, Georg and Marielein Erler were in their living room; they had had a modest supper that evening, and were listening to the radio.5 Herr Erler, as the air-raid warden for this part of the street, was perpetually ready, yet he and his wife were not anticipating any attacks from the air. They were focusing much more on the fast approach of the Red Army. They had a car, and even at this time of severe fuel rationing, sufficient supplies to get them away from the city, and to stay ahead of the brutal invaders.
There were many others around the city who lacked the Erlers’ economic freedom: working mothers and frugal grandparents who – even if they had relatives in other cities – could not guarantee that those cities were any safer, or could provide the means by which they might support themselves. Poorer families had suitcases packed too: but only with gas masks and blankets, to be taken to their cellars, in the event of an air raid. A couple of years previously, Gauleiter Mutschmann had made strenuous efforts to persuade parents to evacuate their children to new billets in distant rural villages. He and the authorities had gone so far as to try to end daily lessons at schools, but the parents did not want their children to leave and the children wanted to stay at home. And so in apartment buildings that ringed the Altstadt, there were many children who had had their Faschingnacht suppers, and were now snugly in bed.
Older children were also preparing for bed. Thirteen-year-old Helmut Voigt, back home after that halting journey from the department store, had had his supper and had also assiduously packed his school bag in readiness for the following day.6 Closer to the centre of the city, ten-year-old Gisela Reichelt was already in her bed, her dolls Monika and Helga by her side. Like other children, she remembered her mother listening to the voices on the radio.7 In innumerable apartments those radios murmured, the lights in the living rooms pale, the ticking of coals in the fireplaces, mothers mending clothes while listening, the elderly sitting with them, eyes grave. Even in peacetime, Dresden was not a city where there was much activity on the streets after a certain hour; away from the industrial concerns and the busy tram junctions, children settled in quiet rooms under thick blankets to keep out the cold.
Yet in the heart of the Altstadt – where horse-drawn carts were still moving in some numbers through its narrow streets – there were brief flickers of teenage romance. Hans Settler was a nineteen-year-old soldier back in his home city on leave; his family lived in the north-western suburb of Radebeul and he had a girlfriend who lived almost in the centre of the city. His had been a patchwork war. Previously an apprentice toolmaker at the Dresden firm of Böhme KG, he had been conscripted aged seventeen. In the rip tides of the conflict he had found himself swept, as a flak operator, from Holland, down to a chateau in France and thence to Poland and the eastern front.8 He had sustained an injury – not serious, but enough to have him repatriated for recovery. And on this evening, Hans Settler was enjoying being back by his girlfriend’s side. They had spent the evening among the little cafes of the Neustadt and now, around 9 p.m., it was time to walk her home to her family’s apartment just off the Altmarkt. He recalled that, as they parted, the bell of the Kreuzkirche rang out across the vast market square.
These bells were the constants of Dresden: the deep resonance of the Kreuzkirche contrasting with the lighter tones that rang out every quarter hour from the Frauenkirche; and just several streets away from that, the rival discordancy of the bells from the Catholic cathedral. The music of these spires was sombre, yet just a short distance from the Catholic cathedral, at the baroque entrance to the Zwingergarten, there was an exquisitely light variation on all of these: a set of bells fashioned from ceramic that – when they sounded the hour and half hour – tinkled with high, amused, sophisticated music. The bells of the Zwinger were there for those who wanted assurance that light and happiness were perfectly natural to this world. But it was to the more reflective, darker notes resonating from the church bell towers that Hans Settler and his girlfriend said their farewells.