For those who were unhurt and unharmed, apart from their racing hearts, the curiosity had a dreadful unmoored quality: what did the world outside now look like? Then there was the fear: for family elsewhere, for friends, for homes, for cherished belongings and keepsakes. Had any of their material possessions survived the onslaught?
To the south of the city, Gisela Reichelt was preparing to emerge from her shelter with the grown-ups. ‘Now the door of the basement was opened after what seemed an endless time,’ she recalled. ‘No one could imagine what to expect! The city burned brightly and it was so hot you could hardly imagine it.’1 The road on which she lived, Schnorrstrasse, was close to the railway station; and beyond that, under the mix of low cloud cover and a widening pall of smoke, the sky was an odd shade of amber, reflecting all the flames below. The girl and her mother walked slowly along the road until they faced their own section of the apartment building. It had been torn asunder. That was when the horror came. Their home had taken a direct hit. To emphasize the implosion of their ordinary lives, mother and daughter then gradually understood that the rubbish lying around them on the street was in fact what remained of their possessions, the debris blasted out of their flat. All their belongings lay in gutters. ‘We could not cry,’ remembered Frau Reichelt, ‘we were just glad.’2 But mother and daughter now thought of the girl’s aunt Trudel, who lived in another neighbourhood. Was she all right? How – late on this burning night and amid the human chaos – could they make contact with her?
As they, and so many others, were now stricken with helpless anxiety for loved ones, the civic authorities – even in the continued absence of the Gauleiter – were already organizing their response to the emergency with impressive speed and coordination. Fire engines and crews, many of whom had in the last few minutes come in from the suburbs around the city, were navigating volcanically hot rubble – stone, paving, concrete, collapsed tram lines, smashed pipes – to get as close in as possible to the wildfires in the Altstadt. The reservoirs in the Altmarkt had been constructed there for this very eventuality; a plentiful supply of water to douse the fires. Yet despite their willingness, the crews found themselves facing an already daunting proposition: ever-climbing blazes stretching out over a vast area from the river down to the railway station a mile away – a landscape of fire.
A little to the south-west of this, Margot Hille and her mother had emerged from their basement. The suburb they lived in, although not directly beneath the main wave of bombers, had still received some stray blasts and incendiaries and Margot, a member of the League of German Girls, was anxious to do her duty. She decided to make for the centre of the city and give first aid to all who needed it.3 Her mother, staring at the livid sky and taking in the distant deep noise, was frightened by the idea. In any case, they first had to check that their own home was still intact.
Frau Hille’s apartment was on the third floor of their block. They took precautions: as part of their emergency kits they had goggles to protect their eyes from flames or falling debris. As they climbed the stairs, it seemed at first glance that – despite fires in neighbouring blocks, and a larger blaze at a nearby textile factory – all was in relatively good order. There was a ‘large, crescent-shaped’ skylight window above the third landing and Margot Hille made to open it.4 The percussive effect of even distant blasts had wrought its damage. The frame had been shaken loose and both it and the glass swung inwards, striking Margot hard on the head, the window smashing at her feet. She had taken the weight of it on her nose. ‘Thank goodness I was wearing the goggles,’ she recalled.
After taking a few moments to recover, and finding that otherwise the property seemed relatively undamaged – the young woman was even more determined to head into the Altstadt to perform her civic duty. But her mother now held her back by telling her that she had very possibly suffered a concussion from the falling window, and that if she went she would be in as much jeopardy as those she sought to help. ‘That’s how she saved my life,’ recalled Margot.5
She also unknowingly saved her daughter from the distress of seeing injuries and mortal wounds that lay quite beyond her imagination. The firefighters trying to manoeuvre through the narrow streets of the Altstadt, down tall alleys framed with bright flame issuing from blank, broken windows, continually encountered corpses as they went – people who, it might only be presumed, had been crazed by the claustrophobia and increasing heat of the narrow brick cellars and had thought fatally that they would fare better in the open. Many simply lay on pavements as though asleep; as if all that had happened was that they had succumbed to peaceful fatigue. And all around, the heat pulsing against the cold night air, and the different scents of smoke from various sources – wood, fabric, tar, paint – filled the lanes behind the squares.
Near the castle, itself burning from a hit, was the Taschenberg Palace, in the well-built shelter of which Lothar Rolf Luhm and Günther Tschernik now understood from the ‘Golden Pheasants’ that they were expected to do their duty outside. The Nazi officials were also ready to act: the first thing was to ensure that the palace itself was not burning. Luhm and his new fire-fighting comrades left the cellar, climbed the stairs of the building, opened a hatchway and made their way onto a flat section of the roof. They extinguished several small fires caused by thermite incendiaries, which all present mistook for what they termed phosphorous sticks,6 but they could also taste the heavy smoke drifting over, and at the back of the building, looking down to the cobbled road below, facing the Zwinger Palace, they were shocked not merely at the smouldering stones, but also by the sight of the inert fire engines and the corpses of their crews. Luhm had been at Normandy in July 1944; now, on the roof, he found himself thinking of that bombardment, and how even that had ‘not been as a bad’ as the prospect he now faced.7
The flames were a source of wonder to the young refugee Norbert Bürgel, and his uncle, who had watched that first raid from under a bridge. Uncle Günther, perhaps traumatized, was gripped by some extraordinary imp of the perverse; he thought that if they could get to the railway station, then perhaps normality would have resumed and they might be able to get home – he lived a little out of the city – by rail. A glance at the skyline might have told him otherwise, but there was also a sense of awe as the middle-aged man and the young lad now walked towards that brightly burning centre. In their view was the former cigarette factory, turned ammunition production line, which at the beginning of the century had been originally and whimsically built to look like a giant mosque; against the black night sky, the flames leaping out of it were dazzling. They walked under the main railway line that pointed across the river, and towards the Taschenberg Palace, the Zwinger Palace, the Catholic cathedral and the castle. All had fires burning. The boy and his uncle, while aware of all the hazards, could seemingly not stop their march, as though they were hypnotically drawn. To the rear of the Taschenberg Palace were a few small courts, and then Wilsdruffer Strasse, upon which stood some of the city’s smartest shops. The whole road was now bathed in dancing, searing light; from both sides of the wide avenue, fires shot out and upward from the shattered windows of smoke-blackened buildings. The pair veered to the right, southward, in the direction of Prager Strasse and thence the central station. Through the side streets, recalled Bürgel, they had been able to see the burning Altmarkt.8 Carefully they picked their way down several more streets of tall, smoking buildings; but they could see that it was probably impossible to get to the railway station. Fires erupting behind windows above them and roofs ablaze from dropped incendiaries, not to mention the thickening smoke and ever-increasing heat, forced them to change direction, and so they pointed themselves north once more, moving slowly in the direction of the River Elbe.
At around 11 p.m., some thirty minutes after that first wave of planes had finished their work, there were tiny corners in the Altstadt – corners so far free from fire – where a few people gathered, dazed and beyond ordinary language. The uncle and the boy came to a small bar, relatively unscathed, that was affiliated with the Würzburger brewery. Several people were inside and Uncle Günther decided that some refreshment was in order before their extraordinary odyssey continued. He ordered half a litre of beer. ‘The bombed-out had already made themselves comfortable,’ observed Bürgel.9 The respite was to be brief.
In another bar, a few hundred yards away, the drinkers had responded to the all-clear with some caution. The shock suffered by Otto Griebel and his musician friends in the cellar when the lightbulb had suddenly gone out had been offset by a corresponding moment of relief when, a short time later, it began to glow uncertainly again. On hearing the faint cry of the all-clear they had gingerly left the cellar and climbed the stairs to the bar to discover that, although the buildings all around were either smoking, smouldering or aflame, their own establishment was serendipitously largely untouched save for a smashed window. That alone called for further refreshment: a drink to survival. The landlady produced a flask of schnapps and some glasses.
The streets around them were heavy with the dissonance of silence and sudden grinding noise, the collapse of stones and bricks. Emerging from this curious atmosphere came the wife of one of the musicians who was drinking there, entering through the still-intact front door wearing an air warden’s helmet. With tears pouring down her face, she told her husband that they had lost everything.
For the others, that strong liquor was welcome, but Otto Griebel was now extremely anxious to get back to his family apartment in the south-east of the city. He had no way of knowing if his wife and children had come through the attack unharmed, or whether the raid had been concentrated on the centre of the town. Near 11 p.m., he made his shaken excuses to the landlady and his friends and stepped outside into a changed world.
The thickly heated air was becoming uncomfortable to breathe; Griebel watched firemen all around aiming jets skyward at high windows. Because of the fires, the centre had become a maze filled with dead ends of masonry and burning timber. The artist instead pointed his way towards the river, perhaps reasoning that he would be able to circle around the worst of the damage and weave back through untargeted streets. Reaching the river, with the fires to be seen roaring in the municipal buildings on its far bank, Griebel gazed at the curious spectacle of the Carolabrücke: around the structure, before it spanned the water, there issued ghostly blue flames.10 It took him a while to realize that this was the result of gas pipes somewhere having been hit. Griebel continued to stare; and then angled eastward.
On the other side of that bridge, the audience and the staff of the Sarrasani circus were emerging from the theatre’s basement, the staff checking anxiously for fires. There were small conflagrations in the straw near the stables and other parts of the permanent structure had been hit, but the building was intact. The impresario Trude Stosch was nevertheless anxious; her instinct, shared by so many other Dresdeners in the Neustadt, was for everyone to assemble on the meadows by the waters of the Elbe. In particular, she wanted the performing horses and their handlers and riders to make for the open air. (The circus tigers obviously had to remain in their cages at the back of the building.) Illuminated by the nearby flames of the shattered Japanese Palace, the elegant horses were guided onto the street, and thence to the gentle grassy slope that led down to the river, where they moved among huge numbers of terrified refugees; and they all faced the fiery spectacle of the Altstadt, the glow reflected in the black waters of the Elbe.
Mischka Danos recalled that as he and his friends cautiously left his boarding-house basement after the first raid, there was initially a remarkable absence of fear. On that gentle hill near his university electronics laboratories, and overlooking at a distance the old city, he was hypnotized by the kinetic spectacle of fiery eruptions: on the wide avenue where he was standing, apartment blocks suddenly exhaled flame; down the hill, those flames near the railway station were more intense and beyond that, into the old city, it was becoming difficult to see. His own research building close by had just caught fire; the blaze was in one of the topmost storeys. Given that the planes had passed, Danos like so many others assumed that it was now safe, and he began forming plans to escort his friend, the ‘Karl May’ girl, home. But his curiosity about the fires in the city was overwhelming; he craved a better view. So Danos fixed upon climbing a little further up the hill. He remembered that in a stretch of open ground, there had been an anti-aircraft battery position. He also knew that it had been abandoned a while ago. This, then, would serve as his vantage point.11
In some cases, the bombers had managed to hit pertinent targets: the factory compounds of the Zeiss Ikon works, although constructed to withstand such a raid, were none the less very seriously damaged. The slave labourers – inmates from concentration camps brought in to engage in specialized technical tasks – were not on site but in barracks a little north of the city. Under the weight of the bombardment, even reinforced modern structures were forced to bend and snap. Also overwhelmed by the conflagration was the bulk of the Seidel und Naumann works. Closer to the river, that vast cigarette factory, recently converted for the manufacture of bullets, was now exhaling flame. The same was true of many other converted munitions works that were to be found outside the Altstadt. One slave labourer in a camp on the edge of the city that night was a Czech Jew called Michal Salomonivic; he recalled looking out at the rich amber sky and feeling a wave of exultation: surely this was a sign that the war was almost over.12
Closer to the centre of the city, a teenage girl called Erika Seydewitz had spent the last half an hour or so frantically fighting the conflagrations started by the incendiaries.13 Her family lived in a fourth-floor apartment very close to the Rathaus. Like countless others, they had experienced that first wave of bombings as a series of sonic shocks in a small brick cellar, from the walls of which dust had cascaded. An especially loud crash was heard just before the all-clear sounded, which the girl’s middle-aged father was convinced was the noise of their apartment block being hit. He made for the cellar stairs and his spirited daughter signalled her intention to go with him. He did not demur.
Her father ascended first, beckoning her to stay on the ground floor, and then he called for her to come up. Astonishingly, given that they had been directly in the bombers’ path, the damage appeared to amount to one shattered window in the living room, burst skylights on the landing and cracks in the ceiling looking up to larger apertures in the apartment-block roof. They tried the electric lights and found to their amazement that they worked. However, it was clear that the pair were not safe; embers and sparks from incendiaries and other fires were beginning to swirl around in a strange, strengthening wind, falling through the skylights and the ceiling cracks and flying through the gaping window. Father and daughter could see the danger from these ‘fireflies’ and ‘glow-worms’, as they described them.14 They had some rudimentary emergency equipment: a large stirrup pump and some buckets of water. The aim was to rescue as many of their valuables as they could and get them out of the apartment. Erika and her father now went down to fetch her mother and sister. The family gathered in the apartment. Through force of habit stemming from years of blackout observation, the mother switched off the light. The father switched it back on again so they could see what they were doing as they fetched their possessions. The mother had to be stopped from switching it off again. ‘We just could not convince my mother that the little light that was produced from the fitting did not really matter compared to the stronger light that was coming from outside,’ recalled Frau Seydewitz.15
The family were aware that they had to hurry. As the eldest daughter worked the water pump, squirting at the ‘glow-worms’ onto the rugs and near the curtains, her mother grabbed a large bag. Into this she threw some items from the kitchen, then some more valuable belongings from the bedroom: a camera, some shoes and even a hat. Through the cracked ceiling could be seen a spreading fire up on the roof caused by a glowing thermite stick. They had to get out.
The family’s most expensive domestic item was their new, state-of-the-art sewing machine, and it was Herr Seydewitz who took charge of carrying this downstairs as mother and sister hauled the big bag filled with the other domestic bric-a-brac. The level-headedness shown by them all was remarkable, for outside in the Altstadt it was obvious that the flames were brightening and the eerie and stifling hot breeze was intensifying. There were other residents in the building who had ventured out of the cellar; some were elderly, and now seemed paralysed on the stairs. The Seydewitzes had planned to return to the cellar to see out the night, but now it became clear that, despite all their firefighting efforts, the building was going to burn. Erika saw the thickening smoke on the fourth and third floors; very quickly it began to billow. The family was gathered in the ground-floor lobby, but now it looked as though they were trapped as the land on every side became a wall of flame. Close by was the grand department store Böhme; and it was engulfed. The flaming wreckage was falling from the sky. The family had a car, but had they left it too late to flee? At the back of the apartment building was a water barrel, and they swiftly soaked all their coats, and some rescued blankets too. Erika, keeping a lookout from the front, told them that the flames from neighbouring blazes no longer seemed to be licking at their walls. There was a chance.
But what to do about the elderly neighbours? One old woman ‘sat on the stairs in the hallway [and] gave us no answer’.16 Fortuitously, her son arrived at the apartment block, and she was happy to move for him. But there were two other older residents, a husband and wife, who seemed similarly incapable of movement. The smoke was deepening and the pervasive heat from outside made it obvious that staying was impossible. The Seydewitzes were desperate to get out but they could not abandon these two. Erika’s father found the answer, delivering his order to the old lady ‘in a sharp tone’. ‘There was a blazing glow on the street,’ Erika recalled. ‘The overhead line of the tram hung down.’17 And here was something she had never observed before: the tarmac on the road was searingly hot. Everyone was loaded into the car, but within a few yards it was clear that it would not get very much further. The tar was bubbling. The family and the old couple would somehow have to find some shelter on foot, sticking to cobbled pavements as opposed to the treacle of the road. The cobbles were hot; and all they could find by means of cover was an archway over a passage near the Rathaus.
Down in the cellars, that bare-bulb-lit brick warren of interconnected small chambers, narrow corridors, makeshift wooden doors, there were elderly people, and mothers with prams who were reluctant to move, thinking it better to see the night out in comfortless safety. The cellars were not still. Through various passages that ran beneath the lanes that led down to the river and its meadows opposite, and to the open air of the Great Garden, other people were picking their way in multiple directions. Some were leaving, some were returning. At the larger entrances to this subterranean maze the effect of the outer doors being constantly opened and closed to let people in and out was funnelling the increasingly hot and acrid air into the tunnels. These were not purpose-built shelters but extemporizations, and so their ventilation was unplanned. The depth of the cellars varied, too, according to the ages of the buildings above, which added to the problem of free air flow. It had been loosely assumed that the cold wind from the river and from the large park would gust through, with a supplementary breeze coming from the innumerable smaller entrances dotted around the old city. That might have been the case in normal circumstances, but the physics of that night were far from normal and the complex pattern of twisting, turning brick passageways leading to that large river exit was beginning to act as a flue, sucking hot air through the chambers towards the cold Elbe outlet.
Even so, this increasing discomfort – accompanied in some cases by a growing drowsiness in the tainted air – was clearly felt by some to be worth risking. In others there was a psychological factor at work, an exhausted passivity, a sense that legs would no longer obey the impulse to move. This phenomenon had been documented in other bombings, and was observed by Erika Seydewitz as affecting her elderly neighbours.
At street level, the shops, the restaurants, the older apartment buildings, the hotels were now burning with a ferocity that was changing the physical characteristics of the atmosphere. The fire was reaching up into the sky, consuming oxygen at an ever-increasing rate, and the cold, drizzly air in the Elbe valley was rushing ever faster into that vacuum. In the cellars, the chemistry was changing too as invisible fumes began to whisper from brick chamber to brick chamber, though so gradually that those who noticed a shortness of breath, a curious feeling that even the deepest breath could not fill their lungs, might have attributed the symptoms to stress or fear.
A short distance away from the Altstadt, those who had emerged from their own basements looked with awe at the vividly flickering, ruby-red sky. For Helmut Voigt – who had spent what seemed to the boy an ‘endless time’ in the concrete shelter of the local brewery – there was astonishment that, in his suburb, everything seemed to be intact.18 As he stared at the burning horizon, the worst problem he could see was that his journey to school the following morning might be more difficult than usual. When he and his mother returned to their apartment they found not one window broken. Indeed, all was so normal that he returned to his bed.
Voigt was lucky. When Dr Albert Fromme emerged from the basement in which he had been sheltering he saw immediately not just the carnage that had already been wrought but also the illimitable mortality that would follow. Just to the west of the Altstadt, near his hospital in Friedrichstadt, large houses and businesses were pulsing with the intense heat of fire. His own home – although damaged – was not burning at that stage, though scorching sparks were floating and falling in the shimmering sky. He raced inside to fetch water and douse fabrics that were vulnerable to the floating embers fluttering towards the building’s shattered windows. His own survival backpack, assembled some time beforehand, was an exercise in carefully thought-out precautions; as well as including the recommended goggles to protect his eyes from fire, of which he would make great use in the hours to come, Dr Fromme had anticipated, for instance, that walking on hot rubble along melted-tarmac roads would require the thick leather padding of large ski boots.19 Added to this, he also carried a razor and a sponge-bag, knowing he would need to live at the hospital in the event of a disaster such as this one. He realized that the next few days were going to be the most extraordinary ordeal medically, but his immediate difficulty was finding a route to the hospital that did not involve passing through an inferno. For Dr Fromme, the longest night had barely begun.
In the east of the city, elderly air-raid warden Georg Erler and his wife Marielein emerged from their bunker to find that, although all the windows had been blown out and the chandelier had been shattered, the house in which they lived seemed – so far as they could see on that glowing night – unscathed. There were fires elsewhere in properties down the street though, and a curious contrast between the chilly drizzle moving in from the Elbe and the waves of heat that Erler felt against his face as he paced up and down the road, assessing what he might be able to do. There were neighbours to help, people of a similar age to him whose apartments no longer had windows and who were anxiously moving all flammable furniture and possessions – curtains, rugs, desks, silk-covered sofas, paintings, much-loved books – as far back as they could from the window frames and the treacherous ‘glow-worms’ that were starting to fall like luminous snow.20 The Erlers then walked back into their own apartment. Books had been hurled to the floor by the force of nearby detonations; vases were shattered. It was difficult for them to carry out a more detailed inventory of damage to their oil paintings and their furnishings because the electricity supply in this part of the city had failed and, in the rising wind, they could not keep a candle alight.
‘We quickly removed the curtains,’ he recalled, ‘which stretched through the open windows like flags waving to the ever more numerous sparks, as if they wanted to catch the sparks and kindle them into flames.’21 The wind seemed to be growing stronger. ‘After getting rid of the glass fragments on the window-sill, we then tried to close the shutters, which, despite their iron bars, barely withstood this storm-like draught.’22 All the Erlers’ neighbours were comparing notes on the damage done, yet perversely the mood was almost helium-light. Partly this was due to sheer relief; here they all were, alive and unhurt. But there was also that sense of the familiar becoming unmoored, and a sort of dizzy excitement – a form of adrenaline-boosted elation – at navigating this new world. ‘We were all happy,’ recalled Georg Erler, citing the fact that their treasured homes also seemed relatively unscathed.
Satisfied that the immediate area seemed safe, Herr Erler set off on an inspection of the neighbourhood; part of his duty as an air-raid block warden. One house in a neighbouring street was on fire, but the caretaker and a few other residents were rushing to and fro with water, and appeared to have the blaze under control. He walked on a little further; but as he reached Striesener Plaza, the prospect was more shocking. This was one of the area’s more elegant spaces; late-nineteenth-century houses and villas overlooking gardens dominated by an ornate fountain. Herr Erler could immediately see that the building housing a large bookshop had taken a direct hit to its north-eastern corner. Fellow fire wardens told him of the immense air pressure that the bombs had created, the deep and extraordinary craters and the even more extraordinary fact that so many of these buildings had actually survived that mighty explosive downpour. The organization could not have been more meticulous: wardens operating on grid systems had instituted fire-watch stations, and even as the clocks crept to twelve they were going about their business tirelessly. The wardens were also comforting local residents who were still ‘terrified in their limbs’ a good hour or more after the bombers had flown off. Herr Erler bumped into a local lawyer, Dr Thor, who himself was still very badly shaken after the attack. There was also another warden whose own home had been hit; in the face of this, he was trying to organize residents of the damaged block to take refuge in the apartments of neighbours nearby. Despite the fact that their homes were seething with smoke and wreckage, there were some elderly people who could not be persuaded to walk even a few yards to temporary shelter.
Even those who were willing faced difficulties. The elderly mother of one resident, Frau Richter, was ready to go but was finding the jagged, smoking rubble difficult to negotiate on frail legs. Adding to the hazards were nearby buildings so damaged that they might collapse at any moment. Herr Erler pointed Frau Richter and her mother to alternative accommodation in a different direction; he never learned their fate. ‘It probably would have been the same [as if they had stayed],’ he recalled, because the following events would turn all their lives inside out once more.23
Meanwhile, his wife Marielein had been trying to find out what had happened to some of their local friends. She had been shocked to see the state of their apartment – the fragment of chandelier hanging down from the ceiling ‘like an icicle’,24 the crunch of broken glass, the infernal glow of the flying embers whistling in through the open window, the efforts to get the shutters closed – but stepping out once more on the streets and surveying the damage seemed to bring a wave of another kind of emotion over her. She found her friend Michael and a few others in a neighbouring street, and in that moment, she recalled, ‘I experienced the most reassuring thing that people can experience – being with friends who had suffered the same pain.’ There was, once again, that curious uplift of happiness. Everyone hugged each other, feeling intensely grateful. ‘All in all,’ she recalled, ‘the joy was that we still lived.’25 Yet the fires dancing high into the heavens from the Altstadt, seen from this genteel suburb, were as stark as they were from other vantage points. And still the prodigiously strengthening wind was rushing towards the inferno.
On the other side of the river, the Bielsses and the other residents of their apartment block who had been sheltering in its basement had in the wake of that first raid checked the property thoroughly for incendiary sticks. Unlike nearby properties, the building had not been hit. ‘The sky was fierce,’ remembered Winfried,26 but there were blazes close by as well. A few streets away the great complex of the Waldschlösschen brewery was enveloped in flame. The all-clear had been heard howling in the distance. There was a dedicated ‘flak’ radio station that broadcast from Berlin and which detailed on nights such as this the areas that had been hit. It also gave warnings of further bomber incursions. (The authorities had issued a map of Germany on which the country was divided into squares. Each city had code letters and numbers that the broadcasters would sometimes use; Dresden, Bielss recalled, was designated MH 8.) Frau Bielss tried to tune in but the radio now seemed to be dead. One of their many concerns was for the family of Winfried’s friend Horst. They asked their neighbours if they could use their telephone to contact them but the number appeared to be unavailable. The boys returned to Bielss’s apartment, where they all ‘cleared the shards’ from the floor; it was a twitchy displacement exercise. As Bielss recalled, they ‘didn’t quite know what to do about the excitement’.27
With the night sky outside glowing with a rose-red light, the immediate requirement seemed to be for food, and Frau Bielss went into the kitchen to prepare them all a light meal. But Horst, gazing at the infernal sky, was increasingly anxious; he was desperate to get back to his own home. Bielss and his mother knew they could not let the boy go on his own, and in any case they too had relatives and friends south of the river whom they wanted to check on, so they all set out together. Underlying all this was a curious kind of exhilaration. As Bielss observed: ‘We were not able to think of sleep after this excitement.’28 They also understood that many other people would be twitching with the same impulse on that night: both to check that loved ones had come through unscathed (seemingly few contemplated the possibility that they had not) and to satisfy that magnetic desire to explore the burning city. It was not a morbid motivation, more an expression of the feverish energy created by the sensory assault of the bombers. Sitting still while their hearts were still skittering did not seem possible. Yet just a few steps outside in the acrid air brought the reality of that night into focus.
The trio walked towards the river, and after several blocks came to the wide Bautzner Strasse, where two grand houses were burning lustily, the occupants doing what they could with pails of water and garden hoses. Some of the more valuable furniture had been retrieved from living rooms before the flames took a grip, placed on the pavement and in the road under the bright night sky that was painting everything a surreal apricot. A little further along a more pungent fire raged in and around the brewery; stone flagstones smouldering, wooden beams crackling. The flames were illuminating the whole area, recalled Bielss.29 Close by was the once-elegant Heidehof Hotel. It too had been hit, and the air was now so thick with smoke and floating ash that it became difficult to see across the river. It was clear that the city below was burning ferociously, but that unsettlingly strengthening breeze, plus the increasing difficulty of trying to see through eyes half-shut to avoid those burning ‘glow-worms’, started to impress upon this small party that getting across the river might not be as easy as they’d imagined.
Then there emerged from the ashy haze a spectral group of shuffling, limping, foot-dragging men in nightclothes: wounded soldiers who had been recovering in the Deaconess Institute – a hospital a little further along the river. The institute had been caught by explosives and incendiaries, forcing its evacuation, with the walking wounded helped from their beds and those who could fleeing the grounds. ‘Everything was burning in the city,’ recalled Bielss, but the smoke was now too thick to make out any sort of detail at all.30 The wounded men had shocked Bielss and his mother more profoundly than anything else; they realized that it might be best to turn back and at least fetch some goggles from the apartment.
Horst agreed to the change of plan, but it became apparent that even the route to relative safety presented new and unexpected hazards. ‘Our eyes were burning with the biting smoke,’ remembered Bielss. In that short time, other large buildings had caught fire and in some of the narrower streets flaming debris was crashing to the cobbles below, throwing out sparks. Retracing a journey that just a few minutes before they had taken for granted now became a matter of anxious calculation. They eventually got back to the apartment via a rather circuitous route and once more tried unsuccessfully to make contact via their neighbours’ telephone. Horst was clearly now becoming quite frantic about his family, and what was happening in that ochre haze across the river. With goggles at the ready, they once more left the apartment building, their idea this time to forge a route along the banks of the Elbe, especially the stretch of meadows that faced the Altstadt on the opposite side. They could all feel that something in the air was being transformed; the pale frontages of the villas and apartment blocks of the Neustadt were being whipped with ‘strong sparks’,31 the sinister embers now flying almost horizontally. As they reached the Jägerstrasse, a road that led down from a park, the wind seemed more of a burning gale, the bright orange embers filling the air with such ferocity that the road actually appeared impassable.
It seemed more obvious than ever that this was not a conflagration that could be countered. The trio passed a building that was used by military administrators: the fires were devouring it, yet no one was making even a token effort to douse the flames. It was obvious that there was simply no point. Moreover, the very air was becoming hostile, the ashy particles that made it so painful simply to keep one’s eyes unshielded also irritating windpipes and lungs, provoking hacking coughs and a frightening sensation of raw discomfort and black aftertaste with every breath drawn.
Then some more people emerged from the fervid haze who seemed to have no official designation but none the less offered a single message: ‘Do not try to go any further into the city.’ They were, as Bielss recalled, ‘strongly advised’, though in truth, looking at the infernal prospect through their ash-flecked goggles, it was advice they scarcely needed. The jittery excitement was giving way to leaden tension.
A little earlier, near what was fast becoming the golden, volcanic heart of that inferno, Victor Klemperer and his wife Eva had – like everyone else – instinctively responded to the departure of the bombers by trying to restore a semblance of domestic stability. They left the cellar and immediately noted the curiously strong wind: Klemperer wrote that, even at that point, he wondered whether it was natural or foreshadowed a firestorm.32 But for him and his wife, there was none of the nervous, excitable springiness felt by younger citizens, rather an awful weariness. The cobbled ground beneath their feet was covered in shards of glass; as they opened the door of the Judenhaus, it became apparent that there was glass everywhere indoors as well. All the windows had been blown in, both those facing the Altstadt and those facing the Elbe. Trudging upstairs together with a fellow resident, Frau Cohen, they discovered yet more glass and a view from one of the windows of the distant bank of the Elbe and the municipal buildings on the north side of the river bright with fire.
Inside the frayed house, the lights were not working and the water supply had been cut off. Frau Cohen, assessing her room in the rich glow of the fires, told the Klemperers that the bomb blasts had shifted her furniture. The Klemperers moved into the kitchen, where Eva found a candle and lit it. There was some coffee from earlier, now cold, which the couple drank, and a little leftover food too, which they ate. The couple by now seemed largely oblivious to any clamour or noise from the surrounding streets, or even the sounds of nearby buildings crackling and creaking, weakened by the flames; indeed, Klemperer and Eva now seemed overwhelmed by fatigue. Extraordinarily, heedless of the danger from spreading blazes or collapsing buildings, they entered their bedroom and lay down upon their twin beds. Eva rose again immediately, exclaiming that her bed was full of glass. She removed it as best she could and lay back down again. Her husband observed her almost disinterestedly, and before he knew it he was fast asleep.33
The Klemperers’ intense fatigue might have been caused in part by the invisible fumes that were fast becoming pervasive; the chemicals and gases produced by the multitude of burning materials in innumerable apartments and grand shops nearby. But Klemperer’s sleepiness seemed to find an echo in many other of the city’s elderly residents that night, something that was possibly a traumatized reaction to that colossal assault: old hearts made to race unwillingly followed by a bitter recovery that left limbs feeling inert and unresponsive. For so many of a certain age elsewhere in the city, swift flight was impossible. But Klemperer had spent years under the malicious Nazi administration not simply accepting what was happening. In the hours to come, he and thousands of others would be driven into the most extraordinary fight for their lives.