Dresden (30 page)

Bergander considers the total number of households in greater Dresden, and ends up with the estimate that for anything like the supposed five hundred thousand to one million refugees to be accommodated within the city limits,
each
existing family would have had to take in
several
refugees on a semipermanent basis. This would have required a massive government program of compulsory billeting, which was never even contemplated. It also ignores impossible difficulties with the ration card system.

“We were expecting friends from Silesia,” says Gertraud Freundel, then eighteen years old. Her family lived in a pleasant roomy flat just south of the Hauptbahnhof.

So in this case, on the night of the raid, two outsiders had been due to be added to the population of Dresden, while, as chance would have
it, one who
should
have been there was not. Multiply such haphazard circumstances by tens of thousands, and accurate calculation is difficult. Bergander's best estimate is that during the previous days and weeks a further hundred thousand refugees might have been accepted into the homes of existing Dresden residents, because they were friends or relatives, or friends of friends, or out of common human kindness. This makes a total of some two hundred thousand nonresidents in the city on the night of February 13–14. Many of these would have found, or been assigned, quarters away from the vulnerable center of Dresden.

None of these estimates by an acknowledged expert plays down the number of refugees who passed
through
Dresden and its surrounding area during those weeks. The numbers probably ran over the million mark. But they were not all there at the same time; and only a fraction is likely to have been unlucky enough to be lodged in the affected districts of Dresden on the fatal night of Shrove Tuesday.

 

ON THE AFTERNOON
of February 13, 1945, Victor Klemperer was also engaged on government business.

The previous day he and other elders of the now tiny Jewish community in Dresden had been charged with delivering to every remaining Jew a deportation order. The order, signed by Dr. Ernst “Israel” Neumark of the Reich Association of German Jews, told them to report on Friday, February 16, at 6:45
A.M
. to No. 1 Zeughausstrasse (one of the “Jew houses” opposite the now nonexistent synagogue) for “a work detail outside Dresden.” They should bring hand luggage and provisions for two to three days' march. They were to bring work clothes, blankets, sheets, and shoes, but no money, foreign currency, bankbooks, matches, or candles.

Such was the letter that Fräulein Henny “Sara” Wolf received at the family's flat in the Glasshüter Strasse, where they were now living
in severely reduced circumstances. An identical instruction was delivered to her mother. Both of them, and Henny's “Aryan” father, knew exactly what this meant. Every Jew or part-Jew knew. Whoever's signature lay underneath it, this order came from the Gestapo. It promised at best transportation to the Theresienstadt ghetto, at worst a death march of the kind that had already consigned tens of thousands of Jews to a bitter and brutal fate just as the new Allied advances seemed to bring deliverance so tantalizingly close.

Early in January 1945 Henny Wolf, now grown into a pretty young woman of twenty, had been ordered to an interview with the Gestapo for the first time alone. Her mother stayed home, helpless with anxiety. More than one acquaintance had committed suicide rather than answer such a summons. Henny's father accompanied her there, but had to remain outside. The doorman bellowed at the young woman: “
Sara
Wolf, upstairs that way!” She obeyed, sick with fear.

For the first and only time, Herr Wolf exercised his right as an Aryan to take the tram home. He had to leave his daughter, for whom all public transport was forbidden, to walk back to the apartment alone. They agreed that this was in order, so that the agony of Henny's waiting mother might be ended as soon as humanly possible.

Also at the beginning of January the night shift at Bauer's box factory had suddenly been abandoned, leaving the Jews without employment (except for bomb-site clearing and the like). No one knew why. Or not until the deportation order came just a few weeks later.

The Wolf family had less than three days to think about their response. They decided immediately that rather than allow the family unit to be broken up, and Henny and her mother to be shipped off to a concentration camp, the women would abandon their yellow stars and
they would try to “go underground.” There was little prospect of doing this successfully, because without Aryan papers, how would they obtain sufficient rations, or a place to live? And what if there were identity checks? But it was better to perish like that, as a family, they told themselves, than separated and lonely amid the obscene, impersonal violence of the concentration camp system.

So came the evening of February 13. Henny's father, still in shock from the news of the deportation order, lay stretched out fully clothed on his bed. This was the first time his daughter had ever seen her highly fastidious father do such a thing.

The air raid siren sounded. At first they thought it was yet another false alarm. The Wolfs had no radio, because in a house containing Jews this was not permitted, so they received no warning of the approaching British bombers. Henny and her mother were not permitted to use public air raid shelters.

A few minutes later, however, their doorbell rang. It was the air raid warden, a decent older man who had known the family for years. He told Henny's father to bring the family down into the air raid shelter. Herr Wolf said this was forbidden, but the man gently insisted. They filed down behind him into the cellar beneath their apartment building.

 

YOUNG GÜNTER JÄCKEL,
seven years old and just starting school when Hitler came to power, was now eighteen and a half and in uniform. The fortunes of war had taken him far away from his hometown of Dresden, and then back again in the space of a few months.

In the summer of 1944, along with most of his schoolmates, Jäckel was conscripted into the armed forces. He managed to join the Luftwaffe. Jäckel had left school at sixteen, taking a job as a trainee clerk at the local government office in Pirna, just outside Dresden. Still in the Hitler Youth, he also undertook gliding lessons. This, he believed, was why he was sent to the Luftwaffe when he reached military age rather than as cannon fodder to the eastern front.

Not that Jäckel became a flier. By mid-1944, with the air war now horribly one-sided and ground troops desperately required, he and his comrades were sent to what was left of German-occupied France to fight as infantry. German resistance had stiffened, and fierce fighting was taking place in the eastern part of the country. Jäckel sardonically recalls his
bemusement, as a boy who until now had scarcely left the safety of Dresden, when he realized how hated he and his young fellow countrymen really were in the places their elder brothers had conquered. He remembered his unit's withdrawal, as night fell and the danger of Allied aircraft diminished, from a small town northeast of Dijon:

October 1944 found his unit entrenched in an apple orchard near Belfort, facing strafing attacks from American Thunderbolts and Mustangs, and—as the front line got closer—systematic air-guided shelling. It was during this fighting that Jäckel and his comrades came under fire from American tanks. His arm was filleted by shell splinters. The boy next to him was almost certainly killed. Only the fact that Jäckel had ducked down at that particular moment saved his own life.

Jäckel was evacuated out of the combat zone and taken to a military hospital run by nuns in Colmar. There, things turned bad. He got a high fever, and his arm swelled up. The Germans had no penicillin. The wound had become infected. He was shipped back into the Reich, and operated on in a Bavarian military hospital. It was there, starting to recover, that he heard his mother had died suddenly. Scarlet fever. A chance civilian death, from natural causes, in the midst of war.

Two days later Günter Jäckel arrived back in Dresden for her funeral. And also for a last reunion with his father, who had been conscripted earlier in the war. After the ceremony, the middle-aged former tram driver went back to his unit on the eastern front. His son never saw him again.

The evening of February 13 found Jäckel, ambulant but still somewhat feverish, in a convalescent hospital in the outer reaches of the Südvorstadt. The dirty work there—dealing with the laundry and changing the urine bottles and bedpans—was done by Italian prisoners of war. They were a friendly bunch, men who had refused to serve
the fascists after Mussolini's fall and so had ended up in what seems to have been a relatively relaxed, if not exactly fragrant, form of captivity. Then came the sirens.

HANNELORE KUHN
was born the middle child and only daughter of a prosperous middle-class household in the suburban area surrounding the Münchner Platz. Her father had studied law, but after service in the First World War went into real estate consultancy and management. Her mother, a teacher until she had her first child, was now a housewife. They owned a substantial villa in the Bamberger Strasse.

As 1945 began, Hannelore Kuhn had already lost her elder brother in the war. Her younger brother had been conscripted into the Wehrmacht. She was a diligent student. After gaining her high school certificate (
Abitur
) in 1942, instead of going to college she had first to complete a stint at a work camp in the mountains. Then, as part of the compulsory war aid service (
Kriegshilfsdienst
), she was sent to work for some months as a tram conductress in Breslau before being allowed to return home.

February 13, Hannelore recalls, was one of those mild prespring days.

At ten that evening, when the air raid warning sounded, she was resting in a chair, holding heated pads over her cheeks to relieve her aching sinuses, just as the doctor had told her to.

 

THERE WERE FOUR CHILDREN
from the Dresden inner suburb of Johannstadt—two girls and two boys. They grew up together within the same few hundred square yards north of the Grosser Garten between 1930 and 1945, went to school and played together.

Nora Lang and Anita Kurz had been friends since before they were old enough to remember. Nora had two brothers, one almost the same age but the other just six years old. Anita was an only child. Nora's father worked as a welder at the Gussstahl plant in distant Freital, traveling there by bicycle for every shift, night or day. His was a skilled job, but the family counted itself as working class. Anita's parents were more upwardly mobile, her father working at a bank before the war, as a salesman for their security and safe-deposit services.

Johannstadt was a socially mixed neighborhood, tall castellated apartment houses in an elegant late-nineteenth-century style grouped around leafy squares. There were large and small apartments, but all were reckoned light and airy. Shops and workshops had been incorporated into the blocks, so there were plenty of crafts people, even small factories in the inner yard areas. It was a nice part of town to live.