Dresden (39 page)
Authors: Frederick Taylor
Victor dropped off for a while, despite the “terrible strong wind” that had started to blow. Then at around one, Eva said suddenly, “Air raid warning!” Her husband had heard nothing. She had somehow picked up the sound of sirens from the other side of the river, or perhapsâas her husband thoughtâthere were hand-operated sirens being carried around the streets. A fellow resident of the Jew house knocked on their door to confirm the warning. The Klemperers in turn woke the woman in the next room. Then they hurried downstairs.
The street was bright as day and almost empty, fires were burning, and the storm was blowing as before. As usual there was a steel-helmeted sentry in front of the wall between the two Zeughausstrasse houses (the wall of the former synagogue with the barracks behind it). In passing I asked him whether there was a warning.â“Yes.”âEva was two steps ahead of me.
We came to the entrance hall of no. 3. At that moment a big explosion nearby. I knelt, pressing myself up against the wall, close to the courtyard door. When I looked up, Eva had disappeared. I thought she was in our cellar. It was quiet, I ran across the yard to our Jews' cellar. The door was wide open. A group of people cowered whimpering to the right of the door. Big explosionsâ¦the window in the wall opposite burst openâ¦Then an explosion at the window close to me. Something hard and glowing hot struck the right side of my face. I put my hand up, it was covered in blood. I felt for my eye, it was still there. A group of Russiansâwhere had they come from?âpushed out of the door. I jumped over to them. I had the rucksack on my back, the grey bag with our manuscripts and Eva's jewellery in my hand, my old hat had fallen off. I stumbled and fell. A Russian lifted me up. To the side there was a vaulting, God knows of what already half-destroyed cellar. We crowded in. It was hot. The Russians ran on in some other direction, I with them. Now we stood in an open passageway, heads down, crowded together. In front of me lay a large unrecognisable open space, in the middle of it an enormous crater. Bangs, as light as day, explosions. I had no thoughts, I was not even afraid, I was simply tremendously exhausted, I think I was expecting the end.
Astonishingly, the professor, with his heart troubleâand his wife, Eva, now missingâshowed great determination and presence of mind. Exhausted he may have been, and “expecting the end,” but after a moment's rest he scrambled over a parapet into the open air, threw himself into a bomb crater, and lay there for some time.
Eventually clambering out of the hole, Klemperer sheltered in a telephone kiosk. Then he saw another man, Herr Eisenmann, from the Jew house. The man was carrying his small daughter in his arms. Together they took refuge in what was left of the Reich bank's regional office building. It was largely shrouded in flames, but solid, with thick walls. No bombs fell on them. Later Eisenmann suggested they take a risk and run the relatively short distance down to the river. The younger man quickly left Klemperer behindârunning was too much for him, especially in the oxygen-poor air.
Instead the professor joined a group clambering up the slopes of the ornamental gardens that led to the Brühl Terrace. With difficulty, he reached the high terrace. There he felt a cooler breeze. Still the
stinging sirocco of sparks and hot air, but an atmosphere that was breathable.
High atop the riverside terrace, he had become one of the select band who had escaped the blind, infernal maze of the Altstadt. Klemperer's vantage point afforded him a matchless view of a terrible panorama of destruction.
Within a wider radius, nothing but fires. Standing out like a torch on this side of the Elbe, the tall building at Pirnaischer Platz, glowing white; as bright as day on the other side, the roof of the Finance Ministry. Slowly thoughts came to me. Was Eva lost, had she been able to save herself, had I thought too little about her? I had wrapped the woollen blanketâI had probably lost the other with my hatâaround my head and shoulders. It also covered the star. In my hands I held the precious bag andâyes, also the small leather case with Eva's woollen thingsâ¦the storm again and again tore at my blanket, hurt my head. It had begun to rain, the ground was soft and wet, I did not want to put anything down, so there was serious physical strain, and that probably stupefied and distracted me. But in between there was constantly present, as dull pressure and pang of conscience, what had happened to Eva, why had I not thought enough about her? Sometimes I thought: She is more capable and courageous than I am, she will have got to safety; sometimes: If at least she didn't suffer! Then again simply: If only the night were over! Once I asked some people if I could put my things on their box for a moment, so as to be able to adjust my blanket. Once a man addressed me: “You're also a Jew, aren't you? I've been living in your house since yesterday.” Löwenstamm. His wife handed me a napkin with which I was supposed to bandage my face. The bandage didn't hold, I then used the serviette as a handkerchief. Another time a young man, who was holding up his trousers with his hand, came up to me. In broken German: Dutch, imprisoned (hence without braces) at police headquarters. “Ran for itâthe others are burning in the prison.”
Another whose fate had been transformed by the intervention of the RAF.
The Dutchman's fellow prisoners had perished, and so had some Jews too. Friends of Henny Wolf lived in the Jew house in the
Sporergasse, from which many had been removed to the Hellerberg camp. They always used to say, if there was an air raid the Wolfs should take refuge with them. It was an old and shabby house, but with sturdy walls and foundations, and on one side the massive remains of Dresden's ancient fortifications. Those walls would hold! And so they did. All too well. In the night of the firestorm, a bomb hit the house. It collapsed over the cellar where the Jews had taken shelter.
As Henny Wolf sadly recounted:
No one could get them out, although for hours knocking signals could be heard from the interior of the house. In this inferno, there were no rescue workers, let alone an excavator or something of the sort, which could have broken through the old walls. A doctor, Werner Lang's brother, was among those buried under rubble. We hoped that he had enough cyanide to enable them to be spared the horrors of death by suffocation. Around 40 of the 170 or so Jews still living in Dresden died there, at the hands of their liberators, and so close to the end. For us, however, macabre as it may sound, the air raid was our salvation, and that was exactly how we understood it.
It was different for the concentration camp Jews. Like the prisoners who had come to Dresden from the Lodz ghetto in October 1944, the Jews had been moved steadily west, to keep them from being liberated by the Russian advance. That night when the Klemperers and the Wolfs found their salvation, the five hundred Jewish workers at the Bernsdorf & Co. factory in Striesen, northeast of the Grosser Garten, were locked into what passed for a shelter.
Ilana Turner had just turned seventeen when Dresden was bombed. She had been working twelve-hour shifts making things for the German war effort since the age of thirteen. This had saved her, so far, from joining the 1.5 million children who died in the Nazi regime's concentration camps. She was with the other slave-laborers in the Bernsdorf factory when the sirens sounded that evening.
It was after nine o'clock. We had alarms all the time, so we didn't pay it much attention, but when the sirens sounded and bombs began falling, we had to take refuge. It was not really a shelter but a
kind of half-shelter. Half of the window was on the street, so it was a semibasement. There we spent the whole night and the bombs were falling all around usâ¦And the funny thing was, the Germansâthe SS and all the othersâcame to us about twelve o'clock, and they said, we came to stay with you because we have heard that the Jews are luckyâ¦
That night, at least, they were. They suffered no direct hits. After the second raid, however, it became clear that incendiary bombs had penetrated the factory roof. The building was on fire. They were evacuated and marched down to the river Elbe about a kilometer away. It was a strange, almost surreal experience as they followed the route taken by many German survivors. The shaven-headed Jewish prisoners and their superstitious SS minders, shuffling through the burning streets. Ilana recalled, “It was a terrible sightâ¦there were electric tramways that had been set ablaze. There were people sitting inside, on fire.”
They reached the river. Ilana is not sure whereâthe nearest place would be the waterside suburb of Tollkewitz. Unlike most of the shore, Tollkewitz is served by two tramlines, which would account for those horrifying, spectral figures inside the streetcars.
It was quite isolated, but full of Germansâ¦the whole population went to the river because probably they thought they could duck into it if something happened. It was still dark, I think four, five o'clock in the morning. The bombing had stopped some time ago. We were there for three or four hours.
“There was one German soldier who went crazy,” Ilana added. “But otherwise everyone else survived.” The factory was quite badly damaged by the incendiary bombs. The Jews could not return. At first light they were marched off along the river to Pirna, a picturesque small town twelve miles southeast of Dresden. Early in the war, Pirna had witnessed the experimental mass gassings of the mentally ill (followed later by Jews), carried out under the notorious “T4” program at the asylum in the suburb of Sonnenstein. It was currently the site of a small concentration camp.
We stayed there for six days to one weekâ¦they had Russian prisoners of war there. They were in terrible condition. We had nothing, but what little we had we shared with the Russians. These young men looked like skeletons.
Then the Jews were returned to Bernsdorf & Co. Sufficient repairs had been accomplished for them to start work once more, making armaments in what was left of Dresden for what was left of the Greater German Reich. The difference was, they now had to sleep on the floor of the machine shop.
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THE CIRCUS SARRASANI,
in its two-thousand-seater permanent “big top” at the Carolaplatz, on the Neustadt side of the Elbe, was one of the few entertainments still permitted in Dresden in February 1945. There were cinemas, the occasional church or military concert, but the traditional status of the city as a center for the performing arts had been suspended for the duration of the war.
Since September 1944, as part of the enhanced “total war” program following the attempt on Hitler's life, all other places of amusement or artistic activity had been closed by the regime, including theaters, opera, dance, and art schools. The Dresden Philharmonia orchestra and the choir of the opera house were disbanded. Their members, along with the actors from the city's famous theaters, had been drafted into the Wehrmacht and to the armaments workshops. At the Universelle factory, which had once produced typewriters and now made parts for the military, there was an entire section made up of thespians.
Perhaps because it was peculiarly suitable for entertaining troops and armaments workers, Dresden's famous circus had been selected as “vital to the war effort.” The management, under owner's wife/performer Trude Sarrasani and her Hungarian artistic director, Gabor Nemedi, continued to mount a lavish spectacle.
On the evening of February 13, 1945, the Circus Sarrasani was filled to overflowing. This being Fasching Tuesday, the Cavallini clown troupe was bringing gales of laughter with its special carnival routine. Many of the seats were filled with refugees, seizing a rare opportunity for an interlude of glamour and light relief during their
wretched trek westward. In their programs, as they settled into their seats, they would have read a carefully worded warning:
The Sarrasani management announces: In case of air raid warning, we ask our guests first of all to remain seated and to follow the instructions of the circus staff. The cloakroom cannot be opened. Do not walk quickly, or crowd togetherâeverything has been arranged. Do not smoke. Do not leave the building. There is no need for concern! Remain calm!
The program also assured the audience that the circus, as well as being thoroughly blacked-out, was “camouflaged from the air.” It also possessed “exemplary air raid shelters”âincluding the cellar bar. On the evening of February 13, the precautions were put to the test. Sarrasani's own air raid warden, a certain Herr Curt Sonntag, reported later on the procedure:
At 21:20 the circus received a preliminary warningâ¦a little later the sirens sounded for the full-scale warning. Our show continued according to schedule until 22:00 hours. I ordered it to be curtailed immediately. The last act that had just finished their performance were the Lindströms. They had been followed by Preto's Unrideable Donkey. This performance was abandoned. The Cavallinis and the Hungarian post-horses had already stopped. I had the seats evacuated according to the pre-established sequence, beginning with the 2nd tier, the standing room and the balcony, then the 1st tier, the middle circle, and so on. The circus possessed three air raid shelters: the tunnel bar, the hunting animal cellar, and the scenery stores. The evacuation proceeded according to plan and without panic. Only a few people, contrary to instructions, left the circus building. In the corridor leading to the basement, a woman became hysterical, and a naval officer drew his revolver. I stepped between them. We were trained for such eventualities. The last guests had not yet been brought to safety when the first bombs began to fall. Some anxiety was understandable but was kept within boundsâ¦
When the all-clear was sounded at about 11
P.M
.âthere was still a power supply in the neighborhoodâthe audience was allowed to go
home. It was, all in all, an exemplary performance by both the Sarrasani's staff and those in their care. They had suffered one near-direct hit, which had damaged rooms over the main entrance, and some incendiaries were found burning in the hay and straw stores. Staff got to work extinguishing these, and succeeded. All the same, the built-up area around them was on fire. There were suggestions of a rising firestorm even on the Neustadt side. Locals who had been driven from the homes came with their belongings to the Sarrasani, which seemed almost entirely undamaged.