Chapter 12 Karma Bites #2
Ben said, “I still don’t—” and I said, “Look. Let me tell you a story that will help you see how it was. I was on a tram one day around that time—did you know that Jews were not allowed to ride the tram unless they worked more than five miles away? But that isn’t the point of my story.
I was sitting on a tram, and a woman nearby began complaining about the war to her male companion.
Most foolishly, as there was a Wehrmacht officer sitting opposite.
He looked tired and dispirited, though, and barely looked up at first as she went on.
Why was the war being dragged out, the Russians were nearly to Prague now, what were the generals doing …
those sorts of things. Nobody said anything, of course—we all knew better than to agree, even schoolgirls like me—until at last, the officer raised his head and said, “It isn’t wise to speak so candidly, gn?dige Frau.
” He said it politely, for he was clearly an educated man.
At which point the woman’s companion rose and told the officer, “You sat there all this time and let her spout defeatism. Come with me.” He was Gestapo, you see, and the woman a Gestapo plant.
Even with the war clearly lost, even then, at the end of all things, they were still that fanatical in their mission to stop any murmur of dissent. ”
“What happened to the guy?” Ben asked.
“I imagine,” I said, “that it didn’t go well for him.
Poor man, I’m sure he was only looking for a little peace that day.
Germany had lost so many men by then that they were sending fifteen-year-old boys and sixty-year-old men into battle, and still they squandered their resources by executing soldiers for what we’d now call ‘thought crimes’.
So, yes, my father would have had a bad time.
But that isn’t what we’re talking about.
We’re talking about what happened next.”
I did my best to describe the scene in the cellar: the explosions that shook even a building as solid as the palace, the rising heat, the thrumming of the engines that seemed to reach into one’s bones.
“Hundreds of bombers hit Dresden during that bombing run,” I told them.
“A densely populated city of only six hundred thousand people, plus three hundred thousand mostly unhoused refugees fleeing from the Russians in the east. And they hit the Altstadt hardest—the old town, the area between the main railway station and the river. Our area. Each bomber held up to twelve bombs—the heavy ones were two thousand pounds each, called ‘blockbusters,’ because they were designed to level a city block. And then there were the incendiaries, which started a fire one couldn’t put out with water but had to smother with sand.
We had a few buckets of sand in our cellar; everybody did.
Imagine trying to extinguish a burning city with buckets of sand.
In fairness, I must point out that Germany used incendiaries first in bombing first Warsaw, then London and Moscow.
We weren’t told that at the time, of course. ”
“Wait, what?” Ashleigh asked. “Refugees? Why were they there? I thought Dresden was, like, at the edge. I mean, Czechoslovakia’s right next door, isn’t it?”
“Ethnic Germans,” I said, “fleeing Czechoslovakia, Poland, Ukraine … many countries. In some cases, Hitler had first depopulated those areas, sending their inhabitants to concentration camps.”
“Karma bites,” Ashleigh said.
“Indeed it does,” I said. “So, yes, there were hundreds of thousands of refugees, all of them cold, hungry, and thirsty. I can’t emphasize enough how badly the conditions of daily life were deteriorating by that point.
There wasn’t enough food in the city for those already there, and no possible facilities to house that many people.
Most of them were sheltered in and under the railway station without even adequate toilet facilities—the shock it was to see an old man dropping his trousers right there on the tracks and squatting to do his business!
What else could they do, though? So there they were, inadequately protected, and the railway station was one of the sites hardest hit.
After the bombing, when my father and I went outside to check …
” I had to stop. “It was like nothing I’d ever seen, and the people were running.
Rushing to the river, trying to find safety.
The stones were hot underfoot, and the sandstone walls as well.
The palace was burning. Everything was burning.
There was a tower of fire that— And there were bodies.
We’d been sheltered from the war, despite feeling like we were in the midst of it.
We’d heard about the devastating bombings of Hamburg, Lübeck, Berlin …
so many cities, but we hadn’t known. Now, the war had come to us. ”
“What did you do?” Alix asked.
“We tried to save what we could in the palace, for there was no telling how much would burn before the fire stopped, with nobody to put it out. We took practical things, and some sentimental things, too. Clothes, food, photos, things like that. My parents and I, and the servants, too, all grabbing everything we could as fast as we could do it. The servants’ rooms burned first, I’m afraid, as they were at the top of the house, and it distressed them greatly that they could save nothing but what they’d brought down to the cellar with them.
After that—well, what could we do? The roof was breached, and there was no safety outside.
The heat, the smoke, the ash … terrible.
We had a large, well-built cellar, though, and we had food and drink—we even had the beer barrel, as that was kept in the cellar—so my father decided we would sit out the night there, and perhaps by morning, the fires would have burned themselves out.
So we went back down, but first …” I paused. This was the hardest part to say.
“First,” I managed to continue, “my father gave me an assignment. It saved my life, but it cost him his.”