Operation Gomorrah

I remember that the summer in Hamburg in 1943 was unusually dry and hot. Three of us now lived in the fifth-floor apartment on Hasselbrook Strasse: my mother, my baby sister, Renate, and me. I was eight years old and a respectful, obedient child. But one day in late July my mother asked me to do something and I disobeyed her, and I shall be forever glad that I did. She asked me to take my baby sister to my cousin Inge’s apartment in another part of the city and wait for her there. We set off. I was thrilled to be outdoors, unsupervised, in charge. A cooling salt breeze from the North Sea blew through the streets and seemed to calm Renate as I pushed her along inside a grey wicker carriage with spoked wheels and a handle as high as my chin. But after a while I turned back and then began to hurry. Something wasn’t right with my mother. She had cried for most of the night and hadn’t told me why.

When I think of myself then, hurrying home with the pram, I also think of all the things that were unknown to me. German officials who had placed our names on deportation lists; Royal Air Force officers studying aerial photographs of our city; bombers revving on runways in the flat fields of eastern England. All of them were about to impinge on my life.

I opened the door to our apartment that afternoon and found Mother slumped on the floor in front of the kitchen stove, and for a moment I just stood there, listening to the gas jets hiss like angry geese. Because she had a six-pointed yellow star on her dress, there was no one I could call upon for help. It hadn’t always been that way, but this was the summer of 1943 and those who might have helped in the past had long since been silenced.

Trying not to inhale too much gas, I pulled Mother away from the stove, tugging first one limp arm and then the other. I managed to get her head and a shoulder into the dining room, but there her clothes bunched and clung to the carpet, making further progress slow and difficult. So I took down the blackout drape that covered the dining-room window, swung back the glass pane and welcomed the air into the room and into my lungs. Mother was lying partly on one side but mainly on her back, with her eyes shut and her lips slightly parted. She was very pale and completely limp, but she seemed to be breathing.

I was sitting on the floor with her head in my lap, trying to think what to do, when coming from the bottom of the stairwell where I’d left the pram I could hear the faint sounds of my baby sister’s whimpering. I slipped out from under my mother’s head and ran down to fetch Renate, and then laid her beside our mother on the floor in the hope that her hunger cries would wake her. They didn’t. I put a pillow under my mother’s head and began to look around for something that Renate and I could eat. I found a few potatoes and filled a pot with water. Then I scratched a match and tried to light the stove, which caused a frightening flash and a loud pop and the smell of singed hair. I tried again and again, until at the third or fourth attempt the gas ring produced a steady flame. And then I cooked and mashed the potatoes and fed and changed Renate and put her on the bed where all three of us slept together when Father was away.

A year earlier there had been four of us, but Father had managed to place my middle sister, Helga, with a family that lived on a farm on the outskirts of Hamburg. With her light blonde hair, green eyes and pale skin, she was easily accepted as one more city kid farmed out among relatives to escape the bombing raids. Father wasn’t Jewish. He was serving with the Luftwaffe in Belgium, not as a combat pilot but as a member of Reichsminister Goering’s procurement command, which kept Germans relatively well fed at the expense of the occupied peoples. He’d been recruited by a group of Storm Troopers who had beaten him almost to death — permanently injuring his kidneys — and given him the choice of joining up or dying together with his Jewish wife and children. Father’s work enabled him to supply us with enough food to survive after our ration cards were cancelled. He was also, though I didn’t fully understand this then, an effective member of the Resistance—like his brother, my uncle Eugene Oestreicher, who was serving in occupied France when he chose to kill himself rather than be interrogated and tortured by an SS unit known as the ‘Ascension Commandos’. On his last visit home, my father told us that his room in his Brussels pension had been searched by the Gestapo. My mother believed that Eugene’s death drew suspicion on us all and that the Gestapo (to whom she had to report every week) took more than a usual interest in us as Jews.

That night I transferred Renate from the bed to the floor, put her on two pillows beside Mother, covered them with a cotton sheet and lay down next to them. There were no air raids to disturb us, though I woke up often to see if she was still unconscious. At last, in the morning, she opened her eyes and hugged and kissed Renate with tears pouring down her face.

Soon after, my cousin Inge arrived. She was the daughter of Father’s half-brother and her parents ran a grocery store. They also had a Jewish woman living in their apartment, which took courage and conviction.

She was breathing hard after her climb up the five floors to our apartment. ‘I was so worried about you,’ she said, ‘but I couldn’t come earlier. Our lodger got a deportation order yesterday. She tried to take her own life while we were out at the store.’

I looked at Mother and I understood. She dried her eyes and explained that she, too, had received a deportation order: in five days we were supposed to report to Moorweide Park, the place from which all our Jewish aunts, uncles, grandparents and cousins had been taken, along with almost all of the other Jews in Hamburg. Mother told Inge that, in a desperate bid to save her children, she had asked me to take Renate to Inge’s home and then tried to take her own life, hoping the authorities would not go further after finding her dead. Inge didn’t say anything but simply leaned forward and took Mother’s hands. Still joined, the two women sat down and searched each other’s eyes and then began to talk while I made tea. The authorities had disconnected our telephone. Inge promised that she would let Father know about the deportation order as soon as possible. When she left, she took Renate with her.