Operation Gomorrah

Where could we go? Brandsende, where Inge and my little sister, Renate, were staying, was impossible to reach because soldiers had cordoned off the streets near the City Hall. A rescue worker told us to go to the Stadtpark. There we would at least be safe from the fires and could try to get transportation out of the city. On our way we saw that the Karstadt department store had collapsed on its two air-raid shelters. People disinterred from the shelter reserved for store employees and city officials were dazed but unhurt, but rescue workers had taken hundreds of dead women and children from the other shelter and were bringing out more as we passed. Mother squeezed my hand to signal her relief that we had not been in the shelter of the dead.

There were thousands of refugees in the park by the time we got there: police and other city officials were loading people into every type of vehicle and sending them off without much enquiry into who was going where. Baby buggies and other paraphernalia stood where they’d been left; abandoned cats and dogs chased one another through the park.

I didn’t think that Mother had decided to leave the city, but when a policeman herded us towards the back of a truck with a canvas cover she didn’t pull away or resist. The truck driver demanded some money and answered her question about our destination with a single word: ‘South!’ And so we left the city. British fighters were reported to have strafed columns of fleeing refugees, and we stayed off the road the next day, parked in an orchard under trees laden with unripe apples to which we helped ourselves. I found swallowing painful but the tart flavour was heavenly. Mother and I took as many apples as we could carry and we still had some when we were dumped in the Bavarian village of Hof at around two in the morning. I was more asleep than awake as arrangements were made to stay in a room over a tavern beside a trout stream.

I can’t remember much of the next few days other than the pain that came with breathing and eating, and that my mother was now my saviour, my beautiful hero. She had outwitted the Gestapo and faced down the Nazis in the shelter and everywhere else. She had held my hand and led me through exploding streets; she had never let go.

Then came news of my father. Mother told me she had talked to him on the telephone, that he’d arrived in Hamburg the day after we left and was staying with Inge in Brandsende. Though the British had made another massive raid on the city, Renate and Inge and her family had survived the bombs. Father arranged for us to hide on the farm of Marie Pimber, the woman who had been taking care of my middle sister, Helga, on the understanding that she was a Christian evacuee. Frau Pimber was part of a network of people, mainly communists or former communists, that Father called upon for Resistance assistance of one sort or another. Frau Pimber didn’t much like the idea of hiding Jews, an offence for which she could be killed, but she had been childless until my sister arrived and had become so attached to her that she thought of Helga as her own. Faced with the prospect of losing Helga or letting us live on the farm, and offered as much material support as Father could muster, Frau Pimber agreed.

Two years passed. The war ended. A fortnight after the Allies formally accepted Germany’s surrender on May 9, 1945, Father arrived at Frau Pimber’s farm and we returned to Hamburg. My parents spent the next few months examining official and unofficial lists of survivors and waiting at railway stations for refugees to arrive. Father volunteered to help the British relief work among the refugees and displaced persons, pointing out that he was fluent in several languages and familiar with the cultures and countries from which many of the refugees had come. A British officer told him that he couldn’t possibly be of any assistance because he was married to a Jew.

The joy of having escaped death made the unearthly ruins of Hamburg seem more like a smouldering paradise than the purgatory other people thought our once lovely city had become. After years of fear and hiding, I skipped down rubbled streets, flashing a smile and a thumbs-up at every British soldier I saw. I desperately wanted the British to know that I wasn’t like the rest, that Winston Churchill was my hero, that I was glad they had come and that I wanted them to stay to protect the handful of Jews who had somehow survived.

The bombings had left me with such a fear of fire that my heart would begin to pound whenever I heard a siren, and something within me would shiver long after the sound died away. I was extremely uncomfortable in enclosed spaces and I dreaded elevators, tunnels, cellars and windowless rooms. I was also aware that thousands of Hamburg’s children had been killed or maimed by the bombings, possibly even more than had been condemned to death for being Jews. And I hated all such killing with a passion that I couldn’t always control.

At the same time I was glad that the intensive bombing of Hamburg by the British and the Americans during the summer of 1943 had enabled my mother and me to escape the fate of a death camp. Since we lived near the centre of the firestorm, the authorities who had ticketed us for Auschwitz assumed that we must have been among the thousands of the unrecognizable dead. Because our neighbours would not let us share their shelter I escaped being roasted alive. If the smile I flashed at British soldiers two years later sometimes appeared a trifle tight-lipped, that was because, while I wanted other Hamburgers to see how I felt, I was also afraid of what they might do when the Tommies packed their gear and went home. Only a hundred or so Jews were left in Hamburg; another 17,000 had been killed or had fled.

Many Hamburgers must have felt some remorse for the suffering Germany had inflicted: when they saw, for example, pictures of the mountain of children’s shoes at one of the death camps. That photograph made my father weep and place his large hand on my shoulder, while Mother had cried out and almost crushed Renate in her arms. But most people seemed too embittered by their own war experiences to give much thought to the suffering of others, especially of people whom they had been taught to hate. Every Hamburg family had experienced losses, most of them in the ten days of Operation Gomorrah, when somewhere between 45,000 and 70,000 civilians had died. Long after those raids, thousands of Hamburgers had to burrow beneath the rubble to sleep in cold cellars and basements. Whatever sparks of penitence smouldered beneath the ashes of the ruined city, the only expressions of regret I saw or heard in the streets, shops and schools of Hamburg were laments for the hardships of defeat.