Mischka's War

by Mischka's War- A Story of Survival from War-Torn Europe to New York (epub)

  With the finality of that interruption the party disbanded, and everybody started out for their homes. Having invited the Karl May girl, I felt responsible for her safe return home, which was diagonally across town, in the town section der Weisser Hirsch.

  Misha must have told me why he called her the ‘Karl May girl’, but I have forgotten. Most likely she was an admirer of the German writer of that name whose now forgotten novels, set in the American West, were immensely popular with German adolescents of Misha’s generation.

  So we start out, pass the Technische Hochschule [technical university], and reach the quite wide street leading to the Hauptbahnhof [main railway station]. But it looks ominous: flames emerging from windows on both sides of the street, the region around the Hauptbahnhof at the end of this street unclear. I decide to get an overview before continuing; behind the TH there are fields on the side of a hill; at the summit there used to be anti-aircraft guns, but just very recently departed. Indeed a clear overview: throughout the town here and there fires breaking through roofs; no direction seems clear. While contemplating the situation airplane noise becomes noticeable, and indeed as if the devil pokes: here and there in town immense fires erupt, sparks, flames, and everything: the explosives air raid commences. The sight is mesmerizing; I stand there hypnotized, a 20th century Nero. Soon incendiary bombs begin falling around us, then also explosive. Not far away one hits; I drag the girl along and drop into the bomb crater; that will provide protection against everything except for a direct hit. The girl starts to cry: I feel only immense tension, expectation, not fear. One hears the whistling of the falling incendiaries, ending with a thud when they hit ground, and the howling of falling bombs which end in an explosion. Is that whistling going to hit? How far—if at all—will the bomb fall?

  The party was in Mischka’s lodgings at Planettastrasse on the hill across the river from the central city. (The street, now Elisabethstrasse, was renamed in Nazi times for Otto Planetta, a Nazi hero for his murder of Austrian Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss in Vienna in 1934.) So if Mischka hadn’t taken the Karl May girl home, he would have escaped direct danger. In the diary, the girl is virtually absent from the account, mentioned only occasionally as ‘A.’ It is as if Mischka were alone, with absolute responsibility for making the right decisions. On 13 April 1945, his first description of the fire, as seen from the heights before the bombing was renewed, is awed:

  I decided to go to the tower on the hill in order to get an overview of the strategic position. But from there the sight that presented itself was even more grisly and yet more splendid: fire everywhere. Accompanied, too—in spite of the distance of c. 0.8–1 km—by the appropriate music: the cracking of burning rafters, the roar of the flames, and now and then crashes as roofs fell in. Added to that there was also a wind, which, fanned by the fire, blew into it and only increased its fury. And to round it all off, a frightened dog, having probably been scared from the house by the onslaught, arrived on the scene and began howling in long, drawn-out tones.

  ‘The picture was really gruesome,’ he summed up, ‘even gruesomely beautiful, but not horrifying’—or not yet. When the bombing started again,

  we lay down, there and then, on the spot. And then came the horror. Even if not yet in the highest degree and not in direct effect but just the very idea of it. Highly explosive fire- and fuel-bombs were being thrown higgledy-piggeldy over the areas that were not yet alight, and on those that were already burning. There was a confusion of firebombs and explosive bombs being dropped, on to places that were not yet on fire or already burning. More fire-bombs had been thrown during the first attack; now the fires were being thrown together by the bombs, as if they were being stirred by giant pokers. And down there, within striking distance, the Technische Hochschule was burning; at the Elektrotechnische Institut the flames were already leaping out of the windows of the top storey. And the whole time the bombs were whistling and the fire-bomb canisters wailing; they shatter in the air with a loud bang and dissolve into an umbrella of individual rods of falling fire.

  Here Mischka’s account diverges briefly into an analysis of his own responses—‘Interesting, the reaction of the nervous system: there was a sense of high tension, but surprisingly, no trace of anxiety or fear’—before continuing with the external scene:

  And all the time, more new combinations kept coming, and it whooshed and howled uninterruptedly, at first directly above us, and then further afield; actually, individual explosions could no longer be differentiated. And when you looked toward the city, mushrooms of smoke and flames just kept rising from the fire, and then after a while there was a more forceful explosion. These were the heavier chunks, like the ones that had already come down in our neighbourhood. One can’t really call them ‘mushrooms’, it looks more like a tree, with the undulation …

  At this point, the diary breaks off abruptly and resumes some days later, on 18 April 1945. (He was in Hamburg by this time, sitting in the Café Condi, which means that he must have been coming down with diphtheria, although his prose gives no sign of this.)

  One can’t really call them ‘mushrooms’. It looked more like a medieval watchtower, made up of a slowly growing and undulating melee of smoke and flames—after a while most of it has risen up into a sea of smoke and fire. And still it went on, non-stop. It seemed as though the force had hardly been alleviated, or at least had scarcely relocated to more distant parts of the city, when once again new combinations began to whir and the bombs began to hiss. The hissing was the most terrible, because of the uncertainty. And over all of this there was still a festive illumination, the luminescent parachutes; they hung like grapes in the air and came down very slowly. It was as bright as day from the fire and the ‘Christmas trees’. But how the meaning of those words has changed! Almost symbolic. And it kept on hissing. Now it was already burning over in Kaitz [a suburb of Dresden to the south]. Just where we were, it was not burning because it was a field. More fire bombs now, fewer explosive fuel-bombs, because they were unloading those in areas that were already alight. And then suddenly it became quieter. It was still whistling at the other end of the city, but then it stopped there too. Then a couple of individual planes buzzed away over us, and everything went completely silent. Overhead, that is. Underneath, the fires roared and crackled; now and again houses tumbled down, sometimes a short time-fuse would explode, but otherwise all was calm. We stood up slowly, somewhat mistrustful of these unusual circumstances. The lower floor of the Elektronische Institut was burning now. Behind that, other buildings of the Technische Hochschule were also alight, and the annex to the High Voltage hall at the front. Only Chemistry remained untouched.

  The 1996 account continues the story:

  That whole thing took about an hour. It suddenly ended. I got out of the crater; there was the town; now an uninterrupted sea of flames. No way to get through. Also it began to rain. So I took the girl to the abandoned battery, found an open bunker, went in and lay down on the floor. Soon some survivors of the vicinity started to drift in, bewildered, and the bunker filled up, but not to overcrowding.

  The diary has a lot more to say, in a tone of outrage, about the behaviour of those survivors:

  Now the first bomb victims appeared. And what did they talk about? About their things. There was a daughter with her mother. They had been protected and had made their way out into the open through a neighbour’s cellar and a shop. They were talking: ‘Oh, my gloves! I’ve always had them with me before!’ and so on. ‘Mummy, I don’t have my diamond ring with me!’ (Mother): ‘Just don’t tell your father! I’ll give you one of mine. I’ve still got enough.’ And then on and on about the stockings and the rest. In the midst of this, but quite rarely: ‘I wonder where Daddy is? He was at work of course. How I worry about him!!’ and then back to stockings. Since then for weeks on end all I heard in Dresden was about stockings, underwear, dresses, hats and so on; I can’t remember any other topics in connection with the raid. At most, someone would explain
that he had been protected. Otherwise they all tried to outdo each other in listing their losses, but only their losses of underwear! From which one has to conclude that those who had lived through worse things were either no longer living or silent. Horror had closed their mouths.

  The next part, the morning after the raid, is the worst in both tellings. The musing recalls the scene that greeted them:

  Then the morning lights came on and I surveyed the situation. The flames had disappeared, the fuel had been consumed. So I thought the best way would be to go through town; that would be much shorter than going around it. We start. The beginning was easy. Up to the Hauptbahnhof, on that wide street, we could simply walk. Some houses were semi-collapsed, with debris covering the sidewalk, and to some extent the street, but one could pass by. After the Hauptbahnhof, in the old part of town, the streets are narrower, and rubble begins now and then to cover the whole street. As the street continues to narrow, the rubble gets deeper, and one has to climb over it. Progress gets excruciatingly slow. If there should be now another raid— I dismiss that thought, suppress that thought is more correct. Climbing gets slower and slower—the pile of bricks is unstable; then there is visible the hair, the back of a human head, then again a leg sticks out, then again the bricks slide under the weight of a step, progress is almost imperceptible, no air raid, some further debris of the non-brick type, still no air raid—about here I notice that my receiver of impressions makes a click: it switches to semi-nightwalking [sleep-walking], no impressions, just climb, girl is crying, just drag her along, climb, the street could be traversed in 4 or 5 minutes, it must soon end, but the absence of buildings precludes knowledge of where we are, and indeed, the height of the brick mountain seems to diminish, some patches of pavement appear, the patches become larger and tend to merge, and then we see that we are out of the narrow street, even some buildings are still standing. Even a stretch of sidewalk is clear of bricks. Instead, there is a row of corpses, evidently extracted from the basement of the still standing building, uninjured, simply dead. Must have suffocated, as I now know, but then I simply saw that row, with no reaction. From then on streets are wide, no problem walking, damage to buildings decreases—we have left the old town, the Altstadt. By now all buildings are standing, seemingly undamaged, and then there is this 5 year old boy, next to the fence, lying face down, fresh as if asleep.

  The diary story continues on 20 April with their renewed attempt to break through the next morning:

  The streets were already full. People were moving about so strangely: for the most part they wandered slowly back and forth, seeming without any plan or goal, as if in a daze, almost like sleepwalkers. Only on the arterial roads was there a more uniform direction emerging: out of here! So we tried to get through. Nobody around had any information about how to get through. Everyone told us: ‘No, you can’t get through here! Try further along, over there’ or ‘Try back there!’ Nobody knew what things were like in the city. We tried to get through at roughly the same distance as the Technische Hochschule sports ground from Zelleschet Way. But the smoke and the dust were so thick there that we couldn’t get through. So we went to the next cross street and tried there, but that was just as bad … That’s where I saw the first casualties, that is, the ones that could still walk, but whose eyes had suffered from the smoke and fire. First-aid men were looking after them; it was actually the site of a burned field hospital. This sight didn’t encourage me in the least. But the futile search for a way through combined with the events of the previous night were gradually beginning to eat away at the nervous system; we had to start holding hands in order not to turn around, although so far the places we were in had only been fire-bombed. Finally we came to a wider street, where the No. 5 and 15 trams use to go up to Monerif [?]. This was where the fuel-bombed area began; clearly this made a much stronger impression.

  The Karl May girl (‘A.’) makes a few rare, brief appearances in the diary story at this point:

  A. was already losing her courage and wanted to turn back. I wasn’t happy about that; wanted to go further; I wanted at least to get through the Grosse Garten and inspect the district there. We kept going. But now the brute, knockout force of these impressions was building powerfully in its intensity. For here the bombs had fallen thicker and thicker. Whereas at first there had been only houses that were partly destroyed, here at the railway terminal and in Grosse Garten Street, every house had got a direct hit and had been burned out; most of them were still burning. And on top of that the smell of smoke and fire. The latter in particular has a splendid effect on the nerves. Subconsciously, the strongest impression of all was made by the people who were presumably still under the rubble. And then slowly one became conscious of the fact that a further attack was possible, and of our absolute helplessness against it if that happened. But I still pressed on, as I hoped at least there would be some breathable air in the Grosse Garten, and then there would not be far to go. But the Garten looked different. This was the zone where the bombs had rained down at their thickest. Instead of the path I had unconsciously anticipated, there lay obstacles in the form of a tangled undergrowth of broken branches and trees, as well as craters. And now there came something that put paid to my moral bravado: the first corpses of the day. I had seen corpses before, after the battle in Riga in 1941, but these looked different. And coming on top of everything else, it was enough to make my courage collapse. Fear caught hold of me. Simple fear, fear of what had now become immediate horror, together with thoughts of a possible new attack. Out! Just get out of here! A. hadn’t seen the dead bodies, but she fully agreed. I had lost all hope that the inhabitants of any place around had remained alive.

  The chronology goes a bit haywire at this point, as Mischka digresses into fears about specific friends, including his new girlfriend Nanni, who later turned out to have survived.

  This whole diary entry is unparagraphed in the original, written in small handwriting to cram in more, with the tension rising until it is almost coming out as a scream:

  We started out again. And now came the horror, compared with which the previous morning was child’s play. Through that, however, I had already been pre-schooled, and I knew that one only needed to notice, that is see, enough of something not to stumble over it … The main railway station. A row of charred bodies. I knew that my mother had actually had the intention to come to Dresden, and there was the possibility that she had come in just at the decisive moment; I made myself look over these rows, but didn’t see the fur coat in question. Then we came to Prager Street, that is, the place where she had been earlier. Now it was just a heap of rubble.

  Again, the diary account breaks off abruptly, to be continued without a break in the narrative on 22 March 1945:

  You couldn’t walk through it, you had to climb over stones and charred beams. Here and there, a sometimes charred, sometimes horribly lifelike body part was peeping out from the rubble. And you couldn’t run away, you had to go forwards quite slowly. The only way not to pass out is, quite consciously, to let nothing affect you, not to think, just to press on, to turn all your thoughts towards where you are stepping, where you are going to climb over, to watch that you don’t tread on a wobbly stone and get your foot stuck. The stones are still hot, and the steam is still rising everywhere. Otherwise, all around is silent, deathly silent; now and then, out of the stillness comes a sudden explosion somewhere, or a wall caves in; the only noise that accompanies you is the sound of your own footsteps, and even that is dead, losing itself without echo in the rubble. Keep going. Don’t think about anything, don’t see anything. Don’t think about how it had looked just the evening before, how the art dealer had been here, the street corner or the cinema there … Keep going.

  Finally, finally, the Ring Road appears. It is so wide that a path free of rubble remains down the centre. Here soldiers are carrying the bodies that are lying around and putting them all together in one place. No, not into one place, but on to the street that runs from Georg
Square to the Elbe, where the No. 1 and No. 16 [trams] used to go to the main railway station. There is already a continuous row of bodies down to the bridge. A few people are going slowly along the row, looking at each one. There are not many. And there is the bridge. Hopefully at least the air will be more breathable. No, not really. There is only a gentle breeze blowing, and it brings with it dust and the smell of fire … We’re walking along the Elbe in the direction of Waldschloesschen. Gradually, gradually, it is getting better. There are still dead bodies lying all around, and the bank is strewn with bomb craters, but the air is becoming cleaner. Now the craters are becoming rarer, and at Waldschloesschen everything is almost unscathed; not even all the windows of the houses are broken.

  The 1996 version includes (as the diary does not) their arrival at the home of the Karl May girl:

  By the time we reach the house of the Karl May girl it is afternoon; the house is essentially undamaged; we get fed and I fall asleep on a freshly made clean bed.

  Next morning we had breakfast, the somewhat shellshocked family—mother and daughter, father [being], as essentially all males [were], absent, and myself. At a point where daughter is absent, the mother mentions that she has confidence in me and would trust me with her daughter. I don’t know what to say, and accept her confidence. The time comes for me to leave; the mother asks whether I need something; I ask to be lent a suitcase, which is granted. I leave.

  As Mischka told me this story orally, it was like a fairytale in which the hero is rewarded for his valiant deeds by being offered the hand of a beautiful princess but must continue on his quest—except that he didn’t want her hand, had escorted her out of a sense of duty, and seems to have found her more irritating than a proper object of chivalry should be.