The ruins of the city of Kiel after many air attacks 1940-1945
ATTACK
(from the Book “Arch of Fire.” copyright 1995)
November 1940. The air-raid sirens had sent their wails across town on many nights before. Alarm! Hostile aircraft above! We had heard the anti-aircraft guns fire again and again at the phantom planes in the sky. One of the gun positions was not far from our house, hidden in a forest known as “Birdsong.” This gun was especially loud, probably because it was closer to us than the others. I used to call it “Dun-Cluck.” That is how it sounded.
Initially we did not take all that noise very seriously. We were sure that the planes were heading somewhere else – maybe to bomb Berlin, or some other important city. Probably they were just passing by. And if they should decide to attack downtown Kiel, the nearby city, the bombs would fall far from us. After all, our house was in a small town, a suburb, about ten long kilometers from the city center of Kiel.
One evening, the shooting started some time around eight thirty. I was already in bed – the racket did not bother me very much. At about ten o’clock everything was quiet again and I fell asleep. My parents had gone to bed too. They were tired and, I am sure, they too were soon asleep.
Later on, all of us were awakened again. Once more we heard the firing of distant anti-aircraft guns. The noise was coming closer. Finally, all the anti-aircraft batteries around us joined in. It was a hellish concert. A few minutes later, we heard another sound, a humming, getting louder and louder: the sound of many propellers.
Then, suddenly, howls and shrill whistling. A horrendous noise followed. The house shook as though it was frightened. Glass was flying around my bed. For a second I was lying still, as if paralyzed, incredibly shocked and scared. Then I jumped up and ran toward my parents’ bedroom. My feet were cut by glass on the floor. “What is that light?” Bright daylight in the middle of the night! But it was a strange light, somewhere between yellow and red.
“Fire!”
My mother grabbed me. The light shone from the direction of the entrance. But our house was not burning. Not this time. The strange light entered through the glass of the outside door. We ran to look.
It was a terrifying picture. Hundreds of incendiary bombs had eerily brightened the evening fog. The misty air had turned orange-red, but around all those places where bombs were burning, the light was bright yellow. It looked like the end of the world. I could not understand what I was seeing. I was so frightened by all that strange light! I pressed myself closer to my mother and covered my eyes with my hands: “Make it go away, please!”
My father searched the house from attic to basement. He wanted to make sure that none of the bombs had hit our house. There were none. We had been lucky – this time. Only some of the windows had been shattered. My mother put antiseptic on my cut feet and bandaged them.
We quickly dressed. I had calmed down a bit. We went outside to see what had happened. Incendiary bombs were lying everywhere: on the street, in front yards, on the meadows around us. The second and third houses up the street were on fire. Another house suddenly burst into flames.
It began to rain, with a little snow mixed in. The rain helped the local fire department to put out most of the fires, but not until the entire roof and the top floor of a neighbor’s home were gone.
A number of other houses had been badly damaged by the terrifying explosive bombs that we had heard howling and whistling down from the sky. Roof shingles were gone, windows were shattered, walls had collapsed. It was incomprehensible. Night had turned into a strange red and yellow day. The familiar town, my home town, was strangely transformed into fire and, in some places, into rubble. I looked, I wanted to see, but I was afraid to look. All those colors were interesting, and, in a strange sort of way, even fascinating – but so ugly!
After a few hours, all the fires were out. It was still raining. We went back home, to a house with shattered windows. My parents covered the gaping holes with blankets and cardboard to keep out the rain and the cold.
“Why is this happening?” I wanted to know.
“That’s what war is like,” someone answered.
“Will it happen again? I don’t want it to ever happen again!”
My mother took me into her arms to comfort me. “Maybe. Maybe it will happen again. But as long as all of us are together….” She hesitated: “I love you, but it is time to go to sleep now.”
In the past, I had not been afraid to go to sleep. The noise of the anti-aircraft guns had been strange, but it had also been somehow amusing. Especially that Dun-Cluck gun. Now it was all very different. In the evenings, I no longer wanted to go to bed.
“We can’t go to sleep, the planes are going to come.” I would say. Every time I closed my eyes, I would see the yellow and red fires, the incendiary bombs. I would try very hard to keep my eyes open so I would not see that ugly, pretty light.
“Let’s go down to the basement right now!” I would plead. “Maybe the bombs can’t touch us there. I know they are coming again tonight!” My parents tried to calm me as well as they could. But somehow I knew that they themselves did not feel calm, no matter how hard they tried to comfort me. And this horrible night was only the first of many more air attacks to come. Bombs would fall more and more frequently. I was afraid for weeks, for months, and to some extent even for years. But slowly, very slowly, the fear began to abate. When one experiences horror again and again, its impact diminishes, even if it is the terror of bombs.
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