“I, the living, must bury my father, the dead.”

Dear grandchildren,

This story gets me every time.

I’ll add some of my own words, but my father’s words are plenty powerful enough. I’ll add some photos, but the pictures in your mind as you read this will likely be plenty powerful enough.

The days my father describes here shaped his life and formed the man he was to become like no other experience he’d had, or was yet to have.

As you read this, remember that Thomas was not yet even sixteen-and-a half years-old.

Here are his words:

Horst Reiszmann and I had been on our way for a good eighteen hours now, making our way across Saxony, not by the normal railroad connection through Dresden, but by small spur lines, and by hitchhiking, more than 80 kilometers in all. Herr Uckel, kind and considerate Boss Uckel, had sent us on our way to look after our families and homes in Chemnitz. By late evening the cabbage truck that picked us up had made it to the outskirts of town, to a point where the road was made impassable by a gaping bomb crater. We were on our own now, and soon parted company, each heading in the direction of his own home.

I was tired and my feet were sore, but I could not stop. Home was so close now and I knew I’d get there in the dark.

I was still three miles from home when I saw the first completely destroyed house. Its brick walls were intact, but the inside was burned out. It had likely not been hit by explosives, but had been set on fire by flying cinders. The closer I got to town, the more ruins I encountered -- first singly, then in clusters, until I was surrounded by entire blocks of destroyed homes.

There was no moon, no stars, and of course no electric light at all. A flashlight once in a while, a match, a candle, visible through a crack in a basement door. There were hardly any people. Where was everyone? Hidden? Dead? Fled? To where?

The photos in this post (except for the one of the Heumann’s destroyed house) are from this book which was gifted to my father by Tilo Richter, author and specialist on Chemnitz history.

In the areas where apartment houses were lining both sides of the street, I walked very gingerly, one step at a time, in the middle of the street and as far away as possible from the sidewalks which were littered with debris, sometimes piled high with the remains of a collapsed wall. I had to watch for the bomb craters in the middle of the street, even the ones that had already been filled in again with the rubble from the houses around them.

I was now approaching familiar territory, my own neighborhood where the houses were further apart, surrounded by once well-tended gardens. Here there was no rubble in the streets, as the houses stood too far back. Some were still standing unscathed and some looked completely intact from one side, but looking back against the night sky, the other side presented the ragged silhouette of a house completely torn apart. Some homes had completely disappeared, victims of direct hits by high-explosive bombs, erased to nothingness, an entire brick house collapsed neatly upon itself and into its basement, almost level with the ground around it. ‘Some bodies in these houses will never be found,’ I thought, and it suddenly occurred to me that I was surrounded on all sides not only by ruins, but by graves.

My old school was still standing. There was some activity around it, hurried shadows moving back and forth, two men carrying a stretcher through the front portal, and I realized that my school had become a makeshift hospital. If the school was still standing, there was hope — it’s only an eight-minute walk home now. I wanted to go fast, my mind racing, but the fear of what I might find put lead weights on my feet. From here, I knew every step. There, just around the corner, would be the great white house with the fox terrier I’d made friends with. Each day on my way home from school, I’d reach through the iron gate to pet him. The gate had long ago been confiscated to be melted into tanks or battleships, or whatever. That house was gone. Then the Winkler’s house, our next-door neighbors - burned out, just empty walls.

I could almost see our house now.

Oh God, please!

Oh God, no. NO!

I felt myself stumbling and stopped myself against a rock wall. As I fell, the wooden cigarette case in my chest pocket cracked and splintered. Maybe only the top floor was gone, I thought. Maybe. But no, there was no bedroom window, no dressing room balcony. Where the children’s room had been, I could see only sky. There was only an empty, hollow, gaping space. My home now consisted of two walls, two façades, a shapeless mass in the night.

I went around the corner to the front entrance. The bricks from this wall had spilled all the way to the street, but the two rock gate posts were still standing. I lit a match, looking for some kind of note. There was a makeshift sign leaning against the rubble by what had been the front porch, with my uncle’s address in Adelsberg scribbled in handwriting that I did not recognize. But the note said nothing, nothing at all, about my father.

Adelsberg is clear across town, far on the other side. To get there, I’d have to go through downtown. I set off, walking down our street, Reichsstrasse, where every single house had been destroyed. Some of the chestnut trees were still standing, while others had only a few branches left or were decapitated altogether. I made my way past the public air raid shelter, its heavy steel door hanging precariously by one hinge. I later learned that it had been hit by a large bomb, a direct hit, and that everyone who had taken cover there had died.

Everyone. Two hundred people, in one insane moment.

Liesbeth, our beloved household helper, was one of them. At every alert, she had grabbed her small cardboard suitcase, and her bony frame had hobbled down the street to the safety of the underground bunker. This time, there was no safety. 

(Look at the date. 1948, and the city was still in ruins.)

In years past, the shelter had been a storage cellar for a beer brewery. It was located under the garden belonging to my friend Fritz. He and I had often ventured down into it through a vertical air shaft and had pretended we were exploring strange caves in strange lands. Now its armor was crumpled, its dark passageways torn open and collapsed. Now it was a cave more eerie than the fantasies in an adventurous boy’s mind.

The stench became stronger. It was the acrid smell of smoldering wood mixed with drizzle and blood, of explosives and excrement, and terror. The closer I came to the center of town, the more noxious it became, and I had to place my handkerchief in front of my mouth and nose.

It was five days since the fateful night, and small fires were still flickering in the dark. A red glow in a basement here, a burning beam protruding from a wall there, suddenly spewing small yellow flames and red sparks as though it were angry that it, and it alone, had been left behind.

(Again, look at the date! Imagine the immediacy of what Thomas describes.)

An old man stood in a doorway leading to the basement of a house that was burned out to the first floor. The tenement building was old and ugly, in the part of town where the factory workers lived, and where I was never allowed to play.

“How is it further south?” I asked him. “As bad as here?”

“Worse. Poststrasse is all gone, not one stone left on the other. No way can you get through there at night.”

“But I have to get to Adelsberg.”

“Not now you don’t. Come on inside and stay here until it gets light, then you can go.”

Inside, I collapsed into a torn overstuffed chair, yawned, and immediately fell asleep.

After just an hour of near-unconsciousness, I awoke. I tried to find a position between the protruding springs and the worn-through padding of the wooden armrest so I’d have a chance of not waking up hopelessly distorted and aching.

But that was not what kept me awake. Images of the long day persisted in an endless loop in my mind, mixed and dreamlike, distorted with fears of the future and with thoughts I did not dare think. What if father was hurt? Would I be allowed to take care of him? I knew it was possible, even likely, from what I had been able to see of the ruin of the house… but I dismissed the thought before it could take hold. It was just not possible.

Father would be alright, and the war would soon be over.

And yet, the note at the house had not been in my father’s handwriting.

I stared into the darkness. Every time I closed my eyes there was a burning pain that shot up like a breaking wave and subsided. I wished I could cry to wash away the smoke. But I could not cry. I could barely think, or feel any emotion at all. I only saw pictures come and go, the truck full of cabbage heads that gave us a ride, the crazy burning beam sticking out of the wall, the pudgy drawn face of Mr. Uckel in the door frame, the white chest at the foot of my bed at home.

I opened my eyes, wide and wild, but I did not move. I must have been dozing off, dreaming. There was no white chest, no bed, no ceiling with the big brown blotches that had been the result of the mishap in our chemistry lab in the attic above. I almost smiled into the dark at the irony -- the day when a water hose had created a veritable flood in the attic, a flood that ruined the ceilings in the floor below. What of it now?

It was no use. As soon as I could see faint light through the cracks in the boards that had been nailed over the empty window frame, I put boots on my swollen feet, left a couple of cigarettes on the table, and stole outside.

In the faint daylight, the scene was indeed worse than I had expected. Practically every house was either burned out to a shell with gaping window holes or ripped apart into a jagged shape of fire-blackened walls. The streets were piled high with broken bricks, sections of walls, twisted pieces of pipes, and occasionally fragments of furniture.

In some places, the debris was piled so high that no pavement was visible. In other areas, two or three bombs must have hit in the same spot and had laid the guts of the street open. It looked like a nightmarish satire of the cross section of a city street in a grade school textbook -- the brick tunnel of the sewer far down on the bottom, above it the water and gas lines, then the telephone cables, and on top, the streetcar tracks embedded in the cobblestone pavement.

Even eerier were some of the houses that had escaped the fire, or where only one wall had fallen away, exposing three or four stories of habitats. Some looked almost intact with furniture in place, pictures on the walls, like a giant doll house. I felt intrusive looking at them, the bed, the bathtubs, people’s personal lives out in the open. The paraphernalia of the petite bourgeoisie -- the lovingly embroidered bedspread, meticulously sewn curtains of cheap flowery material, the good Sunday china still in the living room cabinet, and the family portrait on the wall, the picture of the oldest son in uniform and, of course, the picture of Hitler.

As the sun came up, the downtown area was behind me, and I had reached the hills outside of town. The sun, rising in a dirty sky beyond the city, was huge and dark red, but it was no longer the red of a spring sunrise with pink and salmon pastel colors. It was the sick blackened red of crusted blood, a color that described the smell of decaying flesh and smoldering cloth.

Adelsberg was completely untouched. By the time I reached Försterstraße, where my uncle’s house was, I was practically running. The anticipation was becoming unbearable now. My heart was pounding, my thoughts were racing. Out of breath, I reached the front door and knocked.

A strange woman answered the door.

“I’m . . . I’m Thomas,” I said, “Thomas Heumann. My uncle . . . you know, Herr Buddecke is my uncle. Where are they?”

“Oh, well, yes. They all went to Wernsdorf, I think. We just were assigned to this house. We were bombed out in town, lost everything, but we’re all alive, thank God.”

“But the Buddeckes? Are they all OK? Who went with them?”

“Well, let me see now. There was their little daughter, and the other little girl whose father was killed, poor thing . . .”

“Who’s the other girl? What’s her name?”

“I don’t know. She’s maybe twelve, blond pigtails, sweet girl, I think they said she is a niece…”

“That’s my sister.”

There was no more to be said.

The woman read immediately in my face what news she had just given me. She invited me inside. It was not an emotional moment for me. All night, without being really conscious of it, I had been preparing myself for this minute. And now it was true.

Now the only question that mattered was: what next?

There were no tears, no anger, no frustration, not even fear. In their place, at that moment, was only a survival instinct -- the knowledge that I, being alive and on my own, must now act. There was no immediate sense of loss, only the thought that I, the living, must bury my father, the dead.

I went next door to the Werners, Gisela’s family. They offered me their condolences and treated me with the odd, distant, and somewhat embarrassed awe that people have toward someone who has just seen death up-close. Gisela said nothing at all. Her grandmother was sobbing quietly, and only Frau Werner, a strong and outspoken woman with an exquisite sense for the practicalities of life, addressed the first order of business head-on.

“Your father’s body is still in the basement of your house. I’ve heard that everyone in the house was trying to crawl out because the basement was becoming a real death trap, the house above them was burning so badly. Your father was the last one to leave, and just then a bomb hit and collapsed half of the basement. Your father must have been killed by the blast. He never made it out into the open with the others.”

Frau Werner took me to the pastor of the small church in Adelsberg. Yes, certainly, he could perform the funeral service, and he would assign a plot in the graveyard, but there was nobody, absolutely nobody, to dig the grave.

“We have picks and shovels, though…”

It took me all afternoon and most of the next morning to dig my father’s grave.

Meanwhile, an old carpenter who knew both the Buddeckes and the Werners could be persuaded with a pack of cigarettes to make a coffin out of plain boards that were not good enough for construction.

(“Chemnitz warns Never Again a March 5, 1945.”)