Chemnitz contemporary witnesses: Gerhard Willner

5 March 1945 - this day, as well as the weeks and months immediately before and after, shaped my uncompromising desire for peace for the rest of my life.

I was 7 years old at the time and lived with my brother and our mother on the Sonnenberg in a house on the corner of Jakobstraße and Martinstraße. Our father had already been killed on the Eastern Front in 1942 - senselessly. My first year at school had already been cancelled because the Dürerschule (boys' school) in Reineckerstraße, where I was learning the alphabet with a senior teacher in SA uniform, had been hit by an explosive bomb during an attack in February.

In the weeks leading up to 5 March, the air raid siren sounded almost every day. We were torn from our sleep, especially at night, and had to go down to the cellar. As the time between the pre-alarm and the air raid siren became shorter and shorter, we slept half-dressed in our beds in order to get to the so-called air raid shelter as quickly as possible. There was usually silence when we heard the humming of approaching aeroplanes or received air situation reports via the so-called wire radio. During a daytime raid in February, we lay on the cellar floor full of fear and listened to the muffled boom-boom sound of the bombs coming closer and closer. Finally, an overly loud bang shook our cellar and our mother thought our house had been hit. After the all-clear, we climbed upstairs with an oppressive feeling and saw the corner house opposite, which had been destroyed up to the first floor. All the windows in our flat were broken, there was rubble in the room and bricks on the beds.

The night of horror began for us at around 9.45 pm on 5 March. We hurried back into the cellar with our coats, hats, rucksacks and blankets. The residents sat apathetically on benches, as far away as possible from the cellar doors and windows, and listened to the bombs. We children were terrified. At some point we got the message: Our roof is on fire, we have to get out! The first thing I saw when I left the house were bright flames shooting out of the windows of the flat of a woman who made rag dolls for children and always displayed them in the window. A shock for me as a child!

We fled in the direction of Hainbrücke, but were turned back by air-raid wardens at Ballhaus Zweiniger because a house there was on fire up to the ground floor and the front threatened to collapse onto the street. The further escape route was via Martinstraße towards Oststraße (today Augustusburger Str.). This was hell. The entire left-hand side of the building was in flames, we stumbled over rubble and burning beams, flying sparks hit us in the face. We found temporary shelter in a cellar on Holbeinstraße.

Later, a lorry was provided to take us children and our mothers out of the city. It was an odyssey, during which we witnessed the inferno of the burning city on the open lorry bed. The driver was forced to turn round again and again because the bomb craters or rubble made it impossible to continue on the arterial roads. When dawn broke the next morning, we travelled on foot with many other refugees on the Zschopauer Straße. In Kleinolbersdorf we found a temporary place to stay with friends.

We had lost everything, but we were alive!

What followed were more days in the cellar in Chemnitz because of the shelling at the end of the war, living in a small substitute flat in primitive conditions, cold and hungry. But we lived in peace - at last!