Chemnitz contemporary witnesses: Karl-Heinz Wolf

The air-raid shelter was the inner cellar of the house and was equipped for around 30-40 residents of all ages. It was equipped with blankets, mattresses and pillows lying on the floor. When the sirens sounded, all the residents of the house poured into the cellar, knelt down on the equipped floor and put their heads together.

The radio reported that Anglo-American bomber units were flying into Saxony from the north-west and were heading for our city of Chemnitz via Leipzig.

Then we heard the noise of engines getting louder and louder. The German defences were equipped with guns and fired their first shells, which soon fell silent. The radio kept going and gave reports on the situation. I knelt with my mother, like all the other residents in the air-raid shelter. The noise of the bombers got louder and louder and now the explosions started in our neighbourhood.

When the bombs reached our neighbourhood, the houses were destroyed by high explosives and incendiary bombs. In the corner of our street diagonally opposite, an aerial mine levelled three or four houses in one fell swoop. Dead and buried people everywhere. We heard buried and injured people crying for help everywhere.

My mother, 37 years old at the time, was the only sprightly person in our cellar because of her age. She went out into the street and saw the buried and dead people. In the house opposite, a mother and three children had been buried and were still alive. My mum tried to free these people from the rubble. Walls and beams broke and the trapped women and children called for help and nobody knew what to do next.

We took everything we could carry and went to what was then Schlageterplatz (then Karl-Marx-Platz, now Platz der Opfer des Faschismus) on Zschopauer Straße and tried to find some peace on the wet and snow-covered grass.

The city was burning everywhere and the sky was fiery red. Dead and injured people were lying and sitting everywhere. It was terrible.

A woman from our house suggested that we go to Ebersdorf to visit her relatives. And so we walked to Ebersdorf in the rain, ice and snow with our few belongings. There we were able to get some food in a church and relax a little from what had happened.

We then walked this route every day - in wind and weather, because we had nothing left. When we were once again at the ruins of our flat, I saw parts of my toy railway lying there, it too had been burnt. People kept poking around in the rubble in the hope of finding something useful.

During this time, we found a place to sleep with my mother's sister in Heinersdorf. My mother and I walked to the ruins of our bombed-out flat almost every day. It was mid-March 1945, beautiful spring weather. That day, a soldier in uniform came from Logenstraße (Kurt-Günther Straße). It was my father. He had travelled from Russia and had heard that Chemnitz had been bombed. He was looking for us. It was so nice that my father was there. My mother wanted to stop him from leaving, but he went back anyway because he had already seen enough soldiers hanging from trees. In 1947, I went to school with my school friend in Borna. My mother and I now lived on Sandstraße. On the way to school, we came across a slight soldier in a ragged uniform. He was walking very badly due to an injury. When I came home from school at lunchtime, the soldier with the ragged uniform was sitting at our house. That was my father, he had come home from captivity.

I think back a lot to that time, to what we had lost. And I always think back to 5 March 1945, the day that changed my life so much. I think about the time of reconstruction and the abundance we live in today. I believe it is important that we must not forget what we experienced and that we must pass it on to our descendants.

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