Chemnitz contemporary witnesses: Erika Schladitz

February and March every year bring back vivid memories of what I experienced as a ten-year-old.

I lived with my parents, my two grown-up sisters (born in 1915 and 1921) and a little niece (born in December 1943, her father was declared missing in action in Stalingrad) in the Sonnenberg neighbourhood, not far from Lessingplatz.

During the day and often at night, we were forced to go to the air-raid shelter as soon as the sirens sounded. We usually kept our underclothes on when we slept and put our other clothes over them when the air raid siren sounded again. From February 1945, hardly a day went by without us having to go to the cellar in the house. Due to the precarious situation, my relatives decided to leave us two children (little Nichts and me) in the cellar corridor after the end of an alarm. The basement corridor was where we spent the night. Little Petra slept in a padded zinc tub. I had to make do with warm blankets on a summer deckchair. I still have a bad feeling about it, because although this dark, musty cellar was a reasonably safe place for us, it was anything but nice.

I also experienced the devastating attack on my hometown on 5 March in this cellar. When we returned that night, terrified, to our flat, which had been demolished for weeks (the air mine on 14 February had smashed our windows and doors), we saw the eerie lights of fire flaring up from the city centre. It was clear to the adults that something terrible had happened. Strangers soon arrived on our street with few belongings and told us in bits and pieces about surviving the inferno.

That night, my parents, like many other residents, took in a young mother and her two children. They had escaped death by fire and, apart from a bag, had only saved their lives. All three were crying terribly and I watched them helplessly. The very next day they left us and wanted to make their way to relatives near the city.

My parents and my two older adult sisters decided that my sister and the toddler and I would have to leave the town, which was no longer spared from air raids. On 8 March, my eldest sister took me, her other sister and their baby on foot with a handcart and pram through the still blazing city centre. I still have the image in my mind's eye: the floors of the Flade shop and Siegert's house were collapsing in flames. It was an eerie roar, a clatter. After every bombing raid, the streets were filled with an unpleasant odour. Burst gas pipes, broken dry toilets, carcasses created the odours, I can still feel them today.

I still remember one story: during this inferno and its effects, a front-line soldier actually found his family and his bride in our house. He was on leave for a few days because he wanted to get married as planned. The tragedy was that all the offices in the city centre, including the registry offices, were out of service. Most of them no longer existed. A solution was found in the neighbourhood with forced marches. The marriage was performed.

No trace of celebrations was possible afterwards. The bridegroom had to return to his unit in a flash. No apologies were made to the army. The saved crumble cake remained in the air-raid shelter - safe and sound. It still had to wait for the groom. All's well that ends well. The young soldier returned home one day unharmed. The entire household was happy and the cake still tasted delicious.

Necessity is the mother of invention: right after the end of the war, my mother urgently had to wash the laundry that had accumulated - after all, we were a large family. What to do with this water allotment? Every now and then a water truck was used in our neighbourhood. Many pipes were no longer viable due to the bombs. People helped each other out with buckets. My mum had a good idea. Our milkman had to help out. He lent my mum two milk cans for a few hours. They fitted on the handcart. The sisters made their way to the spring directly opposite the Zeisigwaldschänke with their empty cans. A lot of time passed before the large cans had taken up their "valuables". Mum was already waiting in the wash house and got straight to work. After days of washing, the bottleneck was resolved and everyone was happy.

I also pay tribute to the town's bakers. They had to overcome all kinds of bottlenecks. It was no longer possible to procure flour, not to mention clean drinking water for baking, and so on. Queues formed at lightning speed when a baker was able to bake bread, and we also had to try our luck with other bakers, sometimes far away. School lessons were out of the question. Some schools no longer existed at all. My girls' finishing school was now a military hospital. My parents and a few other parents (businessmen) took the reins. We had private lessons with four boys of the same age in a private flat in Würzburger Straße. We went there several times a week. During this time, our town was occupied by the Soviet army. But before that, as the Allies approached, there were still defence battles. The "hardy", so to speak, did not want to surrender the town without a fight.

In April 1945 there was artillery fire on our houses. One of them hit our house directly. The projectile crashed into the dry toilets. Only a few metres were missing and it would have hit the stairwell of the large apartment block. That would have been much worse. My father was in bed at the time of the bullet hole. He was very lucky. There was a large splinter next to him on the bedside cabinet. It could have killed my father.

One final episode. Our dairy shop had a machine for making whipped cream. Back then, we only knew about them by reputation. But necessity was the mother of invention. With cooked custard (as far as we still had any left over) and some sweetener and a bucket, we queued outside the dairy shop. He made the cream for everyone from what they had brought with them. You wouldn't believe it, the bucket he had brought with him held the "cream-like something". The whole family got their fill for a short time. Disadvantage: everyone had to burp continuously.

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