Chemnitz contemporary witnesses: Günter Schellenberger
In 1945, on 5 March of that year to be precise, a drastic experience turned our lives upside down - not only ours, but also those of our grandparents, as well as so many other people from our city of Chemnitz.
In the evening hours of that day, we, my brother and I, were put to bed a little earlier than usual for good reason, as we had been in the previous weeks, because after a short time, around 9 p.m., we had to expect the much hated and usual air raid alarm and we were torn from our sleep.
This was also the case on this day and evening. Shivering - shaky - and in a hurry, we put on the clothes we had ready, took our satchels, which had long since stopped being filled with our school books and were now filled with various items of clothing, and went four floors from our flat to the so-called air-raid shelter in our apartment block to await what was to come.
We didn't have to wait long. The sound of engines grew louder. It sounded as if the three-wheeled lorries loaded with vegetables or something similar, which were still common at the time, were driving along the street, followed by a loud thundering and crashing, which lifted us up a few centimetres as we squatted on the damp floor of the air-raid shelter.
A wooden crate, which was supposed to serve as splinter protection in front of the cellar window, tipped into the air-raid shelter with a loud bang and covered us in a huge cloud of dust.
At the behest of an elderly hairdresser (ret.) from our house, who had assessed the danger situation on the street, we left our house, not knowing to what extent it had been hit - or spared - by the bombs, and walked between burning houses that were quite - and not quite - in the middle of the street.We ran between the burning houses to the right and left of Ostplatz, halfway between the two carriageways of our street and Uferstraße towards the industrial school, which offered us shelter in its intact air-raid shelter.
On the same night and at about the same time as this air raid, an air mine had levelled our grandparents' house at Richterstrasse 16, as we later learned. It was only thanks to our grandfather's wartime experience that our grandparents survived this attack.
During the attack, the grandparents had taken shelter under a cellar vault and thus escaped the collapsing walls of the cellar ceiling. Unlike the other residents of the house, who were not so lucky.
Paradoxically and dramatically, a three-year-old boy from one of the families had playfully said goodbye to the other people in the bomb shelter by shaking hands and saying "Goodbye".
You can interpret that however you like, but those were his last words, as our grandparents later told us.
No other residents had also not survived this attack.
Contemporary witness brochures
The eternal March
Memories of a childhood during the war
The last witnesses
When the old Chemnitz died in a hail of bombs