Chemnitz contemporary witnesses: Klaus Müller
As I was only 3 years and 8 months old at the time of the bombing, my memories are certainly a mixture of what I experienced and what I reported afterwards. In March 1945, seven of us lived at Lutherstraße 51 in Bernsdorf, in a two-room ground floor flat. (...)
During the bombing raid on 5 March 1945, we found refuge in a large vaulted cellar in Lutherstraße 49, in my memory together with many residents of the surrounding houses. I have three very clear memories of those hours in the cellar. Firstly, that as the youngest child I was allowed to sit on my mum's lap. Secondly, that when an incendiary bomb hit house number 47, everything shook and the plaster fell from the ceiling. And the third and most poignant memory I have is of a woman standing next to my mother and putting on a gas mask, which seemed incredibly threatening to me and the sight of which I could never forget. We were unharmed that night. Our father, who wasn't with us, was too. Only the window panes in our flat were broken. As a result of that dramatic night, I was so traumatised that I didn't speak for how long I'm not sure. At some point I found my voice again, but only with a stutter, which didn't make schooling easy in the deprived post-war period. In the end, the speech impediment only disappeared when I was a teenager.
At the end of the war, we spent some time in the large garden area on Reichenhainer Straße to escape the fighting in the city. I still remember the walk with our most important possessions on a pram and the police or military on horseback coming by one day to tell us that the war was finally over.
My youngest grandchild Lina is four years old these days, so she is similar in age to me at the end of the war. Her biggest worries are the typical worries of a kindergarten child of our time and revolve around toys, the sandman, bedtime stories and birthday wishes. May we always remind ourselves and future generations that these are the worries a 4-year-old child should have and not fear of death, the death of parents and siblings, hunger or similar. We have 75 years of peace in Europe and now 70 and 30 years of democracy in our republic and this is not a matter of course and must always be worked for and fought for anew. Everyone should have realised this, especially in recent years. The careless handling of democracy and in some cases the questioning of it altogether worries me greatly when I think of all my grandchildren.
At some point, there will no longer be any contemporary witnesses who can warn us with their own experiences!
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