Chemnitz contemporary witnesses: Lisbeth Scheinert
"We had to climb halfway over people, everything was lying in the street. On the other side, a house was on fire, there was a firebomb inside. There were still people inside. They were screaming. Nobody could save them. You don't forget that."
Lisbeth Scheinert was 16 years old during the bombing of Chemnitz and lived in Erfenschlag. Her home was destroyed by an explosive bomb. "There was a huge bomb in the meadow opposite, an unexploded bomb the size of a poster pillar."
"As children, we often went to the farmer's, played there and pulled out the occasional turnip. There were six of us girls and we always stuck together. We often went ice skating on the frozen Zwönitz." Ice floe surfing with clothes poles was also the order of the day. "In summer, we went swimming or played in the forest. We also went skiing and sledging, we had some beautiful mountains." Her father worked as a foreman (construction site manager) and helped build the Chemnitzer Hof.
"I had a bit of a hard time at school. Because my father was a political prisoner in Sachsenburg concentration camp. He was in the KPD. That stuck with me my whole time at school. Father was taken away in 1933." He had allegedly cut down one of Hitler's oak trees, which were omnipresent at the time. "But that wasn't true. We even visited him in the concentration camp*." Her father was later released, but was quickly drafted into the Wehrmacht in 1941, even though he was already 40 years old.
Lisbeth left school in 1944. "In March 1945, I was a housekeeper for a family in Erfenschlag. On the 5th, I somehow had a premonition. I was good for nothing. The attack came in the evening. When the sirens sounded, we went to the bunker in Einsiedel as usual. It was an old beer cellar, rock on top, an open corridor. There were masses of people inside. Hundreds, we were standing very close together. You could hear the thunder, the impacts outside. Then the air got tight. And we all went downstairs so that the air could flow upstairs."
People left their shelter at midnight. The houses were on fire. "We had to climb halfway over people, everything was on the street. A house on the other side was on fire, there were still people inside. They were screaming. You don't forget that. Nobody could save them. There had been nine or eleven people in a potato store. And an explosive bomb had gone into this cellar of all places. It shredded the people and blew their pieces out onto the street. We had to pass this spot. Everyone knew everyone in the village. If you knew them and then saw the pieces lying there - you won't forget that for the rest of your life."
At home, everything had been destroyed by an explosive bomb. Across the road in the meadow was a huge bomb, an unexploded bomb the size of a poster pillar. A team from Torgau defused it. But there was still no peace. When the Allies arrived, the Red Army occupied the town as far as an old brewery villa, Lisbeth remembers. "There was no occupation from there up to Schwarzenberg. Everyone was hanging around there. Deserters, SS, prisoners. They stole everything that wasn't nailed down. Everyone wanted to live."
"Once there were Russians there," recalls Lisbeth Scheinert. "They demanded the matka (wife). The butcher shouted at us to hide. We girls crawled into a pipe. But the Russians only wanted a hammer (molotok), it was probably a translation error. They used it to hammer a wheel and moved on."
"We fetched wood in the forest. It looked horrible there. The birch burned best. The spruce had to be dried first. Whole sections of forest were cut down near Erfenschlag. We shovelled bomb craters in the fields because the farmers had to sow. Father came back from being an American prisoner of war in 1946. He had deserted in France."
Lisbeth first became a nursery school teacher, then an industrial clerk. "The five girls I played with all survived the war. The last and best friend died two years ago. That really took its toll on me."
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