Chemnitz contemporary witnesses: Peter Schlegel

I can remember the war - terrible and impressive.

Every now and then we had to go down to the air-raid shelter in our house at Bernsdorfer Straße 42, there were lots of people there, they talked so anxiously, some cried when the lights flickered and there was a loud crash somewhere. Sometimes even the cellar walls shook.

Once we came back upstairs from the air-raid shelter and I found a stick bomb in my cot, the thing had smashed through the roof and ceilings and had ended up as a dud in my bed of all places. I had to spend the night in my parents' bedroom for several days, then the people from the air raid service repaired the damage, the ceiling above my bed was sealed again, but for days it smelled so funny in my room and before falling asleep I would stare for minutes at the spot above me on the ceiling where the paint had been repaired.

And then came 5 March 1945, the day Allied bombers destroyed my hometown and made a deep incision in my young life and my little soul:

On a winter evening walk, we saw so-called "Christmas trees" in the sky and I knew it would soon be back to the bomb shelter. Then the all-clear was given and I was allowed to go to bed. My mum read to me about Siegfried the dragon slayer - I remember that very well. At some point I fell asleep and was then rudely torn from my sleep by my excited mother, hastily dressed and we hurried down to the cellar.attack on Chemnitz and then there was a crash that shook the walls, people were shouting, at some point we were squatting in the back of the air-raid shelter, there was whistling, howling, booming, banging and shaking everything horribly, then a terrible impact, the candle went off.Then a terrible impact, the candlelight went out for most of us due to the enormous air pressure, crying, screaming, people falling over each other, my mum pushedMy mother squeezed me through the dark cellar corridor somewhere into another part of the basement, then there was a window, my mother squeezed me through the narrow opening out onto the street, where everything was ablaze and a terrible smell hung in the air that I will never forget.

To this day, the images of the burning Bernsdorfer Straße still come back to me, for example around a campfire, sometimes even at a barbecue - even the street was on fire from the pools of phosphorus. Bombs after bombs fell from the dark sky into the burning town, one detonation followed the next. I screamed for my mother, but the window was too small for her, she shouted "Run, run, Peter, run away from the house", and I ran across the street towards the small park on Rosenplatz opposite until I came to a halt in the middle of the snow on a large white surface.

Although I wasn't even five years old that day, the images are indelibly imprinted in my memory. The reality is much crueler than most of the films I saw later. Almost all the houses around the square had been slashed open, some of them were missing whole halves, furniture was hanging shamelessly over broken floors, people were shouting, corpses were lying on the pavement. In the middle of the night it was almost as bright as day, and everywhere there was this indescribable stench of burning bodies, charring wood, extinguishing water and chemicals. And then there was this nerve-wracking noise: the roar of aeroplanes, explosions, flashes of light, crashing impacts, bursting walls, the real inferno.

I was screaming my head off and at some point men from the air-raid defence came with long ladders and shouted excitedly that I should get down from the pond. I didn't know what was going on, I just cried and shouted for my mum. The men came crawling towards me on the long ladders they had laid on the ground. Today I realise that I was standing in the middle of a frozen fire-fighting pond and the ice was thawing alarmingly.

Then the men grabbed me, I fought back with my hands and feet, but they were stronger than me. They dragged me to the nearby Dittes School, where they collected the homeless and injured. I could still draw the gymnasium today, the images are so clear in my memory. Bags of straw were lying around, damaged and intact mattresses, adults were crying, something I had never seen before, others were consoling, most just sat and were silent in horror.

At some point my mum arrived, she had also made it out of the cellar of our destroyed house after all, but she was injured, bleeding and looking through me with a blank expression. She cried a lot and I no longer understood my little world.

We spent the next day at Aunt Bertha's two streets away. Someone lent my mum a small handcart, a "Rollfix", and some cushions. I was packed onto the cart and then my mum marched for two days with the cart and me on the country road to Leipzig in the direction of grandma and grandpa. Somehow she made it, my father's parents lived in Bernbruch near Bad Lausick, where we sought and found shelter with my grandparents. The people in the village were kind to us, but my mother never recovered from the "crack", as they said, that she had suffered in the bombing raid, and on 16 June 1945 my dear, good mum died. She was buried in the small cemetery next to the village church.

And now I was an orphan, but I only knew half of it, because we were all still waiting for my father to return from the war.

He was missing in action with the German Wehrmacht and never came back ...

Contemporary witness brochures