Chemnitz contemporary witnesses: Sigrid Klemm

Sigrid Klemm was four years old on 5 March 1945. She lived at Zöllnerstraße 17, a sweet girl with curls, a pout and big eyes. Looking into those eyes, you could see the questions, the incomprehension of what was going on around her: War! What is happening to my city? With my mother? Where is my father? And what are those sirens ...?

They also wailed in the evening on that day in March that was to determine the fate of Chemnitz. She has worked through some of this in poems. "I was an only child. I always regretted that. When I was two years old, I was given a doll. I called her Monika. She always had to go down to the cellar, four floors down. She was a friend."

On 5 March, her aunt lost the key to her flat and went back to the Brotunion bakery in Kalkstraße, where she worked, despite the air raid warning. "But she couldn't find the key and came to us at Zöllnerstraße 17. That saved her life, we learnt later." Because a bomb hit her house next door. "I was sitting in the cellar against the wall of the neighbouring house. The neighbours' faces were pale, introverted, afraid, the light was gloomy and the smell was musty. The impacts came closer and closer. It was so muffled, it rumbled. This
sound made me pray. I hid my hands in the folds of my skirt so that no one would see and mumbled 'Dear
God don't let us be hit by a bomb, protect us. Amen'. Then a whistle, an explosion. The wall I was sitting against suddenly crashed into the cellar. I went flying, landed on soft bodies. I got a wet blanket over my head and a man took me out. The sky was full of fire." When the memory comes, the tears come.

Much later, she wrote her poem "Survived": "The house exploded ... Outside, the sky was burning. My small body in the shelter of wet blankets carried by trembling arms through the firestorm of the roaring city. Glowing air in the middle of winter." Only after 70 years was Sigrid Klemm able to take heart and write what happened to her on the night of 5 to 6 March 1945. It had taken seven decades.

"I was paralysed at the time. It was the primal fear for my life. You know that even as a child. When you've experienced it, you realise that life is very precious and it can be over quickly. I thought it was raining blood from the sky. I didn't know what was going on. I was terrified of the rubble. The stairs of a house in what is now the Street of Nations were exposed. The furniture was still standing, the front was gone. The towel rail was still on the wall. I wondered at the time whether the people had survived."

Almost 74 years later to the day: Sigrid stands in front of her parents' house in Zöllnerstraße, touching the wall in awe. "I was sitting here behind it when the bomb hit the neighbouring house. I'm allowed to stand here, which makes me happy. I'm grateful to have survived. I also got my father back, he was in Siberia and had his left hand frozen to death. We lived near the railway station. Father went there, when the coal trains came, he collected briquettes."

The fact that her mother had to experience all this touched Sigrid Klemm deeply: She dedicated the poem "War Mothers" to her and the other brave women. She reads it aloud: "The labour drove her to the clinic on foot. With suitcases, she lost the amniotic fluid and was insulted for her late arrival. Between her pain and the wailing of the sirens, she gave birth to her child. His cry made her happy. She gazed wearily at the miracle. No man to pick her up, father was fighting at the front. No bus or taxi. But the house was still standing when she returned home with her bundle of life. Hunger was gnawing, her baby was crying, sirens dominated the nights of mother and child. They always had the essentials to hand to escape to the cellar. Mothers of war. Thank you, mum!"

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