All together, considering how richly our apartment had been fitted out and how difficult it had to be to ever own anything like that again, we could not help but feel melancholic. We were especially sad about the loss of Suse's charming Damenzimmer (2), which I had fitted out genuinely during the war, with considerable effort and thanks to good connections, to compensate her, as she was forced by the total war effort in 1943 to give up her studies of art history at Marburg University and return home, to work for the Navy Communications Department located here. How would she have loved, on the occasion of the termination of her service, to invite her former classmates for tea into her admired room, and how would the girls' lively cheerfulness, not yet benumbed by the war, have found a suiting surrounding.

All this, like a dream, now belonged to the past or had shrunken to sad incombustible remnants. Annealed innerspring mattrasses from beds or armchairs, wrecks of iron stoves and bathtubs, stonen and porcelain potsherd, molten glass, annealed table cutlery stuck out of the pile of rubble, where they had got when the upper ceilings caved in under the impact of the fire. The bizarrly deformed structure of my bicycle, which had been standing in the hallway of our apartment on the second floor, hovered, hanging on to an iron beam. Suse's and Margret's bicycles, which had been placed on the ground floor, also had been destroyed, as had been our small hand cart which I only recently had acquired, and with which I had brought in a load of pears from the garden only two days ago.

Now we had to borrow a similar hand cart from our friends, the Hamann family, to transport the treasures recovered from the basement, and to provisorically deposit them in the basement of their villa, which fortunately had survived the attack, in the nearby Hohenstaufenstraße.

(p.28) The larger part of the recovered jars had remained on the pavement, when Hans Seebeck, Gerda's cousin and owner of a machine factory in the district Lehe, approached in his car, to inquire about our fate. With his assistance the jars were brought to our summer house. I sat next to him during both rides, golding a jar with in-laid eggs every time, so that they would not be damaged. We were glad to face the coming winter, having such reserves. Unfortunately, about 40 to 50 jars with strawberry jam, which Gerda just had made, had remained in the apartment and had been destroyed.

Everywhere in the streets, in these sunny morning hours the population, treated so harshly by the nightly fate, was busy, to recover any kind of property unharmed by the fire, they were standing around and exchanging their experiences. The terror which they had not yet overcome, expressed in their eyes, swollen because of the smoke, reappeared when the rumour was spread that there was renewed air-raid alarm. Nobody could say if full alert or only pre-alarm, because the sirens were dead, if still existing, because of power outage. It was said the anti aircraft artillery had shot three times, which was now the proper announcement of the danger of the danger of an air attack.

The panic which would have to unfold if the deadly frightened people, amid renewed bomb drops, had to search cover, in the open ruins, is hard to imagine. Worried eyes looked at the sky, at the clouds passing by which might have hid the pitiless enemy. Yet nothing appeared, while it is probable that one or two reconnaissance planes may have made photos, and it was probably because of them the anti aircraft artillery had shot three times. So the so-called alarm passed without any further consequences.

The midday hours passed without us feeling hungry. The party leadership, improvising quickly, had established food distribution centers, for example at Cafe Roux, were the food had been delivered by trucks from Cuxhaven and elsewhere. The navy school also, the extended edifice of which strangely had remained almost unharmed, distributed nutritious soup among the population, on dishes and in paper cups, but we made use of this offer only the next day.

In the early afternoon Heinz Rebehn dropped by, the young man whose thoughts might have focussed on Suse's uncertain fate (p.29) and at whom her confession yesterday, removed from our presence, "only now I know how much I love him" was directed. So it was him who was so close to her heart, without us knowing, a tall man, a bit too slim, with a sympathetic face, yet rather hollow cheeks, and with curly dark blond hair. He looked rather exhausted by the disaster night's experience, and reported that after the attack, which has also incinerated the villa of his landlords in the Bachstraße, he had been occupied with the extinguishing of fire and the recovery of goods, and then, late at night, he attempted to reach our home, an attempt he had to abort as the girdle of fire surrounding the area where our house was standing had been impenetrable. He had not failed to notice that the entire Borriesstrasse was up in flames, yet while he was driven by the wish to inquire about our fate, he had to take comfort in the assumption that we surely had succeeded in getting out of the inferno in time and moved to a secure place. After the night's strain, he had fallen into a deep sleep, and only just awoken.

If there had been, even beforehand, mutual inclination between him and our Suse, or even a secret understanding regarding a common future, it becomes obvious that last night's events had to affect their hopes for the future, at least regarding the material basis. On the other hand the present situation was fit to bring people closer together , to overcome conventional restraint, to take relations as they were, without talking over it. So Heinz Rebehn, who had lost his quarters in the Bachstraße, from now on belonged to us, and we arranged that, while we lived with Bürgerhoff's, he moved into our small garden house, which provided sufficient sleeping accommodation for one person.

After we had recovered all our property from the basement, we directed our attention at the part of the house in the back, which had remained standing, which included the staircase and the windows toward the backyard. This part was still standing in full height. It now became evident (p.30) that the staircase with it's oak planks, especially in its lower part, had withstood the fire, and that the kitchens to the right and left of it had survived, as their Terrazzo floors prevented a collapse of the ceiling. Thus it was possible to climb up the stairs, almost to the top, and to take, through the openings which used to be hallway doors, a glimpse at the burnt-out ruins. Yet there was no access to the kitchens, as they had to be entered via the not-any-more-existant hallways. Rebehn succeeded in reaching the entrance of our kitchen, balancing over an iron beam and holding on to the naked brick wall and to report about its condition. According to his report, the email coal oven was unharmed, the gas stove next to it only partially burnt, the closets, the tables and all other wooden furniture pieces burnt to ash. Of the closets diverse contents, nothing remained but molten pots, pans, cutlery and other kitchen utensils, and potsherd. Unfortunately the electric refrigerator had burnt out and could not be salvaged. Rebehn fixed a bowl with eggs, which had been in it, to a cord and condescended it from the balcony. The eggs had been blackened and roasted hard as rocks, but they were still edible, and the hard yolk tasted not bad.

Margret was deeply worried about "Hansi", our canary, who has been in a brass aviary hanging at the kitchen wall. The aviary still hang at its place, annealed, but there was not the slightest trace of the bird. We comforted Margret that the bird surely had escaped slipping through the lattice.

Mrs. Esch from third floor seemed to have a similar illusion. When she suddenly had left her apartment for the basement, she had left her beloved black tom-cat "Peter" behind and could not give up the idea that it would have survived the combustion. So she accompanied us and continuously, longingly called "Peter .. Peter!" up to her balcony, without hearing a mewed response. Even the following day (p.31) she continued to call, with a persistence, which, if it would not have shown how deep she was hurt by the loss of her pet, would have caused doubts in her sanity.

As many a tragedy may have occurred among the animals, locked up in the apartments, slowly consumed by the fire, this conception is topped by far by the imagination of the gruesome death by suffocation or conflagration of innocent men and women of all ages. The number of them never has been officially announced; it is estimated at around 400.

Myself, I have seen only a single corpse when I passed the Ulmenallee on my way to the almost completely destroyed Seebeck Shipyard. I saw a body lying with her back atop on the ground of a ditch dug on one side of the street to provide cover, her corpse was covered with soil. I assumed that it was the corpse of a woman which, while in the ditch, had been slain by a stick-type incendiary bomb, thus her thrashed upper body was immediately covered by soil.

Returned to our home, there was a surprise in our already searched kitchen. In addition to the toilet in the bathroom there had been another one, at the end of the balcony. This small room, which we used to call "Kabuff" because of its remote location, and used as a storage room, had not been affected by the fire, A number of hitherto little regarded items were recovered, first of all our electric vacuum cleaner, clothes lines, a polishing block, other cleaning utensils called "Puddermojen", as Gerda used to call this low-value junk. Now every item appeared to us as a valued treasure, even while we had no use for it in the moment.

It was surprising that the house's back front had been better preserved than the front, despite the fact that it was exposed to the firy blaze fed by the paint factory and the log store barn aacross Schönianstraße. How strong the heat wave must have been was evident from the street stone pavement, where especially the curbstones have disintegrated., and the metal hydrant signs which had been affixed to the wall's outside had molten.

(p.32) Only charred trunks remained of the high-towering elms which used, at my displeasure, to block the view from the street toward the east, even when I had climbed up to the 5th floor during alert, in order to reconnaitre the situation. A lush pear tree, little more than an arms length from our balcony, full of ripe fruit, was reduced an insignificant black clod; under it, the fruit was scattered in the shape of blackish oily nuggets which I had first mistaken for rotten potatoes.

Many details could be added to the day's general view, if too many details would not distract from the story as a whole.

The sun went down and we took leave of the place which had, for so many years, been our home, and to which, despite of its horrible alteration inmidst a field of ruins, our hearts were attached.

As in the case of all ruins, the walls to both sides of the main entrance had been covered by graffiti in chalk, reporting the survival and whereabouts of former inhabitants. Among these, written by my own hand : "Kloppenburg, Schiffdorfer Chaussee 124". Nowhere you could find the expression of a grudge, as the plain message : "This we ow to our Führer!", a message which should have been written on every ruin and over every bombed street. But if this bitter insight had been inerasably engraved by the blaze into the hearts of many in this fateful night so dear in sacrifices, nobody dared to express it publicly. The total war was still in full swing, any opposition was treated as undermining the will to resist, and was harshly punished. So there was nothing left for the abused population, kept obeisant with the promise of a quick turn of events by the employment of "miracle weapons", but to stick to unfortunate fatalism and to bear any stroke of fate no matter how hard it was.

In our case the sacrifice was limited merely to material losses, if we disregard the limitation of our living standard caused by the loss of our home. That we would ever receive adequate compensation was, given the immense damage in consequence of the bomb raids of last year, rather improbable. So it had been of little use that I had asked a public valuator to establish the exact value of our furniture and property, which he estimated at 60,000 Reichsmark, the house (without mortgage) not included.

That we had to write off the loss was not the most depressing. Worse, according to sound judgment we could not dare to hope to ever find property of similar value. Regarding our lodging in the Schiffdorfer Chaussee, we could not regard it as our way home, as our hearts remained attached to the Borriesstraße.

Along the way, at the entrance of the Bürgerpark we touched Cafe Roux, in the garden of which sandwiches were handed out. We took a few and consumed them in our little kitchen at Bürgerhoffs, which for the near future served as our combined dining, washing and living room, yet an El Dorado if compared with those conditions, under which the majority of the homeless fellow humans had to lodge in emergency quarters in the rural outskirts of the city.

(1) "Wesermünde" had been created and named in the Third Reich, by the merger of the hitherto administratively separate places Bremerhaven (the nucleus), Geestemünde and Lehe. (up)

(2) 'Damenzimmer' literally translates to 'Lady's room'; a room serving the purpose of being an appropriate living/presentation room for a lady. (up)