German Voices by Frederic C. Tubach

Author:Frederic C. Tubach
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of California Press
Published: 2012-01-22T16:00:00+00:00

Figure 3. Lore Ziermann, 2006.

The weight of her many good years and the fullness of her life had made it possible for her to bear the burden of her youth, which, over the years, grew lighter as she became accustomed to keeping it buried inside. I felt it inappropriate to ask whether bad dreams and nightmares haunted her. And I sensed her gratitude that I had listened.

HANNELORE REBSTOCK

I didn’t know Hannelore Rebstock (née Mehnert in 1924) very well before I interviewed her. But I knew that she had survived the bombing of Dresden, when the ancient city on the Elbe River, with its baroque architecture and Saxon charm, was turned into rubble and more than 100,000 people perished—burned, melted, and blown apart by incendiary bombs. The destruction took place the nights of 13–14 and 14–15 February 1945, a little less than three months before the end of the war. The bombing came as a shocking surprise; as the war had begun to wind down, the inhabitants of Dresden were feeling safer and hopeful that they would be spared destruction, since the city didn’t seem to have any strategic importance.

At the time of its incineration by the British air armada and the U.S. Air Force, the population had grown rapidly, expanding by more than half a million refugees from the East who were fleeing the Russians. Ever since Kurt Vonnegut published Slaughterhouse-Five in 1969, the destruction of Dresden has been widely known. Chronicles of those two nights have been compiled, and the town’s destruction has become part of the epic sweep of violence that characterized the end of the war. I had known about those two nights ever since I sat glued to the radio in Kleinheubach, listening to live reports of the bombing of Dresden. I was initially hesitant to undertake an interview with this survivor. Her husband had told me that she had never told her story to anyone.

When we met, I introduced myself to the frail, elderly woman with a handshake across an empty table. It was immediately apparent that her horrifying encounter with violence had made her life radically different from mine. My first dinner with Bernat Rosner, my friend who had survived Auschwitz, came to mind. In both cases, it was the awareness of difference that challenged me to understand and to empathize as much as possible. I knew that only a dialogue had a chance of bridging the differences between these survivors and me. In both cases, my intention was not to add to facts and circumstances already well chronicled by historians, but to narrate the experiences of two individuals. I hoped to retrieve and thereby save the most traumatic experiences in their individual lives from the leveling effect of the violent storm that engulfed them.

It is one thing to read books and monographs about World War II and Dresden, and quite another to sit with someone willing to recall the darkest moments of her life for you. At first, we were caught by our

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