The Devil's Tinderbox by Alexander McKee

Author:Alexander McKee [Alexander McKee]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780285640962
Publisher: Souvenir Press
Published: 2012-12-17T05:00:00+00:00

Margret Freyer, an unusually beautiful girl of twenty-four, who had already survived a full day’s interrogation by the Gestapo and escaped the concentration camp by carefully considering her answers, was also to survive two cellars in Dresden on the night of 13/14 February. Both were in the Altstadt, where the fire-storm was to develop. She lived at Ferdinandstrasse 13 and took shelter in the cellar there during the first wave of attack, soon to be joined by forty-three other women. The damaged building was abandoned by its occupants at the first lull, and not liking the eerie sensation of being the only person in a five-storey building, Margret set off with her two packed suitcases for the house of a friend, Cenci, who lived a few streets away at Struvestrasse 13. Within an hour or so of the beginning of the lull it became too dangerous to go back again to her own flat to rescue more of her belongings, because the rubble-filled streets were full of sparks and smoke which produced the effect of a thick, hot fog. So the two girls settled down to clean up Cenci’s flat, remove the glass and earth which had been blown in and take down the curtains which, in a night of howling sparks, were a fire risk.

‘Then we had a cigarette and a cup of coffee,’ she recalled.

When the sirens sounded again, my friend and I looked at each other, terrified – surely it wasn’t possible? Are they coming a second time? I just caught the radio announcer’s message: ‘Several bomber units are approaching Dresden.’ The voice of the announcer was anything but steady. I felt sick – so they were coming a second time. Knees shaking, we went down into the cellar. This time there were forty-one women and one man, Cenci’s husband.

I sat next to Cenci on a box while a non-stop hail of bombs seemed to last an eternity. The walls shook, the ground shook, the light went out and our heavy iron door was forced open by blast. In this cellar now, there were the same scenes as had occurred before in the Ferdinandstrasse cellar: a crowd of crying, screaming, or praying women, throwing themselves on top of each other. Cenci and I tried to disentangle them and calm them down. We longed for the ‘All Clear’, but it never came – the sirens had stopped working. But eventually the earth stopped shaking and now we believed that it was really all over. Cenci and I exchanged a glance of thankfulness. Our cellar had held.

Out of here – nothing but out! Three women went up the stairs in front of us, only to come rushing down again, wringing their hands. ‘We can’t get out of here! Everything outside is burning!’ they cried. Cenci and I went up to make sure. It was true.

Then we tried the ‘Breakthrough’ which had been installed in each cellar, so people could exit from one cellar to the other. But here we met only thick smoke which made it impossible to breathe.

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