The Fire and the Darkness by Sinclair McKay

Author:Sinclair McKay
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Publishing Group

16. The Burning Eyes

For those who were unhurt and unharmed, apart from their racing hearts, the curiosity had a dreadful unmoored quality: what did the world outside now look like? Then there was the fear: for family elsewhere, for friends, for homes, for cherished belongings and keepsakes. Had any of their material possessions survived the onslaught?

To the south of the city, Gisela Reichelt was preparing to emerge from her shelter with the grown-ups. ‘Now the door of the basement was opened after what seemed an endless time,’ she recalled. ‘No one could imagine what to expect! The city burned brightly and it was so hot you could hardly imagine it.’1 The road on which she lived, Schnorrstrasse, was close to the railway station; and beyond that, under the mix of low cloud cover and a widening pall of smoke, the sky was an odd shade of amber, reflecting all the flames below. The girl and her mother walked slowly along the road until they faced their own section of the apartment building. It had been torn asunder. That was when the horror came. Their home had taken a direct hit. To emphasize the implosion of their ordinary lives, mother and daughter then gradually understood that the rubbish lying around them on the street was in fact what remained of their possessions, the debris blasted out of their flat. All their belongings lay in gutters. ‘We could not cry,’ remembered Frau Reichelt, ‘we were just glad.’2 But mother and daughter now thought of the girl’s aunt Trudel, who lived in another neighbourhood. Was she all right? How – late on this burning night and amid the human chaos – could they make contact with her?

As they, and so many others, were now stricken with helpless anxiety for loved ones, the civic authorities – even in the continued absence of the Gauleiter – were already organizing their response to the emergency with impressive speed and coordination. Fire engines and crews, many of whom had in the last few minutes come in from the suburbs around the city, were navigating volcanically hot rubble – stone, paving, concrete, collapsed tram lines, smashed pipes – to get as close in as possible to the wildfires in the Altstadt. The reservoirs in the Altmarkt had been constructed there for this very eventuality; a plentiful supply of water to douse the fires. Yet despite their willingness, the crews found themselves facing an already daunting proposition: ever-climbing blazes stretching out over a vast area from the river down to the railway station a mile away – a landscape of fire.

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