Kassel

There is so much news about war in the press and specially on television that it occurred to me that I should retell an account of one of my war-experiences which I had written years ago for the New Yorker Staats Zeitung. War is not fun. It wasn’t then and isn’t now. Just somewhat different. So here is my story of Kassel.1943.

I had just passed my exam at the music-school and cheerfully packed my suitcase for a week at a music-festival in Kassel, a town of about 200,000 inhabitants about which I knew nothing other than the publisher who organized the festival was located there. Being an absent-minded person I had made a mistake in the date and arrived a day early. No matter. My room was available and I cheerfully unpacked my suitcase hanging my few good clothes into the closet, putting comb and my tiny bar of soap( my ration for the month) on the washstand, comb next to it and went into town to the publisher’s bookstore where I proceeded to buy some books. The air was mild, the sun was shining and my spirits were relaxed.

At the hotel I decided to get undressed and go to bed, though it was much too early to go to sleep but no matter. I had my books and no more exams to worry about. This, to me, at that moment was bliss.
At eight o’clock the sirens howled. I casually glanced toward the window, it was still light outside, weighed the odds.how important was Kassel? Not very I decided, and stayed put. After about five minutes I heard running in the corridor outside my door. No shouting, just running. After a short while it stopped. Apparently everybody had made it into the shelter and I settled back into my pillows. At about 8:20 I realized that I was engulfed in silence, silence from the street, silence from inside the hotel. So I roused myself from the bed, got dressed, threw the books into my elegant but impractical suitcase, left soap and comb on the wash-stand, clothes in the closet and headed for the door. I did have the presence of mind to take my coat, draping it over my arm, and heading down the corridor in search for the shelter.

There was not a soul around but plenty of signs showing the way to the basement and the make-shift air-raid shelter. The room was filled with people, mostly women, a few children, a few officers and a sprinkling of men in civilian clothes, a rarity in those days because everybody was drafted to fight the war. Nobody spoke. Everybody stared at me, or maybe just stared. I put my suitcase on the floor and leaned against the wall where I had found a bit of space. I don’t think it was more than two minutes before the first bomb fell. Very close to us. The room had one window which was boarded up, no glass, just a few wooden planks. The second bomb hit a minute or so later the wind-pressure of which caused the the planks to blow out so that we could see fire right outside our window burning furiously.

From then on it hailed bombs incessantly. The cement floor heaved under our feet as if we were on high sea. Nobody spoke or cried or made any kind of noise except for a few mothers who had begun to whimper quietly.We all just waited. Were we going to be hit directly, was the fire coming into the basement? How long was this going to last? I think I am correct in saying the it lasted about half an hour, from 8:30 to 9:00 P.M. Somehow these times stick in my mind after all these years.

The bombing stopped as suddenly as it had started. Other than the raging fire outside our window there was no sound. Neither did anybody in the basement speak. As it turned out nobody really knew where we were since we were all from some other place than Kassel. So, finally two of the officers decided to reconnoiter and took off, armed with a small toy-trumpet which they blew intermittently After a while, maybe half an hour they came back and declared, we had to leave the basement because the hotel would simply collapse on top of us. Every building surrounding the back yard was burning from top to bottom and bottom to top. The Allieds were throwing big bombs which went deep into the ground and little phosphorous ones which ignited on impact on the roofs.

We were advised to dip our outer garments into the water from a bathtub standing in the basement, get our scarves wet and breathe only through them. So we left the basement, holding on to the person in front of us, running through fire to the “safety” of a covered ditch in the back yard. After a while the officers had discovered a space along one edge of the yard with no houses from where we could reach the street. But we had to jump because the wall was pretty high off the ground. Once on the ground we should head downhill toward the river because the air was less filled with smoke.The street onto which we had jumped must have been fairly wide because, though all the houses on either side of us were burning we were not threatened by the fire. Neither could we turn into any side street since everything was in flames.

Finally we did make it to the river and safety from fire and smog. I finally made it back to Berlin after waiting an entire day on an over-crowded train platform for a train which would go in direction Berlin. My hair was totally matted, my nice wool coat had dried with all the soot in it and I had no train ticket to show in Berlin where they insisted I buy one. By now it was two days after the bombing but nobody at the station had heard about it.

Much later I learned that they made locomotives in Kassel. So, no wonder it was an important industrial area. It took me months to get the soot out of my hair and never out of the coat. A few weeks later my home-town, Hamburg, was bombed into the ground and millions of others lost everything and many their lives. Luckily my mother was in the country and I missed the attacks by a day. Such was life then. It is different now but for many no better.