Can You Tell Me Where We Are

CHAPTER ONE

Berlin, Germany – November 23, 1943 was a foggy, cold, and drizzly evening when the air raid sirens began to howl.

"Rudi, let’s go down to the basement!" my mom yelled from the kitchen.

"Don’t worry," I told her. "It’s probably just a leaflet visit." That meant that two or three planes would fly overhead and drop a snowstorm of papers from America and keep us up half the night. As my mom filled up pots, pans, and the bathtub with water, I came to the realization that I was wrong – very wrong. This was to be our night.

We lived in a four-story office and apartment building that was located on the corner of Dessauer and Bernburger Strassen in the center of Berlin. The Allies’ objective this evening apparently was to send down 500-pound bombs instead of a harmless snowstorm of leaflets. For half an hour, the relentless pounding continued. Everything went flying: door, windows, curtains, and the thickest dust that you ever saw. Mom and I never made it to the basement. We huddled together in the hallway, choking on the dust. Thank God for the wet towels that Mom supplied, otherwise it would have been impossible to breathe. Then, as suddenly as it had started, it stopped. It was a very welcome silence.

A man came down from upstairs with apples and instructed us to chew on them to counter the effects of the dust. He introduced himself as Carl from Hamburg and warned us of the lack of time. He explained that the next wave would be incendiary bombs, three foot long, four-inch octagonal cylinders made up of five inches of iron, two inches of magnesium and eight inches of tin fins. They ignite two minutes after impact and start relentless fires.

"We should run upstairs to the attic and wait for them to come through the roof, pick them up, and throw them out of the roof windows into the street," Carl said. He reassured us that there was nothing to worry about and that he had done it many times in Hamburg. No way in hell was I going to go up there to join him!

So Carl went up and these things came down. When they struck the street outside, they sounded like the klack, klack, klack of machinegun fire. A short while after they began falling, Carl came back down to inform us that he had only gotten rid of three of them.

Within a half an hour, everything was ablaze with flames towering 100 feet against the dark backdrop of the sky. Everything was burning except for our apartment. I think that the reason that we were spared was that our building was at least one story lower than the surrounding buildings. By now, people had come out of the basement and were hanging out in our apartment. They were all dazed and confused.

Two days before the raid, we had come back from our summer home in Mellensee, a recreational lake in a country setting, about twenty miles outside of Berlin. There was a big garden, chickens, rabbits, ducks, and a goose. We had brought back an ample supply of winter provisions, preserved in big glass jars, which we stacked under the huge kitchen table. But we had a lot of people wandering around, and after three days, our provisions were gone.

That was when we decided to leave Berlin. With Carl’s help, we nailed the apartment shut and returned to Mellensee, away from the bombs.

In Mellensee, on November 27th, 1943 the air raid sirens sounded. We were sitting on our patio, listening to the droning of thousands of airplane engines above us. The searchlights came on and the 88-millimeter anti-aircraft guns fired away. The show got better as the whole city lit up when aluminum anti-radar strips came down looking like giant Christmas trees. Some of the strips came down in our woods and decorated our pine trees very nicely. We heard the 500 pounders exploding in the city and Berlin was burning again.

We thought that we were safe, but one B-17 got hit and it sounded like the pilot tried to land in a potato field that was 500 meters from us. The tail section almost landed on top of us, coming to rest with a big bang in the woods just 200 meters away.

"Well, is it nice and safe here?" I asked Mom. "What do you think? Should we go back to Berlin?" We agreed that this was a fluke and decided to stay in Mellensee. I crawled through what was left of the B-17 the next day. Later, I found out that the airmen had all bailed out. Nobody was hurt, but all were taken into German custody.

It was time for me to go back to school in Berlin. As I came out of the Potsdamer Platz S-Bahn station, I ran into my classmate and buddy, Gunter Maier.