 out from the 18th, had partially burst. Water ran everywhere. It was chaos. One could not readily cross the square. Either a streetcar lay askew, or there were contact wires, or there was rubble, debris and so forth on the street.
Q: Once again the question, how does a child react to that? Is it unreal at that moment, or is it very real?
As a child, I would say, one just huddled against someone, against adults. Small communities form when one is in such a bunker, even for a short period of time. You become friends very quickly with someone who shares the same fate as you, who has to bear the same burdens as you, because you know that it is better to be a group or a pair than to be alone. So it was that one often said, “We’ll go to your place first and take you there,” depending upon who was feeling better emotionally, in terms of morale. Only then did one go home. One made a small detour and first brought the woman who had three children and a small baby. Families were all bigger, the men weren’t at home, they were at war, and the families had three or four children. The woman also had a piece of luggage. One first delivered this woman to house number 68 for example, and then one went to one’s own apartment building and assessed the situation. It’s a small solidarity, one didn’t just call that a bunker community, but a solidarity among people. It developed spontaneously in such situations.
Q: Did the people conceive of that as a crime that was being perpetrated upon them, or did they see it as a part of the war?
That is a difficult question, how the people reacted in such a situation. Of course there were people who quite clearly repudiated the war, and also expressed that the war must be brought to an end. But everywhere you looked, even in these bunker complexes, there hung posters, proclamations, “Enemy, listen up!” This propaganda, which ultimately directly affected the people in such shelters, which was in plain view … there were enough informers, and enough examples have come to light, that people who spoke out spontaneously were picked up by the police, by the Gestapo, and that they were no longer in these shelters, that they were charged with being traitors to the Volk, among other things.
Q: You also experienced how enemies of the people, or alleged enemies of the people were treated. Can you explain that once again briefly, about the half-Jews, or those who were held to be half-Jews?
At the new Friedrichsstrasse 70 there was a respectable middle-class house. In the front of the house there were also several small business owners. It was a house which was highly esteemed so to speak. Extremely varied people lived in this house, but all were either employed or retired. The air raid marshal was a man who stood 100% on the side of the National Socialists, who could no longer be drafted into the Armed Forces due to his age, who always carried his air raid helmet with him, even beyond the event itself: Mr. Wernege. Already at that time the individual residents adopted a position against him. There was a saying at that time, an old German saying, “Give a German a function, and you won’t recognize him anymore.” That’s how Mr. Wernege behaved. It came about time and again that a child would violate the so-called blackout order, in that a small light would shine somewhere; a door was opened without the light inside having been extinguished first. Then he always roared immediately upwards through the house, “If that happens again, I’ll have to turn you in as a public enemy!” One was a public enemy in that instance.
In this house there lived a young theater director, whose ancestry was not 100% accounted for so to speak. He did not wear a yellow star, and as a result he was not viewed as a Jew. But Mr. Wernege had his information, and always gave the theater director a good talking to in the presence of all those in the shelter of the house, and informed him that he must verifiably demonstrate his credentials as an Aryan, because only Aryans belong in his air raid shelter. As a child that hurt me very much, because the th