Clara A

Clara A

Miss Clara A's account of the events at Heckershäuser Straße 10 and Main Cemetery.

1944-03-11

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Record 24

BKasselVdObmv10024

Translated from the original in German: Present is Miss Clara A., born 25 February 1901, of Heckers-häuser Straße 10, and makes the following statement:
When we heard the alarm, we grabbed our suitcases and went down to the cellar. The bombs dropped one after another, we heard them come down and explode, down at the cemetery and the open field. Luckily, we only had canisters with phosphorous in front of house and behind it. The men went up, there was a fire. They put the flames out and every ten minutes, they went back up and put them out again. On the upper floor a bed was on fire and on the second floor the floor boards but they had been there in good time so that the fire did not spread. And then came the people from further up the street and brought their beds and suitcases because everything was on fire there. The stables of the garden centre were on fire, cattle and horses perished there. And then slowly people came into our street from the whole district around the train station in the lower town and they sought refuges with us. They were all very quiet, they were mainly older people, dazed by the horror. We prepared seats in the cellar and brought bread down. We couldn’t make coffee as we did not have any water. Even the foreigners from the barracks in Holländische Straße fled to us. They were Italians. They did not stay for long. They also made the rounds with us through the house. Nothing was stolen from us. There were also some people with heart diseases and other illnesses, we had to control ourselves. When it became lighter, we noticed that everything was black with people. On the cemetery too we could see people sitting on their furniture, they’d built something there and sought refuge among the dead, for two days there was an encampment of the bombed-out from Mombachstraße. No one died there, they’d all made their way to cemetery in time. Apart from that I don’t know anything important. We were really lucky.
My sister and her husband, Dora and Fritz Weißing, visited us that evening. They left about a quarter to eight. They had to change to no 3 tram on Hedwigstraße. Then the alarm came. They had to go into the cellar of Hedwigstraße 12. And in the breakthrough to Tack, in Untere Königstraße [65], that’s were their bodies were found. During the first week I searched everywhere for them. Another tenant from the house recognised them and stated that he had talked to them. He ran with his wife and child through the flames and stayed on Lutherplatz. The four boys of my sister are soldiers, the two little ones are still at home. I live there now and look after the children, the 17-year old and the daughter of 24 (Bettenhausen, Eschenweg 10).