Anna K
Title
Anna K
Description
Anna K's account of the events at Wittichstraße 49.
Date
1944-04-06
Coverage
Language
Type
Publisher
Rights
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Contributor
Identifier
Record 61
BKasselVdObmv10061
Transcription
Translated from the original in German: Present is Mrs Anna K., née Ritter, born 20 June 1908, formerly of Wittichstraße 49, now of Mosheim, district Homberg/Efze and makes the following statement:
Our house stood alone in the Auefeld, in a large orchard of 40 trees. None of these still stands. All gone. It was alarm and I immediately went down with my suitcases and my children. Granny had been reading the newspaper and was very calm but I was very agitated. I had hardly arrived in the cellar when the shooting started and I dressed the children in the cellar. The French civilian also carried things down and kept an eye on what was happening and then he said: “The attic is on fire.” He wanted us to hand him sand to fight the fire. Granny followed him. And we stayed in the corridor of the cellar, not the air raid cellar; that was maybe our good fortune. We never heard or saw anything of them again. They had hardly gone up there when the water came running down the walls from the bath tubs. We have no idea whether anything exploded up there.
And then fire shot through the coal bunker where the coke was – whether a mine exploded at the moment, my hair was completely roughed up, I could not get them back in order, and the children had their eyelashes singed off. The light had already gone out earlier. Terrible dust and dirt and smoke and we wanted to get out to the washhouse but that did not work, the door was already three quarters buried; the conservatory had been torn off and lay in front of it. So we tried to get out through the regular exit of our air raid cellar but that too was already blocked, and so we went out directly through the front door, but it wasn’t as if we could just have walked out nicely, because the staircase was on fire and we had to squeeze through the debris. We had only been in the cellar for less than half an hour.
Then we crossed the street, everything was a mess and wires were lying on the ground. We went into the house next door but no soul was left, the whole house had been torn open. Just before we left, incendiaries had dropped into our cellar through the windows. Little Richard (two years old) wasn’t wearing his shoes anymore, I don’t know why. The children shouted only once: mum, but so loudly that the people on the street could hear them. Rolf was five in December. My husband is on the Eastern front. He had just started his journey and arrived the day after. We had run to Petsch’s house. Behind the house lay a blockbuster and innumerable incendiaries. In the garden, we had a solid little house that was blown over by the air pressure. And at the front of the house was a dud. The cellars all burnt out completely. With us in the cellar was the Hässler family, fairly old people, and Mrs Umbach from Niederzwehren.
Granny, my mother-in-law, was Martha Korn, née Fuhrmann, born 21 May 1873. She was found in the cellar under the kitchen when the cellar was dug out, she had been looked for specially (found 1 February 1944).
The Frenchman was found the day after the raid. He was lying on the cooker in the kitchen. His name was Fassio and he was from Nice.
Our house stood alone in the Auefeld, in a large orchard of 40 trees. None of these still stands. All gone. It was alarm and I immediately went down with my suitcases and my children. Granny had been reading the newspaper and was very calm but I was very agitated. I had hardly arrived in the cellar when the shooting started and I dressed the children in the cellar. The French civilian also carried things down and kept an eye on what was happening and then he said: “The attic is on fire.” He wanted us to hand him sand to fight the fire. Granny followed him. And we stayed in the corridor of the cellar, not the air raid cellar; that was maybe our good fortune. We never heard or saw anything of them again. They had hardly gone up there when the water came running down the walls from the bath tubs. We have no idea whether anything exploded up there.
And then fire shot through the coal bunker where the coke was – whether a mine exploded at the moment, my hair was completely roughed up, I could not get them back in order, and the children had their eyelashes singed off. The light had already gone out earlier. Terrible dust and dirt and smoke and we wanted to get out to the washhouse but that did not work, the door was already three quarters buried; the conservatory had been torn off and lay in front of it. So we tried to get out through the regular exit of our air raid cellar but that too was already blocked, and so we went out directly through the front door, but it wasn’t as if we could just have walked out nicely, because the staircase was on fire and we had to squeeze through the debris. We had only been in the cellar for less than half an hour.
Then we crossed the street, everything was a mess and wires were lying on the ground. We went into the house next door but no soul was left, the whole house had been torn open. Just before we left, incendiaries had dropped into our cellar through the windows. Little Richard (two years old) wasn’t wearing his shoes anymore, I don’t know why. The children shouted only once: mum, but so loudly that the people on the street could hear them. Rolf was five in December. My husband is on the Eastern front. He had just started his journey and arrived the day after. We had run to Petsch’s house. Behind the house lay a blockbuster and innumerable incendiaries. In the garden, we had a solid little house that was blown over by the air pressure. And at the front of the house was a dud. The cellars all burnt out completely. With us in the cellar was the Hässler family, fairly old people, and Mrs Umbach from Niederzwehren.
Granny, my mother-in-law, was Martha Korn, née Fuhrmann, born 21 May 1873. She was found in the cellar under the kitchen when the cellar was dug out, she had been looked for specially (found 1 February 1944).
The Frenchman was found the day after the raid. He was lying on the cooker in the kitchen. His name was Fassio and he was from Nice.
Citation
Vermisstensuchstelle des Oberbürgermeisters der Stadt Kassel, “Anna K,” IBCC Digital Archive, accessed July 22, 2024, https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/collections/document/8727.
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