Elisabeth Sch

Elisabeth Sch

Elisabeth Sch's account of the events at Jägerstraße 9 and 5.

1944-05-10

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Record 83

BKasselVdObmv10083

Translated from the original in German: Present is Mrs Elisabeth Sch., née A., born 26 January 1908 in Vollmarshausen, and makes the following statement:
My husband was home on leave and we had been a bit boisterous and we had not heard the alarm at first but then we went into the cellar, my husband, our three children and I. We could not stay there for long. All the people from the building were down there with us. We heard hit after hit. We thought everything was going to fall down on us. Smoke was not coming in yet and we could also not smell limestone but it smelled of dirt. So we went through the breakthrough to no. 7 and then went on to no. 5 because that was a public shelter. So we stood there for a while and then went into this corner and then into that and the men had a look as to whether we would be able to get out and when the lights went out, my husband said I should sit down with our youngest. He kept moving about and looked for a way to save us. At the end, when he couldn’t go on, he said: “Come on, let’s lie down over there, it’s no use.”
The people in the room were fairly calm, only the little children were screaming terribly. So we lay down on an air raid bed, my husband, the little girl and I, and the twelve-year old boy lay across on top and the girl on the floor in front of the bed and then I went to sleep. I don’t know anything after that. I woke up on Saturday, in Jägerstraße where we were lying in the street. I could not get up and a soldier came and asked me my name. And then they carried me away to Lutherplatz and from there I was taken to the Red Cross. The next morning I had such a yearning for my loved ones and I tried to walk and I could about manage, and then they wanted to take me to Witzenhausen but I said: “I have to find out first where my husband and children are.”
So I walked alone from the Red Cross [hospital] to Jägerstraße, half unconscious. That was Sunday morning. And there was my husband, lying on the street, dead. And then we were told there was another alarm, we had to leave. So I made my way to the shelter at the Schlagd. And when the alarm was over, I went back. And when I came to Jägerstraße, the first one lying there was my boy; they had brought him out in the meantime. And I started screaming so much that they told me to go away. I went to Vollmarshausen to my brothers and sisters and went to bed. And my brothers and sisters went to Kassel every day to look and on the cemetery, and they watched every van being unloaded and they always said the girls were not among them (11 and 4 years old). And when they could not find them, they started looking in the hospitals. And so they found the little one in Kirchditmold, in the Katharinenstift. And my Margaret also must be alive if she was not among the dead. She would have been eleven this March.
I had been at my sister’s in Vollmarshausen with the children and because my husband came on leave on 10 October, we went to our flat in Kassel and that’s where fate befell us.
They got them all out of the cellar and no one was burnt and my husband and the boy were buried as identified and all the people in Jägerstraße knew them. She has to be alive. A woman told me that she had seen my husband die in the street. Why did they only bring them out on the Sunday? My husband was young and strong, I am sure that he had still been alive.