I was born at Ivensweg 27a, in the Hamburg suburb of Barmbek on Christmas day 1937. Our housedoctor, who delivered me, was Dr.Fuchs. Doctor Fuchs was Jewish and in 1942 paid for this CRIME with his life in a concentration camp.
The block of flats where we lived was situated in a green and very quiet short street. On the opposite side of our street were “Schrebergaerten”, gardenplots. Behind these was the Towing-Tank building of the H.S.V.A., the shipbuilding research centre where large models of ships were tested in a tank 450m long.
An almost circular open-air basin, 250m diameter, was connected with the towing tank. Here models were tested for manoeuverability, while in the towing tank models underwent different tests.
It is now 2008 and I am almost 71 years of age, but I still see in my mind the slowly moving lights of ship-models, as they were towed up and down that canal in that long building. Being in the hight of war, all those windows were meant to be totally blacked-out!
But the allied bombing raids never managed to hit their important target, the “Schiffbauversuchsanstalt”, instead in July 1943 our block of flats got hit and was completely destroyed. It happened like this.
My father was stationed at a military hospital in Busko, Poland. My mother and brother went to visit him. I stayed with auntie Dolly in Harburg, while Oma Hennig, who lived with us, stayed at the flat. Whenever the sirens sounded and a bombing-raid was imminent, it had become customary for people to take their valueables, papers and photographs with them into the shelters (basements). Our Oma left all OUR photos behind and everything got burned. That is why we have hardly any childhood pictures, only those which our mother carried with her.
I have some very distinct memories from Ivensweg. On friday nights we always had the weekly bath, and it being the beginning of the Sabbath (we were Seventhday Adventists) the evening meal had to be quick and simple, usually hot chocolate and kaiser rolls with liverwurst. It is still one of my favorites.
Ants have always had a fascination for me. I remember sitting on the curbstone of our street and disturbing the columns of marching ants in the gutter or those coming out of the gaps between curbstones.
My brother Siegfried, being 3 1/2 years older, naturally played with the older kids. I was considered a baby, but I was always big enough to defend him against older kids, or retrieve his toys from kids twice my size. That is how my glasses always ended up broken (I had to wear spectacles since age 2, when I had hooping cough and became quite crosseyed). I just could not resist teasing older kids and it always got me into strife. My big brother was of no help to me, I just had to stick-up for myself.
Sometime in 1942 I was sent to a “Kindererholungsheim”at the the Baltic Sea resort of Timmendorf for 3 weeks. This was to give city children a break from the constant bombing raids on Hamburg. The only unpleasant memory I have from there is a dish I really hated, but still had to eat. Mashed potatoes with spinach, which was cooked to a thin slurry, with an halfboiled egg floating in the centre. For many years I refused to eat spinach!
We were bombed out in early July 1943 while my mother and brother were still in Poland. As I said previously, Oma Hennig looked after our flat while I stayed with Aunty Dolly in Harburg.
Harburg suffered as much as Hamburg from bombing, and even though Onkel Fritz had built a very deep bunker in the clay cliff behind their house, my father did not think I was safe. Consequently my father came from Poland and collected me. The whole family was united again until October ’43 when my mother, brother and I returned “Home” but as Home lay in ruins, we moved in with Tante Lina in Harburg. We stayed with her until February ’44 when we returned to Busco, Poland.
The reason was, I became too terrified to go into the bunker during the never ending bombing raids. During one raid my mother and I had to take refuge in the basement bunker of a large six story department store. The building was
totally flattened, hundreds of shoppers died and hundreds more including us,were trapped in the sealed off bunkerb. It took rescue teams 9 hours to literally dig us out. For years afterwards I suffered every night from terrible nightmares.
It was safe and peaceful in Busko until July 1944,when the German army had to retreat further and further and the russians were at the doorstep. The German civilians still in Busko were put onto two buses, and under army escort – tanks and trucks – driven to Kielce, the nearest safe city. It took us approx 16 hours to get there, 80 km.
The road went through very deep forests and the convoy was continually attacked by Polish partisans. All tires on the buses were shot out and the tanks pushed and towed us most of the distance. We were laying flat on the floor all the way and it was a miracle that we survived. Many did not.The buses were riddled with bullets.
From Kielce we made our way to Lichten, in Ostsudetenland, where my father was now stationed. On the way there we detoured to Krakau, to look up my mothers sister Hertha, who worked there as a teacher at a German school.
In Lichten I was finally enrolled at school and we stayed there until January ’45 when the Russians again stood at the door. My father meanwhile had been moved and was stationed in Austria (Lofer, near Cell am See). Again we followed him as there was no point in returning to Hamburg, no home nor any possessions.
The weeklong train trip through a very unfriendly Czechoslovakia was harrowing and fraught with danger. In hindsight I can only admire our mother, a very petite person, for her guts and determination to keep the three of us alive and to get us out of the Czech Republic.
The Austrians at that stage of the war also hated the Germans and we were much discriminated against. My father found us lodgings in a small village, Weissbach, while he was stationed at Lofer to train Volkssturm Truppen, (Homeguard).
Life was not easy for us, we did not speak-or understand the local dialect, and the villagers refused to understand the high German we spoke. Shopping for food at the only shop in the village was futile, there was hardly any food on the shelves and the locals were selfsufficient. So we went begging for food at the farms.
Farmers in the valley were stingy, but those high up on the Alms were goodhearted and always gave us something. Milk and bread, sometimes an egg, or smoked eagle meat. The bread was usually stale, but bread nonetheless. My mother kept it in a pillow cover until it became rockhard, then made breadsoup out of it. We didn’t starve!
At school we were also bullied and discriminated against. Usually, I was left alone, and my brother Siegfried took the brunt, until our mother marched into school and confronted the culprits, mostly bigger boys, as all grades were taught in the same classroom by the one teacher.
A few weeks after settling in Weissbach the Americans started to invade Austria from the south and the German army retreated, our father being one of them. I still see in my mind the neverending columns of American tanks and trucks rumbling down the narrow band of bitumen into and through Weissbach, the locals standing by the roadside cheering and waving! From personal experience later in life I can say – never trust an Austrian. How they cheered when Hitler declared the ANSCHLUSS and they became a part of the greater Germany not so many years before and now they cheered the Yanks as their saviors.
Quite a large number of Americans occupied the village and took over the best houses and the only pub, right next to where we lived. Until now I had never seen Negroes before and we were all frightened of them, but all soldiers black and white were frienly and very polite, especially towards children. We were given chewing-gum, chocolate, lollies and marsbars, not to mention whole ration-packs.
The women of the village soon took in washing of the soldiers and were paid well, mainly with cigarettes, coffee, sweets or food. And peanut butter, huge tins of it. They used to eat a little out of the centre, then throw the can out, the same with cakes of Lux soap, use it a few times, then throw it out. They had everything in abundance and enjoyed showing it off.
The pub had a bowling lane in the basement and it was very popular with the soldiers. The only problem was they needed someone to set up the pins and return the ball after each throw, and that is where us kids came in. We were paid handsomely with mars bars, peanuts or fruit (the first time I ate bananas and grapefruit).
The soldiers found it very funny to play with life ammunition, they would pull the pin on a live handgranade, then hand it to a kid to throw it quickly into the nearby river. They would collect all the belly-up fish and hand them out to us. They were a welcome addition to our meager pantry. Once I came home with a nice little wooden box. It contained about six funny looking things made of metal and glass. Our neighbours husband happened to come past and see me playing with those thing. Apparently he turned ashen as he gently took them off me and placed them back into the box.
Someone had given me a box of detonators! Our neighbour took them to the commanding officer of the regiment and made a stink, and that was the end of us playing with life ammo – those detonators were very sensitive and could have blown up any time in my hands. My mother was very grateful to Mr. Dachsdoppler, as he probably saved our lives.
Our stay in Austria came to an end in October 1945. All Germans had to leave immediately. We had to make our way to Salzburg, where thousands of German civilians were herded together and put onto goods trains to be shipped back to the Fatherland. We had straw to sleep on, and we had blankets to keep us warm, but food was scarce.
Our travel by goods train from Salzburg in Austria to Hamburg in northern Germany progressed at snails pace. The total distance was roughly 900 kms. but it took 3 weeks to get there. Allied bombing had left the rail network in shambles, tracks ripped up or blown-up trains still laying across tracks. Detours around destroyed cities and towns and day long holdups were a day to day occurence, as was the lack of coal and water. The infrastructure simply wasn’t in place anymore.
At one little town we were “unloaded” and had to wait 3 days for another train. We found lodgings with a rail worker. I remember this well because speck was part of most meals. Seventh Day Adventists don’t eat pork, and our mother told us to put it into our pockets – do not eat it, it is unclean!
The towns name was Unterrosphe, near Giessen. It was an importent railjunction. I remember watching steam locos pushing goods wagons up a long incline and rolling down under their own steam as they were shunted onto a maze of different tracks.
While we waited for another train we were sorted out according to our final destinations. There were some hundreds of Hamburgers trying to make their way back to Hamburg, and finally they coupled six or seven goods wagons with us on board onto the back of a long goods train. It was roughly 400km to Hamburg.
We had been bombed-out but we owned a “Schrebergarten” in Barmbek. This is a garden plot of 800sq/m with a large garden shed on it. But no facilities. Where else could we stay, 80% of Hamburgs housing was destroyed. We had 3 lots of relations living in Harburg, my fathers sister Lina and her little boy Peter, her husband Ewald had died in 1942. He worked as a stevedore and fell to his death on nightshift when someone left the hatch cover off a hold on a freighter.
My father also had two brothers living in Harburg, Uncle Karl and his wife Hertha. They had one son, Erich. The other brother was his half brother Fritz Kutkowski and aunty Dolly. They had one son, Georg. He was married, his wife’s name was Liesel. Fritz and Dolly also had a daughter. Her name was also Liesel. Anyhow, none of the relations were bombed out, and aunty Lina took us in as she had the largest place. Until now we had no idea whether our father was dead or alive, as we had not heard from him since he was posted from Austria.
When we turned up at Tante Lina’s she had good news for us, she had received a card from my father. He was a POW in an American camp near Aachen, close to the Dutch border and he was hopeful to be released soon. This turned out to be correct. He knocked on our door in December ’45, carrying a battered suitcase filled with goodies, complete
ration packs, marsbars, soap and american cigarettes. These were worth a fortune, and bought absolutely anything on the black market. As most retail shops had empty shelves, black market trading had really taken off, despite a heavy presence of police.
Those cartons of Chesterfields and Lucky Strikes eventually paid for all the hard to get building materials my father needed to build a house on our garden plot. This began to happen in spring of ’46. We stayed with Tante Lina until spring, when my father managed to rent a more solid weekender than our own one in close proximity to our garden. Our shed had to be demolished and the site cleared.
The house was to be of very simple design. Length 13 meters,width 7 meters, divided into 4 rooms with a kind of lean-to added to the width of the house. This gave us one large and 1 small bedroom, living room and kitchen. Toilet, shed and chicken coop were under the lean-to, the bathroom consisted of an extra basin in the kitchen. Under part of the livingroom we would dig out a cellar with a trapdoor. This would be for storing home made preserves and the traditional yearly supply of potatoes – usually one ton, delivered in October. My father was no bricklayer or carpenter, but he was handy with tools. A bricklayer helped with the foundations and the layout, he also laid all the corners, while Dad did the filling in. Bricks were cheap, and that is where we boys came in.
We collected them from the ruined appartment buildings and carted them home by wheelbarrow. But first they had to be cleaned, also sorted as we didn’t want chipped or broken bricks. I will never forget one little episode; we always carried – or threw our bricks to our collection point were we cleaned and stacked them. On that day Siegfried and I were both throwing our bricks. He was in my line of fire and had crouched down to pick up a brick. Just as my brick flew overhead he came up and interrupted the
bricks flight path. It knocked him out cold, and blood was pouring from a deep gash on his head. But he came to while I tried to stop the bleeding with my handkerchief. My big worry was our bricks. We were not the only ones collecting them and if I took my brother home, someone would take our cleaned bricks. So I told my brother to stay put while I raced home and got our mother.We eventually carted him home in the wheelbarrow. Our mother cleaned and bandaged his wound and he was alright and didn’t need stitches. But our bricks helped to build someone elses “Behelfsheim”, or emergency home.
Dad needed double-T steel beams for the roof structure. Finding these in the ruins was not a problem, but most were either too short or bent and twisted. We carried the best ones we could find home and when he had enough to do the job he borrowed a trailer and carted them to some welding place where they welded them into straight length to fit the roof. I still remember helping my dad to drag those seven meter beams to the building site on that little trailer, no pump-up tyres! My darling brother never seemed to be around to help, and I was only 9.
It was now probably the middle of 1946 and the building progressed nicely. I think the roof was on before winter started. Dad had by now started working. He worked at the Eilbeker Krankenhaus (hospital) as a nurse and he travelled there by pushbike. Suburban tram and train services were still very unreliable, as electricity was only generated on an off and on basis, at home we used home-made carbide lamps for lighting.
The winter of 46/47 was one of the coldest on record, and a lot of people froze to death for lack of warm clothing and heating. The one-room weekender where we lived was only built for summer, and the icy wind and cold whistled through the cracks. We had no heating at all, but dad knew of a way to put sawdust to good use, perhaps he had seen it in his blacksmithing days in Prussia. It was a very simple heater, and it consisted of 2 steel cylinders roughly 0.8 x 2.0 meters in size, but one being slightly wider than the other, and fixed on a metal base one within the other. The inner cylinder was filled with sawdust and lit – there was some kind of firing mechanism at the bottom and a flue rising through the centre, long enough to pass out through the ceiling and roof. The heat was teriffic and the flue and inner cylinder became red hot. That freezing winter we were never cold. One drawback this type of heater had was that they were prone to blowing-up and we were not allowed to put too much sawdust in at a time.
Christmas of that year, 1946 I remember quite well, we had a tree with a candle stand – a “bunten teller”, which is traditionally a large cardboard plate with christmas motiffs.
It is usually filled with red apples,walnuts hazelnuts, dates, figs and chocolate. Fancy sweets and imitation marzipan were a bonus. And of course home baked Christmas biscuits. Toys were almost impossible to come by unless you had American cigarettes for payment, or go to a “tauschgeschaeft,” shops were could exchange or barter for goods. I remember standing in front of one such shop many times and admiring the Maerklin trainset displayed in the window, and playing with it.
Coming back to Christmas ’46, I probably got some home sewn clothing and perhaps warm knitted socks, but I also got a box of building bricks, real stone bricks in miniature, each perhaps 5cm in length, and enough to build a house with. It was a beautiful present, quite expensive, and very hard to get. I was a very happy little boy that Christmas, and birthday, as both fell on the same day.
Spring in ’47 was a long time in coming. All that snow melting, additional to heavy spring rains caused a lot of severe flooding in Hamburg.The weekend garden colonies, such as where we lived, had no roads, only unmade footpaths.These of course turned to mud or were just little rivers. It was the ideal playground for children. Access to most houses was by bricks and planks placed upon them, and we had a ball, playing with homemade boats and rafts, pretending to be on the high seas. My battleship capsized at one time and I ended up in the drink. Somehow I fell onto a broken bottle and badly slashed my left wrist. I managed to make it home without bleeding to death. Luckily I had only nicked the artery and mum soon had me bandaged up. The scar is still visible today.
Sometime in ’47 we had to move. The older couple which owned the place but had not been bombed out, had family evacuated from Hamburg during the war. Now it was safe for them to return and we had to move. We found a similar dwelling a few doors away and stayed there until our own house was ready. It still required a lot of work, as even American cigarettes could not buy some of the materials and fittings still needed. I remember dad saying that he had to pay 70 marks or 50 cigarettes for one bag of cement on the black market. He didn’t have 70 marks, and his stash of Lucky Strikes was getting very low. One bag of cement wouldn’t go veryfar, and that was probably the reason why we only had stamped clay floors in the house. But we finally had our very own roof over our heads before winter came.
As our sawdust combustion heater was too unsightly as well as unsafe, my father built a “Kachelofen”. This was a contraption roughly 1.8 x 1.0 x 1.0 m in size. It was built of fire bricks and cladded with ceramic tiles. The firebox and grate were at floor level and 2/3 up was an open recess to keep dishes hot. On the very top we used to dry wet garments or warm our eiderdowns before going to bed.
In the early days doors were a luxury. There were only three; front door, back door and toilet door. All other openings just had curtains; the same applied to light fittings, there weren’t any. Just bare globes dangling on wires. But that doesn’t mean we had electricity. Some was available for industry, but not for domestic users. It meant candles, which were hard to get, or carbide lamps. These gave off a nice white light but you had to put up with a constant hissing sound. Light fittings were mainly of the ceramic kind, and as they were all salvaged out of the ruins they were all brittle from fire or age. Dad had collected some to be used on our lights and we were not to play with them. But once while he was at work I had to find out how the bits fitted together. Of course some ended up in pieces and elastoplast tape would not hold. It was a long time before araldite.
My mother didn’t often hand out punishment, it was always – wait till your father gets home. If this happened in the morning you were in fear all day of the belting you had coming. He never disappointed and it was a cruel way to punish children. Dad was hardly in the door when he was told by our mother… do you know what he did today? Then the belt came off and we copped it.
And the buckle would inflict a lot of pain. How can one reconcile that with being almost fanatically religious? Our parents could never understand why my brother and I never embraced religion once we were adults. We both totally turned our backs on our Seventh Day Adventist upbringing. I remember one occasion, my brother would have been 16 or 17, when he got a belting from our darling Father. My grandmother and I both tried to intervene when he got flogged and kicked between the legs.
Many years later I confronted my father about it and both my parents denied or exused their actions. Such was life, but in general I had a fairly happy childhood. Church services on a Saturday morning were a bit boring but going on a two or three week camp during the long summer holidays made up for it. In the ’49 holidays we went to Lohmuehle, 60 km. from home.
The camp was situated at a lake and there were approximately 70-80 kids. The tents, large ex American Army, were set up in an oval shape on a big sheltered and grassy paddock. Meals were usually served out of large couldrons from the middle of it and you could come back for as many helpings as your heart desired. I certainly didn’t argue about this.
We had lots of activities; swimming in the lake, long walks, games and competitions. After tea at night we usually sat around a large bonfire and sang folk or religious songs, one of the leaders always accompanying us on a guitar. And after the last song and a good night prayer we all received a piece of chocolate before heading for our tents. Boys on one side of the oval, girls on the other, and no fraternizing!
Both my brother Siegfried and I were allowed to go on these yearly camps until we were 15 or 16 years old. Each year they were at a different location, but never too far from Hamburg. One year at the Baltic Sea, once at the north sea near Cuxhaven, and another at the Moellner lake in Schleswig Holstein.
There were two or three other summer camps I went to, one in the Lueneburg Heath and one at the lake at Ploen in Holstein and I have nice memories from each camp.
The late 40s, early 50s in Hamburg were quite uneventful. The family had finally moved into the new house, even though it still required a lot of work. Our correct adress was Kleingartenverein 556 Schmachthagen, Parzelle 124, Hamburg-Bramfeld. It was a 5 minute walk to the major shopping strip in Fuhlsbuetteler Strasse, which went as far as Barmbeker Bahnhof, 4 km in distance. From here you could catch a tram right into the city, or change over to the U-Bahn at the Barmbeker Bahnhof. Our other mode of public transport was the S-Bahn, but the nearest station was Ruebenkamp, behind the Barmbeker Hospital, and it was a 20 minute walk. A long walk in winter at minus 20, and you always had a head wind. Warm winter clothing were only a dream in those days.
It would have been in 1949 when I managed to put my first bike together. Second hand bits and pieces, bald tyres and no gears or free wheeling, but it was a bike, and my whole pride and joy. Us boys never got any pocket money, so we collected scrap metal in the ruins, copper gas pipes or lead water pipes, copper wires and wallpaper for waste paper. It was all turned into Pennies and Marks.
Once I was caught by a watchman loading a heavy cast iron heater (central heating) onto my handcart. I had salvaged it from the basement of a bombed-out block of flats, which was being rebuilt. And because of new building materials being stored on site, the builders had a watchman. I got a belting for my troubles and also had my cart confiscated, but I was lucky the police were not called. Later I went back with a friend. While he distracted the watchman I got my handcart back and took off. It was a very close shave, but you had to be resourceful!
The proceeds from scrap metal sales was usually spent on sweets, and double dutch licorice or chewing gum were a favorite. If I could get enough money together I would buy a rubber ball. Leather footballs were unobtainable, but not very far from home was a factory where they recycled old rubber and tyres to mould and vulcanise various products, including balls of different sizes. The quality wasn’t very good, the balls were never perfectly round and the rubber was porous, so they leaked air. As they had no pump-up valve the balls soon became useless. Sometimes we took the balls back and got them repaired or pumped up again, but it always depended on who came to the counter.
Another pasttime, which was very popular, was “pretend car races”, trudelreifenrennen, our cars being old bicycle rims which we pushed and guided with wire hooks, as we raced with them around a home made banked oval. We went to a lot of trouble to build our racetracks and even held races away from home.
This of course was before the advent of having bicycles. We still used the same tracks, only the racing became more sophisticated and the competition more fierce.
Quite a few of my friends or school mates were also bombed out and lived in basements of bombed-out apartment buildings. Most buildings in Hamburg had cellars, with most of them reinforced to hopefully withstand the impact of bombs. The heaviest and most destructive bombing raids on Hamburg happened during July 1943 (when we also lost our home). Approximately 650,000 Hamburgers were evacuated from Hamburg, including ourselves.
After the war ended people slowly started to return to Hamburg. But it lay in ruins and people had no choice but to live under the ruins in cellars. How, I don’t know, as there was no electricity or sanitation. People simply made do, and the places I saw were quite homely and comfortable.