Helga Schneider - The Bonfire of Berlin - A Lost Childhood in Wartime Germany

The plane sets off down the glittering runway before rumbling into the air. The control tower gets further away, grows smaller, becomes a vague dot. Goodbye, Berlin!

A lump rises in my throat, turns into a mountain, I can’t breathe. I’m starting to panic. I’m about to leave Berlin. I start to cry. Why am I crying? I’m not leaving anything but my good old Opa. But how it hurts!

I’m leaving a city that has refused me everything: a mother, a father, my grandmother. A normal life, a tranquil childhood. A city that has given me only pain, deprivation, terror, worry, sadness, anxiety and despair. Why am I crying? The vast field of ruins slips by beneath our eyes: buildings, churches, bridges, squares, a heritage reduced to crumbs.

The shimmering of the flames, the smell of burning. The stench of the corpses.

Ashes on the skin, JUDE on the shutters, the child beneath the lilac bush. The apple-sized bloodstain on the mattress, Gudrun’s staring eyes, Erika’s tureen. You urri? Spasibo .

And bombs and fire. Fire and destruction. Destruction of things, bodies, laws, traditions, the achievements of ivilisation. Back to zero. The destruction of the very last brick, the very last tiny grain of hope.

Beneath the enamel blue of an indifferent sky the sea of ruins disappears into the distance, becomes a shapeless mass, but something down there is calling to me.

Because down there, among the grim remains of that vast extinguished bonfire, among the cracks in the tarmac, in the damp cellar in Lothar Bucher Strasse, among the kindly folds of Opa’s crumpled coat, that is where my roots remain. Stupid, stubborn roots clinging to the place where my heart heat most desperately.

Goodbye, Berlin! The lump in my chest swells, suffocating me. Berlin is disappearing on the horizon, sinking into a veil of mist. I feel a chill breeze, a sense of emptiness. The engines roar, I focus my eyes: I can see nothing now.

Soon we will land in Lübeck, where a refugee camp will take us in. Perhaps hunger awaits until a goods train takes us to Austria.