Downstairs she found her friends and neighbours close to despair. They all knew that they must leave the building, but when one had tried to go out by the front entrance he had been blown by the wind into the fire. The front of the building was ablaze, and a timber business opposite was burning so fiercely that they would not be able to get through to the relative safety of the canal beyond it. Eventually somebody came up with the idea of breaking through the back wall of the building – Frau Klank’s husband had remembered a pickaxe that stood in the corner of the basement. They smashed a hole through the wall big enough to push through the pram that contained their newborn baby.

The vision that greeted them on the other side of that wall was worthy of Hieronymus Bosch: ‘We came out at the Stadtdeich but into a thundering, blazing hell. The streets were burning, the trees were burning and the tops of them were bent right down to the street, burning horses out of the Hertz hauling business ran past us, the air was burning, simply everything was burning!’ ¹⁹

The bombardment had been so fierce that many people found themselves in similar situations: their houses were on fire, yet their escape routes were blocked by rubble or flames. That was what happened to Erich Titschak, a professor of entomology, who lived on Dimpfelsweg in the centre of Hamm. At 1.15 a.m., in the middle of the attack, an incendiary set the cellar stairs alight making escape from the shelter virtually impossible. He and some others broke through to their neighbouring cellar, only to find that the way out there was also blocked by flames. In desperation they got through to the basement on the opposite side. That house and the one beyond it had been burned down in a previous raid, so they thought it would be easy to find a way through to the street. In a letter to his children shortly afterwards, he described what he found:

A labyrinth of cellars, hallways, corners and sheds opens before us… All kinds of useless junk block our way. We break through eleven doors, one by one, hoping to finally find the exit on to the Hammer Landstraße… there must be a safe way out of here, the corner house, for our wives and children. Some cellar doors fly open at the first hit, but now we are faced with two heavy doors, which resist all our efforts. We take it in turns, sweat running in streams from our foreheads, but without success. The doors are probably lined with iron on the other side. The bolts are strong, our axe glances off the concrete without leaving a trace. ²⁰

Disappointed, Titschak and his companion, Herr Bläß, returned to their own cellar, knowing that the only way out was up the burning stairs. On the way back they caught a view of what they were up against.

In one of the adjoining rooms, I knock out the cellar window and catch my first glimpse of Dimpfelsweg and the gardens. What I see takes my breath away. Not just our building and the neighbouring building: no, the entire Dimpfelsweg, the buildings opposite, the Wagnerische Villa, the big building by the cinema, the cinema itself, the Claudiastraße – it all is one enormous sea of fire. A tornado-strength storm sweeps through the streets, pushing a rain of embers before it as thick as a snowstorm in winter. We were supposed to go through there? We’d never make it! Our clothes would instantly catch fire. The Hammer Landstraße, which was supposed to save us – the same picture. As far as I could see through the iron bars of a small cellar window, all the big beautiful buildings were burning from top to bottom. ²¹

Back in their cellar they instructed everyone to wrap wet towels round themselves and do their best to escape up the burning stairs. At that point, while they could see the immediate danger, they had no real idea of the hell that lay outside. Each person in the cellar made the short run through the flames, Titschak leading. As they stumbled out on to the street, they were confronted by the sight of their entire neighbourhood on fire.

Another survivor in similar circumstances, Hans Jedlicka, claims that the shock of this sight numbed him:

I was still convinced that the fire bombs had only hit our doorway, that once we’d run through we’d be safe. As we came through, the sight that met us was like a blow. All I could see was flames. The whole of Hammerbrook was burning! A powerful storm took hold of us and drove us in the direction of Hammerbrookstraße. That was wrong. We had to go towards Heidenkampsweg – there was water there, and the Stoltenpark. We stumbled over the first charred corpses. From there on it was like a switch turned in my head. It was like being in a dream. I saw and heard everything, crystal-clear, but in spite of the great heat felt no pain. We had to fight our way through the firestorm metre by metre. My mother’s clothes caught fire. I put the flames out with my hands. ²²

It is little wonder that many people chose to stay in their cellars in the unrealistic hope that the reinforced ceilings would afford them some protection from the flames in the buildings above them. Some people must have believed they would be safer in their makeshift bunkers than they would be outside – as the public-information documents and broadcasts had told them. Others gave up in despair. When everything outside was burning, what difference did it make whether one stayed or left? Some air-raid wardens reported having to bully people into seeking safety elsewhere with blows and kicks, even though it had become obvious that to stay put meant certain death. ²³

In any normal raid, when the upper floors of a house were on fire it was still fairly safe in the cellar, and certainly better than risking the explosions outside – occupants of a burning building were encouraged to stay where they were at least until the all-clear had sounded. But, this was no normal raid. Once the firestorm had taken hold, the wind and all the flaming debris it carried made it almost impossible to escape through the streets. Many of those who survived did so because they left their cellars early – perversely, those who initially appeared to be in the most danger were the most likely to survive. Those whose buildings caught fire later in the raid found themselves trapped between their own fire and the ‘hell’ of the firestorm outside.

In an interview with Der Spiegelmagazine in 2003, the poet and song-writer Wolf Biermann described how agonizing the decision was to stay or go. He was six at the time, but remembers the events of that night as clearly as if they were burned into his memory:

I sat there alone with my mother… She was sitting there as if she was paralysed or maybe because she was smart – because in such a panic everything you do is a mistake. It’s a mistake to leave: you run to your own death. It’s a mistake to stay: death will come to you. Nobody is rational in such a situation. In a sense I was rational: I pressed my little head into my mother’s coat, into her lap, and thus I could breathe; the air was impossible to breathe elsewhere.

Then my mother realised we’d burn there. She took a little leather suitcase with our papers and a few photos of my dad who, just a few months ago, had gone through the fiery oven in Auschwitz, as a Jew, as a Communist. And she handed me a little bucket – a little aluminium bucket with a cover. There was mirabelle jam inside, my mother had made it. And I took my little bucket and then we got out. We crawled through the basement. ²⁴

As he stepped outside it was not so much the sight of all the flames that terrified him as the noise. The crash of the bombs exploding around him, the roar of the fires, the drone of the planes and, above it all, the terrifying whine of the wind: ‘What a sound it was! It was hell, it was hell’s fires. In hell it is not only hot but loud. The firestorm was screaming!’ ²⁵