‘You were a tour guide, I believe, Herr Dorfmann?’
‘I was a teacher for twenty years. English. Then I became a tour guide. To begin with I worked for the city and then as a freelancer. Because I speak English so well, most of the time I looked after groups from Canada, America and Great Britain, as well as tours from within Germany. It wasn’t like a job for me. I love my city and I enjoyed helping people discover it. I retired over ten years ago, but I still do part-time work at the Rathaus… taking tourists around the city chambers. You wanted to ask me about Karl Heymann?’ Herr Dorfmann poured the coffee. ‘I tell you, that’s a name I haven’t heard in a long, long time.’
‘You knew him well?’ Fabel showed him the photograph of the two teenage boys, smiling uncertainly at the camera.
‘My goodness.’ Dorfmann smiled. ‘Where on earth did you get that? Karl’s sister took it. I remember posing for that photograph as though it were only yesterday. It was a bright sunny day. Summer of forty-three. One of the hottest I can remember.’ He looked up. ‘Yes, I knew Karl Heymann. He was my friend. We were neighbours and he was in my class at school. Karl was a bright lad. He used to think about things too much at a time when it didn’t pay to think. I also knew his sister Margot – she was a few years older than Karl and always clucked around him like a mother hen. She was a beautiful girl and all the boys were in love with her. Margot absolutely doted on Karl… after he disappeared, she always claimed that he had got away from Germany. That he had taken a job on a freighter to avoid being conscripted. I met her after the war and she told me that Karl had gone to America and was doing very well. She said that Karl had always talked about doing that before the war.’
‘Did you believe her?’
Herr Dorfmann shrugged. ‘That’s what she told me. I wanted to believe it. But we all knew that Karl had gone missing after the night of the firestorm. So many people had. And it was on that night that I saw him for the last time. That night belonged to the dead, Herr Fabel, not to the living. Afterwards, I always just assumed he was one of the dead. Another name on a note pinned to a wall. There were thousands of them, you know. Thousands and thousands – countless pieces of paper with names on them, sometimes with a photograph, asking if anyone had seen them, stuck to the ruins of a house or apartment block, telling them where to find their families. Do you remember they did the same thing when those terrorists attacked the towers in New York? Walls covered with notes and pictures? It was like that, but ten times as many.’
‘You say you saw Karl that night? The night of the twenty-seventh of July?’
‘We lived on the same street. It was just around the corner from here. We were close friends. Not best friends, but close. Karl was a quiet lad. Sensitive. Anyway, we had arranged to head over to the other side of the Alster and were about to take a tram into town together. But we didn’t go.’
‘Why?’
‘We were about to get on the tram when Karl suddenly grabbed my sleeve. He said he thought he should stay close to home. I asked why and he didn’t have a reason. More of a gut feeling, I suppose. Anyway, we didn’t go. We went home and got our bicycles. He was right. It was a night to be close to home.’
‘Were you with Karl when the bombing started?’
Heinz Dorfmann smiled a sad, uncertain smile and for the first time Fabel could detect the ghost of the youth in the photograph with Heymann. ‘As I said, it was a wonderful summer. I remember how tanned we were.’ He tilted his head up, as if towards the phantom of a long-extinguished sun. ‘So bright, so hot. So dry. The British knew that. They knew it and used it to their advantage. They knew they were setting light to a tinderbox.
‘We had become used to the raids. The British had been bombing Bremen and Hamburg during nineteen forty-one but they weren’t able to launch significant raids. The planes had to turn back after only a minute or so over the city. What was more, Hamburg had been well prepared: we had been encouraged to convert and fortify our cellars into bomb shelters. And then there were the huge public shelters. They were massive and could take up to four hundred people easily. The shelters had been built with two-metre-thick concrete and were probably the most bombproof shelters in any European city. They may have protected us from the blasts, but they didn’t protect us from the heat.
‘By nineteen forty-three the British bombers were able to bring much bigger payloads and to stay over the city longer. We were spending more and more time in the shelters. Then, at the end of July nineteen forty-three, the British came over in force. Two nights before they had bombed the city centre… that’s when they hit the Nikolaikirche and the Zoo. The night after that there had been a tiny raid, just to unnerve everyone. But on the night of the twenty-seventh and the morning of the twenty-eighth they turned Hamburg into hell. They made their intention clear in the name they gave their operation – there was no way they could claim that what happened was an accident. “Operation Gomorrah”, they called it. You know what happened to the city of Gomorrah in the Bible, don’t you?’
Fabel nodded.
‘It was just before midnight. For some reason the sirens didn’t give as much warning as usual. We didn’t have a cellar in our building so we all spilled out onto the streets. It was a beautiful clear warm night and the sky was suddenly filled with “Christmas trees” as we had all come to call them. They were beautiful – really beautiful. Huge clusters of sparkling red and green lights, great clouds of them, drifting gracefully down onto the city. I actually stopped to watch them. Of course, what they were were marker flares for the next wave of bombers. I heard it approach. You can’t imagine what it sounded like: the engines of nearly eight hundred warplanes combined into a single deafening, reverberating drone. It is amazing the terror that a sound can stimulate. It was then that we heard another sound. An even more terrible sound. Like thunder, but a thousand times louder, rolling across the city. People started to panic. Running. Screaming. It all became crazy and I lost sight of my family in the crowds. And Karl. I couldn’t see him either. Then he just appeared from nowhere and grabbed my arm. He was mad with worry – he had lost his family too. We decided to head for the main public shelter, assuming our families would do the same.
‘We made it to the public shelter but the blast doors were closed and I had to hammer on them before an old man in a Luftschutz warden’s helmet let us in. We searched but couldn’t find our families and we demanded to be let out again but they wouldn’t open the blast doors. I remember thinking that it didn’t matter. That we were all going to die anyway. I had never heard so many bombs hit us before. It sounded as if some giant was hammering the city flat. Then it eased off. The next wave was not so loud. Quieter explosions, as if they were using a much lighter bomb. But, of course, that wasn’t it. The bastards were dropping phosphorus on us. They had it all planned out: first the high explosives to shatter the buildings and then the phosphorus to start the fires. I had to sit there and think of my mother and my two sisters somewhere out there. I could only hope that they had found a shelter. Karl was the same, but he was almost hysterical about it. He wanted to get out to find his sister and his mother. Everyone had been calm in the shelter to start with, but soon our nerves were as shattered as the buildings outside. Then it started to get hotter. A heat that I can’t begin to describe. That public shelter began to turn into an oven. Like all the shelters, it was airtight apart from the pumps to bring air in from the outside. We were using a manual bellows pump but we had to give up because we were filling the shelter with smoke and scorching hot air. Eventually, we started to suffocate. What we didn’t know was that it was happening in cellars and shelters all over Hamburg. The firestorm, you see. It was like a hungry beast that fed on oxygen. It sucked it out of the air. All over the city, first the children and the old people, then the others, either suffocated or baked to death in the airless shelters. Some of us insisted that the doors were opened so that we could see what was happening outside, but the others said no. Eventually, once the sound of the bombing had ceased, everyone was so desperate for air that it was decided to risk it.