When the safety of an open space was too far for the fugitives immediately to reach, they had to try to get there in stages, taking what shelter they could along the way. One woman tells how she, her husband and daughter travelled from one burning cellar to the next, sheltering for as long as the flames were not immediately threatening, before moving on again. They did this no fewer than seven times, before finally succumbing to despair:
So we had finished with our lives. There was too little hope of escaping this hellish cauldron. No way to break through this ring. We no longer said a word to one another, we did not cry either, nor did we whine or complain, we only stared silently in front of ourselves. Suddenly we were told there was an escape route by the railroad embankment, that we should get onto the rails, since no trains could come because the station had been destroyed. We then slid down a long rope on to the platform. Today I can’t imagine how we managed to get down there – but anyway, we got down. Exhausted, we threw ourselves on to the embankment. However, the grassy knolls were so hot that one could not stay on them. The opposite embankment had already caught fire. Hannelore climbed to the top of the embankment with the last of her energy in order to see how thick the smoke above was… She called to us, and we climbed with what little strength we still had to the top, our cramped hands in the hot grass. When we arrived at the top, we fled into a small corrugated metal toilet. Here people sat on top of each other in the disgusting air, safe only from the sparks, and in no way from the smoke. 38
On such a hellish night, a public toilet was a welcome haven, particularly if the cisterns still had water in them. Erika Wilken and her husband Willi found shelter in a toilet under the street on Grevenweg, at the centre of the firestorm area in Hammerbrook. For a while they huddled with at least eighty others, wetting a blanket in the water from the cisterns to drape over their heads. When it ran out they used the water from the toilet bowls. There was little they could do beyond staying put, and hoping not to suffocate as all the oxygen was sucked out of the air by the fires. But worse was to come:
To our misfortune, a large phosphorus bomb fell directly outside the entrance (whose door had been blown off on Saturday evening). The people nearest the door now gave way to an indescribable panic. The inner lavatory doors were torn off and used as shields in front of the bomb. After a few minutes, they too were burning brightly.
Terrible scenes took place, since all of us saw certain death in front of us, with the only way out a sea of flames. We were caught like rats in a trap. The doors were thrown on to the canister by screaming people and more smoke and heat poured in. In the meantime, the water in the tank had been used up… My husband was completely worn out and we crouched next to the bowl. The other people here sat down too; some collapsed and never woke up again. Three soldiers committed suicide. I begged my husband to beat back the flames with our blanket – the one object we had brought with us apart from our papers – but he was no longer able to do so. So with my last strength I did it. My hair began to singe and my husband extinguished it…
What now? Our hearts were racing, our faces began to puff up and we were close to fainting. Perhaps another five or eight minutes and we would be finished too. On my question ‘Willi, is this the end?’, my husband decided to risk everything and try to reach the outside… I took the blanket and he the little suitcase. Quickly but carefully, so that we would not slip on the corpses, we reached the outside, me first and my husband behind me. One! Two! Three! We were through the wall of fire. We made it. Both without burns; only our shoes were singed. But our last strength and courage had gone. We lay down on the ground at the side of the canal… People swimming in it kept wetting our blanket for us. 39
Erika and Willy Wilken had stumbled by accident upon probably the last safe haven in Hammerbrook. Away from the relative security of the parks and open spaces, the canals that criss-crossed the area proved the only salvation for thousands of people. Beside the water they were a fraction cooler, and the air near the water’s surface was breathable. Most of the fugitives did not stop on the canals’ banks but hurried to submerge themselves, cooling their burns in the life-saving water.
Yet even here it was not completely safe. There are many tales of people becoming drenched in liquid phosphorus and being unable to extinguish the flames, even by throwing themselves into the canals because phosphorus burns as soon as it comes back into contact with oxygen. Most of these stories can be dismissed as repetition of a particularly gruesome urban myth, 40but the British used liquid phosphorus in some of their incendiaries, and there are enough first-hand eyewitnesses to make one or two instances of this terrible story possible.
Just as dangerous, however, was the thin layer of oil on the water’s surface. Ben Witter, who witnessed the firestorm as a local journalist, describes the circumstances in which some people found themselves as they sought shelter in the canals:
It is difficult to explain how water can burn. It was burning because very many ships, small ships, had exploded and oil had been released into the water and the people who were themselves on fire jumped into it and… I don’t know, some kind of chemical must have been in it… and they burned, swam, burned, and went under. 41
The official report of the Hamburg police chief confirms that while the canals were often the only safe place to go they were still by no means comfortable. Even those who stayed in the water throughout the firestorm suffered burns on their heads; they were obliged to keep wetting their faces to avoid perishing in the heat. ‘The firestorm swept over the water with its heat and its showers of sparks so that even thick wooden posts and bollards burned down to the level of the water.’ 42Many people were obliged to stand in the water or swim for hours; some became exhausted and drowned. Others died from injuries caused by falling masonry and other debris that fell on to the water’s surface.
Twenty-one-year-old Heinz Masuch was driven to the Süd Kanal after being forced to abandon every other place of refuge he’d come across. Having left his shelter in Robinsonstrasse (a street so badly burned that it has since been erased from the map), he tried the docks, the Sorbenpark and a space behind the pillars of a bridge – but in each case the temperature became so unbearable that he and his companions feared that their clothes would ignite.
So we sat in the canal up to our necks in water and our wet jackets and coats over our heads. If we thought we had escaped the flames there, we were gravely mistaken, as there were glowing coal barges floating along, from which we had to protect ourselves. We must have spent two hours, maybe more, in the water, until the fires had died down. 43
Wolf Biermann’s mother was likewise trying desperately to find a safe place for them to weather the storm. Having taken shelter in a factory for a short time, she was now steering her son towards one of Hammerbrook’s canals, rightly assuming that it was the only place left that might offer them safety. As he recalls, he was still clutching a little bucket of jam she had entrusted to him in the cellar:
Back into the streets? To try that was to put yourself straight back into the blaze. That was suicide. Impossible. But we had to go. We turned left round the corner, there was a canal, a bridge. My mother tried to reach the water with me near the bridge. We crawled through the handrail, down the canal’s bank… We reached the water, found a spot in the group of people and stood in the water. I was standing next to an old lady who on every finger was holding a little suitcase or handbag, everything she could grab. And now that was all floating on the water. I saw, from my low point of view, that my head was at the same level as her hand. And suddenly I could see right in front of me how the woman’s fingers were losing their grip, how the suitcases were floating away, how the woman was sinking. Then she was gone.