The Valour and the Horror

Elli Nawroski was a sixteen-year-old girl worker in a small paint factory in Bankstrasse, Hammerbrook. This night it had been her turn to sleep in the factory air-raid shelter as part of the works' fire-fighting team. When the sirens sounded, the members of this team had gone to various parts of the factory, ready to deal with incendiary bombs.

It wasn't long before we had to go down to the shelter. The houses opposite had no basements and the women and children there ran across into our shelter also. Above this shelter was our paint factory in which there were stored several tons of highly explosive liquid nitrogen.* We were all sitting on the floor, where we thought it would be safer, heads bowed, praying. The civilians who had come thought that we air-raid people, with steel helmets and some sort of uniform, were fully trained and that they would get some protection in the company of such people. This was not true. I didn't even know where the water hose was. I was just a sixteen-year-old girl with such a uniform and a steel helmet.

The earth shook, the walls cracked and the plaster came down like flour until the whole basement was one cloud of dust. We thought that it was like an earthquake. No one spoke a word.

Then, the nerves of one of my colleagues snapped. There was complete silence in the shelter when this girl suddenly started to laugh. There were obviously heavy bombs bursting near by and, maybe, this girl thought that her house had been hit. Someone said 'This is nothing to laugh about,' to which the girl replied, 'This is all I have ever wanted.' She really had no idea what she was saying. Her mother and grandmother were both killed that night.

* The liquid nitrogen would not have exploded but would have evaporated quickly causing skinburns, damage to eyes and suffocation.