The next picture is from 1944. Around this time Hildegund started to study classical singing in Dresden. Gertrud and Wolfgang were still going to school. Wolfgang is wearing a uniform. In the final two years of WWII the older school boys had to help with defending the country by joining the Flak-artillery. These combat units were equipped with special cannons (Flak) to bring down attacking bombers during air raids.

While the boys were marching to the collapsing front lines, the girls had to spend their holidays in Reichsarbeitsdienst (RAD) doing unpaid work in factories or on farms. (The next picture is retrieved from the internet, showing marching soldiers and young women doing farm work). In February 1945 Gertrud had joined the RAD camp in Radebeul, a small town close to Dresden. Whenever possible she would visit her sister who lived in a small room in downtown Dresden.

In the night of February 13 to 14 the heaviest air raid on a city in the Second World War was carried out on Dresden (approximately 630,000 inhabitants). 773 British bombers dropped massive amounts of explosive bombs in two waves. With a lot of roofs and windows destroyed by the detonations, the 650,000 subsequently dropped incendiary bombs could have a greater impact. The firestorm destroyed about 80,000 homes, and its heat deformed all the glass in the downtown area. The British night attack on the unprotected city, which had no air defense, was followed by the carpet bombing by 311 American planes during the day.
On February 15, the already completely destroyed Dresden, which was overcrowded with Silesian refugees, faced another attack by the US Air Force. Altogether up to 25,000 people lost their lives. Many bodies, charred beyond recognition, lay for days on the road or in the rubble before the piles of corpses could be burned to prevent epidemics. (translated from https://www.dhm.de/lemo/kapitel/der-zweite-weltkrieg/kriegsverlauf/bombardierung-von-dresden-1945.html)

From the camp in Radebeul Gertrud and the other workers could see the fire and smoke, hear the noise of the detonations and, as she herself said to me “smell the odor of fried meat”. Naturally she was terribly frightened that her sister would not survive this hellish inferno and she wanted to search for her on the next morning. But the leaders of the camp didn’t allow anybody to leave the camp before the 15th or 16th because the air raids were still continuing. When she finally was allowed to walk into the city, she found the house, where Hildegund had stayed, destroyed. The basement, which was the regular air raid shelter, was still smoldering hot. Frantically Gertrud started searching and calling her sister amid the ruins, corpses and straying people, and finally found her in a state of total shock. She had lost her voice and had difficulties finding her orientation. Later she remembered that during the bombing she and the other inhabitants had stayed in the air raid shelter underneath the house. Some smoke had entered the chambers in the basement and she must have fallen unconscious. When people sought for survivors afterwards, they thought that Hildegund was dead and threw her on the pile with the corpses. But she did regain consciousness and managed to pull herself up and walk away from the horrible heap of dead bodies. Considering that temperatures in February in Germany are usually around freezing point, it’s a miracle that Hildegund survived. In spite of the nightmarish setting the sisters were overjoyed to be reunited and made their way back to the camp in Radebeul, where Hildegund could recover a little bit.
However, soon they were told to leave the camp, as refugees from the east front needed the space. Most railroads had been destroyed through the bombings. So they worked their way on foot and by hitchhiking to a small town about 200 km westward of Radebeul. In Saalfeld their uncle Hans, a catholic priest, was head of the local parish and provided them with food and shelter for some weeks.

The young women wanted to reunite with their parents and their brother in Aschaffenburg and – as no telephone communication was possible and letters were only transported irregularly – they decided to continue their journey after a few weeks on the off chance. It would be even more adventurous than the first half of the trip. A German ammunition truck gave them a lift, but when allied hedgehoppers were looming over their heads trying to destroy the remaining traffic infrastructure, they risked being blown into pieces. The American planes were equipped with machine guns and diving so low, that the pilots could be seen from the ground.

The driver managed to camouflage his truck. He and the young women hid in a ditch until the attack was over and fortunately they were able to continue the journey to Aschaffenburg.
In the meantime, unbeknown to Gertrud and Hildegund, the house of their parents had been damaged during a bomb attack on Aschaffenburg. Josef and Frieda had found a temporary home with friends in a village close to Aschaffenburg, called Hösbach. Incidentally the ammunition truck’s route passed through this village and Frieda happened to walk along the main road at the same time and spotted her two daughters in the driver’s cab. The miraculously reunited family stayed in Hösbach until the end of the war on May 7, 1945. In spite of the horrors and fears they had gone through, the Beckers considered themselves lucky that all five of them had survived, while most families had lost one or more members.
In the sixties, when my mom told me her stories from the war for the first time, she said once “There was a beauty about war, there were no worries about the future possible, because we never knew what would happen tomorrow”.