Tag #126809 - Interview #78071 (Edita Adler)

We were in Bucharest during the bombings in 1941/2 [Editor's note: actually, the American raids occurred on 4th April 1944]. It was 4th April, I remember exactly, when the alarm went off for the first time. My parents had an acquaintance, Mrs. David, who lived not very far from us, in a house with a garden. In the garden she had a shelter and that's where we went during the first air raid. I remember we were running down the street, and I looked up: there was a long row of airplanes, shining in the sun. They had a beautiful silver color and I said: 'Look, what beautiful birds!' In fact, they were airplanes, of course, and had already starting bombing Bucharest.

Another shelter was about 50 meters away from our house, in the basement of an eight-story apartment block. There were two underground basements: women and children hid in the lower one, and men in the one that was higher up and closer to the surface. We went down through a sewer, using a ladder: it was scary to descend a few meters into total darkness. And when a bomb fell near the shelter, the blast was so strong that you were practically thrown from one bench to the opposite wall of the shelter. When the alarm went off in the morning, signaling that the raid was over, we came out: it was still dark outside, and you could see a red, red sky, because of the flames, where the bombs had hit houses. Our house wasn't bombed, but one bomb fell quite close: One time, when we got out of the shelter, we saw all the curtains from our windows fluttering in the wind: the windows had been broken by a nearby blast.