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Sinzig after the flood: How an undertaker fights for the dignity of the dead

2021-07-25T08:02:22.463Z


Many victims of the flood in the Ahrweiler district come to Reinhold Dedenbach's funeral home. He is responsible for ensuring that the dead find their peace - and that the mourners can live again.


Enlarge image

The Bad Neuenahr-Ahrweiler cemetery one day after the flood: gravestones were washed into the living rooms in the area

Photo:

Friedemann Vogel / epa

Reinhold Dedenbach does not simply say that Sinzig's dead are temporarily stored with him, cooled down to around zero degrees so that the decomposition process is delayed until the police have identified the corpses.

Dedenbach, undertaker in Sinzig, says the dead will be embedded with him.

On Thursday afternoon, twelve hours after the flood, Dedenbach had started to collect the first deaths.

In the end, there were more than 70 water bodies from the Ahrweiler district, with no names, only numbers.

His rooms offer space for 15. He had to rent a refrigerated truck for the others, which pained him.

Embedding a dead man in a refrigerated truck in the yard is not what he imagines with piety.

It is also not the case that Dedenbach thinks that the dead should now be in a newspaper and that he therefore urgently needs to talk to SPIEGEL about them or even be shown in a photo.

The families need rest, he says;

the people who are now doing their work that has to do with death also need them.

Rather, a small question after an interview at the door of the funeral home accidentally turns into a long conversation, at the end of two hours, about death and life.

Because, like the people on the rubble roads, Dedenbach, whose work is silent and obligatory, has to talk to get along.

Dedenbach says that he is still lucky because he runs the business together with his brothers.

That's good, he says.

Because they could talk.

If it gets too much for one, if nothing works, then two could step in.

Dedenbach is in leather shoes and a wine-red polo shirt, not in mud-smeared rubber boots like the people down in town.

But there are figures that leave no doubt that he plays a major role in coping with this catastrophe: 172 dead so far in North Rhine-Westphalia and Rhineland-Palatinate.

Hundreds of people missing.

Dedenbach is responsible for ensuring that the dead find rest.

He is also responsible for ensuring that the people who knew the dead can live again.

He says that it is only when a dead person is let into the earth that the processing of the horror can begin.

In normal cases, death is a very regulated, very sterile thing.

Death is determined, the undertaker comes.

If no investigation is made, the funeral will be discussed.

Perhaps a pastor will join them, a freelance speaker, a pastor.

For the people who lost their lives in the flood a week ago, funerals are more like regular improvisation.

The flood victims come to undertakers like Dedenbach, and are then distributed by the police to, for example, forensic medicine in Mainz.

Some corpses still have identification papers in their jeans pockets.

Fingerprints, DNA samples, photos are taken to answer the questions: Who was this person?

Which relatives need to be informed?

What does a number say?

Finally, if the relatives decide in favor of the Dedenbach funeral home, the dead come back to Sinzig.

Then they have their names back.

The people he buries must have a name.

It's about value, he says, everyone is important.

What do a number say?

Dedenbach is concerned with the question of dignity these days.

The last will of many of these flood deaths was often also lost.

Documents, wills.

How to treat those with dignity that no one will ever find?

He saw photos from the cemetery in Ahrweiler.

Gravestones were washed up from there in living rooms in the area.

Nobody knows anymore where one grave ended and where the next started.

Which person was where.

There are rumors that not all corpses are there anymore, especially the newly buried ones where the earth was still loose.

Coffins in the Rhine.

Many cemeteries in the Eifel, explains Dedenbach, have not been built directly on the churches on the mountain, but often below, close to the Ahr, the river, the level of which rose from 80 centimeters to 8.39 meters in 15 minutes.

Dedenbach is a fighter for the dignity of the dead.

When he talks about her.

If, for example, he only says without precise details: the sooner the rest of the corpses that are still lying in the water or under piles of rubble, the better.

Or how he designed an appropriate farewell to the victims' coffins.

"We decide what we should do with loved ones," he says.

Many people called him now.

You don't know anything.

Where are my relatives? They then ask.

He expects the funerals to begin by the end of the week.

At the cemetery in Sinzig, for example, which has remained intact.

On Tuesday evening, when Dedenbach sits down in his office and thinks a little about the past few days, which are all blurring in his head, he doesn't have a single corpse in the yard at the moment.

All are in forensic medicine.

The refrigerated truck is gone.

But Dedenbach expects that he will have to leave in the evening.

A parking garage nearby had been cleared, it was almost completely flooded.

You will find quite a few there, says Dedenbach.

Source: spiegel

All life articles on 2021-07-25

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