The Ukraine war weighs heavily on Elsa Landfahrt.
The pictures on television brought back bad memories of her youth in the Second World War for the 99-year-old from Dachau.
Dachau – When Elsa Landfahrt sees pictures of the Ukraine war on television, bad memories are awakened: of bombs, tanks and dead people.
"Please, Europe, don't intervene in the war!" pleads the 99-year-old from Dachau.
Your voice is brittle.
She has tears in her eyes.
"If the West intervenes..." She falters.
"Then we can see something.
I don't wish that on anyone."
I will never forget the sound of the sirens.
Elsa Landfahrt
As a teenager, Elsa Landfahrt experienced the Second World War in Dachau.
She knows the feeling of having to wait in air raid shelters, of being afraid of death.
"We had to black out everything.
Not a single ray of light was allowed out.”
Her clothes always lay next to her bed.
ready to hand.
To be able to get dressed quickly and flee to the air raid shelter when the air raid alarm went off.
"I will never forget the sound of the sirens."
War in Ukraine awakens terrible memories in a contemporary witness from Dachau
At first, Elsa Landfahrt, who lived with her mother on Ludwig-Dill-Strasse during the war, found refuge in a bunker on Karlsberg.
From 1944 they hid in the Ziegler family's earthen bunker, which was located in the park behind their villa.
The Zieglers didn't use the bunker at the time because Kurt Ziegler's mother didn't want to leave the house, explains Elsa Landfahrt.
Once it was close, she didn't make it to the bunker in time.
A bomb once fell on the spot where the BRK in Dachau is now, she says.
There was a laundry and several private houses.
They were all destroyed.
Elsa Landfahrt knew a family who lived there.
"She did not survive the attack."
Bombs also hit the Amper and the Ascherbach.
"The dishes in the cupboard broke from the shock." Then came the water.
From the front and from behind, tells Elsa Landfahrt.
The water masses flooded the garden.
But the house remained intact.
She herself crouched under the stairs at her home during the bombing.
The war in Ukraine makes the 99-year-old from Dachau think of the atrocities she had experienced herself
Of course you have to help the people in Ukraine, but please not with our soldiers.
Elsa Landfahrt
Landfahrt can not stand pictures of bombing raids on Ukraine.
She only turns on the television to see if the war in Ukraine is finally over, she says.
Landfahrt never thought that there would ever be another war in Europe.
"Of course you have to help the people in Ukraine, but please not with our soldiers," she says.
Again she has tears in her eyes, her hands are folded.
Reports of Ukrainian civilians taking up arms are intolerable for Landfahrt.
"It's the most stupid thing you can do.
They don’t achieve anything with that.”
Elsa Landfahrt: "I lost all my cousins in the war"
During World War II, Landfahrt witnessed what happened to people who resisted: the dead men in front of the town hall on the day of the Dachau uprising, the woman who fired a rifle at American tanks from a window.
The Americans fired back.
Then they stormed the house where the woman was hiding.
"We heard the screams," she recalls.
She never saw the woman again.
Elsa Landfahrt was 22 years old at the time.
Many friends and family members of Elsa Landfahrt died in the war.
"I lost all my cousins," she says and has to cry.
Her husband, Josef Landfahrt, was also at war.
He fought in Russia in the Nebelwerfer Regiment.
At the end of May 1945 he returned to Dachau.
"That was my greatest happiness."
Elsa Landfahrt had two children with him.
Her husband is now deceased.
She lives with her daughter and her children in the old town of Dachau.
Elsa Landfahrt turns 100 in September.
More current news from the district of Dachau can be found here.
By the way: everything from the region is also available in our regular Dachau newsletter.
