The Hamburg floods
When I was just a little child in nineteen-fortythree
I lived in the town of Hamburg with all my family.
My father had gone off to war and left us there alone.
One night the British bombers came and destroyed our little home.
For five nights in July that year, the bombs they fell like rain
And Rothenburgsort, Hamm and Horn were one great sea of flame.
The names of those who burnt to death and choked their lives away
Were nearly fifty thousand in the mass grave where they lay.
My brothers and my sisters I never saw again,
And in the cemetery we raised for each a tiny stone.
We went to live in Wilhelmsburg with many thousand more;
With some sticks and old tarpaulin we made ourselves a home.
It was some waste land by the canal where no one else would build.
There we made our shanty town and fruitful gardens tilled.
And when the war was over they promised us a home,
But ten years passed and then five more and still they gave us none.
The night of 17th February in 1962
There came a sudden storm and before the people knew
The canal had broken through the dikes and flooded all the land:
The water swept our homes away like castles in the sand.
When we counted up the dead three hundred had been drowned,
And three hundred more that never could be found.
The City Council said that they'd find for us a place:
For six hundred people this good news came too late.
In April of that self-same year I heard a sudden noise
Of songs and shouted slogans and many girls and boys.
It was the Easter marchers, they came three thousand strong.
So I fell in behind them and I sang with them their song.
(We sang:)
“The earth it is a pleasant place, though sometimes cruel and wild.
The earthquake and the hurricane can slaughter man and child.
We should employ our greater gifts to problems such as these,
And not to murdering millions, but to building up the peace.”
Tune American traditional, The Buffalo Skinners
