Ratingen.
The mayor of Ratingen, Klaus Pesch, knows many of the injured firefighters well. The city, he says, was “stunned.”
Klaus Pesch has been doing voluntary service with the volunteer fire brigade in Ratingen for 25 years. We spoke to him 24 hours after the bloody crime. “If you have gone through dangerous operations together,” he says, “then words like fire brigade comrade, fire brigade comrade are not just empty phrases.” He hasn’t been able to sleep since three in the morning, and sometimes he can’t fight the tears anymore .”
He had the situation on Thursday in the high-rise described in detail. The harmless start of looking after a helpless person. “They are at the door with the pull fix. You take off the glove to feel at the lock that nothing is burning behind it either. At that moment, someone rips open the door and something explodes. The cops and firefighters are in this aisle, it’s like a horizontal chimney.”
“The nerve cells were burned away”
The head of the fire brigade met the injured a little later “in the green area of the street” and they went down themselves. He didn’t recognize one. “What happened? How are you? Are you in pain?” he asked. “When they then say it doesn’t hurt, to a layperson it initially sounds like ‘It’s not that bad’. But in fact they couldn’t remember anything. The nerve cells were burned away.”
The seriously injured are in a special clinic for burn victims near Cologne – under full protection, isolated, because for someone with such skin burns everything that comes from the outside is dangerous. The others would be cared for by a psychologist and an emergency chaplain, third would be “placed next to someone so that there is contact when they withdraw and go into themselves”.
“Everyone talks to you, calls you, texts you”
Klaus Pesch will have one or two mayor appointments this Friday. “I try to distract myself with other tasks,” he says. But everything is different: “Everyone talks to you, calls you, writes to you.” The city was just “shocked”. And some felt “unbridled anger”.
More articles from this category can be found here: Rhine and Ruhr
