The exodus of survivors from Hamburg had begun on the night of the air raid itelf. It started, as Nossack writes, with “constant movement in all the neighbouring streets…going no one knew where.” The refugees, numbering one and a quarter million, dispersed all over the Reich, as far as its outer borders. Under his diary entry for August 20, 1943, in the passage already quoted above, Friedrich Reck describes a group of forty to fifty such refugees trying to force their way into a train at a station in Upper Bavaria. As they do so, a cardboard suitcase “falls on the platform, bursts open and spills its contents. Toys, a manicure case, singed underwear. And last of all, the roasted corpse of a child, shrunk like a mummy, which its half-deranged mother has been carrying about with her, the relic of a past that was still intact a few days ago.”

on the destruction of Hamburg by incendiary bombs,
in W.G. Sebald's "Air War and Literature."