Something Frightening Was in the Air
How a single afternoon shook a family and an entire school community.
In the early afternoon of 27 August 2026 Mrs Sommer (all names changed) drove to the Docemus school in Gosen-Neu Zittau to collect her two teenage daughters, Mary and Emma. During the drive the phone rang again and again, with the usual: “Where are you?” She kept putting the two of them off. “I’ll be there in a moment, I was only just round the corner.”
She drove into the car park they had agreed on and got out just as the phone rang again. It was her younger daughter Emma.
“Mum, Mum, drive away from this car park, quickly! There’s a rampage here!”
At first Mrs Sommer did not understand; she was confused and looked around. Behind her a large crowd of people came running from the schoolyard into the street. There were people in the car park too, gesticulating frantically. In the distance Mrs Sommer made out a brief scuffle, but could not see what was happening there. Something frightening was in the air. At the same time everything seemed unreal, as if in a film. Panic rose in her, she began to shake.
She got back into the car and drove to her children, who were waiting for her in a side street. Again many people came towards her. Some girls were crying. Then she saw her elder daughter Mary among them. Mary was not crying. Her mother asked what on earth had happened.
“There was someone with a knife. I called the police.”
“You called the police?”
“Yes, of course. Someone there is stabbing people with a knife. So I called the police.”
They drove home without knowing exactly what had happened. Many police cars came towards them. And ambulances. The school chats on the daughters’ phones were running at full tilt. Then a classmate of Mary’s rang. While they were still driving they learned who had been stabbed: a girl from Mary’s class. Mary, so brave only moments before, broke down on the back seat.
In the crush in the schoolyard Mary had seen the attacker, but had not recognised who his victim was. Many other pupils had seen the attack with their own eyes, and so had teachers. They stood there as if paralysed, unable to intervene – all except the youth worker (Erzieher), who came to her aid. The boy who later carried out the attack had stood in the schoolyard for quite a while, close to the entrance. Everyone walked past him, her girls too, Mrs Sommer says.
What exactly happened in the schoolyard Mrs Sommer only learned later, from pupils who had watched it. According to them, the boy first stabbed the girl in the back. When the youth worker came to her aid, there was a brief struggle. Now Mrs Sommer also knew what the scuffle had been that she had made out from a distance: the struggle between the youth worker and the attacker. The youth worker was killed by a single stab. After that the boy is said to have sat down on the girl and stabbed her several more times. He then stood up, raised his hands and surrendered at once.
Mrs Sommer knew the girl who was killed. She had once given her a lift in the car. Mary and she were good classmates, even if they were not close friends.
At home the first calls came from relatives and acquaintances. They wanted to know whether everything was all right with them. At that point there was still nothing to be learned from the news, and the family clung to the hope that the girl might have survived.
From the class chat Emma learned that the children who had not been collected were being gathered in the sports hall. Then came the message: “Yes, and the girl is dead.”
In the evening the Sommer family sat together and tried to grasp what had happened. To work through the horror somehow. The first hints came from the daughters. The girl had talked about her ex-boyfriend, saying he was a “psycho” and that she was afraid of him.
“She was still saying it today, in the break in the yard!”
Mary has worked through the first shock astonishingly well. The very next day she was comforting others from her class. She was one of those who had called the police at the scene. At the memorial service, too, she took on a small task together with other classmates.
Mrs Sommer marvels at her daughter again and again. She herself, she says, would never be so composed in such a situation. Mary, by contrast, can be. She is there for others, she stands up for them. Later she wants to become a social worker.
Emma, by contrast, is very angry. At the attacker. She had only just moved to this school; it was her second day. That morning she had gone at all only because her mother had insisted. Emma had developed a fear of school and wanted to stay at home. Mrs Sommer told her she only had to get through this one day, and promised to collect her after school. In the end Mary practically dragged her sister along with her. The fear has not grown stronger since then. It has turned into anger.
For all her composure, Mary too carries anger inside her. Above all at the journalists.
She had seen children being approached in the schoolyard. A crying girl was photographed. Mary walked up to the journalist.
“Have you no respect at all?”
She told the police to make sure the pictures were deleted.
Almost two weeks later Mrs Sommer is still lost for words. She broods constantly over why anyone does such a thing and what goes on inside him. She feels no anger towards the boy who killed the girl and the youth worker. She wonders rather what happened to him, and feels great pity for his parents.
“He comes from a perfectly ordinary family, after all. For his parents life is over now too.”
She remembers the girl she had seen only fleetingly, that one time, and tries to call the meeting back to mind.
It was shortly before the summer holidays. The girl sat in her car, quiet, barely saying a word. But as she got out she suddenly said, quite elated, that she too would soon be taking her driving test. After all, she would be turning 18 shortly. Then she would be able to take her friends along with her.
She did live to see her 18th birthday. For the driving licence there was probably no time left.
Mrs Sommer was deeply impressed by the way the school dealt with what had happened. That same evening there was a small memorial gathering. The next day the headmaster went into the classes and said, in essence: what had happened was terrible, but somehow everyone now had to carry on. Then the real support began. A large team of psychologists was there. The pupils could go to them if they needed help, and the psychologists also came into the classrooms. In the days that followed there were repeated moments of shared mourning. On the Monday there was a minute’s silence. On the Thursday the large memorial event took place. The media stayed outside, the street was closed off so that the ceremony could take place undisturbed. On the Friday the school community said goodbye once more to the youth worker who had been killed.
Yesterday the mother of the girl who was killed came into the classroom. Together they remembered her and shared happy memories. The pupils were invited to the funeral and also to the girl’s home. Mary found that very comforting and very beautiful.
Perhaps the school’s handling of it impresses Mrs Sommer so much because she herself, at 17, had experienced something quite different.
Back then her best friend died in an accident. Mrs Sommer felt guilty about it and carried the experience with her for many years. No one asked how she was coping with it or whether she needed help. And she herself did not know how she was supposed to work through what had happened.
So many people are traumatised now. The best friend of the girl who was killed was beside her when she was killed. Mrs Sommer asks herself: how is she to go on living with that?
She herself had put her own trauma away at the time, suppressed it. In the years that followed she suffered panic attacks. Only much later did she undergo trauma therapy. Since then she has been better.
Perhaps that is exactly what preoccupies Mrs Sommer today: a trauma does not end with the day on which something happens. It can continue, sometimes for years.
This 27 August, too, will remain. In the memories of the pupils, the teachers, the parents and friends. An entire community was shaken.