NOVANEWS
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| The famous photograph in which August Schreitmueller’s sculpture ‘Goodness’ surveys the city |
February 14th is Valentine’s Day when we all remember the ones we love. It’s also in the middle of three days when, in 1945 the German city of Dresden was bombed by the Anglo-Americans. On a visit to Germany with my friend Dr. Francis Clark-Lowes I visited the city. We trod the tourist route so my guess is that we saw what Dresden wanted us to see. But it was only in the Altmarkt that we saw any public memorial to the bombing. It was a partially obscured metal plate on the ground which marked the spot where, to cope with disposing of the bodies, the citizens of Dresden had set up a huge funeral pyre. The inscription read:
“After the air-raids of 13/14 February 1945 on Dresden, it was at this place that the bodies of 6865 people were burned.”
Then engraved in stone
“Germany brought war to the world and here it was brought back to Germany.”
Not 50 meters away in the Kreuzkirche was an exhibition – “The Yellow Star” about the fate of Dresden’s Jews – and through it passed a long stream of visitors all shaking their heads in the now-obligatory expression of Holocaust-horror and dutifully inscribing their “never agains” in the visitors book.
So how is it that not fifty meters from where 6865 of their own citizens were incinerated, the citizens of Dresden chose only to remember their Jews?
