the bombing of Dresden: A TESTIMONIAL
Edda West
of Current Concerns No 2, 2003
September 11, 2001, as I watched the horror and destruction of the World Trade Center, I remembered the pictures of the place from which I came, all that my family had to face and wakes me in the deep cellular memory that I still have survived as the bombing of Dresden in 1945. I could feel the despair and terror of the poor people trapped in the towers, the terrible knowledge that there was no way out and that what I was observing was the collective death of thousands of people, an unimaginable mass murder. My mind was screaming: this is Dresden! E 'Dresden again! I am a new witness. It 's another time, another place, but the horror and destruction are the same and the only difference is a milder death toll, a few thousand people compared to the many hundreds of thousands of innocent people who died in Dresden.
I was born in the early morning hours of September 7, 1943, in Tallinn, Estonia, immediately after an intense bombardment of the city by the Soviets. When the sirens began air to play, my mother, pregnant and in the process of labor, took refuge in a cellar at a friend's house, not knowing if he would stay alive from one minute to the next or whether he would live to give birth to the child was about to give birth.
Over the years, I have often wondered what strange karma, and what fate has brought me into this world was during the intense bombing and what miracle has allowed us to survive not just the one night of terror, but to many other episodes that led us to brushes with death while fleeing the militias that have engulfed the Soviet Estonia for the next 50 years.
During the Second World War, Estonia was occupied on numerous occasions by both the Soviets from the Germans. He had suffered under the brutal threats of invasion of the Russians from the east, had faced occupations and violence against his people over the centuries and had fought to defend their language and culture from the perpetual threat of annihilation.
And as the Estonia had been occupied at times even by German troops, the influence exerted by Germany had lived in a different way. There was the idea that the culture of Estonia had evolved under German influence, in terms of education, architecture, literature. And there was the sense of community with a culture more noble than the hordes of marauders that would have rained down from Russia in terrible waves of looting and massacres.
Towards the end of 1944, it became obvious that Germany was retreating and that his army was preparing to leave Estonia for the last time. In people spread the chilling realization that there would be more of a buffer force to oppose the Soviet armed and that a permanent occupation and brutal by the Communist forces was imminent and inevitable. During the first Soviet occupation of 1939/40, my grandfather and many other members of our community had already been deported to the Siberian gulag (work camps), where he had died of cold and hardship, and most of the village men were forced military service. The
my grandmother's farm had been occupied for some time by German troops. It was a large farm, whose resources enabled them to feed many of those soldiers. It proved to them a sense of gratitude for the protection offered against Soviet troops. My mother fell in love with a German officer who served in the army as a doctor. When the fall of 1944 the German army began retreating and it became clear that the communist invasion was inevitable, that kind German doctor made sure that I, my mother and my grandmother could leave the country.
We went with a German ship evacuation, which reached Germany via the Baltic. The ship that was in front of us was bombed and sank, that there were survivors. He lived from moment to moment and my mother's motto was "Live today for tomorrow may never come." My mother and my grandmother were convinced that, whatever the fate that we had to face, it was still better than being sentenced to Soviet labor camps and certain death, if we had remained in Estonia. We saw no more that a German doctor, who was recalled to serve his country. We joined the river of thousands of refugees seeking shelter and a safe place, wondering every day where we could find food and shelter and to hide where we could have salvation.
Hunger and malnutrition were our constant companions. My mother crawled on their knees at night through the fields in search of a little 'food, digging with their hands in hopes of finding the abandoned remnants of a potato. Even in the years following the war, when we were finally safe in Canada, my grandmother's eyes filled with tears when I started to complain about a food that I did not like. It reminded me of what was sacred food and how she had kept aside every crumb of bread so I could feed. The flow of humanity
homeless, the homeless and desperate shocked by the bombs, starving refugees, all had a single, fervent prayer that the war would end soon, which could survive horror, go home, meet their families, and that by the time they were allowed to find a safe haven where one can rest their souls tried by war. It happened
Dresden was the destination, answered prayer, the safe haven for hundreds of thousands of refugees, most of whom were women and children. Many fled from the gun Soviet arriving from the east and had come to Dresden because they had heard that it was a safe place, it would not be targeted by the bombing because there were no munitions factories or military installations nor heavy artillery capable of feeding the war machine. Even the Red Cross was promised that Dresden was bombed. It is estimated that more than half a million refugees had returned to the area of \u200b\u200bDresden in search of safety, making more than double the number of ordinary people.
I do not know where our ship docked or which route to take to go to Dresden. But it is likely to come ashore near Danzig, and that way we did then slowly inward with a visit to Dresden. I remember my mother and my grandmother often spoke of their need to strike again during the trip, behind the Soviet lines, since the Russian army was advancing from the north and east. They walked on foot for hundreds of miles, with backpacks on their shoulders and girl tied me up and pushing a cart on which they had piled their meager belongings. For years my mother kept the old snow boots he had worn and that reminded her of that long march and bleeding feet. They always pulled out of the drawer when it came to war stories. Those boots were worn and soaked in blood like old trusted friends who had helped her during that long journey.
I do not know how long to stay in Dresden. My grandmother, in exchange for some 'food, working as a nurse in a hospital in the suburbs and had found nearby, a room to live in a garret. But even if the safe haven was finally reached, both women instinctively knew that security would not last long, because the Soviets were moving rapidly towards Dresden and approaching each day. During their journey from refugees, their biggest fear was to fall back into the hands of the Communists and to be sent back to Estonia and then in the Soviet labor camps.
My memory of the bombing of Dresden is mediated through the eyes of my grandmother, who witnessed the horror and devastation, and includes some episodes that history has recorded. The experience of Elisabeth, the only other survivor of the bombing of Dresden, which I've encountered in life, can give a personal dimension to this story. Although I was too young to have conscious memories, I relived those events through nightmares that were repeated constantly in my first 12 years of life, with my subconscious struggling to get rid of the collective terror that had been imprinted on my soul and I tormented with images of death and destruction, with frightening fires announcing the end of the world, with the land that opened in crevices of hell ready to swallow.
My grandmother always started the story of Dresden with the description of the bunches of red candles burning which descended from the first bombers, and lit up the sky like hundreds of Christmas trees, a sure sign that this would be an air attack of all respect. Then came the first wave of British bombers, which struck shortly after 10 pm the night of 14 and 15 February 1945, followed by two more bombing raids by British and Americans over the next 14 hours. The story takes the view that it was the deadliest bombing of all time, with a death toll exceeding that of the atomic explosions at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
In 20 minutes of intense bombing, the city became an inferno. The second attack came three hours after the first, with the stated purpose of "attacking the rescuers, firefighters and residents fleeing totally without coverage." Overall, the British launched about 3,000 tons of explosives, that destroyed roofs, walls, windows and entire buildings that included hundreds of thousands of incendiary substances from phosphorus, a flammable liquid that is unquenchable fire which spread in every crack that penetrated, lighting the fuse Dresden hell that turned into a "hurricane of flames. "
When the Americans flew over the city for the third and final attack, the smoke rising from the burning city nearly obstructed visibility. An American pilot recalls: "By launching bombs from an altitude of 8,000 meters and we could barely see the ground because of clouds and tall columns of black smoke. Not a single shot was fired at the bombers, British or Americans. " The Americans rushed 800 tons of explosives and incendiary bombs within 11 minutes. Then the Americans went down P-51 flying low and began to strafe the people trying to flee the city.
My grandmother described the terrible fire storm that rages like a hurricane, destroying the city. It seemed that the air itself was on fire. Thousands of people were killed by the explosions, but a huge number of unknown and was incinerated by the firestorm, an artificial tornado with winds that were running at over 100 mph and that "sucking their victims and debris into the vortex and oxygen burning with temperatures of 1,000 degrees centigrade. " Several days later, when fires were extinct, my grandmother made a tour in the city. What she saw was indescribable in any human language. But the suffering etched on his face and the depth of anguish reflected in her eyes as she told this story was the last witness of the horror, cruelty to man and the absolute obscenity of war.
Dresden, Saxony's capital, a center for art, theater, music, museums, university life, resplendent with harmonious architecture, a place of beauty full of lakes and gardens, was completely destroyed. The city burned for seven days and remained hot for weeks. My grandmother saw the remains of the multitudes of people who had desperately tried to escape the fiery storm diving in ponds and swimming pools. The parts of their bodies were soaked in water were left intact, but the parts that protruded above water were charred beyond all possibility of identification. What he saw was a hell beyond human imagination, a holocaust of destruction that defies description.
It took more than three months only to bury the dead, thousands and thousands of bodies were dumped in mass graves. Irving wrote: "The bombing had hit the target so disastrous, that had not survived a sufficient number of healthy people to bury the dead." The massacre mass terror and created so much confusion and disorientation that it took months to understand the real extent of the devastation and the authorities for fear of a typhus epidemic, cremated thousands of bodies in hastily prepared and pyres fueled by straw and wood . The estimate of casualties inflicted by Germans came up to 220,000 dead, but the completion was interrupted by the identification of corpses in Dresden by the Soviets in May.
Elisabeth, who at the time of the bombing of Dresden was a girl of 20 years, wrote for his children in a memorandum describing what happened that day. He had taken refuge in the cellar of the house in which he lived, and said: "Then the detonation of the bombs began to shake the ground and all, in a panic, rushed down to the basement. The attack lasted about half an hour. Our building and the surrounding area were not affected. Almost all went back upstairs, thinking it was over, but it was not. The worst was yet to come and when it arrived it was a living hell. During the brief reprieve, the basement was full of people seeking shelter, some of which were injured by shrapnel bombs.
"A soldier had been sheared off a leg. He was accompanied by a doctor who tried to take care of him, but he was screaming in pain and there was a lot of blood. There was also a wounded woman, whose arm, just below the shoulder, had been cut and now hung suspended from a piece of cartilage. A military doctor took care of her, but blood loss was very extensive and his screams were appalling.
"Then again began to drop bombs. This time there was no pause between detonations and shocks were so strong that we lose our balance and we were thrown here and there in the basement like a bunch of rag dolls. At times the walls of the basement is divided in half and lift it up. We saw the flashes outside of the terrible explosion. There were a number of incendiary bombs and containers of phosphorus spilling everywhere. The phosphorus was a thick liquid that ignited when exposed to air and when it penetrates into the cracks of the buildings burned everything it came into contact. Its fumes were toxic. When we saw him slide down the stairs of the basement, someone shouted to get the beers (there were a number stored in the place where we were) to moisten a cloth or a piece of our clothes and press it against your mouth and nose. The panic was terrifying. All pushed, pushed and scratched to get hold of a bottle.
I had removed a piece of linen, I had soaked in beer and presses it against his mouth and nose. The heat in the basement was so intense that It took only minutes to the piece of cloth dries up completely. I was like a wild animal, protecting its reserves of moisture. I'm glad to not have second thoughts.
"The bombardment continued. I tried to stand leaning against the wall and I ripped the skin from his hand. The wall was hot. The last thing I remember about that night is that he lost his balance, that I clung to people to keep up, but then fall to be dragging on the ground with me, saw me fall on him. I felt that something had broken inside. While I was lying there on the ground had only one thought: to continue to think. As long as I knew that I was thinking it meant that I was alive, but at some point I lost consciousness.
"The thing I remember is right after I heard a terrible cold. I realized at that moment to be lying on the ground, I saw the trees on fire. It was daylight. On some trees, animals were screaming. There were monkeys in the zoo, which had caught fire. I began to move his legs and arms. It was very bad, but could not move. The sensation of pain told me that I was alive. I believe that my movements were noticed by one of the soldiers of the emergency medical departments.
"These departments had been sent to every area of \u200b\u200bthe city and were open to them outside the cellar door. They had brought all the bodies out of the building in flames. Now they were looking to understand if any of us showed signs of life. Later I learned that the cellar had been extracted from more than one hundred and seventy bodies, twenty-seven of whom had returned to life. I was one of them. A miracle!
"Then they tried to bring the hospital out of the city in flames. This was an appalling attempt. A burn was not only the buildings and trees, but the asphalt road. For hours the truck tried to find alternative routes, before he could come out of the chaos. But before the rescue vehicles could carry the wounded to hospitals, some enemy planes sank back towards us. We were pushed in haste out of the truck and made lie away beneath them. The planes fired on us with machine guns, throwing firebombs other.
"The most vivid memory in my mind is that of images and the cries of human beings trapped in the asphalt melted and hot, burning torches as a calling that no one could help him. At that moment I was too numb to fully comprehend the horror of that scene, but when I was "safe" in the hospital, the impact of those pictures and everything else caused me a complete nervous breakdown. They had to tie me to the bed to prevent me alone inflict serious wounds. I cried for hours and hours behind closed doors while a nurse remained at my bedside.
"It makes me wonder how all this is still so vivid in my memory (Elisabeth had more than 70 years since he wrote these lines). It 's like opening a dam. This horror is left in me, in my dreams for many years. I am happy not to feel more feelings of anger or rage when I think of these experiences. I feel only a great compassion for the pain to anyone, including my own. "
"The experience in Dresden was very vivid in me for the rest of my life. The media later reported that the number of deaths caused by the bombing had been estimated at over 250,000, more than a quarter of a million people. This was due all refugees who arrived in Dresden looking to escape the Russians and the reputation of the safe city of Dresden where he enjoyed. There were no air raid shelters, because it was made a deal with the Red Cross.
"What became of all those dead bodies? Most remained buried in the rubble. I think all of Dresden became one mass grave. For the majority of those bodies, each identification was impossible. So the relatives of the victims were never warned. Countless families were left without mothers, fathers, wives, sons and relatives of which today no one knows anything. "
According to historians, the question of who ordered the attack and he has never been answered. To date nobody has been able to shed light on these two crucial questions. Some think that the answer may lie in unpublished papers of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower, Winston Churchill and perhaps others. The story reports that the British and American attack against Dresden caused a death toll equivalent to two and a half times that England had suffered throughout the Second World War and that among the Germans who died during the war, one in five died during the holocaust of Dresden.
Some say the motive was to inflict a fatal blow to the German mind, that the psychological impact caused by the complete destruction of the heart of German history and culture have brought to its knees Germany once and for all.
Others say it was an experiment to test new weapons of mass destruction, the phosphorous incendiary bomb technology. No doubt there were at the root of all necessary control and power. The insatiable need of the dominant to impose control and power over captive and fearful humanity is what leads to mass killings such as the bombing of Dresden or Hiroshima.
But I believe that there was a further and more cynical motive, which could be the reason why every full investigation of the bombing of Dresden has been deleted. The Allies knew full well that hundreds of thousands of refugees were headed to Dresden in the belief that was a safe haven and the Red Cross had been assured that Dresden was not a lens. At that point you could see the horizon the end of the war and would have faced the problem of the huge mass of refugees caused by it. Cha do all these people after the war? What better solution than the final solution? Why not kill two birds with one stone? From the burning of the city, along with a large percentage of its residents and refugees, the effectiveness of the new incendiary bombs had been tangibly demonstrated. Awe and terror had been instilled in the Germanic people, thereby speeding up the conclusion of the war. Finally, the bombing of Dresden assured the substantial reduction of a huge ocean of humanity junk, considerably reducing the problems el'incombente burden of postwar resettlement and restructuring.
We may never know what was in the psyche of the powerful men of that age or who were the real reasons that led to unleash a monstrous devastation so against the lives of civilians, mass murdering helpless humanity which did not constitute any military threat and whose only crime was to seek relief and shelter dall'infuriare the war. In the absence of any military justification for such a slaughter of civilians, the bombing of Dresden can only be considered a horrible crime against humanity, waiting silently and invisibly justice, to resolve and heal so much in the collective psyche of its victims as well as in that of his executioners.
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