I'm a woman

I'm a woman
Photos copyright Laurence Gouault
No reproduction on other media without the photographer's permission.

Thursday 15 October 2015

Dresden and tears. By Stevie Haston.


Well it rained and we went to Dresden. I wanted to go to Dresden when I was a little boy, as I had seen great old photos and engravings of the most beautiful city in Germany, a little later I found out we had bombed it into obliteration and beyond! Clearly I had been looking at a pre "bombing them back into the stone age" photo. It was on the night of the 13 Feb 1945 at the end of the war, that for some weird arbitrary reason we levelled the city. Creating a fire stone that killed a civilian population!


 This church, cathedral, or monument was totally reconstructed from the ashes, and has only in the last few years been finished. The Dome of the church survived for a day or so, only to fall through the gray sky. It was a heart breaking moment for the city which now stood in roughly 5 square miles of flattened rubble and ashes.


 This plaque is on a few meter high bit of rubble that is in front of the church, and says in some very fine words how the man witnessed the dome crumple and with it his spirit too.

 a hundred meters of lovely cartoons and graffiti!

Each King or potentate is either called Charles the fat, or Charles the not so intelligent.

When you go to Dresden, and realise the meanness of obliterating the most beautiful city in Germany, just try and understand we are still doing this. We did it in Iraq, and now we are doing it in Syria. Why are we doing it?