‘The old city is still alive’
By William Boston
Published: June 23 2006 10:35 | Last updated: June 23 2006 10:35
Rudolf Eichner supports himself on the railing of his eighth-floor
balcony with his good arm and points feebly with his mangled left at the
vista in front of him.
Some 40km to the south-east, a misty line of hills marks the
German-Czech border. On the edge of the expansive park below this
Communist-era white “Plattenbau” apartment building, the silver
floodlight posts of the local football stadium rise like lonely
sentinels out of the green. Eichner, 82, with robin’s-egg blue eyes,
grey hair and a 10-inch white scar on the inside of his arm – a reminder
of his time on the eastern front during the second world war – makes a
limp sweeping gesture at a bucolic clearing below dotted with mature
linden trees.
“Those trees were all houses. And there, see? That’s the old road,” he
says, pointing to a cobblestone driveway leading up to the Robotron
office centre parking lot. “For me, the old city is still as alive as it
was 60 years ago.”
He is speaking of Dresden, the 800-year-old baroque city affectionately
called “Florence on the Elbe” that was all but destroyed by Allied bombs
on February 13, 1945 near the end of the second world war.
cont'd....
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/56735c5e-0206-11db-a141-0000779e2340.html