One among several structures like it are laid out in neat rows in a bend of Germany’s River Elbe, two miles from Dresden’s historically reconstructed center. In February 1945, after sheltering in a deep underground meat locker in the abattoir-turned-P.O.W. Claiming around 25,000 lives late in World War II, the Allied firebombing raids on Dresden whipped up an inferno so fierce it sucked the oxygen from all but the most subterranean of shelters and destroyed practically everything that would burn. Vonnegut would later compare the sound of bombs stomping across the earth overhead to the footsteps of giants. Put to work by his German captors disinterring corpses from the rubble, he would one day write with characteristic black comedy that the hideous task resembled “a terribly elaborate Easter egg hunt.”

Source: New York Times March 21, 2019 18:22 UTC