A Chosen Few Read Free

eighteenth-century splendor of Dresden’s golden age or simply undoing the 1945 bombing? Are they trying to remember the eighteenth century or forget the twentieth century? Are there to be no traces left of World War II?
    The Dresden debate becomes more tense when discussing one of the last baroque buildings on the restoration list. In 1838, Gottfried Semper, the man who designed the Dresden Opera house and the adjacent Old Masters Picture Gallery, also designed a synagogue. The Jews prayed in Semper’s baroque palace that looked like the Christians’ baroque palaces, holding services that resembled those of the Protestants, in German instead of Hebrew, on Sundays rather than Saturdays. They believed in fitting into Dresden life.
    Most Dresdeners remember the synagogue being bombed in 1945 along with everything else in the center. The tourist board even noted that it could not be rebuilt like the Frauenkirche but would have to be completely reconstructed from new materials because the destruction from the bombing was so total. But in fact the reason that no wall, not even stones, remain from the synagogue is that it was not destroyed in 1945. On the night of November 9, 1938, Kristallnacht, when Jewish stores and synagogues throughout Germany were attacked, the Dresden synagogue was burned. After the mob burned the synagogue, a “civic group” cleared the ruins, an operation for which the Jewish community was forced to pay. Heinz-Joachim Aris, the current director of the Dresden Jewish Community, then a small boy, remembers his father being forced to wear a yellow star as he and other Jews were made to gather the remaining stones from the synagogue and use them to pave streets.
    Of the nearly 5,000 Jews who had lived in Dresden when Hitler came to power, by 1945 all but 198 had fled or been killed or were dying in concentration camps. With the Reich rapidly disintegrating, the German government was desperate to kill the last of the Jews. On Tuesday morning, February 13, the remaining Jews received orders to report for deportation to the camps on Friday. But that evening when Dresden was destroyed, the roaring wall of fire that collapsed the beautiful Frauenkirche also destroyed Gestapo headquarters and deportation from Dresden came to an end. Aris and his family were among the 198 who survived because of the bombing.
    Herbert Lappe, a Jewish engineer whose parents survived in England and returned when he was three in 1949, said, “When the Dresden people remember the bombing, some of the Jews remember how they survived.” On February 13, when the city bells would ring to signal the gathering at the Frauenkirche rubble for the annual bombing memorial, Lappe’s mother always refused to go.
    A group of Protestants raising money for the Frauenkirche felt strongly that it would be wrong to rebuild their church and not the synagogue. They formed a “Christian-Jewish friendship group,” Lappe said. “As always happens with such groups, they were entirely Christian.” Once again the question was not what kind of synagogue the Jews of Dresden wanted but what would be the proper symbolic gesture toward this metaphoric people. The Germans wanted the Jews to have back their synagogue, eventhough the Jews did not want it. To the Dresden Jews, the baroque palace was a symbol of their parents’ failed experiment at assimilation. The few who still want to pray do not want to pray in German on Sunday or in a synagogue that looks like a church.
    The Jews want to add something different to the cityscape, something that was not there before the bombing, and so the Jewish community commissioned a concrete block, slightly twisted, straining toward Jerusalem, with a courtyard that marks the outline of the original synagogue. This was not what the Wessies had in mind for the new Dresden.
    “It is friction,” said Lappe. “It should be a needle in the town. Nothing aggressive. But people should see it and say, ‘What is this?’ ”