Dresden, a city rising from tragic ashes While the architecture of the Frauenkirche mirrors its original design, that of the new synagogue could not be more different, striking though it is in its cubic modernity, with two inward-facing, seemingly impenetrable buildings evoking the first Israelite temples. It won the European Building of the Year award in 2002. It is, of course, impossible to walk round the city and not think of that night in February 1945, when so much of it was bombed to smithereens. Since it featured so enticingly in my old West German guide to East Germany, I also took the train a few miles further down the River Elbe to the beautiful town of Pirna, with streets where, if you removed the cars, one could well imagine Marlene Dietrich walking by. So strikingly beautiful is the town that Canaletto painted as many as 11 townscapes there. Fortunately, it was spared from Allied bombing, but, as I discovered, not the horrors of Nazism. I walked up to the beautifully restored Sonnenstein Castle, towering above the old town, half- expecting to be shown the elaborate state rooms of some German princeling. Instead, I discovered that one of the buildings in this complex was a former psychiatric "clinic" where 13,720 mentally handicapped people from a wide area of Germany and 1,031 prisoners from concentration camps were gassed between June 1940 and August 1941. Now the building serves as a museum and moving memorial to those who were killed there, with visitors able to see to cellars where these people were exterminated and read about their lives. Continuing a tour of neighbouring towns, I went on to Freiberg, an old mining town to the west of Dresden, which also, for the most part, survived the bomb attacks ("only" 172 people died in an Allied air raid on 7 October 1944) and parts of the old city wall remain. Here, as in Pirna, is another magical main square with huge cobblestones surrounded by splendid facades. Freiberg Cathedral boasts a Silbermann organ, one of four still intact in the town. The one in the Frauenkirche in Dresden was destroyed that fateful night. As I made my way back to the station to return to Dresden, I took a walk round the cemetery behind the Jakobikirche. In one corner I came across the grave of Helene Michel, a teacher, born in 1885 and killed, aged 60, in the "night of terror" (as it said on her gravestone) in Dresden on February 13 1945. Coming across this individual grave struck me more than any statistical death toll. What had she been doing that day? Marking books? Preparing lessons? There had been no school on February 13 that year as there was a shortage of coal to heat the classrooms. A few weeks after I had returned to my home in Switzerland, I happened upon the obituary, in The Daily Telegraph, of Sqd Ldr Gerry O'Donovan, DSO. At the age of just 23, he had been one of the pilots who flew out on the night of February 13-14 1945 to attack Dresden, on what was his 60th operation and 90th bombing sortie. Unlike so many others, he had been able to fly back safely to England that night. He was later awarded the DFC, and lived for a further 67 years, finally retiring to Scotland.