574
PARTISAN REVIEW
Protestants-in German and on Sundays rather than Saturdays. They
believed in fitting into Dresden life.
On the night of November
9, 1938,
when Jewish stores and syna–
gogues throughout Germany were attacked, the Dresden synagogue was
burned. The Tourist Board's Munch noted to me with irony that the syn–
agogue could not be reconstructed because the ruins were destroyed in
the
1945
bombing. But this does not seem to be the case. After the mob
burned the synagogue, a "civic group" cleared the ruins, an operation for
which the Jewish community was forced to pay. The Germans made a
film to document this operation, a film now in the possession of the Jew–
ish community. 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 morn–
ing, 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 last
198
who survived because of the bombing.
Herbert Lappe, a Jewish engineer whose parents survived in England
and returned in
1949,
when he was three, said "When the Dresden peo–
ple remember the bombing, some of the Jews remember how they sur–
vived." 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. The Lappes had returned to East
Germany from their wartime refuge in England to build the new Ger–
many, the bold new experiment. They never foresaw a reunification that
would leave Herbert stranded in an old Wessie-run Germany.
I met Lappe in the lobby of the Taschenbergpalais and, escaping the
Nigerian entourage, we found a quiet corner behind an enormous
Christmas tree. "Talking Jewish business behind the Christmas tree,"
Lappe quipped. By
1991
and the reunification of Germany, fifty Jews
were left in Dresden. Every year the East German government would
have a Hungarian cantor come to help them celebrate Passover and the
Jewish New Year in a hall they still use as their synagogue and meeting
place. Lappe, who is middle-aged, was the youngest remaining Jew of
