Remembering the Dead

Mood: somber
Stage notes: listening to sounds of construction at Neumarkt

Yesterday I spent several hours with God in a cemetary on the outskirts of Cologne. In the far back corner there is a seldom visited WWII memorial. The graves of 85 men and women are enclosed with a dense hedge. Simple stone crosses arrainged in a horseshoe mark the resting place of each person. Those which simply state ''unbekannter soldat'' are interspersed with the graves of women and young children who presumably died during Allied bombings, and old men who were either forced to fight at the end or who fell to bombs like the children.

Cologne was the fourth largest city in Germany during the War and was the first city to be bombed by the Allies in 1942. ''Operation Millenium'' dispatched over 1000 aircraft to destroy it. In a BBC broadcast, George Orwell stated, ''the amount of bombs dropped on [Cologne were] three times as much as the Germans ever dropped in any one of their heaviest raids on Britain.'' Of the 800,000 inhabitants before the war, only 40,000 remained in 1945 and 90% of the city was demolished.