Posts Tagged ‘Dresden firebombings February 13 1945’
….Mourning Girl Sea of Tears…..
Wednesday, February 13th, 2013Mr. Gunther Kannegiesser
Wednesday, February 13th, 2013
Mrs. Ursula Skrbek
Monday, February 11th, 2013..May 2010.. ..Dresden..
Mrs. Ursula Skrbek
Mrs. Skrbek and her family experienced the first wave of attacks over Dresden at home. She remembers shaking so much she couldn’t stand or sit. Her father tried his best to comfort her while bombs exploded above.
At the end of the first bombing raid, they checked the house for fires. Just the windows were broken. While checking the roof for incendiaries they could see the entire city was burning.
Her father could see the grandmother’s home burning a close distance away. He ran to get her. When he returns home through the firestorm, his clothes are on fire and he can hardly see.
“He described it as Hell. Living people were fire. How can something this beautiful be destroyed?”
During the second attack they stayed in the cellar again. More people from nearby damaged homes join them. A huge detonation went off. The house next door received a direct hit and was completely toppled.
Rumble crashes through the basement. Mrs. Skrbek was hit and briefly knocked unconscious. She was covered by rumble with only her head showing. People started to dig her out. Her mother was also hurt and unconscious. They didn’t know where her father was.
Mrs. Skrbek tries to wake her unconscious mother. She stays there for a little while. Fear and shock flow through the cellar. Her mother regains conscious and they slowly exit an unlocked cellar door.
Outside a firestorm brews, sparks and intense heat ignite the air. The balcony from their home collapses to the street, narrowly evading them. They were encircled by fire, destruction and death. Her mother collapses again.
Shortly after they’re helped by an emergency vehicle collecting survivors. Her mother suffered life threatening internal injuries.
After the bombings, Mrs. Skrbek was taken in by the Headmaster of a school. She was reunited with her grandmother at the end of February.
A former neighbor heard that her father was buried deep underneath the rubble of their collapsed home. In mid-March, a month after the bombings, his corpse was found, burnt in a fetal position. They were able to identify him because of the wristwatch he was wearing. A neighbor helped deliver the coffin to bury him.
Mrs. Skrbek still keeps her father’s destroyed wristwatch in a little box.
She lived with the Headmaster’s family for a while. The Headmaster was later imprisoned by the Red Army and never seen again.
Mrs. Skrbek was photographed in the Dresden Altmarkt with a homemade doll that survived the war.
The ruins of the Trinitatiskirsche and the Coventry Cathedral
Sunday, February 10th, 2013..February 2012.. ..Dresden..
The top photo in each series are the ruins of Trinitatiskirsche and bottom photo are the ruins Coventry Cathedral.
Trinitatiskirsche was destroyed on February 13th, 1945 when Dresden endured 3 continuous waves of Allied bombing that lasted until the next day. Only the crater lined outer walls still stand today.
The Coventry Cathedral was destroyed during the Coventry Blitz on November 14,1940 by the German Luftwaffe. Only the tower, spire, outer wall and bronze effigy of its first bishop, Huyshe Wolcott Yeatman-Biggs, survived.
Both destroyed structures serve as reminders of the indiscriminate scars of war. Coventry and Dresden shared similar fates during WWII. The cities were pulverized with bombs leaving only memories of what the famous cities once were.
The structure of the Trinitatiskirsche was used as a community center during the GDR. The ruins of the Coventry Cathedral is now used as memorial while it neighbors the new cathedral.
For those who experienced the bombings, these surviving structures are not only reminders of what once stood respectively in Dresden and Coventry but also lost memories of their childhoods and experiences with their families that were taken away by war.
Dresden…Walking in Kurt Vonnegut’s footsteps….from Slaughterhouse 5
Friday, February 8th, 2013
Mr. Heinz Meier
Thursday, February 7th, 2013
FROM ABOVE featured on the John Batchelor Show- WABC Radio
Sunday, December 23rd, 2012..December 2012.. ..New York..
My interview from earlier this year with talk show host John Batchelor was broadcast again on WABC Radio this weekend. It was the first US interview about FROM ABOVE, my limited edition book featuring portraits and testimonials of atomic bomb survivors and firebombing survivors from Dresden and Tokyo.
The interview can now be heard on the web at this link:
http://podfuse-dl.andomedia.com/800185/podfuse-origin.andomedia.com/citadel_origin/pods/WABC/WABC-Batchelor/jbs_102911b.mp3
The book can be purchased in the US, Japan and Europe from this links:
http://www.photoeye.com/bookstore/citation.cfm?catalog=I1040
There is only one edition of the book printed and there is a limited amount remaining.
From Above book review featured on Leica365.no
Saturday, July 21st, 2012..July 2012.. ..Norway..
Rune Bergan’s book review of From Above is now being featured on Leica365.no.
I hope the exhibition will see Norway.
From Above can be ordered exclusively through PhotoEye.com
From Above
Sunday, May 13th, 2012..May 2012.. ..Tokyo..
Some of the remaining copies of From Above at Gallery EF in Tokyo. About 500 more books to be sold.
In the US and Europe they can be purchased exclusively at PhotoEye.com. In Japan they can purchased directly from Gallery EF in Tokyo.
From Above book review by Japan Times
Monday, April 30th, 2012..April 2012.. ..Tokyo..
From Above, my book featuring portraits of atomic bomb survivors and fire bombing survivors from Dresden and Tokyo, was reviewed by the Japan Times on April 29th, 2012.
This is a link to the review.
http://www.japantimes.co.jp/text/fb20120429a2.html
or a copy of just the text:
Sunday, April 29, 2012
Portraits and memories of those who survived the horrors of war
By GIANNI SIMONE
FROM ABOVE, by Paule Saviano. Contents Factory, 2011, 256 p.p., ¥8,000 (hardcover)
The twentieth century had, among other things, the dubious distinction of being one of the bloodiest, deadliest times in world history. Wars, genocide, mass murders, etc, aided by the best technology available at the time, were responsible for the death of hundreds of millions of people. But who were these people? And what about the survivors? History books are invaluable sources of facts and figures, but all these data, while showing the sheer scale of those tragedies, hardly convey the suffering, hopes and desperation of millions of people caught up in the fight. In other words, the ponderous weight of History all too often ends up hiding the faces of those reluctant protagonists.
Some of those heartbreaking personal stories are now aptly shown in Paule Saviano’s book, “From Above,” a collection of photo portraits and memories of Japanese and German people who have experienced the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki; the fire bombings of Tokyo and Dresden; and the Bikini Incident. In the first half of this elegant big-sized book the photos are paired with fragments of memories, while in the second part short biographies are followed by the first-person tales of the atrocities those people somehow managed to overcome. All the texts are bilingual, Japanese and English.
Saviano used a Hasselblad camera with an 80mm lens to shoot his models the old-fashioned way, without any digital embellishments, in order to achieve a natural effect. At the same time, many of them were photographed from a low angle, giving them a distinguished air of solemnity. All the images are black and white and most of them only show the subject’s face and little else, so that the viewer is not distracted by the things in the background.
Some people might find Saviano’s choice of subject rather puzzling. After all, the American photographer is especially famous for chronicling the over-the-top and glamorous world of fashion models and rock stars. Indeed, those who have seen his loud color pictures are in for a big surprise. Whatever the subject, though, Saviano’s modus operandi and his ultimate goal are to capture people’s feelings and emotions. In this respect his humanistic approach is the same for both an American stripper and a Japanese 90-something granny. In this particular case, Saviano shows how all these people were united by similar tragic events, and yet they coped with their experiences in different ways. In Nagasaki he conducted the interviews at the Peace Park, while in Tokyo he actually visited each person’s house. In each case he spent hours talking to them and gaining their trust before finally shooting their portraits. Indeed, the whole project has a highly personal feeling, like a conversation between friends, or maybe old people and their inquisitive grandchild.
Even when shooting, the photographer never made his presence felt, letting instead his subjects speak for themselves. The result is a moving series of intimate portraits which are at the same time deceptively simple and very powerful. Except for some of the photos shot in Dresden, where a monument or a church hovers over the person like a symbol of History’s inescapable weight over our helpless lives, the blurred surroundings bring the faces to the foreground in all their deeply wrinkled beauty.
The stories at the back of the book tell of miraculous escapes, personal losses and survivor’s guilt. The Japanese hibakusha, for instance, remember how they had to endure rejection by their own people, and how those psychological wounds hurt them even more than nuclear radiations. In the end, though, one keeps going back to their portraits; those faraway gazes who seem to recall the past and, at the same time, cast a hopeful look at the future.
