Dresden Plus 93 Days
Previously unpublished account of a British veteran, caught up as a POW in the Allied bombing of Dresden. Dick Sheehy recounts his experiences in and around the annihilated city and of life later as an escapee on the road in Germany, coming across the French, Russians and Americans, while the Third Reich disintegrated in the spring of 1945.
My experiences in Dresden have largely been suppressed throughout my lifetime. Not because I am a shy person, but because to some extent I blanked 'that time' out. Occasionally a trigger would be touched and my family and friends have had to suffer a monologue until I have cleared my system of that recall.
In 1990 I started to write my account of Dresden's dreadful time. This is about the sixth rewrite and it has been stripped as far as possible of all heroics and horrors quite deliberately. Today's news media graphically shows us all: pain, grief and destruction as an almost daily diet. I have no wish to wallow in that pit again.
In 1945 I was a young man of twenty-five years. I had been nearly four-and-a-half years a PoW, without access to real news and with a cynical disbelief of anything I heard. Also I was a survivor, living from day to day.
Letters and parcels provided my highlights; comradeship, reading and routine sustained me. To me, Dresden was what I saw in transit from Stalag IVB (Mulberg) and in the brief period after the raid. Otherwise my horizon was Niedersedlitz and its immediate neighbourhood.
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