A House in Dresden

One cold night in November 1932, two girls were running through Dresden's narrow, medieval streets, carefully avoiding the circles illuminated by the streetlights. They were dressed in assorted rags, too thin to offer any substantial protection from the cold that was causing a coating of frost to appear on the windows of the houses that enclosed these dark streets. One of the girls looked to be around 15 years old; the other was probably 8 or 9. The convoluted route they were taking through the twisted labyrinth that was Dresden suggested that they had no plan, and no idea where they intended to get to, and were merely trying to put as much distance as possible between them and their pursuers. Every time they heard anyone approaching, they withdrew into the shadow cast by doorways or other irregularities in the walls that surrounded them, like rabbits hearing footsteps might dart into their burrows. Eventually, exhausted, terrified and half-frozen, they reached a large house that seemed far older than the ones surrounding it - perhaps dating from the 16th century. There was no glass in the windows, and the roof was missing many tiles but, since the girls had for several months now lived in a shack constructed from miscellaneous pieces of wood, corrugated iron and even - in some places - cardboard, it would suffice for shelter, both from the elements and whoever was chasing them. As it was obviously uninhabited, they entered.

Outside Dresden, there was a shanty town, as there was outside every German city at this time. In America, the equivalent were known as Hoovervilles. These ramshackle oceans of whatever materials their inhabitants could acquire were the dwelling-places of those left destitute by the Wall Street Crash and subsequent depression, those whose homes had been repossessed because they were unable to pay their mortgages and as a result were left homeless with minimal assistance from the government. These were the abodes of that mass of humanity cast out and abandoned by society. This chaotic monstrosity was where the girls we have already mentioned originated.

In the midst of this seething mass of decrepitude, there was a tree, and leaning against that tree the following morning, with a bloodstained face and a large, ragged knife wound in its stomach was the dead body of a man wearing an armband displaying the hammer and sickle of communism. Presumably, he had been killed by the Storm Troopers, but no-one could be certain. An area round the body had been cordoned off by the police, but there was a large crowd of people either with genuine interests in the person who had been killed, or merely possessed - as humans almost always are - by a fascination for the macabre, just beyond the tape separating them from the dead communist.