The winter weather in Dresden lifted abruptly on Shrove Tuesday, February 13, 1945, ushering in a hint of spring. On this last day before the beginning of Lent, small children begged to be allowed to wear their costumes early for the traditional Carnival Night, and teenage girls hurried to hem their dresses in time for visits to relatives’ homes. North of the Elbe River, the Circus Sarrasani finished erecting its huge domed tent, expecting a full house because the skies promised to be clear. The POWs were vaguely aware of the holiday, but everything seemed to be happening far away.
That night, air raid sirens sounded at 9:51 pm. Many of the Shrove Tuesday celebrants returning home barely hurried. Looking up, they saw no bands of blue-white searchlights crisscrossing the darkness overhead and no antiaircraft guns pounding at enemy planes, because there were no searchlights or antiaircraft guns remaining in the city at all. They had been dismantled and taken by trucks to protect the industrial areas of the Ruhr Valley.
Ten minutes after the air raid sirens began moaning, brilliant magnesium parachute flares fell from the sky—“Christmas trees,” some romantic-minded Germans called them. Dresden’s buildings, fountains, statues, trees, rail lines, the zoo, the Circus Sarrasani—the Elbe River itself—were all illuminated for the last time, in a kind of flickering snapshot of seven hundred years of European civilization.
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