Reblogged from besonian:

The other day, I listened to an interview, recorded very recently, with a British man, now over 100 years old – a prisoner of war I suspect – who was caught up in the bombing of the German city of Dresden by British and American air forces, 75 years ago. He came across as a very ordinary man, honest and straightforward, probably with little education beyond the elementary that would have been standard when he was school age.

Talking with the interviewer, he describes scenes so harrowing you just don’t want to hear of them – at least, in one sense you don’t. But in another, you do; we all do; scenes which we need to hear about in order to lead us to feel in our hearts what he did that night – a night when the ‘stupidity’ of war, as he put it, was so blatantly, cruelly exposed.

Continue reading at besonian