Dresden

It’s been 64 years and Dresden is still rising from the ashes of the Allied bombing that obliterated its core in February 1945.

Buildings have vanished and people still leave to find work, but Dresden’s treasure has returned and what treasure it is.

We would have found the two day drive from our house in France worth it just to see the Amber Room in the Historic Green Vault, but then there were the 1,080 astonishing objects in the New Green Vault upstairs.

Baroque pearls adorned as figures by goldsmiths and enamelists, ivory whimsies, goblets and a sail-rigged ship, a cherry pit carved with 185 faces, an Indian mogul’s throne room in silver miniature, a pear wood moor carrying a tortoiseshell tray of emeralds and a gold coffee and tea service only skim the surface of the glories within. August the Strong, Elector of Saxony and King of Poland, collected with abandon and taste three centuries ago. Fortunately most of his art and objects were evacuated before Dresden’s nights of terror and many were returned even after the city was consigned by the Allies to the Soviet rule which lasted 40 more years.

August built the Zwinger Palace and began filling it in 1719 with art, armor, scientific instruments and porcelain, much of it Chinese. He filled his castle across the way with amber, silver, gold, bronzes, ivory and garnitures — suites of sapphires, emeralds, rubies and diamonds sparkling right down to their very last buttons in a series of highly ornamented rooms called the vault.

It has taken decades to rebuild, restore and restock both the Castle and Palace, a feat almost as daunting as the rebuilding of the nearby Frauenkirche, the city’s Protestant temple which survived the bombings only to collapse after three days from the heat of surrounding fires. The newly opened Frauenkirche was pieced together from a pile of stones. The remains of the cross which fell when the building collapsed is placed to the side under the new light, creamy and delicately decorated bell dome. It is an understated and wholly appropriate memorial.

Walking the terraces above the Elbe, the narrow streets of stately Baroque buildings and the square of Newmarket today it is easy not to recognize that almost everything is a reconstruction and that the clearing near the church is not just another archeological dig, but one more remnant of a war only old people remember.

The revitalization of Dresden’s cultural center aided by detailed Canaletto views contrasts sharply with the rest of the core city – a flatland of severe Soviet era blocks, wide avenues, efficient trams and trees not much older than 20 years.

The Hygiene Museum, which gave the world the first transparent man and gave the Nazis unqualified support before its Bauhaus inspired building was destroyed, has been reborn as well. We couldn’t translate most of the educational prescriptions, but we could read the twitters on the faces of the of pre-teen boys lingering long enough to light up parts of transparent woman.

Earlier generations would have gawked at “cantankerous woman” whose civic punishment caused her to wear a weighty stone “infamy flask” around town. It is preserved along with a model of the “fool’s cage” (undoubtedly for men) in Dresden’s Municipal History Museum. It holds a delightful and sometimes disturbing collection of artifacts from Saxon pre-history to now. The Nazi years are treated matter of factly with acknowledgment that some in Dresden followed the Nazis and profited from the import of prison laborers into the factories and then silently cooperated with deportation. A slideshow intersperses the destruction of Dresden by American and British bombers with photos of the destruction of Guernica. the blitz of London and the battering of Rotterdam by Nazis. A shiny shoe painstakingly tapped out of a tin cans sits under glass as a poignant reminder of deprivations under Soviet rule.

Not far away is Dresden’s new synagogue, an interestingly nearly windowless affair built on the site of the original by Gottfried Semper which was destroyed on Kristallnacht in 1938. It is a modern and bold statement in a community which now has but a few hundred Jewish residents.

Semper also designed the city’s beautiful opera house which not only fell to bits in 1945 but when rebuilt was nearly ruined by flood in 2002. It stands restored in Theatre Square across from the Zwinger. We toured under the tutelage of pretty, petit woman of a certain age with perfect posture and stunning silver hair tucked in a dancer’s twist. She began with a heavy sigh and launched with authority. We couldn’t understand a word, but she talked for 45 minutes non-stop leading us up a side staircase into the house where we were seated for the duration until commanded onto the marbled grand staircase.

Spring was fighting to come when we visited. Visitors queued for timed tickets to the Historic Grunes Gewolbe rooms, but the streets were quiet – more so at night when we seldom saw others. “Where are they?” I asked a first time visitor from Bavaria. “They’re gone. You see here in the hotel lobby there may be 20 workers. Ten of them will be trainees. When they finish training there may be jobs for only three of them. The rest leave. It’s a problem,” he said. He shook his head and added, “I’m not confident we’ll ever be able to absorb the East.”

Our stay in Dresden was enhanced by our lodging, the Dorint Hotel located very close to all the main attractions and with a tram stop directly in front of the building. We used the silent, clean, efficient trams exclusively.

It took longer than it should have to drive from Dresden to Krakow thanks to road works, police inspection and our own ignorance. By the time we figured out that Wyjazd meant “exit” and Uwaga meant “attention” we were practically there and got lost again.

Poland presents itself with a certain casualness in contrast to its tidier neighbors. Its roads and its countryside are a mess. It is Medieval Krakow which beckons the traveller, all the more likely today to be a Brit flying in for a cheap weekend of drinking in its many bars and the outdoor cafes surrounding Market Square. The scene on Friday night was one of young people swarming into the square from all corners as if rushing to a sporting match or rock concert. Still, Krakow has something to offer not least being the extraordinary Leonardo in the charming Czartoryski Museum. “Lady with an Ermine” is one of only four known DaVinci portraits of women. We found Cecilia Gallerani far more alluring than the “Mona Lisa” and understood why an acquaintance once drove all night just to see her.

The old Jewish quarter is a tourist attraction now but there are too few Jewish people in Krakow to maintain it so others do. There we met two interesting women from Golders Green in London who accompanied us on a walk through the ghetto and explained some of the exhibits in the old synagogue where detailed descriptions of Jewish practice were pronounced surprisingly accurate.

It was a fitting prelude to a trip to Oswiecim the following day. Auschwitz, the Germans called it. It is a grim place, made more so by the rain, wind and cold of that day as we trudged its mud packed paths and through the cold, barren brick barracks beyond forests shrouded in fog. We had misgivings about making the trip in part because it seemed an intrusive foray. In a way, it is that. There were hundreds of people — students on school trip and tourists — so many that it was single file through barracks with walls lined with thousands of pictures of people who were killed in crematoria at the end of the path or even as they arrived at the larger, grimmer, more secluded Birkenau camp nearby. It is impossible not to be horrified by what they went through.

A more pleasant day was spent at Wawel Castle where the state rooms with tooled leather walls are as tasteful as any, the cathedral is a riot of color and a museum preserves former resident John Paul II’s throne, cassock and snow white slippers in anticipation of sainthood. A “Coke” style machine dispenses his medals at 6 zloty a pop.

Prague was a treat. “Your president’s coming,” we learned as we arrived. Next day the castle was being primped and primed for his speech which drew thousands including some American students we met afterwards clutching flags in hands he had shaken.

Prague is a fairy tale city, even if its history is sometimes quite grim. The treat for us was just to wander its hills, squares and streets. It is a city where one walks a lot and enjoys a rich and consistent streetscape encompassing several centuries of style, made all the more satisfying by the absence of glass-sheathed skyscrapers. The harmonious fenestration was particularly notable, and Peter was amused because of his vivid memory of a high school history teacher discussing “the defenestration of Prague,” a concept of obvious appeal to adolescent boys.

The castle with its gardens, quiet corners, plazas, St. Vitus cathedral and Romanesque St. George basilica was a pleasant place to wander on a sunny spring day but all the more delightful was the chance to sit down by the Vltava River below and just take in the view.

We stopped more than once to appreciate Spanish artist Juane Plensa’s hommage to the Czech Republic’s turn at the rotating presidency of the European Union. “Alphabet” is part of an EU artist project called “Transparency.” Plensa’s five meter white painted steel torso incorporates characters from many languages and is as successful as a metaphor as it is as sculpture.

Paris may claim Art Nouveau, but Prague claims its creator. Alfons Mucha was a Moravian working in Paris when he designed the poster for Sarah Bernhardt that evolved into a style. The Mucha Museum near Wenceslas Square celebrates both his influence and his work.

Art Nouveau may reach its most flamboyant at the Obecni Dum not far from Mucha’s Museum. That the Czech Philharmonic was rehearsing in this totally over the top and sensational building added to our delight.

The National Museum is a great grey hulk of a building at the head of Wenceslas Square badly in need of restoration. It houses a motley collection including natural history. We didn’t expect much and were pleasantly surprised and very interested in a temporary exhibition called “Republika” which traced the history of the First Republic. We intended a quick look and stayed two hours enlightened by exhibits on the Nazi years, the handover of the Sudetenland, the abandonment of the Czechs by the allies and the Communist era. An older woman tried to explain to her granddaughter what she lived through as the distracted teen surreptitiously texted on her phone. Then we met the grandfather as he explained the significance of the Munich Agreement to his grandson and turned to us and said solemnly, “It is an original document on loan from Italy.”

Life in the Czech Republic “is not so good now,” he said, adding a lament on the absence of spirituality and once refined culture. “All the young want is money.” Outside on the museum porch, a young man was prepping for an interview as the leader of a demonstration gathering to press for the legalization of hemp.

At the City Museum of Prague in a run down area we found a delightful exhibition of objects, the highlight being a model of the city hand made in paper board and painted by Antonin Langweil from 1826 to 1837. Its detail is extraordinary, but more extraordinary is that his Prague still exists.