In a book with a fistful of fascinating digressions, none is so striking as the slim chapter Marilyn Walton devotes in "Rhapsody in Junk" to the Allied bombing of Dresden.

The controversial annihilation of the cultural center of Saxony in February 1945 came 11 days after the Rhapsody in Junk officers, including Walton's father, Thomas Jeffers, passed through the city on a prisoner of war train.

"Allied bombers destroyed the entire city, which was also full of thousands upon thousands of refugees fleeing from (the war in) the east," Walton reports.

By that time in the book, the reader has met some of those refugees traveling beside Allied prisoners on the move from one prison camp to another.

"No one knows for sure how many were killed those fateful days, Feb. 13 and 14, 1945," Walton writes, "but estimates indicate between 70,000 to 130,000 lost."

The attack usually is addressed in the context of ethics or the morality of war.

"I had never read a firsthand account," Walton writes. Until her research led to "a chance encounter on a Web site."

The account she found is from Hugo Purins, the brother-in-law of a friend of Walton's and a German army war correspondent who had fled his native Latvia when the Russians invaded.

Written years later — after Purins had emigrated to the United States — the story unfolds like a brooding political novel by Arthur Koestler.

Purins bribes his way into Dresden with cigarettes so he can reunite with his wife, Regina, who is living there.

He is in conversation with his wife's landlord, an old lawyer, and with an ex-Wehrmarcht officer named Baumann, who was "permanently injured during winter battles in Russia," when radio warnings sound.

At first dismissed, they give way to more radio warnings, as the bombers close in on the unlikely target in waves.

"We won't die here, Regina," Hugo reassures his wife, as the carpet bombing begins. "We have lost too much already. ... We have lost everything but our lives, and God knows that. He will be with us. Just pray, forget everything, just pray."

Moments later, Walton writes, "he heard the deep-hollowed crash of collapsing buildings all around him, and he became so nervous that he bit his hand to suppress the involuntary shake which took command of his whole body."

After the devastation — in which the body of an infant in the street causes Purins to come unraveled — the lawyer says: "Dresden is dead ... a dead town, think about the people ... hundreds of thousands of them and why? Why? What for? What have we done? This is not a war. This is murder!"

Purins, Walton writes, "had other ideas."

In a rant that seems lifted from a philosophical Russian novel, Purins calls it "the price this nation has to pay for (the bombing of) London, (the sack of) Warsaw, for the concentration camps, for the ghettos and for the civilian mass graveyards over all over Europe ... a price a nation must pay for lulling itself into the hands of a dictator."

His wife worries that such words spoken in the street will get them in trouble. Instead, their actions do.

After touring the devastated city and resolving to escape, Purins puts on civilian clothing, only to find the ex-officer, Baumann, pointing a gun at him and threatening to shoot him or turn him in to authorities as a traitor.

Purins refuses to go and tells Baumann that further military service, particularly to his native Latvia, then occupied by the Russians, could do no more good.

"I can't help here anymore, not right now," he tells Baumann. "What happened here last night has convinced me of that."

In the end, Baumann not only lowers the pistol, he offers it to Purins in the event he needs it for safety's sake during his escape. Purins refuses, saying, "I have always hated firearms."

Then, "the two men looked at each other for a long minute and shook hands," the story concludes.

The Dresden digression ends there.

But the account is disarming enough that it might enable a wider discussion of the event to begin.

Contact this reporter at (937) 328-0368 or tstafford@coxohio.com.