Working by the light of candles and torches, 200 museum workers, police officers and soldiers carried some 4,000 paintings to the upper floors of the 19th-century palace as the Elbe rose by the hour. Six paintings too large to move were attached by ropes to pipes in the ceiling in the hope that the floodwater would not reach them.

"It was like a horror movie," said Martin Roth, managing director of the State Art Collections of Dresden. "But under horrible circumstances, we were lucky. We found the right people to help and no one panicked."

But the flooding has proved particularly traumatic for Dresden, an eastern city that since the reunification of Germany in 1991 has been working to rebuild itself around its historic cultural image. Even now, cranes stand above church towers as restoration goes ahead on the Schloss, one of the former royal residences of the Saxon dynasty that played a crucial role in turning this city into a Baroque jewel.

For older Dresdeners, the flood has brought reminders of the rebuilding that followed the end of World War II. In February 1945, Allied bombers flattened the city, killing perhaps as many as 100,000 people in the resulting firestorm. It took East Germany's Communist government decades to rebuild. A Baroque church, the Frauenkirche, which was left in ruins for half a century, is now finally being rebuilt using much of the original material.

"We pulled so many bricks out of the ruins so we could use them again," said Irmgard Krause, 75, who came to look at the floodwaters today. "And now this is shocking to see again."

Ingeborg Richter, also 75, was even more upset. "All this was reconstructed," she said. "You could see the gold shining. And now it has all gone again. It throws it back all so far. It's almost like 1945 when the war ended."

The Elbe, already close to its 1845 record high, continued to rise today as the water that swamped Prague earlier this week headed downstream toward its eventual release into the sea near Hamburg.

In Dresden, the main railroad station, the Haupt-Bahnhof, has been flooded by the nearby Weisseritz River, while gardens on the northern bank of the Elbe are underwater. Some 3,000 of the city's 480,000 inhabitants, including 570 hospital patients, have been evacuated.

Today, tourists and curious residents crowded the riverside area around the opera house and the cathedral as well as the Augustus Bridge that crosses the Elbe to watch the muddy swollen waters rushing by.

Elsewhere in Saxony, the river continued to threaten towns and smaller communities. Some 20,000 people have been evacuated from the low-lying region around Magdeburg. Nine people in the state have reportedly died so far this week.

Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, who is involved in a difficult campaign for re-election next month, has promised help to the region, $100 million of it in cash for those most immediately in need.

But, for the moment, the threat to Dresden's cultural heritage seems to have passed. Firefighters continued to pump water from the basement of the 19th-century Semper Opera, which has suffered damage to technical equipment and costumes. Officials indicated Wednesday that the opera could be open again within eight weeks, although they acknowledged that this might be overly optimistic. Mr. Roth, the state art official, said the 11 museums under his charge could be back to normal by early next year, although it will be costly to restore air-conditioned underground storage rooms. He said he plans to open new galleries for the porcelain collection at the Zwinger Palace on schedule on Oct. 6.

The Albertinum, another Baroque palace, which houses Dresden's museums of antique statuary and 19th- and 20th-century paintings, was also forced to empty its basement on Tuesday. With the help of many of the same people who had saved the Zwinger Palace artworks hours earlier, some 650 paintings and 11,000 statues or antiquities were carried up a narrow staircase to safety.

"We had candles and we had to go up those very heavy things," said Helga Puhlmann, the spokeswoman for the state collections. "You had women carrying heavy boxes. I put an Egyptian alabaster piece in a box with soft paper and carried it very carefully."

Nowhere was relief greater than in the Old Masters Picture Gallery of the Zwinger. Many of its greatest masterpieces, like Raphael's "Sistine Madonna," Giorgione's "Sleeping Venus," Titian's "Tribute Money" and Correggio's "Holy Night" are permanently displayed on the building's second floor and were never under any threat. But the museum's collection is so large that there were many works by old masters that simply could not find room in the gallery. Now they lean against the room's wall, five deep ?safe, but uncertain of their future.

(China Daily August 16, 2002)