It is impossible to believe anything in a world that has ceased to regard man as man, that repeatedly proves that one is no longer a man.--Simon Wiesenthal, The Sunflower
I promise you that I do not purposely choose the books I will next read... And yet, the stories arrive as if arranged... By God? You see, I can't help but compare, to a smaller significance, the "disappearing" of immigrants from America via ICE's removal of those who lived in America for years, by lying and claiming that they were all criminals and gang members, under this administration. Both actions are based upon hate, or hunger for power--for no reason other than that they have a different heritage... What evil can explain actions so cruel?
From somewhere I learned that Donald Trump kept a copy of Mein Kampf on his bedside table when he was young... It was quite easy, therefore, to see the very real comparison as I learned of Reiner beating his brother in the exceprt below, who rose quickly in the German military forces... While at the same time, remembering how, when his Trump's brother, who had become an alcoholic, died, DJT worked to ensure that his two children would not receive their family inheritance as was normal in families... see books by niece, Mary Trump, by searching her name in th right-hand column...
Josef: I will not answer to the other name. That person, he is someone I like to think I have never been. But this isn’t true. Inside each of us is a monster; inside each of us is a saint. The real question is which one we nurture the most, which one will smite the other. To understand what I became you must know where I came from. My family, we lived in Wewelsburg, which was part of the city of Büren in the district of Paderborn. My father was a machinist by trade and my mother kept house. My earliest memory is of my father and mother fighting over money. After the first Great War, inflation spiraled out of control. Their savings, which they had diligently put away for years, were suddenly worth nothing. My father had just cashed in a ten-year insurance policy, and the proceeds did not even cover the cost of a newspaper. A cup of coffee was five thousand marks. A loaf of bread, two hundred billion marks. As a boy, I remember running with my mother to meet my father on payday, and then began the mad rush to the shops to purchase goods. Often, the shops had run out. Then my brother, Franz, and I would be sent at twilight into the fields of farmers who lived outside of Wewelsburg, to steal apples from the trees and potatoes from the ground. Not everyone suffered, of course. Some had invested in gold early on. Some speculated in fabric or meat or soap or produce. But most middle-class Germans, like my family, were ruined. The Weimar Republic, shiny and new after the war, was a disaster. My parents had done everything right—worked hard, saved well—and to what end? Election after election, no one seemed to have the answer. The reason I tell you this is that everyone always asks: How could Nazis come to power? How could Hitler have had such free rein? Well, I tell you: desperate people often do things that they normally would not do. If you went to the doctor and he said you had a terminal disease, you’d probably walk out of that office feeling pretty low. Yet if you shared this news with friends, and one told you, “You know, I had a friend who was diagnosed with that, too, and Doctor X cured him right away.” Well, maybe he is the biggest quack, maybe he charges two million dollars for a consultation—but I bet you’d still be on the phone to him immediately. No matter how educated you are, no matter how irrational it seems, you will follow a glimmer of hope. The National Socialist German Workers’ Party, it was that ray of light. Nothing else was working to fix Germany. So why not try this? They promised to get people back to work. To get rid of the Treaty of Versailles. To regain the territory we’d lost in the war. To put Germany back in its rightful place. When I was five years old, Hitler tried to take over the government at a beer hall—the Munich Putsch—and failed miserably by most accounts. But he learned that the way to lead a revolution was not violently but legally. And at his trial in 1924, every word Hitler spoke was reported in the German newspapers, the National Socialist Party’s first propaganda onslaught. You will notice I say nothing about the Jews. That is because most of us didn’t know a single Jew. Out of sixty million Germans, only 500,000 were Jews, and even those would have called themselves Germans, not Jews. But anti-Semitism was alive and well in Germany long before Hitler became powerful. It was part of what we were taught in church, how two thousand years ago, the Jews had killed our Lord. It was evident in the way we viewed Jews—good investors, who seemed to have money in a bad economy when no one else had any. Selling the idea that the Jews were to blame for all of Germany’s problems was just not that difficult. Any military man will tell you that the way to pull a divided group together is to give them a common enemy. This is what Hitler did, when he came to power in 1933 as chancellor. He threaded this philosophy through the Nazi Party, directing his diatribes against those who leaned left politically. Yet the Nazis pointed out the linkage between Jews and the left; Jews and crime; Jews and unpatriotic behavior. If people hated Jews already for religious reasons or economic reasons, giving them another reason to hate them was not really going to be difficult. So when Hitler said that the biggest threat to the German state was an attack on the purity of the German people, and so her uniqueness must be guarded at all costs—well, it gave us something to be proud of again. The threat of Jews was in the mathematics. They would mingle with ethnic Germans in order to raise their own status and in doing so, would bring down Germany’s dominance. We Germans needed Lebensraum—living space—to be a great nation. Without room to expand, there was little choice: you went to war to conquer territory and you got rid of the people who were a threat to Germany, or who weren’t ethnic Germans like you. By 1935, when I was already a young man, Germany had left the League of Nations. Hitler announced that Germany would be rebuilding its army, which had been forbidden after the first Great War. Of course, had any other country—France, England—stepped in and stopped him, what happened might not have happened. But who wanted to go back to war that quickly? It was easier just to rationalize what was happening, to say he was only taking back what had once belonged to Germany. And in the meantime, in my country, there were jobs again—factories for munitions and guns and planes. People were not making as much money as they used to, and they were working longer hours, but they were able to support their families. By 1939, the German Lebensraum extended through the Saar, the Rhineland, Austria, the Sudetenland, and the Czech lands. And finally, when the Germans moved into Danzig, Poland, the English and French declared war. I will tell you a little bit about myself as a boy. My parents desperately wanted their children to have a better life than they had—and the answer, they believed, was in education. Surely people who had learned how to invest better would not have found themselves in such dire financial straits. Although I wasn’t particularly bright, my parents wanted me to test into Gymnasium, the most academic education possible in Germany, the one whose graduates were university-bound. Of course, once there, I was always picking fights or clowning around, anything to hide the fact that I was in way over my head. My parents would be called into school weekly to see the headmaster, because I had failed another test, or because I’d come to blows with another student in the hall over a petty dispute. Luckily, my parents had another star to hitch their wagon to—my brother, Franz. Two years younger than me, Franz was studious, his head always buried in a book. He would scribble away in notebooks that he hid underneath his mattress and that I would routinely steal to embarrass him. They were full of images I did not understand: a girl floating in an autumn pond, drowned because of a lost love; a deer hollowed by hunger picking through the snow for a single acorn; a fire that started in a soul and consumed the body, the bedding, the house surrounding it. He dreamed of studying poetry at Heidelberg, and my parents dreamed with him. And then, one day, things began to change. At Gymnasium, there was a contest to see which class could first get 100 percent participation in the Hitler-Jugend. In 1934, joining the Hitler Youth was not mandatory yet, mind you. It was a social club, like your Boy Scouts, except we also swore allegiance to Hitler as his future soldiers. Under the guidance of adult leaders, we would meet after school, and go camping on weekends. We wore uniforms that looked like those the SS wore, with the Sig Rune on the lapel. I, who at age fifteen chafed at sitting at a desk, loved being outside. I excelled at the sports competitions. I had a reputation for being a bully, but that was not necessarily fair—half of the time I was beating someone to a pulp because he had called Franz a sissy. I desperately wanted my class to win. Not because I had any great allegiance to the Führer but because the local leader of the HJ Kameradschaft was Herr Sollemach, whose daughter, Inge, was the prettiest girl I had ever seen. She looked like an ice queen, with her silver-blond hair and her pale blue eyes; and she and her friends did not know I existed. This, I realized, was an opportunity to change that. For the competition, the teacher put everyone’s names on the board, erasing those of the boys who joined the HJ, one by one. There were some who joined out of peer pressure; some who joined because their fathers said they had to. There were more than a dozen, however, who joined because I threatened to pound them in the school yard if they did not. My brother refused to join the Hitler-Jugend. In his classroom, he and one other boy were the only ones who didn’t. We all knew why Artur Goldman did not join—he could not. When I asked Franz why he would align himself with a Jew, he said he didn’t want his friend Artur to feel like he was being left out. A few weeks later, Artur stopped going to school and never came back. My father encouraged Franz to join the Hitler-Jugend, too, to make new friends. My mother made me promise to watch over him at our meetings. “Franz,” she would say, “isn’t strong like you.” She worried about him camping out in the woods, getting sick too easily, not connecting with the other boys. But for the first time in her life, she didn’t have to worry about me. Because as it turned out, I was the poster child for the Hitler-Jugend. We would hike and sing and do calisthenics. We learned how to line up in military formations. My favorite activity was Wehrsport—military marching, bayonet drills, grenade throwing, trench digging, crawling through barbed wire. It made me feel like a soldier already. I had such enthusiasm for the Hitler-Jugend that Herr Sollemach told my father I would make a fine SS man one day. Was there any greater compliment? To find the strongest among us, there were also Mutproben, tests of courage. Even individuals who were afraid would be compelled to do what we were told to do, because otherwise the stigma of being a coward would cling to you like a stench. Our first test was climbing the rock wall at the castle, without any safety harness. Some of the older boys scrambled to be in the front of the line, but Franz held back and I stayed with him, as per my mother’s orders. When one of the boys fell and broke his leg, the training was aborted. A week later, as part of our tests of courage, Herr Sollemach blindfolded the group of us. Franz, sitting next to me, held tightly on to my hand. “Reiner,” he whispered, “I’m scared.” “Just do what they say,” I told him, “and it will be over soon.” I had come to see a beautiful liberation in this new way of thinking—which was, ironically, not having to think for myself. At Gymnasium I wasn’t clever enough to come up with the right answer. In Hitler-Jugend, I was told the right answer, and as long as I parroted it back I was considered a genius. We sat in this artificial dark, awaiting instructions. Herr Sollemach and some of the older boys patrolled in front of us. “If the Führer asks you to fight for Germany, what do you do?” Fight! we all yelled. “If the Führer asks you to die for Germany, what do you do?” Die! “What do you fear?” Nothing! “Stand up!” The older boys pulled us to our feet, in a line. “You will be led inside the building to a swimming pool with no water in it, and you will recite the Hitler-Jugend oath and jump off the diving board.” Herr Sollemach paused. “If the Führer asks you to jump off a cliff, what do you do?” Jump! We were blindfolded, so we did not know which of the fifteen of us would be pulled to the diving board first. Until, that is, I felt Franz’s hand being torn away from mine. “Reiner!” he cried. I suppose at that moment I was thinking of nothing but my mother, warning me to take care of my younger brother. I stood up and yanked off my blindfold and ran like crazy past the boys who were dragging my brother into the building. “Ich gelobe meinem Führer Adolf Hitler Treue,” I cried, streaking past Herr Sollemach. “Ich verspreche ihm und den Führern, die er mir bestimmt, jederzeit Achtung und Gehorsam entgegen zu bringen…” I promise to be faithful to my Führer, Adolf Hitler. I promise to him, and to those leaders he has assigned to me, to give them my undivided obedience and respect. In the presence of this blood banner, which represents our Führer, I swear to devote all my energies and my strength to the savior of our country, Adolf Hitler. I am willing and ready to give up my life for him, so help me God. And without looking, I leaped. Wrapped in a coarse brown blanket, my clothes still soaking, I told Herr Sollemach that I was jealous of my brother for being chosen first to prove his allegiance and courage. That was why I had cut him in line. There was water in the pool. Not much, but enough. I knew they could not let us all jump and kill ourselves. But since each of us was being brought into the building individually, we could not hear the splash. I knew, however, that Franz would, because he was already at the edge of the pool. And that, then, he would be able to jump. But Herr Sollemach was less convinced. “It is admirable to love your brother,” he said to me. “But not more than your Führer.” I was careful the rest of that day to avoid Franz. Instead I played Trapper and Indian with abandon. We split up into platoons based on the colors of our armbands and hunted down the enemy to rip off their armbands. Often, these games escalated into full-on brawls; they were meant to toughen us up. Instead of protecting my brother, I ignored him. If he was trampled in the dirt, I wasn’t going to pick him up. Herr Sollemach was watching too closely. Franz wound up with a split lip and bruises up and down his left leg, a nasty scrape on his cheek. My mother would hold me accountable, I knew. And still, when we were walking back home at dusk, he bumped his shoulder against mine. I remember the cobblestones on the street were still warm, from the heat of the day; there was a rising full moon that night. “Reiner,” he said simply. “Danke.” The next Sunday we met at an athletic hall and squared off in boxing matches. The idea was to crown a winner from our group of fifteen boys. Herr Sollemach had brought Inge and her friends to watch, because he knew that boys would show off even more if girls were present. The winner, he said, would get a special medal. “The Führer says that a physically healthy individual with a sound character is more valuable to the völkisch community than an intellectual weakling,” Herr Sollemach said. “Are you that healthy individual?” One part of me was healthy, I knew that much. I could feel it every time I looked at Inge Sollemach. Her lips were pink as ribbon candy, and I bet just as sweet. When she sat down on the bleachers, I watched the rise and fall of the buttons on her cardigan. I thought about peeling back those layers to touch skin, how she would be white as milk, soft as— “Hartmann,” Herr Sollemach barked, and both Franz and I stood. This surprised him for a moment, and then a smile spread across his face. “Yes, yes, why not?” he muttered. “Both of you, into the ring.” I looked at Franz, at his narrow shoulders and his tender belly, at the dreams in his eyes that scattered when he realized what Herr Sollemach wanted us to do. I climbed between the ropes and put on the padded helmet, the boxing gloves. As I passed by my brother, I murmured, Hit me. Inge rang the bell to get us started and then ran back to her girlfriends. One of them pointed at me, and she looked up. For one amazing moment the world stood perfectly still while our eyes met. “Come on,” Herr Sollemach urged. The rest of the boys were cheering, and still I circled Franz with my hands up. “Hit me,” I muttered under my breath again. “I can’t.” “Schwächling!” one of the older boys yelled. Stop acting like a girl! Halfheartedly, I shot out my right fist into my brother’s chest. All the air rushed out of his body as he jackknifed. There was a cheer from the boys behind me. Franz looked up at me in fear. “Fight back,” I yelled at him. I jabbed with my gloves, pulling my punches before I could make contact with his body again. “What are you waiting for?” Herr Sollemach screamed. So I punched Franz, hard, in the back. He fell to one knee, and there was a gasp from the girls in the bleachers. Then he managed to drag himself upright. He pulled back his left fist and threw a punch at my jaw. I do not know what flipped the switch in me. I suppose it was the fact that I had been struck, and was in pain. Or maybe the girls watching, whom I wanted to impress. Maybe it was just the sound of the other boys egging me on. I started beating Franz, in the face, the gut, the kidneys. Over and over, rhythmically, until his face was a bloody pulp and spit bubbled out of his mouth as he collapsed on the floor. One of the older boys jumped into the ring and raised my glove, the conquering champion. Herr Sollemach patted me on the back. “This,” he told the others, “is the face of bravery. This is what the future of Germany looks like. Adolf Hitler, Sieg Heil!” I returned the salute. So did all the other boys. Except my brother. With adrenaline pumping through my veins, I felt invincible. I took on contender after contender, and everyone fell. After years of being punished for letting my temper get the best of me in school, I was being praised for it. No, I was being exalted. That night, Inge Sollemach gave me a medal, and fifteen minutes later, behind the athletic center, my first real kiss. The next day my father called on Herr Sollemach. He was very disturbed by Franz’s injuries. Your son is gifted, Herr Sollemach explained. Special. Yes, my father responded. Franz has always been an excellent student. I am speaking of Reiner, Herr Sollemach said. Did I know this brutality was wrong? Even that first time, when my brother was the victim? I have asked myself a thousand times, and the answer is always the same: of course. That day was the hardest, because I could have said no. Every time after that, it became easier, because if I didn’t do it again, I would be reminded of that first time I did not say no. Repeat the same action over and over again, and eventually it will feel right. Eventually, there isn’t even any guilt. What I mean to tell you, now, is that the same truth holds. This could be you, too. You think never. You think, not I. But at any given moment, we are capable of doing what we least expect. I always knew what I was doing, and to whom I was doing it. I knew, very well. Because in those terrible, wonderful moments, I was the person everyone wanted to be.
~~~
But my mother also would have been the first to tell me that good people are good people; religion has nothing to do with it.
Mother's favorite song...
No matter how many times you hear a story about the Holocaust, there will always be another perspective to learn about. This time, the writer, Jodi Picoult, has brought in the family of two boys who will become part of the military under Hitler. How many of us, today, have asked ourselves and others how is our president getting away with all that is happening. Can't something be done? And, yet, there are some who continue to support him no matter what he does!
Is it true what was said when the mother of the Jewish family began to see and fear what was happening? That there are good and bad people and it has nothing to do with religion? After watching the years since 2015, I tend to "want" to agree, especially as, at present, religion is being used by those who are bad, in their attempt to sway our opinions... Just as happened in WWII...
The book moves back and forth in time, as well as from character to character talking, beginning with Sage who is attending a small-group grief session where people bring things in that they can't get over, such as not being able to get over losing your husband... Sage goes, not saying much, since her mother died three years ago... But really, she is unable to get past the accident that left her face scarred...
It was at a group session that she and Josef started talking. Soon there seemed to be a connection, but Sage can't figure out why... And then he starts talking about what happened during the WWII... Josef is in his 90s and feels like his life should be over, but his health is good... Soon, Josef has come to know Sage well enough to know that she is Jewish... And, he wants to share with her about his life, seek and receive her forgiveness...and then... have her kill him... Yes, you understand correctly... Of course, this is very upsetting to even be asked to participate!
What Josef doesn't know is there is somebody who could possibly be a better individual to whom he should seek forgiveness... Her grandmother... Her grandmother is one who has never found it possible to share about her time during the Holocaust. The only way Sage learned of it is when she saw her tatooed prison number on her grandmother's arm...
Readers will then become intimately involved with exactly what happened during the time leading up to and during the actual deaths of the millions who were killed in the 1940s. If this is your first time reading details, be prepared. The story is disgusting, devastating, and impossible to understand just how humans can treat other humans as they do and have... And, if you haven't read any book on this slaughter of men, women and children, I can tell you that this is an excellent book from which to learn.
The inclusion of those young people who were pulled into the German military based upon lies and manipulation is something that, indeed, we should never forget! In my lifetime, the closest devastation I am aware of is what DJT is doing to the world right now. His words, lies, threats, attacks on people, including the loss of millions of jobs, threats of recessions, and so much more, all to fund a major tax break for the richest people in our country, including himself, is simply incomprehensible...and yet, just as those who followed Hitler, there are those who accept what is being done, such as on the basis of DEI, causing disruption at every level of activity that can possibly be destroyed by criminal actions "mandated..."
As we know that the World must Never Forget, we also see continued wars around the world... Loss of Freedom for Ukraine is practically being handed to Russia by America--one day, then something changes, all on the whim and insanity of one man who has no idea how to constructively lead the U.S. Government. We cannot go backward and lose all that America has gained in the period since WWII! Eighty years... A Lifetime!
Many share their stories; others can't bring themselves to remember their own lives being under such a cruel group of armed men who had total control of each and every one that was killed in their homes, or gathered up to ride toward their deaths, based upon lies they had been told...
No wonder that we now face those who use lies to persuade and then turn their backs on those they have lied to and often destroyed. I recognize that this has turned into more of an opinion piece... However, I, along with millions who are protesting and otherwise speaking out, am compelled to be one of the good people who care about others... No matter whether they are in some way different from me...
It's Sad, don't you think, that millions of people look back at WWII with regret, shame, and, fear of it happening again...
While at the same time, we see attacks against Jews one day and then turning against them another day... Could it be, that, it's really about good people versus bad people... And, it's our time for America to have all of the bad guys, who just happen to be greedy on top of being bad guys?
Still, the surprise ending from The Storyteller reminds us that it is extremely hard to trust anybody who is asking for forgiveness and then wanting you to murder them, all the time while continuing to lie directly to your face...
Our only hope...
Psalm 118:8 It is better to take refuge in the Lord
than to trust in man.
God Bless Us All
Gabby
