[Bret L]

To be a German (Part 1)

Michael Colhaze

April 5, 2010

"Every Jew, somewhere in his being, should set apart a zone of hate — healthy virile hate — for what the German personifies and for what persists in the German.

Elie Wiesel, Nobel Prize winner and "chief witness" to the Holocaust



Those who sow wind will harvest a Tempest.

Hosea 8,7

To be a German is not easy. Though it got a lot better. And it was
much worse.

Take me, for example.



Me and World War II, many summers ago, saw the light of day only a few
months apart. When I was a year old my father, an airman, died in
Belgium, together with his driver. Both careened, late at night and
probably under the influence, into a tree laid across the road by the
valiant Resistance. The driver was in his early twenties, my father
had just turned thirty. I do not remember him, of course. Once, while
passing Belgium on my way south, I deviated and went to visit his
grave. The German government pays the Belgian government for the
upkeep of the cemetery, so all is neat and proper and meets every
standard of good Ordnung. Simple white crosses as befits a brave
soldier, with name, rank and date, stretch into the distance as far as
the eyes can reach. The afterglow of so many candles prematurely
quenched is still strong, and the sheer number fills the heart with a
dread that can never be put into words. A dread I felt strongly as I
stood there under the low sky, with a few wild flowers in hand I had
plucked in a meadow before, thinking too late of a more fitting
tribute. I never went there again. But as so often before, I wondered
what kind of man he had been. And father at that. He tried his hand at
the Fine Arts in his leisurely hours, and I still cherish the only
canvas that survived, a small still life. It shows, strangely
appropriate, a bunch of wild flowers in a simple vase set against a
dark background, lit by a ray of light that gives the daisies and
dandelions a becoming inner glow. And from that, and the rare comments
my mother occasionally ventured, I deduct that he must have been a
good man.



The first years of my childhood were uneventful. We lived in a small
village, not far from the military airport where my father had been
stationed. The war was far away, and thinking back, I remember only
farms under endless blue skies, with poultry wandering freely about,
pigs rolling in the mud, horses clip-clapping over the cobble stones.
I had a friend, my age but about half my size, and whenever we turned
up in a courtyard the women kept a sharp eye on our movements. My
mother wore black, very elegant for Sunday mass, rather drab during
the week. I could hear her sometimes crying at night, and she
occasionally shed a tear while smiling at me, and I probably believed
this to be the accepted behaviour of silent and beautiful women in
black. The one great tragedy of that time was the death of my sparrow,
dearest friend for more than a year, who mistook a mirror for the
passage into undiscovered lands.



Slowly the war moved closer. My mother received orders to work in a
make-shift factory, there to assemble ammunition in the company of
PoWs who spoke foreign languages, some French. One gentleman of that
tongue turned up shortly after the war had ended and brought roses,
homemade sausages and other unheard of delicatessen. But my mother
must have discouraged any serious intentions, because when he left, he
looked as sad as she did while accepting a last peck on her marble
cheeks.



I meanwhile spent the days in the kindergarten and remember a
generally joyous time.



Until the day when the first enemy planes began to appear high in the
sky. Glinting dully in the sun, huge even from where I stood, uttering
a throbbing roar while trailing long white tails, accompanied by sleek
hornets with a shriller pitch that turned into an ugly shriek when
diving to meet an adversary.



Once I saw from far away a true air battle that involved four or five
planes, with two bursting into fire and smoke while one parachute
opened and, in the strangest antilogy, drifted gently earthwards like
a big white cloud.



Soon afterwards my father’s airport was bombed to smithereens,
including a row of houses just around the corner, with the result that
one third of the kindergarten went missing and never showed up again.
Air raid sirens had been introduced long since, and now they began to
scream at every reasonable and unreasonable hour. It became a nightly
occurrence that my mother grabbed me in the dark, since even a candle
might give the position of the house away, and carried me downstairs
and into the cellar. There we crouched with a few neighbours on a low
bench, shivering and huddled close together, listening to the heavy
thuds as they moved closer and closer, sometimes so close that the
house shook to its foundations, accompanied by the roar of engines
that eventually passed overhead and then disappeared into the night.
While the sirens wailed, escalating from a muffled howl into an ear-
splitting scream and then sagging again, on and on and on…

Fear!

Naked, undiluted fear.

I am not easily impressed, and later in life found myself occasionally
in a tight spot without getting weak in the knees. But whenever I hear
the monthly check of the local air raid sirens in the town not far
from where I live, my body turns cold and my heart starts beating high
in the throat and a nameless horror raises its ugly head and I need
all my willpower to wrestle it down.

J.C.C. Dahl Dresden under a Full Moon Oil on Canvas 1839

As the war moved into its final years, it brought first hunger and
then disease. Once a week a loaf of bread was the official decree,
plus loads of turnips until they came out of your ears, and on Sundays
a soup cooked from a handful of wheat ground in the coffee grinder,
followed by a few potatoes fried with margarine. Diphtheria,
pneumonia, meningitis and other afflictions made the round, and people
began to succumb in frightful numbers. The jolly and very fat farmer’s
wife from next door coughed blood for a few days, then told her
husband that their time together hadn’t been that bad after all, and
chuckled for a last time. Agnes from across the road went as well,
which upset me nearly as much as the death of my sparrow. She was my
age, and in a somewhat patronizing manner my friend and I had allowed
her, before the advent of the bombings, to join us on our forays.
Agnes the Lamb, blond, with cornflower-blue eyes, a freckled little
nose and an angelic face that radiated pure light when she smiled. The
last time I saw her she was laying on her little bed, a rosary in the
folded hands, thin like a waif. Her face had a yellowish tinge, with
dark shadows under the closed eyes and a slight frown as if she still
tried to understand what had happened to her.

The Allied Powers, I learned much later, would apply something hideous
called the Morgenthau plan when victorious, an infamy bound to cripple
Germany into a few rural serfdoms, never to be free again. And ten
times worse than the injustice of Versailles, if that was possible.
Which must have been the reason why even those who had little sympathy
for Hitler and his Reich fought furiously to the last bullet. And
which, as we are told to believe now, made the attacks ever more
vicious.

The weekly handout of a loaf of bread at the local baker had turned
into an excursion fraught with danger, and one day my mother drove her
bicycle and both of us into a ditch as something huge exploded nearby.
For a long second, and before my mother pushed my face into the dirt,
I saw a massive splinter that looked like one of Lucas’ spaceships
passing my field of vision, strangely in slow motion. It hit a
sidewalk and burst into thousand fragments that hissed into every
direction. I still believe that on that day I owed my life to my
mother for a second time.

It must have been the winter of ’44, because one day, again on some
errand, my mother stopped her bicycle on a bridge that spanned a small
river. Some ancient chaps of the Home Defence had pulled a woman and
her child from the icy waters. Both had been near an exploding
phosphor bomb, as could be seen by the burns and deep holes in their
bodies. Phosphor, in case you didn’t know, doesn’t need oxygen to
burn. It sits on your arm like a beautiful green light, and when you
try to douse it, it splits up and sticks to your hand as well and
burns another hole into your hide. The Israelis are using phosphor
bombs in Gaza today. The poor woman jumped into the shallow river to
safe herself and her child, not knowing of course that even under
water the deadly fire would continue to burn both to death. As my
mother stared at the terribly mutilated corpses, something snapped in
her, and for once in my life I saw her flying into a rage. She dropped
down on her knees, raised the arms at an empty sky and demanded to
know, in a hoarse and inhuman scream I will never forget, how it was
possible that they could murder women and children in such a horrible
way.

But apparently they could.

The day when the Americans took over was warm and sunny. Hitler’s
gaudy banners and flags had long since disappeared, and white bed
sheets hung from every window in case someone might be in doubt and
continue the carnage. We were again in the cellar, and my mother held
me tight, and I saw olive-green legs in strange boots passing
stealthily along the narrow window. Then they were in the house. My
mother called something in English, which surprised me because I
thought her only foreign language was French. A soldier with a funny
round helmet appeared and pointed a gun at us. But my mother said
something again, and the soldier only nodded and winked an eye at me.
They left soon afterwards, taking my fathers ceremonial dagger and
sabre along, plus a wooden target board that showed a hand-painted
wild boar whom he had smacked right between the eyes and so won the
competition.

The next day all of America’s armoured might passed by or stopped
occasionally, and my mother told me to remember my manners and address
the newcomers in English with a measured “How do you do?” Which I
memorized by heart and extended later into a reasonable command of
that language. My first contact was a huge negro who reclined on top
of a Red-Cross vehicle. I had never seen a negro before, except in the
Struwwelpeter, Germany’s foremost children’s book. It shows a rather
diminutive negro with a black umbrella who is taunted by three wicked
boys, but an over-large St. Nicolas comes along and dips them into an
inkpot and they are black with a bluish tinge which makes them blacker
than the negro ever will be. After I had muttered my piece rather
sotto voce, he flashed snowy white teeth, and said probably something
like: “Just great, man! Yeah!” and dropped me a beautifully wrapped
item called Wrigley’s. It was sweet and tasted of peppermint and made
me nearly faint with desire and I swallowed three quarters and kept
one quarter for my mother after much inner struggle. Who refused it
gracefully, read the cover and informed me about the nature of chewing
gums.

Slowly things got back to normal. The Polish enforced labourers were
set free, got drunk on everything they could find, including methyl
alcohol, staged a rampage including theft and rape, and my mother took
me to town where we stayed in a small pension until the Poles were
sent home. Our grand piano went for a few pounds of butter, but that
was, as far as I remember, the final aftermath of the terrible war.
Germany began to recover amazingly fast, helped by the fact that the
old alliances had crumbled and new strategies were needed to contain
communist Russia. My elementary school years evolved uneventfully.
While at high school, Germany won the football world cup, which lifted
sprits even more, but must have caused a few indignant frowns in
certain quarters. My years at college were chaotic. We were forty boys
in an overcrowded classroom, most of us for inexplicable reasons
uncommonly tall, on the whole an unruly lot, and taught by teachers
still heavily marked by the war. Our Latin master, I remember well,
had been something of an air ace who flew the final missions mostly on
amphetamines and little else. We adored him, and always sat motionless
when he stopped dead in mid-sentence and grabbed his left arm with the
right hand because it began to tremble uncontrollably while he stared
with naked horror at something that had come back to haunt him. My own
accomplishments were poor, due to a nearly total incomprehension of
algebra barely counterbalanced by a few merits in other areas.

It must have been during those years when the first terrible rumours
began to emerge. "

http://www.theoccidentalobserver.net...-GermanyI.html

[Shhhh! I'm Listening to Reason!]

On Apr 13, 2:36*am, Bret L wrote:

"Every Jew, somewhere in his being, should set apart a zone of hate — healthy virile hate — for what the German personifies and for what persists in the German.

On Apr 13, 2:36 am, Bret L wrote:

"Every Jew, somewhere in his being, should set apart a zone of hate — healthy virile hate — for what the German personifies and for what persists in the German.

"There is a time to love and a time to hate; whoever does not hate
when he should does not deserve to love when he should, does not
deserve to love when he is able. Perhaps, had we learned to hate more
during the years of ordeal, fate itself would have taken fright. The
Germans did their best to teach us but we were poor pupils in the
discipline of hate. Yet today, even having been deserted by my hate
during that fleeting visit to Germany, I cry out with all my heart
against silence. Every Jew, somewhere in his being, should set apart a
zone of hate -- healthy, virile hate--for what the German personifies
and for what persists in the German. To do otherwise would be a
betrayal of the dead."

Elie Wiesel, Nobel Prize winner and *"chief witness" to the Holocaust

Oh, the full quote looks a little different, doesn't it.

Moron.

I forgot to add that you and the Senator also cut quotes to suit your
means. Liar.

Those who sow wind will harvest a Tempest.

Hosea 8,7

There is a special corner of Hell reserved for people like you,
Bratzi.

You know, people who are liars, people who can't or won't think,
people who are dumb enough to believe other bigots...