3rdgenwarstories's Blog

This is as close to the final product as I can provide you with for right now. Enjoy!

Concentration Camp Prisoner’s Poem

In the barracks there is ash

It comes in through the hold where the wall joins the ceiling

It comes with the snow, and the snow comes with cold

This stiff striped suit lets in the chill

But keeps out the warmth of the man in my bed

Not mine, not ours, but the Nazis’ bed

Crowded side by side, stacked upon each other

And this is how we lay upon them, two by two like beasts

Who will not be saved ourselves to save our kind

Shuddering, sighing, groaning and moaning

So different from a young boy’s snoring

Little dreamy sighs and whimpers my brother would make

What he dreamed of, I’d never guess, something loathsome

In whose place he kicked at me

While I aspired to a bigger bed

Better yet, one of my own, one for each of us

I promised Father and Mother that the money they put aide for my schooling

Would be paid back in full when I put down their broom

And I picked up my books

And then set them down to free my hands to heal

Now these hands, raw places in calloused skin, aren’t fit to sort coins

They were fine hands, though cut

True gashes, scrapes and splits on rough palms and knotted fingers

Where little cuts have long since healed

Each time one would fade, I’d find another piece of glass

It would prick me at the back of a drawer

No matter how deep I pushed the broom into the corners

I never did sweep it all away

Shards of every shape and size, as they lay in the pile the morning after

They called it Kristallnacht

I kept sweeping and mopping and I called it a mess

It glittered like snow had blown in through our empty window pane

Like the hole in this wall that no one will repair

The guards won’t bother and we won’t dare

Nobody will spend their savings on this whole

As our family did for our window

We repaired the shop to keep it

And I and my brother could earn our education all over again

But before they took me away

From hard labor to slave labor

They barred us Jews from university

And all I could have bought with my money were four beds

One for me, who would never leave

Perhaps I am wrong again, and will leave this place too

Leave this bed for an oven rack

And blow through a broken window or a cracked wall

However small the space

The cold and snow, ash and glass, will always come through.

The Grossmutter’s Poem

On the window there is dirt

And the dust makes the glass hazy

Not enough to keep me from seeing my grandchildren play

So I suppose it can wait

At least until the weather is clear

And it’s too warm to snow

Why I’ll clean this house from top to bottom

Windows first, scour them and then open them up

To let out the dust and let in the clean spring air

But for now it is enough to see what I can see

Through this dirty window

And what I see is snow

The first warning specks before a storm comes down on our heads

Of course the little ones don’t have their hats

So I go to the door and call them in

I catch the littlest one by his coat sleeve

And try to brush him dry

But the snow doesn’t melt, it smears

Because this isn’t snow—it is ash

Coming down on us from the camp where the Jews work

To think, I can barely get enough coal to warm the house

Even when it’s all shut up

And they waste piles of it burning up the Jews

Now the children are getting it all over the house

It will be several weeks more before I can clean it

So for now I shut the door behind us

To keep the warmth inside.

The American Housewife’s Poem

There is dust on the mantle

No matter how many times I sweep it up

It’s never all quite gone, and it always comes back

It’s a depressing thought

You clean and you clean and you’re just never done

The radio doesn’t help

They’re not playing music, just news about the war

As if nothing else was happening in the whole wide world

And we have to suffer through the latest count

They think the Nazis have killed about two million Jews

It’s sad as anything

Who wants to hear it?

I go to get my rag again

And clean that mantle one more time

The numbers keep coming

Hundreds and hundreds more of our boys blown away

I stop for just a moment

The chores can wait that long at least

While we honor our dead

But dead men don’t help around the house

Any more than the live ones

So it’s up to me to finish this dust off

But a smell hits me, and chokes me

So bad I almost put the rag over my face without thinking

That must be where the dust is hiding

Down in the radiator

It smells god awful

Every time I smell it I think of what someone told me once

That dust is mostly people’s skin

What a rotten thought to have on a rotten day, cleaning day

I take a look outside

It must be cold, but it’s not snowing yet

I crack the window just a bit

To let the smell out while I finish the room

I’ll take care of the mantle and let the radiator clean itself

The dust can burn itself out.

Nazi Soldier’s Poem

There is dust on these boots

When I stare to the ground

They must wonder if I am shy, or deep in thought

Neither are desirable, nor do my comrades desire to know

Entertained by each other’s stories of shows and women

And other things that are fun to watch

I wonder, were they watching me

When the old Jew fell today?

Tripped on his shackles, a pitiful sight

Stirring up ashes on the ground

But now I wonder, had he tripped?

Or did he stumble under my hand, against my gun’s muzzle?

His reaction was pained, to an obvious fall

But not from an obvious cause

My reaction was nothing

Nothing but to stare as he righted himself

For I know I did not help

Who would help to pick up what they’d felled themselves?

And so perhaps I hadn’t.

But had I, would I have been so bold

To look into the old man’s eyes and be still?

Would his shame have shamed me, frozen me?

Does this mean I did it, or that I didn’t?

Hauptmann Rinkel does worse things, all the time

And he remembers them

Ivan smiles and takes long drags on his cigarettes

To stick his chest out more

And grins his school boy grin

He brags about cracking skulls like he’d been kissing girls

Why just the other day, he’d pulled one of them off the fence

He says it the way your son would tell you

That he’d climbed the tallest tree

Would I have such a child’s pride?

“Back on duty,” Major Schefferling says stiffly

Now the schoolteacher has come to scold us

I expect the other boys to scamper away

But they saunter like young men

Something halfway between a school boy and a soldier

The major stops me. “You,

“Clean yourself up.

Your uniform is a disgrace.”

In dumb silence I examine myself

My sleeves, my jacket, my pants

My whole front smudged with dirt and ash.

The U.S. Soldier’s Poem

There’s dust stirring up everywhere we walk

This place is dry as death and depressing as hell

Would be as quiet if we weren’t here

The Nazis made their mess and now we’re here to tidy it

Three years here and the ugliest thing I’ve seen

Was a lunch of Limburger and tea

I never even shot a man

I shot at a few of them, traded fire with Nazis out in the field once

But I didn’t even hit one

And now they want me to clean out the death camp

But I’m here to do my duty

Whatever they decide that is today

And today I’m on cleanup duty

This must be one of those laboratories we heard about

Where they did things so bad that nobody hears about them

Because nobody wants to talk about them

One man comes out, a colonel

“No, man, don’t go in there.

You’ve got no business in there.”

He can’t block the sight of a bloody table, though

Or jars full of formaldehyde and God knows what

Damn right I’ve got no business in there

Nobody does but the devil

A sharp whistle draws me to where I do have business

Next to one of the storage sheds

They’re laying out stretchers and I grab one end, looking busy

A partner takes the other end, and another fellow

Rolls something onto it

I must have the head end

Because I’m face to face with a dead man

His eyes wide open

“Shame, isn’t it?” someone says

“They die with their eyes open like that.”

Yeah, yeah, a real shame

Shame doesn’t describe this

I’ve stared death in the eye and death stared right back

They can cover his face with a sheet

But I’ve already seen it

I can get the poor bastard to the truck and throw him in

It’s the least I can do

And then excuse myself

Get behind one of the barracks

Where I can be sick in privacy

Somebody’s got to hear me, but they leave me to it

And for their sake, when I’m done

I kick the ashy dirt over my mess

So nobody has to look at it

My humanity’s indulged

I go back out to do my duty

This is what they call “soldiering on”

Soldiers do the dirty work.

So now that storytime is over, allow me to elaborate on some factual details that painted the pictures in my head that I expressed in my last blog.

The Concentration Camp Prisoner - In reading "Eichmann in the Holocaust," I learned that very early into the Nazis' persecution of the Jews, they barred Jewish students from German universities. It was only mentioned in one sentence early on in the book, but for some reason that really stuck with me (maybe because I'm a college student myself?). There you had it--a more subtle and personal conflict between the prisoner and his oppressors than the obvious one of being imprisoned. Everything from that point was mostly imagination. I already knew the story of the Kristallnacht, which for academia's sake I'll mention happened on the night of August 9, 1938. As the story goes, two Polish Jew immigrants had been expelled from the country. In retaliation, their teenage sonHerschel Grynszpan, who lived in Paris, traveled to the French German embassy where German diplomatic aide Ernst Vom Roth was and shot him. To counter that, Nazi thugs rampaged through the streets of Germany, destroying well over 200 synagogues and many more shops and other Jewish properties....such as the one owned by my fictional family. My image of the barracks he lived in were a combination from what I saw in the French documentary Night and Fog, which explored relatively newly deserted concentration camps, and pictures from that book my grandfather has.

The American Housewife - She was a relatively easy character for me to bring to life due to her lack of direct involvement in the ugliness of what was happening in Europe. She only had to embody a relatively general idea of what America thought of the happenings of World War II near its end, when the U.S. military did get involved. As both a civilian and a housewife, she couldn't be too well-informed or politically charged, especially on her designated dusting day at the house. By this time, the anti-Semitism in mainstream America had largely been turned around by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, and the Americans were sympathetic to the plight of Jews in Europe, even those that did not have a full understanding of the situation. (One day soon I really ought to tell you more about Henry Ford's thoughts on "the Jewish Question"). However, I imagine that their greater concern was with the fate of "their boys"--the American soldiers--which is why the woman in my poem is more affected by the American death toll than the much larger and more gruesome scale on which Jews and others were being killed. Something else worth noting is that while I was at the museum I passed by a framed page from a Detroit newspaper reporting the Jewish death toll at about two million when it was printed--right around the time in which the housewife's narrative is set. I just so happen to live outside of Detroit, making this bit of news all the more fitting for me to use.

The Grossmutter - She was inspired by another relatively small detail in the book "Eichmann and the Holocaust." There was this delightful little story contained within of a woman who wasn't able to see her doctor about a not very urgent issue with a vein in her leg, who began complaining to the man who would later tell the author about her that all that "good, expensive gas being wasted on the Jews!" I believe I mentioned this earlier....it was unsettling enough when it caught my eye, but believe me, when put into its proper context it's much more disturbing. Apparently she and the whole crowd of Germans surrounding them were comforted by the thought that even if Hitler lost the war--which was next to impossible in their minds--he would ensure that they were euthanised humanely before Germany's enemies could overrun the country. However, taking into account the Grossmutter's preoccupation with everyday concerns such as grandchildren and cleaning house, she could not find the time or energy to get all riled up at those damn worthless Jews. They're just an unfavorable afterthought, which is what I was going for for her, as she wasn't thrown into total poverty by Germany's war effort (only enough to be a bit short on coal).

The American Soldier - His "brush with enemy soldiers" was inspired by a story my grand dad told me about ducking some patrolling Nazi soldiers in a vacant house in rural Germany. Like him, my grandfather didn't have anything particularly traumatizing happen to him while he was overseas. My image of my soldier picks up where that true story left off, putting him in a nondescript Nazi death camp where these traumatizing sights greet him. Inspiration for those came from footage of laboratories and dead and dying prisoners featured in Night and Fog. The narrator mentioned that the Jews who were subjected to poisoning and neglect in the camp infirmaries almost always died with their eyes open.

The Nazi Soldier - There was surprisingly little factual knowledge about the war to be found in his narrative once it had materialized for me. Maybe my fixation on psychology is to blame--I am a psych major after all--but this came out as more of a commentary on the psychological effects of being raised with Nazi ideology and trained to serve that decidedly sick cause. In the psychological community the fact that Nazis were able to carry out such acts of violence and objectification of their fellow human being, which most people are somewhat shocked by, actually has an explanation. Your typical person will, when given an order by someone they consider to be an authority figure, will carry out that order even if it goes against their better judgement. Consider the famous--or infamous--Milgram experiment, in which subjects were led to believe that they were delivering increasingly painful and finally fatal shocks to people in another room and could only explain their actions as doing what they had been told by the experimentors. Now, this experiment involved people who had been taught all their lives that inflicting pain on others was basically the wrong thing to do, so you can imagine how much easier it would be to get someone who had been taught to dehumanized a certain group of people to do much worse things to someone who belonged to that group. But of course it's nearly impossible to train the humanity out of someone completely, and I made this Nazi the enemy equivalent of our American soldier--not especially devoted to the cause, but able to do his duty without completely coming undone.

I feel we have made a big step in the right direction. While I don't have the wording down for the final poetic product, I can spoil it for you with the synopses of the five poems, which I finally have typed out.

The Concentration Camp Prisoner - He is crowded in his bunk that he shares with another prisoner. The beds are barely big enough for one person. With fondness he remembers the bed he shared with his younger brother back home. His family lived modestly, not because they had no money bust because their parents put most of it into savings, determined to send them both to school one day. Someday, our prisoner joked, he would be taking care of them instead, and he'd buy them each their own bed! He's wanted to be a doctor. These hands were meant to heal, not to sort things and count coins. Then his tone turns hard as he recalls how his dreams were shattered. It started with the windows. Nazi things shattered their windows on Kristallnacht into so many glittering pieces that it looked as though snow had blown though the hold in the window now gaping. His parents had no choice but to take some of the money they'd been putting aside for their sons' college fund to replace it. Though he was unhappy, the prisoner kept working, kept sweeping up glass whenever he found it. It lurked in corners like dust--you just never quite get it all cleaned up. He was still finding it from time to time a couple of years later, until he was finally taken in and hauled off to a concentration camp. Now he toils harder than ever, but he knows no good will come of it. No good would have come of it anyway, really. Even if he ever had saved up the money to go to a university, they weren't letting in Jews anymore. After a hard day of working in the cold, he watched he snow drift into his barracks from a crack in the wall. The cold will always find a way in, no matter how small an entrance you give it. He knows it's not all snow. Some of it is ash, caught in the air from the crematory, and that someday soon he will be ash, indistinguishable from the snow or the dust.

The American Housewife - She is busy with cleaning, and things that she finally has the mantle clean, but when she moves a picture frame aside to be sure, to her dismay she finds still more dust! As she goes to get her rag, she pauses to listen to the news report playing on the radio while he works. The latest estimates are that at least two million Jews and other minorities have been executed by the Nazi forces. She keeps moving toward the rag, but is stopped in her tracks by talk of the riding U.S. casualty rate. In the moment of sad and patriotic silence that follows, she notices a burning smell. Dust has gotten into the grate of the radiator again. The frustrated housewife cleans the dust from the mantle and decides not to worry about the stuff in the radiator. It doesn't smell pleasant, but, she notes, it's not snowing outside. It's probably chilly, but there's no snow falling, so it can't be that cold. She can just open a window to let the room air out and the mess will burn itself out.

The Grossmutter (Grandmother) - Watching from a window as her grandchildren play in the small backyard, she notices that the window is cakes with dust and dirt. It's been too cold most days to open them, so she's gotten to neglect the windows all winter. The filth, however, has not taken a break from gathering just because she has taken a break from cleaning it up. Come springtime, she vows, she'll give all the windows a good washing, but for now it is enough to watch the children. Then she notices snow starting to fall, so she calls the little ones to come inside. She catches one child by the arm and goes to brush the snow off his coat, but instead of melting away it only smears. This isn't snow at all, it's ash. She sends them back out to shake themselves off. She can't afford to have them dirtying up the house, because she can't open the windows for fear of letting the heat out. She doesn't have that much coat--all the fuel is being wasted burning up the Jews and making a mess all over the city--and it's important to keep the warmth inside.

The U.S. Soldier - He has just gotten his orders to go into a concentration camp and help dispose of the bodies. He is understandably displeased. This fellow has had a relatively easy go of it, a couple of brushes with enemy soldiers out in the field, but he's never been hit, never seen anybody hit and even though he's exchanged fire he's pretty certain that he never hit anybody either. You can see how hard the chock of stacks of dead bodies, filthy emaciated prisoners that look like walking bodies (and so are all the more disturbing) and the horrific "facilities" would hit him. Luckily he doesn't go inside the laboratory--another officer steps out just as he's coming up to it and holds him back with one hand. "Son, you don't have any business going in there." But our soldier catches a glimpse of bloody table and specimen jar. Nobody but the devil has any business in there. He wanders away, closer to where some other soldiers are gathered, thinking maybe that is where he is supposed to be. One end of a stretcher is thrust into his hands while he is barely paying attention and one of his partners gestures at him to kneel down like he is so another man can roll a body onto it. The soldier now find himself making eye contact with a dead man whose eyes stayed open (this was common in the death camps). He is literally starting death right in the face, and death is staring right back. The white sheet is pulled over the dead man too late. The soldier manages to get the stretcher to the truck and toss the body id, but then he must excuse himself. He could out behind the first building he sees and he vomits. Not wanting anyone to see his mess, he kicks a bunch of dirt and ash over it and goes back to cleanup duty.

The Nazi Soldier - This can't bother him. He can't let it. What kind of soldier would he be if he let a little thing like starving prisoners and dead bodies bother him? It doesn't seem to bother any of the other soldiers, who do worse than he does and don't even blink when they do it. He's watched one soldier he calls a friend tell a crippled man to move aster and then shoot him when he couldn't. It surprised our soldier at the time because when he talked to that one he seemed like a decent fellow. They all did when they talked. He wonders if any of them feel as uneasy as he does sometimes, despite himself, and just put that uneasiness aside like he does, but when they stand together and smoke they don't talk about the prisoners, or the war. They talk about their friends at home, about women and other things they like to do. He doesn't have much that's good to brag about, and the only thing that he's done lately that was noteworthy--good or bad--was watching a new coming Jew trip over his own shackles in the line and not helping him up. It wasn't as though he'd knocked him over himself, but he reacted so much like he had at the time, no motion to undo the action by helping, showing no remorse, that now he can't say for certain whether he had done it or not. That would have surely explained why he made no move to help the Jew to his feet. Of course he wouldn't but someone was bound to have been watching and so even if he had felt the impulse to help strongly enough, he wouldn't have dared. He wants to ask if any of the other soldiers had seen, could tell him what had really happened, but he doesn't dare. He's not that bold, really, bold enough to look into that Jew's eyes and let him get himself up and brush the dirt and ash off his striped uniform, but not enough to lend his hand, and certainly not bold enough to ask whether he'd done it or not. No, no, there's no question about that. He knows he didn't pick the Jew up. What he doesn't know is if he pushed him down in the first place. He's getting confused. He shakes his head and flicks his cigarette. A higher-ranking officer comes by, tells the man shortly to get back to work. "And God in Heaven, man," the officer says to our soldier, "brush yourself off." He looks down. The front of his jacket is speckled and smeared with ash. Did it fall on him from the crematory chimney, or did he get it on him helping up the man in the shackles? "Don't stand there looking stupid," the officer tells him. "Clean yourself up. That uniform is a disgrace."

And if I seem a bit repetitive, it's no accident. It's a very purposeful theme.

My apologies for this taking so long, my computer access has been limited for the past couple of days, not long enough to finish an entry.

Anyhow, let me just share with you a couple of particularly interesting notes I jotted down during my trip....

- The reason behind Kristallnacht. It seems that the vandalism was carried out by Nazi mobs in retaliation for the shooting of German diplomatic aide Ernst vom Rath.

- America was strongly anti-Semetic in the late 1930's, and pro-isolationist, and was dead-set against the U.S. military getting involved in the Second World War until President Franklin D. Roosevelt began a campaign against the Nazis and their ideals, bolstering public support for joining the Allied Forces and sympathy for the Jews and other victims of the Nazi regime.

- A survivor of the Warsaw ghetto, which saw great hardship and the most noteworthy uprising from its residence, was quoted as saying "To live one more day was resistance." I don't know, that just really struck me.

- Total lives lost to Nazi persecution and execution: 6,258,484.

A couple of things to elaborate on that last point.... This is not an estimation, a nice rounded number. This is considered to be the EXACT death toll. Think about it for a minute....it wasn't "about" six million people. This was six million, two-hundred fifty-eight thousand, four-hundred and eighty four INDIVIDUALS snuffed out by Nazi extremism. And this isn't just the number of Jews killed, but all the "undesirables" as defined by the Nazis, which ranged from Jews and Gypsies to the mentally and physically handicapped. Also, the beautiful shining rock wall on which these numbers were carved listed all the totals of lives lost in different European countries. Interestingly, more lives were lost in Poland than in Germany itself, and if I remember correctly that wasn't the only one with a higher death toll. I wish I would have had more time (we passed by the wall on our way out, right about closing time) to write down all the totals. In any case, the whole place really added weight to a fact I've already known for most of my life: this single mission to slaughter of fellow souls in the name of political and ideological purposes was the largest that had ever been carried out in known human history (although how any larger an atrocity could be carried out without imprinting itself on the collective memory of mankind is unthinkable), and has happened since. I also got a couple of ideas to elaborate on my poems, for which I am almost done with the plotlines. Just thought I'd end this entry on a positive note....I AM making progress....and while this is not the finished product it is a summary of the stories the final words will tell.

This afternoon I went to the Holocaust Memorial Museum, which you can learn more about here:

http://www.holocaustcenter.org/

I assure you, though, there is no virtual substitute for really being there among the artifacts and exhibits, the whole gleaming solitude and solemnity of the place....and even that was artificial. I couldn't imagine walking through an actual death camp (although if the opportunity ever arose I would pounce on it). Still, I gathered some useful information in their fine library. The only problem is--and I don't really think of it as a problem per se--is that I walked away with more questions than answers! All conveniently scribbled in my notes, which are conveniently tucked in my bag, which is ever so inconveniently outside of my reach. I wouldn't want to dwell on the big socio-political issues I hit on today anyway.

Maybe tomorrow. No, tonight I am content to reflect on that twenty minutes I spent in the actual museum displays, rather than the hour or so I was poking around in the library and browsing books. I know how counterproductive an attitude this is toward a poetry project, but honestly, words do not describe.... It's not enough to give the facts and figures, to write up eyewitness testimonies, or even to fabricate testimonies yourself for the sake of art. And words do not describe how these images, these pieces of history, moved me today. You'd think I'd be immune to it--I mean, these kinds of things illustrated what my grandparents gave me for "storybooks" as a child--but maybe it's a good sign that I'm still affected by it all. There needs to be a balance between practical intellectualism and humanity, and I'd like to think I'm there. I certainly need to be for this project.

I'll go into detail later on.

I just noticed the view counts on the tail ends of my posts. Wow, for one person actually having a stake in what I write (my professor), there certainly seems to be a lot of traffic on this blog. I'm assuming the site counts one person visiting multiple times, but unless my professor is checking back fifty-plus times, there must be other people reading my work. Not that this is important to my purposes, but I am curious, so if you're NOT my professor and are following my posts do you care to comment?

Thanks!

I just thought I would keep things moving with some visual aids....

A Berlin synagogue following Kristallnacht, or Night of the Broken Glass.

One take on the life of a Nazi soldier....

....and another. I felt this was important to include because of my precarious goals with my Nazi character, to portray his humanity. Also, I have to note that this is believed to be a picture of Estonian soldiers who happened to be part of an army cooperating with Nazi forces, and not German Nazis themselves. I only include this picture for the effect.

What wouldn't you give to have been a fly on the wall during this exchange? (A bilingual fly, that is). I came across this and my first thought was, "That look in his [the prisoner's] eye! What could he be saying to his captor?" Furthermore, what is the German's reaction, judging from his face? Very interesting....

Concentration camp barracks. Not as cozy as the ones in Hogan's Heroes, now are they?

Pictures of German civilian children. As it turns out, pictures of everyday life in Germany during World War II that don't paint a picture of impoverished suffering or lockstep conformity are hard to come by. I'll have to keep looking, I suppose, if nothing else just to prove to myself that they exist. They have to, don't they? But this one in particular reminded me of stories my grand dad tells me of how he and all his fellow soldiers would save back some of their food, candy bars, whatever they had, and give it to the little native children begging outside the trains and trucks. As he puts it, "Those Nazis were taking all their food and giving it to the soldiers, and the people were starving. So, you know, we'd always set back a little something to give to the kids. Oh, you should have seen them, just as hungry as anything...."

Well, I think that should do it for right now. I wanted to give you a more complete picture of life in wartime than I could with words alone.

(IMPORTANT EDIT!!!! I thought about this after I posted it and realized that I don't have proper citation for these images, very unprofessional of me, and I have to own up to it. However, whether or not I dig up better documented pictures, this will do for now for my own notes, and I will be more diligent when it comes time to put together the final product in PowerPoint. Besides, you have to admit, whatever the source, these pictures are striking).

Before I say this, let me note that I am fully aware that the Holocaust was a bad thing. Terrible. But like all terrible events in human history, there was a silver lining to each oe of those clouds--great art. In this case, poetry. I've gotten to "Art From the Ashes," compiled by Lawrence L. Langer. Great stuff....going to have to link you to a few of my favorites sometime.

*Sigh*  Why do such wonderful things have to come out of tragic situations? You can still appreciate them, but with mixed feelings....

The German Soldier - I had to give this character some serious thought, especially after starting in on "Eichmann." In terms of his involvement in the war and the Holocaust, he is somewhere in between the higher-ups in the Nazi regime and Germany's general population, and therefore would logically be closer to the middle of the spectrum between public indifference or uninformed approval of the war effort (read: extermination effort) and Nazi extremism and antisemitism. In order to retain his believabilty and relatability to the readers, I need him to harbor some humanity in his heart. He can't act on it, of course, at least not to any degree noticable to his peers or superiors. That would definitely be unbelievable, and dangerous, but he can know it and be affected by it, which will be a nice contrast to his training by the Nazi army to the opposite effect. I know there are many of his kind who lived and died with a clear conscience despite their deeds, but let's give this particular soldier a little more depth.... He isn't a kid anymore, maybe he's in his late twenties, but he's been in the military since he was much younger. I'd say he joined some time after the early wave of oppression of and violence against Jews and other "undesirables," let's say when he was about twenty. Now, from the first persecutions in 1933 to the last executions in 1945 was a span of about twelve years, so take away a few and skip over the years he might have spent in training and more minor tasks to when he'd have been "promoted" to working within the barbed wire of a concentration camp, and this would put him at age twenty-nine, after more camps had been started and better established. He sees the exploitation, starvation, suffering and murder of his fellow human beings every day, but half because he has been trained not to think of such people as human and half because it is the natural tendency of the mind to dehumanize others in order to keep our distance emotionally (remember, there isn't a thing he could have done to stop the prisoners' suffering, so instead he was forced to merely cope with it), he is almost immune to it. There is the key word--ALMOST. He still doesn't like the suffering. There's still an open-hearted young man in there somewhere, emotionally stunted at the tail end of his teenage years, and while he didn't grow morally since then his morality hasn't atrophied into nothing. However vaguely, he does feel the weight of his deeds, as an anvil would be easier to bear on your stomach if there were one or two pillows underneath. He repeats this "pillowing" jargon against the Jews to reassure himself, but with such a lack of conviction (which I'll try my hardest to show in his narrative) that you can tell he doesn't completely believe it, and hopefully as a reader you'll be glad for it, glad for him, but like he himself is you'll be saddened by the fact that he can't really do anything but keep on prodding the cattle through the slaughterhouse (note the bite in that anaology, there will be the same lack of belief in it in him as there is coming from me). All I can tell you right now about the action of his poem is that it will end with him shining his boots, all covered in dust.

If you're picking up on the clues of what the bigger metaphor is yet, feel free to take a stab at it. I won't give it away just yet, but it'll definitely be more obvious once I can narrate the action (both inward and outward) of each character's part of the story.

I'm forty-odd pages into "Eichmann and the Holocaust." Now, before I call Eichmann a thoughtless clown and every other name I can think of, I have to acknowledge that so far, most of the information I have of him and his actions come from that book, and so I'm very much subject to fall into the bias against him that the author obviously has. Hannah Arendt was a Jew herself, who fortunately escaped persecution and execution during the war, so she would understandably hold resentment toward the Nazis, particularly Eichmann, who a narrator on the History channel describes as "the architect of the concentration camps" (my father happens to be watching a documentary on World War II and I overheard Eichmann's name, which inspired me to write today).

That being said, based on what I know so far, Eichmann WAS a clown. We're dealing with a man who not only committed heinous crimes against humanity, but had managed to brainwash HIMSELF into finding nobility in these actions. Maybe he was or was not a liar on the questions of what he did and why--after all, if he was convinced of his warped sense of reality and morality, then as far as he knew he was being honest. In a way this is even more sickening, because it is not only playing a park in mass murder, but mass murder committed with perverse self-righteousness. I'll have to get ahold of more quotes by him...I'm sure his reliance on propoganda and cliche will get a little lost in translation, but I'll see what I can get out of it.

The German Grandmother (Grossmutter?) - To see this woman, the younger set might mistake her for an idealized grandmother. Indeed, she has grandchildren and is very tender and loving toward them. I'm seeing her as a sturdy woman in her sixties...picture her in a modest dress, sensible enough to wear around the house but presentable if she happened to go into town. I don't know why.... She was inspired by a bit I read when I skipped forward in Eichmann, where a woman is complaining about the Nazis wasting all that good, expensive poison on those damn Jews, or something along those lines. I'll have to hunt that passage back up again. But that's basically what I'm getting at. This woman can lovingly watch her little grandchildren play in the alley from her window, but then be so callous toward the plight of the Jews that when she sees the ash falling from the sky (oops...did I forget to mention that dear Grossmutter lives in the vicinity of a concentration camp, on the other side of that fence designed more for discretion than confinement?) she tells the kids to come inside so they won't get dirt all over them? Yes, she will be using the word "dirt," and yes, this ties into my symbolic conspiracy.

Well, four down and one to go. I still have a German soldier to conjure up. I'll probably get a lot of inspiration for the proper Nazi mindset reading about Eichmann.

I apologize for waiting so long to post again, but I've had a few things crop up in my personal life that needed to be taken care of. I want to stay professional, so I won't go into that, but one of them did involve a health scare with my grand dad, so as you can imagine I haven't asked to take another look at his books lately. Not to worry, things have improved on that front and now I can get back to work.

I DID manage to flesh out my American housewife a bit, however, and set a rough date to visit the Holocaust historical museum to gather some information (some Monday in November), so I can't say the week's been totally lost. Her story is prett generic--grew up, got married, popped out a pup or two, and when she gives her angle on the war she's cleaning house as she would any average day when she hears a news special about concentration camps. She doesn't think much of it, isn't any more put off by it than anyone should be who isn't personally involved (of course she feels bad about it, but she doesn't know anyone over there and besides, there's dusting to be done). This all ties into the big symbolic surprise I'm building up to.... Well, back to work I suppose.

I started reading "Eichmann and the Holocaust" (by Hannah Arendt, and I highly recommend it). I mean I have been looking through it, took a random excerpt from it for another writing project in class, but this week I opened the front cover and started reading it properly. So far, so good. I'm starting to get a feel for who Adolf Eichmann was and what he did. I must say I'm impressed...not in a good way, but impressed all the same.

Also, I've had some inspiration in the way of characters for my series of poems:

The Concentration Camp Prisoner - This man was working in his father's store because he could not get into a university to fulfill his dream of being a doctor (I would have rather given him less stereotypical ambitions, but the greater metaphor here is that not only did the Nazis seek to harm and finally destroy the Jewish population, but they did not want to let them heal--pun absolutely intended). The store was vandalized during Kristallnacht, or "The Night of the Broken Glass," an incident in which the Nazi's shattered the windows of Jewish owned shops among other malicious acts of destruction. Up until he was hauled away he was still finding pieces of glass turning up when he swept the floors. Now he is ruminating on his ruined life and having his future taken away from him by degrees--first his education, then just carrying on the family business, and now just growing up and growing old at all.

The American Soldier - I meant to base this more on my grandfather, but to tell the story I want to tell to get across the message and work in the plot device I have in mind for him, this soldier will have to have a much more gruesome war story to tell. He has known this whole time that Nazism is wrong and that they must be stopped, obviously, but it isn't until he is assigned the sad task of helping haul bodies away from an evacuated concentration camp. He feels a great deal of sadness looking at the hollow faces of the emaciated bodies and even those of the survivors. There's more to be said there, which ties into what I hope will be the common thread stringing all these lives together eventually, but let's leave that for another day..

I also started working on the American civilian, a housewife, but so far all I have for her is a setting--in her living room, cleaning and listening to the news on the radio. Plenty to work with there, and I've already got her piece of this metaphorical puzzle in place (sorry folks, I'm keeping that one to myself for now).

I took a look at that book I mentioned in my initial post, but as expected I couldn't take it home with me today, so I just looked through it, scribbled down some thoughts. I didn't really copy the statistics--there were quite a lot of them--but mostly just my general impressions. The captions of the pictures were what really got me. They started out very dry and informational, counts of soldiers and locations, but as the story goes on into the gorier details of casualties and concentration camps, I began to see more affective language describing the "horrors." Finally, though, toward the end after the fighting had quieted down and the war had been won (officially), the pictures and their descriptions became a lot lighter, sometimes even happy. You see two soldiers pulling a "honey wagon" (a primitive septic tank on wheels used by rural Germans to help them fertilize their fields) and a young US soldier with a big smile on his face and his Army-issue boots up on the coffee table in der Furher's palace.

You can tell that the authors and editors of this book (I couldn't find that information anywhere on the cover, might have to take another look at the title page) were emotionally invested in this war. They might not have meant to forgo the obligatory objectivity that probably applied to writing a history book (if that's what this was supposed to be), but their personal feelings about the second World War and about the Allies' victory in it definitely show through.

Greetings all.
I'm in the Honors program at my college (for the sake of anonymity, I won't say where), and my program director put me to the task of thinking up and then carrying out a directed study...a project to be completed under the watch of a willing professor who specializes in the field. As luck would have it, one of my favorite professors from last year (let's call her Angela...not for the sake of anonymity, but because she has a long and complicated last name) was offering to take on a student for a variety of subjects, two of which really stood out to me: World War II and poetry.
This won't be the first time I've juxtaposed the two. In her Literature class last winter I collected poems written about each of the major wars in America's history, starting with the Revolutionary and ending with our latest travesty (for lack of a more subjective word) in the Middle East. This time around, I'm doing a little creative work of my own, five different poems written from the perspectives of five different groups of people who were affected by WWII: a concentration camp prisoner, an American soldier, a German soldier, an American civilian and a German civilian. The last one might be a bit of a challenge, as there is relatively little information about the experience of the non-Jewish German population (I'm sure there is some out there, but compared to the volume of material written from the other four perspectives it's next to nothing). All the more reason to include them.
Why World War II? I have a special connection to this particular war...my grandfather. I grew up listening to stories about his journeys through Germany, France and across Europe. In lieu of storybooks, he showed me his books from the Rainbow Division (in which he served). They were a lot like yearbooks, except instead of pictures of high schoolers painting posters and playing sports there were pictures of soldiers in combat and emaciated Holocaust survivors.
These books, however, could never tell the whole story of this brutal war. To this day, I have a hard time believing that the whole story has yet been told, and I wonder if it ever will be. The people who experienced it are in their seventies, eighties (like my grand dad) and older, and, as much as it pains me to say this, the audience of this major world event is dwindling down. Many of them are taking their stories to the grave.
I will have to take some poetic license with this project. After all, I certainly didn't experience the war, and I'll have to put my imagination to work overtime on this. However, I have the deepest respect for anyone who was a part of the war (I am, understandably, on the fence about the Nazis, but I have a theory about their motives which we'll explore later that keeps me on the fence). That respect is the reason I'll make sure that my opinions, told through my five characters, will be informed ones. That entails a lot of research...this blog will help me keep track of it all.

Well...that's about it for now. I don't know if anyone besides Angela is going to actually read this, but if you do and want to put your two cents in, be my guest. I welcome any advice, any constructive criticism ("You suck" ain't gonna cut it).

Carry on.