And last, but certainly not least.... | 3rdgenwarstories's Blog

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.