3rdgenwarstories's Blog

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.