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Researching a novel ...
Topic Started: Sep 6 2005, 03:03 PM (1,082 Views)
emily_jae
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has your soul in tupperware..
Admin
well, as for why they were arrested, they weren't even part jewish. It was after her father and brother were taken away, and i have a feeling that it had to do with the fact that they were christians. They were germans, living in poland, there was no good reason for them to be arrested.

oh something else you might find interesting. the only story my grandpa has ever told us specifically about the war is about the drafters coming to their farm. He was just in his teens, and it was near the end of the war when germany was being pushed back, and really they just needed cannon fodder: kids to stand at the front of the line and take bullets for the real soldiers. When they saw them coming, his mother told them to run and hide, and they ran into the woods. He remembers hiding while the drafters came through, and watching them find his brother. to hear him tell this was just bone-chilling...
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JerseyJohn
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Bearer of the Spatula of Wisdom
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I can imagine.

It sounds to me like they were arrested either because someone secretly denounced them to the SS goons following the regular soldiers into Poland. Or, your grandmother might have made some negative remarks about the nazis and, once more, someone she'd said it to, might have run to the local SS SD commander and informed on her. She'd never have known that was the reason. And, if the local gestapo didn't think there was more to it than that they wouldn't have bothered interrogating her, for them it would have been an open and shut case of carting off a couple of political prisoners, in the camps they'd have been regarded the same as the others, Jews, communists, Gypsies, homosexuals and so on. There are some instances of people being arrested because they were Christians, but the overwhelming majority of Germans were either Lutheran or Catholic, so usually it was also because they'd either said things against the regime, acted against it (in which case they were usually executed) or had in some way helped conceal or cover for people who fit in one of those categories.

Here's a true story about a German priest who was executed in 1944 for telling the following joke -- to a small group of friends, one of whom secretly reporting him to the gestapo.

<Dying German soldier to priest> "Father, please place a photograph of Hitler on one side of my head and Goering on the other."

<Priest> "Such devotion even unto the end."

<Dying German soldier to priest> "Yes, father, I'd like to die like Jesus, between a pair of criminals."

Regarding the desperation of the German army and SS toward the end of the war, this is another true story. It involves one of my uncles, an American infantryman, and it happened shortly after Hitler's death with the Reich trying hard to surrender.

His squad came upon a farm house. They were sure all of the regular German army in the area had either surrendered or retreated farther into the German heartland, so they were a little careless. A few rifle shots rang out and they scattered. My uncle said they were surprised to see that they hadn't been hit as the house was very nearby. In pigeon German they screamed for the defenders to surrender and they'd be treated fairly. The called that Hitler had killed himself and the war was already over -- which it wasn't, technically. The response was more gunshots.

The next surprise came when they saw several rifle barrels sticking out of each of two large windows. The defenders were obviously crowded together inside and that wasn't the way veteran soldiers would have done it. My uncle knew this because he'd been fighting for three years, Tunisia-Sicily-Normandy-the Bulge, all the way through, he'd been in all of them and was many times decorated sergeant.

After a while one of the men with him said he got a good look at one of the bastards inside and they were SS. My uncle didn't believe that, the SS were many things, but one thing weren't was poorly trained; he was sure that, if they'd been ambushed by Waffen SS they'd all have been killed in the initial firing. A moment later, squinting at one of the windows, he saw it too, the camouflage uniform of the Waffen SS infantry. "Okay," he said, "These birds aren't going to surrender and I don't feel like dying today, do you?" The others nodded and figured they were probably up against some clerks who'd recently been handed rifles, but they were obviously still fanatics and had to be treated as such.

With the others shooting at the windows, he made his forward in a running zig-zag and popped a pair of hand grenades through the first window and a moment later did the same with the second window before running for cover.

A few seconds later one part of the house shoot, the windows being blown out and then the other half, the wooden door splitting down the middle. Smoke billowed out and he heard children, boys, crying inside.

Certain that none of them were still capable of handling a weapon, he stood and moved toward the shattered door.

It creaked open and a boy of about eleven stumbled through. His Waffen SS uniform was in shreds and dripping blood. He word a pair of over sized combat boots with the pants cuffs folded and stuffed inside. The shirt was far too large for him and, dazed, he looked at my uncle and swooned. My uncle rushed over and took him before he fell to the ground. The boy looked up at my uncle's face and touched it and said, "Father. Father." A moment later he was dead.

My uncle and went inside and there were another dozen boys the same age, all either dead or dying, several of them doing it my uncle's arms, two others also thinking he was their father.

That was May, 1945. My Uncle was honorably discharged on medical grounds a week later. He returned home a basket case and my aunt said he hardly said a word for the next five years.

-- He never told anyone that he'd been in the army or served during the war. I didn't find out about this till after his death, when my aunt had a photograph of him in uniform atop the casket. He wasn't the same man I'd known during the fifties and sixties. The man in that photograph was young with everything ahead of him, all the good and terrible times, and he was smiling. That was something I never saw my uncle do.

I visited my aunt a couple of days later. She was packing his uniform and a brace of medals that would have qualified any ten men as heroes. It was then that she told me that story.

She's also dead now and, of course, I'll be including this story in the novel.
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