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Edited on Mon Nov-14-05 02:35 AM by Dunvegan
I ask...I don't believe it is time yet...I will probably never believe it is time...but the question is: If your country goes mad, when do you know it IS time to leave?
Here is why I ask...this question has haunted me since I was very, very young.
When I was a child my caretaker was a woman who lived in Berlin before the war and came to the US in the early 1960's. Occassionally she would talk about Nazi Germany, back when very few Germans (even ex-patriots) would mention those days. Of course, she was a German woman who moved to the United States in the '60's and married a Black engineer, so she was extraordinary in many ways politically.
I was also a child that liked indulging in adult converstion. Charlotte always conversed with me is this manner.
She said that the average German was demoralized and the economy was somewhat depressed after WWI.
Upon Hitler's rise to power, at first most people just thought that they needed to recover after their defeat in WWI, re-establish the industrial base and revitalize the economy.
The Nazi Party at first preached a renewed belief in Germany as being able to take it's place as a first-world nation once again. It lifted the spirits of a post-war Germany. It struck a cord. First with the most marginalized of society, but eventually most of the average citizenry came together to implement this renaissance.
I remember she said that slowly many of the common folk in Berlin lost all feeling for what may have been behind Hitler’s cult of personality, and began to cheer on the conquest of one European country after another without any conscience as to the morality of the adventurism, without any feeling that the enemy was human.
That even German Jews and German left-wing party members, and German homosexuals were also considered non-human.
It was then that she made a decision.
She left Berlin and married a sculptor. She moved with him to a remote aerie in the mountains of Austria for the duration of the war.
Charlotte had saved from that bleak time a collection of figures hand-carved by her Austrian husband: an example of the most amazing wood crèche sculptures I have ever seen.
Each Christmas she would decorate her entire living room with the willowy congregation, all of hand-waxed cherry wood.
I still remember them vividly: over thirty extraordinary individual sculptures, each with its own personality. They were El Greco-esque. The wise men were at least a foot and a half tall, but only a few inches wide. So hauntingly thin and poignantly forlorn...eyes looking off in the middle distance for something, perhaps some semblance of sensibility, forever seeking their infant Savior.
After the war, she returned to Berlin. She told me that the suffering of the enemies of the Fatherland that her countrymen were so callous about was the same abject suffering she and other Germans themselves now endured in a decimated capital city...a great First World capital that had set out to, in it's Fuhrer's Reich, rule the entire world for a thousand years.
To create a sort of "New Reichland Century x 10."
She told me this story one morning while making breakfast and coffee and explaining the origin of the word "ersatz"...as in "ersatz coffee."
I was eating my toast and carefully avoiding the slightly burned crust. Charlotte watched for a moment, then sat down next to me with her cup of coffee.
She said to me, "Do you know this German word 'ersatz?'
"After the war in Berlin, we had to beg. All of us. We dug in the ashes...we lived in pieces of houses. My clothing was rags. There was precious nothing to eat. Little water. No doctors. For years.
"If we could get anything, we used every part of it, everything...if we could get a potato, we would save the potato peel. Then we roasted them, and when dry, we crumbled the peels into powder which we mixed with boiled water for something hot to drink in the morning.
"That was what we called 'ersatz' coffee...that was coffee to us after the war was over.
"When the Americans came they were a blessing. Everyone tried to get to the part of Berlin where the Americans and the English were, we were afraid of the Russians because they were cruel and took revenge.
"I always remembered the soldiers of America and how they freed the Jews and left no doubt about the truth of the camps.
"The Americans cared for us, even though we were their enemies. That I why I finally came to America.
"Now, go on...eat your toast, and think…and try not to waste the crust."
Sometimes the "enemy" are just citizens...citizens...just like us.
I'm a fighter, I love my country, I love the Constitution, and have been politically active since I was a teenager, which adds up to 35+ years of activism.
However, in the back of my mind, there is something I cannot shake, and had not thought much about since I was a pre-teen.
When I was a child I wondered, even obsessed, about two things:
1. If I were in the situation the non-Nazi Germans and the German Jews were in, prior to Kristallnacht, or beyond...would I know to leave...like Charlotte?
2. Or, like many, many others in Berlin, would I stay and say, “It cannot be that bad. How far would they REALLY go? We are not savages...we are a great country, with a great heritage. This will pass before it becomes madness.”
Would I say, "I'm a citizen, I was born here, just like anyone else...what would they possibly do to me? I can speak out, this is foolish. They are made up of the bullies and cultist worshipers of the government, the fringes of society. How far could they possibly go?
"We can make them stop...at some point, surely at some point...they have to listen to reason!"
...and stay too long?
Edited for syntax.
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