Undying Love - Brian Hesse (best non fiction books of all time txt) 📗

that he would write his thoughts and observations every day in the hopes that one-day future generations will know what happened. “The world must never forget,” he whispered, as he felt a stabbing pain of hunger assault his belly.

December 22, 1939. The Warsaw Ghetto:

    It has been three months since the Germans attacked Poland, but the seeds of hate were planted long before. Why didn’t the world listen? It is not as though, the manic, Adolf Hitler did not make his intentions known. I remember just nine years ago, when I was teaching poetry at the University, a colleague of mine, Professor Zhukov, handed me a book. On the cover was the picture of a dark-haired man with a small square patch of hair resting on his upper lip. I don’t know what you would call such a style. The mustache looked very absurd to me. I remember thinking that maybe this was the fashion of men’s moustache’s in Germany today. Regardless of my trivial thoughts, what struck me the most was the man’s eyes. They were large and intense. The eyes of a visionary staring intently at an already predicted future, a man of destiny. I had several minutes before my next lecture on the poetry of Edgar Allen Poe, or something or other. I excitedly ran to my small closet-sized office just next to the Professors lounge. There was no chance I would pass up this opportunity to read, for what I was sure to be, brilliant writings of the great visionary with the star-filled eyes. I sat in my hard-oak chair and read the title on the cover, Mein Kampf (My Struggle). What a title I thought! If I learned anything during my brief time on this earth, one of the lessons I learned is that all great men and women face struggle and bide their time before their dreams could be realized, like butterflies that break free from the cocoon just a short time after all the others have broken free. The waiting and watching may just add a bit more vibrancy to their natural color. However, after speed reading, the so-called book in front of me, my theory quickly fell apart when I read the hatred contained within the pages.

    Hitler made clear his belief that the German was of superior racial stock. All other races, meaning non-Aryan, were refuse material. He made clear that the German people were entitled to all the lands wrongfully taken from the German peoples. The mention of Lebensraum was the most disturbing aspect of the writing, at least for me anyway. Lebensraum means living space. As I read the word Lebensraum, I considered where this madman could possibly look for such vast real estate. I thought, where in Europe are large concentrations of his imagined enemy, the Jew and, enough open space for German resettlement? The answer was as plain as day to anyone with little more than an elementary education. I had a picture in my mind of this crazy man with the visionary’s eyes looking greedily at a map with his finger pointed directly at Poland. I walked out of my cubby hole with a heavy feeling in my heart. I spotted my colleague, Professor Dimitri Zhukov in the hallway just outside my door, strolling hurriedly to his next lecture.

      “Dimitri,” I stated, gently placing my arm around his small hunched shoulders. He was a very short man, standing just five-foot five inches, with a stooped over disposition, balding light blonde hair, and always wearing his thick Prinz nez eyeglasses. I felt a bit sorry for him but not because of his boggish appearance. I felt a stab of pity every time I saw him because he always seemed afraid of people. Just the simple act of touching his shoulder caused him to jump and I could feel his muscle on his shoulder tighten and spasm, under my touch.

      “Hello Aleksander,” he said, in a soft, almost feminine voice.

       “I just want to thank you for the book. Very frightening contents between those pages.” “Did you read any of the book,” I asked, releasing my light grip, lest he take a heart attack under the anxiety.

         “I did read the entire book,” he stated.

I could not believe he did not immediately grasp my concern, so I waited for just a few seconds before beginning. “Did you find anything disturbing in the book?

He turned his head sideways and upward, looking at me through his thick dirty lenses. His left eye was magnified by the lens and really did look like the eye of strange insect under the magnifying glass. I stopped myself from recoiling in my momentary disgust so as not to offend the poor creature.

“What do you mean by disturbing Aleksander?”

“You know the author is writing about the Jewish enemy, the need for German living space, and the slavery of inferior races.”

He remained silent and looked at me with a dumbfounded expression that sent a bolt of anger racing through my body, like lightning slicing through the bark of a tree. I could not talk to my old thick-headed friend any longer. I stormed off to my next lecture feeling alone, like a prophet without an audience for his message.

All of this seems so long ago now as I sit here among the cries of the starving and the walking dead. I am covered in lice but I dare not remove my tattered jacket. Everybody in the ghetto is desperate for the basic needs of life. My jacket will surely be stolen. I am so hungry and tired. I ate a small handful of blackened bread and a rotten potato I took out of the pocket of a man I found dead on the renamed Germania Avenue. I was walking down the street showing people the only faded photograph I have my Anastazja. Some people politely nodded the negative in their hungry and humiliated silence. Others ignored me as though I were already dead, like a ghost condemned to walk the earth looking for his lost love. My stomach was cramping so bad from the hunger. I did not eat since I was knocked unconscious by the concussion of a Panzer tank round. The last I remember is charging with my rifle at the ready and trying to circle around the iron beasts toward the infantry lying in wait behind the tanks. I was so close to the enemy I could see the face of a young German soldier shivering with fear under the distinctive German Stalhelf (steel helmet). He was just a boy, no older than seventeen. Certainly not what I expected when reading Hitler’s Mein Kampf. Did this boy fully digest the garbage propaganda fed to him by Hitler and his henchman, Dr. Joseph Goebbels, Minister of Propaganda?  I didn’t think so at that moment when I considered his frightened eyes. I aimed my rifle toward the boy’s face, doing my best to compensate for the violent trotting of my war horse. Just as I was about to pull the trigger, I felt the concussion of the tank round smash into the frosty ground beside my horse. My ears immediately muffled as if my head were suddenly thrust under water to ear drum shattering depths. Then nothing but blackness. I was awoken in the ghetto’s only make shift hospital, my head covered in dirty bandages thick with my own blood and puss. So please forgive me my love if you should be alive and read this diary. Forgive me for taking this bread. The man was not dead yet, but he was dying.

I was walking down that crowded street smelling the sour odor of my own dried sweat. I did not bathe in days and, understandably, the Jewish and Polish ladies acting as nurses did not have time to give patients a bath. In fact, I am certain that I was already classified as dead, judging from the amount of blood on my bandages. Surprisingly, my face was not damaged but my scalp was split wide open and quickly stitched in a crude manner. I shall have to remove the stitches myself after the scalp fuses back together properly in a few weeks. So, I was walking, staggering, down the street with sharp hunger pains threatening to double me over with every few steps. I saw the figure of a man lying in the trash filled gutter just a few hundred yards from the hospital. His face was pressed into the ground and I could see the back of his soil covered tan suit jacket moving, as though an invisible hand was trying to poke through the fabric in random spots. I staggered over more out of curiosity, than a desire to help, I must confess. I bent down and lifted the jacket and a large grey and brown rat leapt from the man’s back with fresh blood staining the ragged fur and whiskers of his pointed pace. I could see the man’s back where the rat was gnawing directly on the middle of the spine. I turned my head to throw up but could only make loud retching noises because my stomach was empty. I wanted so desperately to scream for help. I looked up with mouth wide open but no sound came out, as if an invisible hand squeezed my throat allowing no sound to be produced. Why scream out to people walking over, and around, a dying skeleton being slowly digested by a cat-sized sewer rat. He was surely alive. I could hear faint moaning like a phantom voice murmuring from the bottom of a deep well. His back slowly rose and fell in very infrequent but deep movements. I could not help this man. Death was patiently waiting for me to do my dirty dead before taking this poor soul swiftly away into the void. So, I did it my dear. I reached into his pocket and filled my own with his daily ration of bread. I will survive at any cost. I will survive any horrors this world should offer just to touch you one more time.

Aleksander placed the diary in his pocket and fell asleep, too tired to even feel the lice biting at his frail neck.

December 22, 1939: The Lodz Ghetto

 Seventy-three miles southwest from the Warsaw ghetto, and Anastazja’s lover Aleksander, rests the Lodz ghetto. Prior to the nineteen thirty-nine invasions of Poland, Nazi planners, such as Reichsfuhrer Henrich Himmler, eyed the vast natural resources of the Country. Like greedy children left to run amok in an unsupervised candy store, the Nazi’s quickly raped the land of anything not nailed to the floor. The Poles were to be nothing more but slaves to their German masters. German corporations waited with nervous excitement at the prospect of mining the vast coal stores Poland possesses. Hitler knew that any full-scale war with the West and, later the East, in Russia, would require oil resources that Germany lacked in sufficient quantities. German engineers proved that synthetic oil and rubber can be produced from coal, and Poland was in no shortage of coal, and the necessary slave labor needed to keep the machinery of war oiled with sweat, blood, and unimaginable terror. The ghettos of Poland quickly filled with Poles and Jews immediately after the invasion. Nazi SS special action squads, in conjunction with German ordinary police and Polish police, began a program of terror with several aims. The first aim was the identification, and liquidation, of the Polish intelligentsia. Hundreds, if not thousands, of University professors, politicians, and suspected communists were immediately executed or, interrogated by torture and then dispatched accordingly. The next aim was to use the local German minority to inform, beat, and kill Poles and Jews who had been once their neighbors for many years. The final aim was to separate Jews from Polish prisoners. Although crammed together by the millions in the ghettos throughout the country, Jews