Don’t talk about the war

[skyring]

The Nazis would have killed her. They wouldn’t have let a glimmer of regret flicker across their minds. If it was the Leader’s will, they would have extracted every bit of useful work from her for the greater good of the Reich and then they would have marched her into the gas chambers and cremated the empty husk.

Dear, sweet, earnest, beautiful Elhamisabel, the Nazis would have called you hateful names and shut those soft dark eyes forever. They would have called you a subhuman and gotten rid of you for the sake of the master race, the Herrenvolk.

The saddest thought of all is that for so many innocents, so many whose only fault lay in not being big and blonde, this was not a matter of “would” but “did”.

There were millions killed during the Nazi years. And millions more treated with appalling cruelty who somehow managed to survive.

I have been in the Holocaust Museum in Washington and it is the children who are the wisest there. Their messages of peace and love and understanding shine out above the dark and hate-filled slogans of the Nazis, their twisted nightmare dreams cloaked in a spurious science. A child could see through it. A child could tell who owned the moral high ground.

I have read Mein Kampf. Or rather, tried to read it. It is the most tawdry turgid drivel imaginable. Yet it was the bible of a generation. Hitler became rich on the royalties. His paranoid rantings were treated as holy gospel.

I can only wonder at how a country full of rational beings found themselves slaves to such twaddle. For some mindless ideal their cities were destroyed and so much suffering visited upon them. Barely a family left untouched by the most terrible losses.

It is Good Friday, a day for remembering sacrifices. For a reason I won’t go into, I am extremely grateful to be aboard this particular flight into Frankfurt. My little commuter craft is barely bigger than a fighter jet and we swoop through the sky, retracing the paths of warplanes going about their deadly business sixty years back.

But we don’t drop our bombs on a blazing city. Instead we slide down over a green and peaceful landscape and thump thump our wheels onto a wide runway, rolling past dozens of huge airliners to a parking bay.

A bus, long corridors, a short queue to a uniformed fellow in short hair and unsmiling eyes who stamps my documents, baggage collection where I once again bless the bright BookCrossing yellow of my bags, Customs counters unmanned, and here I am at the arrivals gate.

Where a small, intense, dark-haired young woman is returning my smile. How happy I am to see her! There is nothing better than being a vast distance away from home and having a warm welcome. Again I bless BookCrossing for giving me a community of friends across the world; an instant crystallisation of names into smiling faces and close embraces.

Elhamisabel is a local BookCrosser. We’ve been reading each other’s blogs, swapping messages, and even chatting to each other for months now, but there is only so much one can get out of long distance communication, and having a living breathing Elhamisabel within the span of my arms is a precious moment.

I let her go after several heartbeats, and we begin chattering away to each other like long friends. Which of course we are, even if we have never met until now.

She steers me through the vast terminal, across to a monorail to an even larger building where we are to catch the S-bahn into the city. Somewhere along the way I am forced to leave the luggage trolley, and she helps by carrying one of my lighter bags. Full of books, within a few paces it is too heavy for her, and when she takes it in two arms I ignore her protests and retrieve it. Over the past dozen flights I’ve somehow grown muscles and arms enough to handle four bags at once.

And bless whoever invented the rolling bag. My biggest bag is the easiest to manage so long as I have a smooth surface. It turns into a pig on stairs, of course, but these are few enough that I can put up with them. I might rethink my transport strategy next time I visit Paris and its Metro system, however…

As we move from monorail to S-bahn to bus, it emerges that my guide spent the previous day researching the route. She has not only copied the timetables and route numbers, but actually taken the bus to my hostel and scouted out the stops I must use coming and going. I have found a treasure!

I’m not much chop with languages, but there’s something inside me that takes a nerdish interest in uncovering the way words are put together. I took French in school so I have only a few words of German to fall back on and I begin to remedy my lack by picking Elhamisalbel’s brain.

“Left?” I ask, pointing that way.

She follows my finger. “Ah! Hauptbahnhof!”

Hmmm. I try again. “Left is…”

She’s smart as well as beautiful. A light goes on. “Linkes!”

“…and?’ I point the other way.

“Recht.” There’s an extra sibilance in there that I try several times to match, but I can tell by her smile that I’m not going to fool a native.

Up unter, heisse kald wärmen. While waiting for the bus we get into translating transport systems, and when I point at a tram, she says “Tram!” making it sound like “Tremm”.

German is half English. English with a twist. Some words jump out at you, and some others can be put together with a bit of logic, Germans are good at logical systems.

“Tram is also strassebahn”, she tells me, and that makes sense, even if the two esses are run together to make a kind of squiggly B.

“Der Groβe Straβe!” I point towards a nearby avenue.

“Nein. Kaiserstraβe! Sex shops one end, high class shops the other.”

I wonder what’s in the middle, but we won’t go there to see if German logic and town planning has placed the high-class sex shops there. Luckily our bus arrives and we follow a different path instead, translating the names of the streets. I am a little concerned to find out that my hostel is located in the Frankensteiner Platz, and I try Mel Brooks.

“Fronkensteener?”

But I don’t think she’s seen that movie. I’m sure there’s a twinkle in her eyes, but she is so endearingly serious. And proper, refusing to cross the threshold of my bunkroom. Even though there are two other occupants in residence already, one of them young and blonde and female, who I presume is just visiting.

I unpack my belongings, by the simple process of dumping stuff all over my bunk, and fill my big tote bag with a jumper in case it gets kald, a few books in case I find BookCrossers, a camera and Tim-Tams.

She shows me my bus stop for tomorrow’s journey back to the Flughafen, explains the timetable, and then we walk into town. It’s a pleasant walk along the riverbank and I point excitedly at a group of birds.

“Look! Recht there in der Main! Weiβe schwans!”

She looks puzzled, bless her heart, and when I explain that in Australia the swans are schwartze, she doesn’t believe me. I’m not averse to pulling legs, but when I’m recht and not believed, well!

“And the crows flug backwards to keep the dust out of their eyes.” I echo her earnestness.

We pass another couple strolling along the river walk and in that peripheral way one has of picking up important words, we both stop and turn at the clear utterance of “BookCrossing convention”.

The other couple are several metres away and like us they have faced about. We look at each other uncertainly, and then close the distance.

It emerges that one of the two speaks English and has lived in New Zealand. She has caught sight of the Dunedin BookCrossing Convention t-shirt I am wearing and is wondering whether I am a Kiwi.

As it happens, Elhamisabel has several books concealed about her person, and in a few precise moves she has explained the concept – “Like banding swans to see where they migrate,” I chip in – and loaded down the new converts with books. The perfect BookCrossing ambassador.

Soon we’ve crossed a bridge and have entered the old town. I gaze with admiration at the architecture. I don’t know if these are original or reconstructed after the bombing, but we don’t have anything like them in Australia. One thing about Europe – I will never go hungry so long as I have old buildings to feast my eyes upon. Some of these kircher are just amazing.

“What’s that one?” I ask my local guide.

“It is the... the… let’s look at the plaque.”

“Entrance other side.”

Who says Germans have no sense of humour? We both giggle delightedly.

And now we encounter strolling groups of BookCrossers, making for our gathering in an authentic German keller restaurant. Here is Allysther, with her husband and sweet little four year old son, all wide eyes and smiles, guaranteed to melt the sternest heart.

The Nazis would have destroyed two-thirds of Ally’s family but here in modern Germany nobody turns a hair. Or nobody I can see, anyway. I suspect that there are a few dinosaurs still about, believing that they are the pinnacle of evolution.

Everybody is welcomed at our BookCrossing gathering. I embrace the women, explaining that I have a license to hug beautiful women.

“He just likes to hug women,” someone says. Cripes, am I that transparent?

A pile of books grows in the middle of the long table. In the miracle of all BookCrossing meetings, the pile grows into a hill, a mountain, a range of mountains, and then disappears by the end of the meal, everybody saying they already have a mountain of books at home, and they can’t possibly take any, but still the books vanish.

I chuck a few in, take some of the thinner ones, and promise that if I don’t read them myself, at least I will give them a good long trip. This time tomorrow they will be in the New World.

Beside me is GirlFromIpanema, looking very much like her namesake, and she is as enraptured as I am with the works of Patrick O’Brian. She pulls out a copy of The Surgeon’s Mate, one of his best books, and tells me that some of the names he gives to Baltic people are quite wrong.

By sheer chance I turn to one of my favorite passages, one about the best way to prepare honey-buzzards for eating, and here on the same page is one of the names she disputes.

“Pellworm. It is the name of an island, not a person!”

She explains that the island itself is a relatively recent creation, being created by a flood. It seems that O’Brian may have nodded, but we both agree that his books are extremely good.

And both the beer and tucker are jolly good. I am interested in the kaise mit musik, but when I see the looks on the faces around the table, I put it aside. instead I have some rare beef mit green sauce, which is totally top notch. And I demonstrate how to suck up coffee through a Tim Tam, but there are some squeals from around the table as disasters occur when the timing is misjudged!

Books, journals, photographs and good company. Sorry if I don't mention everybody, but I'm going to have to cut this one short, as my flight is almost ready.

However, I am extremely pleased to report that in modern Germany it doesn't seem to matter what you look like. I just wish that Hitler had got the message in 1936 when Jesse Owens beat everyone with white skin in the Olympic sprint. Perhaps if he'd worked out what a child could see, such a great deal of misery, hatred, death and destruction could have been avoided.

For my part, I don't care what people look like on the outside. The people I like best are those with a good and true heart. People who like people. People like BookCrossers. People like Elhamisabel, who has totally won my heart.

Comments

Re: Ooops!

[martip.livejournal.com]

Bwahahaha!! Pete is masquerading as me! LOL! Sorry I forgot to log out. :-(