“Husk”
Anonymous


Translated from the original German by John James Finch, 1986. Original text compiled from an undated interview with Aleksander Holl, c. 1970.

I have a story to tell. Most people about my age do, don’t they?

I’m not Jewish. I’m not Polish. I’m not even a survivor, not in the sense the rest of the world wants to hear about. Yes, it’s true that I survived. But I didn’t survive because God was on my side, or because I was clever, or because I persevered. I’m sitting here because I happened to be on the surviving side. It wasn’t even my choice.

You should realize, of course, that by 1939, attendance of the Hitler Youth was legally compulsory. Not that it makes our collective atrocities . . . acceptable, but it remains the truth. School was hardly the safe-haven of intellectualism Europeans think it is now.

I can remember days when I fell asleep in class because I’d been at Hitler Youth meetings late into the evening. I can remember a great deal of things about school, about life before the war . . . even about life before Hitler’s election. I can remember when Hitler’s picture appeared in my classroom at school. I was only thirteen in when he invaded Poland.

But my story takes place before that - two years earlier, in fact, in 1937. It has, at the same time, both very little and everything to do with Hitler. It has everything and nothing to do with Germany, and patriotism, and school and the Hitler Youth. All those things, and others, made me what I was then, as an eleven-year-old-boy, but the fact remains that this story is not about Germany. It is about me, and something terrible I did long before I was old enough to go to war.

At the age of eleven, I had already been pushed towards the realization that I wasn’t good enough. My mother may have been a handsome blonde with childbearing hips who’d been awarded a gold Motherhood Cross, but my father was hardly so respectable. Despite being of solid German ancestry, his dark hair and dark eyes were attributes that had been passed onto his five sons. He worked hard, it’s true, and he adhered to the appropriate values we all needed to know, but that didn’t save his sons from being beaten in the schoolyard.

The man who changed my life was a history teacher at my school. He had the fairest skin I’d ever seen on a man, and bright red hair, which was a little too long, and fell in his eyes. His eyes, themselves, were absolutely remarkable, a shade of purple-blue that was admittedly unique. He wore tailored black suits and used remarkable diction when he read from our textbook.

He would begin each lesson by quoting the Fuhrer. “ ‘To ‘lean’ history,’ “ he would say, his voice ringing clear across the room, “ ‘means to seek and find the forces which are the causes leading to those effects which we subsequently perceive as historical events.’ ”

He was the first to stand up for me, when even I couldn’t fight back. Previous teachers had encouraged the brawls my classmates would start, saying a boy must learn to hold is own in a fight. He, however, pulled the boy away from me by his jacket lapel and dropped him firmly on his feet a meter away.

“You listen to me, Mr. Gerard,” he said sharply. “A very intelligent man once said that a nation divided cannot stand. If you raise a hand against your own kinsman, are you willing to accept responsibility when they say that you are the one who caused the Reich’s downfall? Hitting this boy is just a beginning, but I would suggest you reconsider before you make a decision you may live to regret.” With that, he sent the boy to detention and turned back to me.

At the time, I didn’t understand what he’d said. His words stuck with me, all the same, and, eventually, when I was much older, I can to see what he’d meant.

“Are you all right?”

I sniffed and wiped my bloody nose. “Yes, sir,” I said.

He nodded once and caught me with an intense look. His purple eyes seemed to be almost studying by soul. I shuffled my feet, uncomfortable. “Can I go, sir?”

“You may go, yes,” he said, and straightened up.

Months passed and I found myself enamored with my history professor. He inspired in me an interesting in learning that I had never felt before, nor would I ever feel afterwards. My father was pleased to see the improvement in my marks, and my mother maintained that is was about time. With six children that still needed raising and one about to get married, she had little time for much else.

In any case - Thus began my love affair with my redheaded history professor. Not that I knew it was such a thing, then. Looking back, of course, I realize that I had fallen in love for the first time in my short eleven years.

I took to staying after school, so that he could tutor me in history. He seemed thrilled that I expressed such an interest in the subject, and was more than happy to indulge me. We would read from books from his own personal collection. His books were marvelous.

Close up, one of the most impressive things about him was how pleasant he smelled. His scent was a combination of the sharp tang of soap and the expansive scent of tobacco. I had never seen him smoke, and I’d been told that only foreigners and anarchists smoked. I couldn’t help but be intoxicated by the smell, all the same.

I don’t particularly care to relive the details of those months. They were, suffice to say, the most enjoyable days I spent during my entire school career.

In February of 1938, I committed the first of a series of unforgivable acts that would characterize the rest of my young adult life. Perhaps I should have taken it as a sign, but, at the time, I saw nothing wrong with it. Hindsight, don’t they say, is always quite clear.

It was in the middle of February and very cold. I was only days away from turning twelve. Once again, I had stayed behind at school, and he was reading aloud from one of his books. Presently, he paused in his recitation, and looked at me.

“Can you tell me what that means?” he asked. “What does me mean when he says, ‘He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you’?”

I paused, looked back at him. I felt like I was looking into an abyss of my own, one of a violet-blue shade more remarkable than any I had ever seen before. And, sure enough, the abyss was staring back.

Without another thought, I leaned forward and brushed my lips across his. I felt his breath gust lightly across my cheek as he sighed. Things seemed to slow down for a moment. Then he refocused his eyes on me, and straightened up.

“That is thoroughly inappropriate,” he said sharply after a moment’s hesitation. “I trust it will not be repeated, and, so, as a favor, will make no mention of it.” He looked at me for another moment, and the stood up. “You are excused. I think we’ve had enough of a lesson for today.”

As I walked home, the hurt I had felt as his initial rejection only sunk further into my heart. I knew I had been irrevocably wronged, and I felt like my heart had been broken. It was, in fact. And it was on the walk, as I walked into the wind, that I resolved to return humiliation for humiliation. And of all the other things I have done to people, in the course of my life, of all the blind eyes I have turned, of all the cruelties committed, this is the one I regret the most.

After dinner that night, I spoke to my father. I told him my professor had touched me somewhere, and I didn’t think it was appropriate. Needless to say, my father was furious.

It was then that I found how quickly the Reichstag could serve ‘justice.’ Within a week, my first love had been fired from my school, discredited, and sent to an institution to be cured. I can remember listening to a substitute teacher drone on about Napoleon as I watched him carry his teaching supplies across the school yard, the cold February breeze tugging at his coat and at his hair.

I remember the feeling I had when I realized that I was better than all my classmates because I had aided the Reich. Most of all, I remember feeling as if I had triumphed.

I don’t know what happened to him after that. He may have been ‘cured,’ and gone on to marry. Or he may have been in a concentration camp, even as I worked listlessly on my homework assignments and attended Hitler Youth meetings. Perhaps he died, in one of those places, his stunning strength, which I had marveled at as a child, which was so neatly contained inside his slender body, withered away until he was nothing more than a husk.







Notes:
Boys joined the Deutsches Jungvolk at the age of 10 and transferred to the Hitler Jugend, or Hitler Youth, at the age of 13.
The Motherhood Cross was awarded to women who had ‘done the nation a service’ by producing a large number of children. The gold Motherhood Cross was given to women who had birthed eight children.
“To ‘learn’ history means . . .” Is, in fact, a quote from Adolf Hitler. I don’t know when it was said, so I’m not sure if it’s period-correct, but bear with me anyway.
Smoking was looked down during this era as something that was “un-German.”
“He who fights with monsters might take care . . .” is a quote from Friedrich Nietzsche, whose philosophy Hitler was famous for adopting.