This
Letter is written from America out of a keen and earnest sense that I am
writing not just to you, whom I don’t know, but for the sake of history.
I read in a document that carries the seal of your office that you believe
it necessary to restrict my husband’s mailing privileges, and that you
insist, or request, that henceforth both of us should write in German to
ease the bureaucratic burden of governmental inquiry of what might be
expressed between a husband and a wife.
It is in our interest and also our
genuine desire that we cooperate with you because you hold our future in
your hands – and you may well decide, not knowing our side of this vast
struggle, that our marriage be sacrificed to politically correct
expediency, for I can’t come to Germany, as you well know, because of
items on my website that are considered “criminal” in Europe, and Ernst is
banned from ever coming back where he belongs - for chances are, he won’t
survive another 20 years, perhaps spent all of them in prison.
For what?
A friend of mine, a brilliant German
attorney, wrote to me recently: “Der Fall Z. ist kein Kriminalfall,
sondern ein geschichtliches Ereignis.” [“The Zundel case is not a
criminal case. It is an historical event.” It sounds more elegant in
German ... ] My heart skipped a beat because that sentence gave me
clarity and direction for this letter the way a thousand mundane words
could not have done.
Since 1995, my website, the
Zundelsite, has carried the United Nations Universal Declaration of
Human Rights, adopted and proclaimed by General Assembly resolution
217 A (III) of 10 December 1948 and binding on all signatories, including
Germany:
Article 19. “Everyone has the right to
freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold
opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information
and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.”
Those words, to me, are sacred. It
hurts me to see them not only ignored but violated by the German
government.
I will continue to write to my unjustly
incarcerated husband in English. As a professional writer keenly aware
of the power of words, I claim for myself that right for several
compelling reasons:
Legally, I am entitled because I am a
legally unblemished American citizen living on American soil, protected by
those words and by the First Amendment to the Constitution. I
carried on my website, the Zundelsite, these all-important safeguards to
my freedom since 1996 when faceless European bureaucrats attacked my
website – mine, not Ernst’s! - and called me nasty names.
However, this letter has another purpose.
I do not strive to be belligerent. That is not in my nature. I would like
to make you understand why I would write the way I do and act the way I
do.
It is true that I was born into an
ethnic German family and learned High German as my first, intensely
cherished language. However, after having lived in Russia since 1789, my
German-descent relatives, among whom I spent my early years, communicated
largely in an oral-only, language-impoverished Low German.
Luckily my parents, Russian-educated
but German to the core, imparted on me the High German that was the
cultural treasure of my people. Especially my mother, a German language
teacher in awe of High German, would threaten to scalp me if I as much as
lost a comma. So, yes – I understand every nuance of written and even
spoken High German and am keenly aware of grammatical rules, but I lack
the tools of thought - that fertile German vocabulary of past generations
that would permit me to express myself with precision.
As a professional writer and ethnic
novelist, precision of thought is important to me. For me to write to my
unjustly incarcerated husband in that stilted, impoverished High German I
rescued from the rubble of our bombed-out Germany plain hurts me in my
soul because I cannot convey what is dear, important and intensely
intimate and private between us.
I have now lived and worked in
English-speaking surroundings since May of 1960 – almost half a century.
I speak, write, think, feel and dream in English.
I plead not only for myself. Ernst is
the beloved step-parent of my oldest, handicapped son. Erwin,
brain-insured since shortly after birth, loves Ernst without reservations,
and that is mutual. He is heartbroken at the cruelty and injustice of it
all. He speaks and understands only English. He, too, is entitled to
know and to follow just what is going on - and I believe his special needs
and simple wishes should be given precedence over bureaucratic
inconvenience.
Practical considerations also enter the
picture. After my husband’s arrest, I was left with an established
network of Truth-in-History supporters – thousands and thousands of them,
in more than 40 countries. They call me; they write to me; they send me
kind words and financial support – and I have to reply. Each month,
hundreds and hundreds of letters! I have to raise enormous sums of money
to pay expensive attorneys in three countries and two continents - I
simply do not have the time to write letters to my husband with a
German-English dictionary at my elbow. I feel emotionally raped by that
unfair bureaucratic request – or is it a demand? - to write in a language
that feels like a hair shirt to me.
[How] I wish I spoke a perfect, fluent
German the way I learned to speak English! A very great cultural treasure
is lost to which I was entitled, but war and political mischief deprived
me of it. I don’t know who you are, how young or old you are, how much
you know of the emotional and even spiritual dimensions of what is snidely
called “Holocaust Denial” - our costly, freedom-draining struggle for
unblemished Truth in History. You may or may not sense just who we are –
but untold thousands know we are good people engaged in a principled
quest. Both Ernst and I know this in every fiber of our being. We
serve a sacred mandate that destiny has given us. We must proceed on our
chosen path, regardless of the consequences. We have a “Heimatland” –
“Ein Volk in Not” entitled to hear truth and heal its soul of unjust
accusations. I was not even born in Germany, but even to me, the
beautiful word “Heimatland” is a rare thing, a frail thing that
reverberates on wings.
Can I explain that? I don’t know. A
scene of many years ago, somewhere in Russia or Poland, is burned into my
memory - one freezing, hungry Christmas on the trek, on rickety wagons
pulled by exhausted horses that left their bloody footprints in the snow.
We Volksdeutsche, thousands and thousands of us, were fleeing the
murderous hordes of the Red Army. We stopped somewhere when it got dark,
and there was nothing but ice and dark sky in a snow-laden forest. Many
had died on the road. Many more would. Only four of us were still alive
- my grandmother, my mother, my baby sister and I, then seven or eight
years old. I lay, curled up beneath snow-sodden blankets, and sobbed my
little heart out. I watched my grandmother climb down from the wagon,
tears freezing on her cheeks. She had nothing to give me but this - she
broke off a twig from a fir tree, and with her trembling, frostbitten
hands she put a match to it against the howling wind, and when it threw
sparks, she held it up to my nose with these shy words: “Sei still! Halt
aus! So duftet Weihnachten im Vaterland.” [Be quiet! Endure! That is
how Christmas smells in our homeland!]
One day, when all this is over and
right will triumph over wrong, I will experience Christmas in my
homeland. One day, I will reclaim the many treasures of my heritage that
have been lost or stolen, including a rich, fertile German. Until then,
it will have to be English – the language of my adopted and equally
besieged America.
Sincerely and from the heart,
Ingrid Zündel
