ZGram - 10/28/2003 - Prisoner of Conscience Letter # 28

[zgrams at zgrams.zundelsite.org]

ZGram - Where Truth is Destiny:  Now more than ever!

October 28, 2003

Good Morning from the Zundelsite:

Two distinct excerpts from Cell # 5 in the Canadian Gulag:

The first is from a recent letter to me, dated 10-20-03.  The second, 
a bit further down, is from a letter sent early this month to a 
rather new supporter in Texas who will, so we fervently hope, get a 
small Zundel delegation together to pay Congressman Ron Paul a 
reconnaissance visit.  We need to find out if something can be done 
at all to find somebody with a spine up there in Washington who won't 
disappear in a mouse hole the moment the Holocaust Lobby says "Boo!"

Let me say this:  I have only the highest regard for Congressman 
Paul, but I do know that he made a withering remark about my 
venerable husband.  If you were in my moccasins, would you let that 
pass by?  For many, many in America, Ron Paul is like a beacon of 
hope - but he needs to be clued in, don't you agree, that when it 
comes to Mr. Zundel, he will be dealing with a man of substance, 
integrity and, above all, resilience, and not the cardboard cut-out 
caricature created by Spielberg et al to scare the gullible?   

Letter to Ingrid up-front:

[START]

It's Monday before noon.  My tall Punjabi Indian bodyguard, turban 
and all, came early to fetch me for my ten minutes of fresh air.  It 
was a nice brisk morning.  Then it was shower time.

In the meantime, I had my own anxieties to contend with, for my 
trusty glasses broke.  For months, I wondered silently what I would 
do if and when that moment would arrive.  So now I am waiting for our 
Security Chief to come to give him one more Zundel lament.  Without 
my glasses, I won't be able to read, write or sketch.  I will be 
speaking to my lawyers at 4 p.m. today - hopefully, I can get the 
phone then.  I will see if they can get me one of those all-purpose 
Walmart glasses.  I have half a dozen in my desk at home in the top 
drawers.  What a fate!

My being jerked around is like all the other Zundel persecutions to 
serve [people] as an example not to open their mouths, or else - and 
in some quarters of the German community, it's obviously working.  [A 
Canadian supporter] told me about the fear he encountered once he 
asked the German Canadian Congress to engage themselves for me.  They 
never were much good, but not even in this extreme situation will 
they do or say anything.  It is really perverse - to think how hard I 
have fought for that community, so that their children in school 
would not be subjected to the constant taunts, and that their 
heritage would not be denigrated in their children's school books. 

I can see why our soldiers, after the war, were so bitter.  Imagine, 
some of them had lost limbs or their eyesight, their wives were 
raped,  their children killed. I can only explain it in the context 
of Hitler's aftereffect that the German nation could still gather its 
remnants - and like a Phoenix rising from the ashes with all of these 
traumatized and battered psyches within their community rebuild that 
place in a remarkably short time to be again the powerhouse economy 
of Europe.  An amazing feat!  Mr. Arcand used to tell me:  "Mr. 
Zundel, you come from the most virile, dynamic people on earth!"  He 
said that in utter awe and sincere admiration. 

This reminds me of the historical writer, William Manchester.  He 
once told in an article in Reader's Digest in the late 1960s or early 
1970s that he accompanied Charles DeGaulle on a battlefield visit to 
Stalingrad in the summer of 1943.  DeGaulle kept exclaiming aloud: 
"Mon Dieu, quelles peoples!"  When Manchester asked him, "Mon 
General, quelles peoples?" DeGaulle answered, "Of course the German 
people!  To think that they came that far!" 

An amazing accolade by an enemy!  One has to remember that France, 
all of it, was still occupied at that time, and DeGaulle was the 
chief of the "Big Four" engaged in a life-and-death struggle with the 
German forces.  He still had the grandeur and chivalry to say this in 
front of an international coterie of war correspondents.

A little closer to home:

A brutal murderer has been put into this isolation area in the last 
few days.  I heard one of the guards scream obscenities at him 
because the guy is obviously mental, raging like an animal, pounding 
on his cell door, making animal grunts all the while.  It seems he 
killed his wife in a gruesome [fashion], stabbing her 27 times, 
according to what I overheard.  I feel sorry for the guards who have 
to be serving food to creatures like that, take them to the shower, 
the yard, to sick bay etc.  One really is exposed to the garbage dump 
and the broken wrecks and refuse of society in these places.

I always try to keep that in mind when one of the guards, or the 
captains, have a "bad hair day."  Imagine doing this as a career all 
the rest of your life!  I have asked some of them why they chose this 
kind of work.  You would not believe how carelessly and without 
forethought most of these men and women ended up being prison guards 
- a whole life spent like a comet's tail based on a whim of a 
decision! 

They don't make all that much money, it seems, and it's shift work. 
It also seems that management, in order to save money and to 
intimidate the Union, are using a lot of part-time contract helpers. 
That was one of the constant discussions in Thorold, almost like an 
echo chamber while I was in the shower or outside in the yard doing 
my rounds.  Everybody has worries, problems, job fears.  Only you and 
I have the perfect job - work we like to do, which is meaningful and 
reaches the world in an instant, bypassing borders, customs, snoops, 
censors most of the time!

This is quite a time to be alive, when one really thinks about it. 
Europe is like a sleepy giant, drowsily blinking into the sunlit 
[air], stirring - and, unsteadily as yet, staggering to its feet 
after 58 years of abject prostration before its conquerors in East 
and West.  In comparison to such a momentous occasion, what are the 
inconveniences I have to suffer, and the loneliness you have to 
endure, until all this has been sorted out?

Sorry for rambling on, my lady!  I will end this now and get the 
envelope ready for you. 

[END]


Next comes the excerpt from that letter to our young Texan supporter:

[START]

In Tennessee's Blount County jail,  where the food portions were 
small and of very poor quality, most of the prisoners would buy junk 
food, like chocolate bars, by the armful.  M&Ms were the favorites, 
Mars bars a close second.  My schizophrenic/manic depressive cell 
mate, a chemical engineer who had apparently peddled designer drugs 
via the Internet, bought in one week 40 packets of Cool-Aid in powder 
form, 30 Mars bars, 10 bags of M&Ms and 20 bags of potato and corn 
chips, because he said he was "starving".  All the prisoners 
complained of hunger.  Imagine in rich America, prisoners going 
hungry!

[At breakfast], lunch and supper, there was a regular loud, 
slave-auction type shouting going on, especially between the Black 
inmates, many of whom were in on various drug charges.  They would 
trade their two pieces of dry toast or their soggy porridge for "one 
item" - that's what it was called, an unofficial in-prison currency 
established by inmates among themselves. 

Since I was desperate to write to Ingrid and to make some drawings to 
cheer her up as well as to send them as "thank you" notes to my 
supporters, I participated in the auction to rent - yes, RENT! - a 
prisoner's ball point pen for 1  1/2 days for some of my food items. 
Another man gave me three sheets of paper for some apple pie, 
oversweetened as all this stuff was.  I did not miss it. 

The early drawings that Ingrid received came into being because of 
this Black entrepreneurship. As soon as the inmates saw that I could 
draw, they crowded around, and serious bargaining took place around 
the Zundel table. 

One white man, approximately 27 years old, in for over 20 years, was 
willing to trade me the use of his ball point pen [plus] rental of a 
book on America's beautiful national parks if I made him a 
letter-sized pen drawing of his vintage Camaro, of which he showed me 
a faded color Polaroid, cut off at the end.  We shook hands on our 
deal.  I got paper, pen, snapshot, and that precious book from the 
boy.  I made Ingrid a prison Valentine's Day card, which took 27 days 
from the date I mailed it in prison to our home maybe 35 miles away.

I drew a picture of a grist mill from memory, as I had seen it in 
Cades Cove Park, not far away from our home, and one beautiful summer 
vista overlooking parts of America.  Ingrid gave those as numbered 
prints to our better donors.  That's how the first, desperately 
needed money was raised for my defense, for the lawyers gobble up 
money at an alarming rate, let me tell you that!

Then I drew the young man's car, and business started booming. 
Unfortunately my free enterprise barter system was short-circuited by 
my being expelled from America. 

[End]

A reminder:

Support the Zundel Struggle - one day you will be proud you did! 
Ernst's  Prisoner of Conscience sketches are rapidly becoming 
collectors' items.  I have a few new ones in the hopper I need to 
computer-enhance and put on the Net so our enemies can see we will 
not be defeated!

NO SURRENDER!