Should Ingrid be required to write letters to Ernst only in German?

[zgrams at zgrams.zundelsite.org]

Title:  Should Ingrid write letters to Ernst only in German?

As part of a separate court ruling, all letters to Ernst must now be 
written in only two langauges:  German and English.  Relatives still 
in command of German are urged to write only in German so as to save 
the German government the costs of a translator:  After thinking it 
over, I sat down and composed the following reply:

[START]

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
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