Copyright (c) 1997 - Ingrid A. Rimland
". . . When the long trek took up the struggle with the winds, she walked away from Apanlee forever, in the direction of the sinking sun. She left the grain, unharvested, behind. The air was light, the knowledge heavy: far better to face hardships now than be damned and lost forever to the Beast.
She walked with stoic certainty: her loyalties were clear. She led the sad procession, with shackled heart, steel fists, and adamant resolve. The teeth of unrelenting suffering were lodged within her flesh, but walk she would, and did, stopping only when night fell and flies stopped feasting on cadavers.
She did what needed to be done, and thought such thoughts as needed to be thought. She loosened her limbs by the fire.
Her world was black and white and never changed its hues. Behind her, Apanlee burst into yellow flames--not for one moment did she hesitate, did she look back. Nobody said the loaded word, but everybody knew: No longer was the outcome Lebensraum. It was survival now--survival, base and raw.
The trek wore on, swallowing the roads. It grew longer and fatter, decrepit and sluggish, a slow-moving reptile, a living entity on makeshift wheels that creaked on doggedly in the direction of the Fatherland--women and children, baggage and boxes, carts, lorries and livestock, all streaming like a silent river to the west. Horse followed horse. Cow followed cow. Smoke trailed behind. The trees started shedding their leaves. The earth kept burning. A thick blanket of dust hung over the trek. Soon, the entire road was strewn with mattresses and broken furniture. Hamlet by hamlet, her world collapsed in ruins at her back. A straw-loaded shack: that was bliss.
Marleen walked stoically. She walked toward the Führer's promise, and he would not fail her. She walked away from Apanlee where, for six generations, her clan had harvested the wheat.
Where were her people now? Except for that small handful trekking west, all vanished in the ice and snow that was Siberia. She would have perished, too, had not the Führer come.
She walked away from Apanlee with a long whip, urging the animals on. Frost, hunger, enemy fire would come; she would not change; she knew no one who would. Feet raw and soul deformed by decades of brute suffering, she would keep walking, on and on, just walking west, in the direction of the sun that dropped into a gray horizon, making her escape from the bowels of the Beast.
Life was reduced to this: great suffering was part of the design. She lived on meager morsels. Nobody questioned God's omnipotence, and surely not Marleen. She followed Faith and Führer. The Führer was His helper, for when the Führer came to Apanlee, the land was rich again.
There would be victory. When the decisive battles had been fought and won, she would eat all her fill, and still have food left over. The enemy was bleeding from a thousand fearful wounds - tomorrow the war would be won.
And in the meantime, fortitude.
Her journey to find answers in the worsening disorder was not a murky one. Her God was innocent. It was the Devil who kept tricking people with his schemes. She did not cringe and grovel before God. The Devil piled hardship on hardship.
Before she left, she took the balance of her bludgeoned life with care and without flinching, an orderly and conscientious woman.
Here's what she saw as though outlined in sharpened pencil: she had done all that she could. She had tried to please the Lord. She had tried to please the tsars. She had tried to please her parents and her husband and her children. And now she tried with all her might to please the Führer, too.
She owed him all she had. She owed him everything. One sentence summarized it all for her: had he not come with fire, flags and steel, she would have perished. Verily. As her clan had. The blood drained from her heart in memory. By the hundreds of thousands, they had perished.
That's why she drove herself. The blind servility this war demanded of all living flesh to higher law and orthodox authority was no alien feeling for Marleen. The Führer gave her certainty. In scrupulous exchange, he did not like to have his wishes crossed. She knew she never would. She never questioned him, nor did she test his gospel.
Much like the stone slabs Moses brought to guide the tribe of Israel, her gospel said: Thou shalt, and Thou shalt not. She felt no discord with a message that came in black on white, surrounded by a sea of red to script the course of duty. For it was duty that this struggle was about! Soon there was little left but duty. In generations past, her people lived by it, and most had died by it. Her faith was absolute. In its confines, her soul reposed. This was today, containing hardship, but surely tomorrow would bring hope. The earth was still full of potatoes.
"Thy will be done," she said, and did not pause to think which autocrat she meant. A traitor was a traitor. A bullet in his neck!
Who wouldn't have felt likewise, Marleen asked of Natasha, as she left Apanlee behind, now walking past the waterhole where, in the ashen years, she and her famished kin had knelt to sink the grain into the inky night so that her family could eat.
So that the world had bread!
In the East, small flashes and distant thunder, but in the West, the tree tops stirred. Life, far ahead of her, was tremulous. The crimson menace, in the East, was growing on the world like cancer, devouring the past that her forebears had loved. Young Germany, by contrast, was waiting in the West.
She was too old, by then, to savor the potential of future progeny, but there was Mimi. Still. A gun hung from her shoulder, tied to a piece of string. There was still Erika, somewhere in Germany. And there was still the baby. The day would come when they would prosper, fall in love, and multiply. And seek their Lebensraum.
Who sowed the dragons' teeth? Not anyone she knew.
The Jews, the Wehrmacht said, who knew more than she did. The Jews had hatched it, caused it, fueled it, paid for it, and in the end, abandoned it. To cause dissent, and hence destruction, was part of their self-serving itch. That's what Marleen believed.
That's how it all began for Apanlee - and brought the end for Apanlee - when Hebrews started shrieking of the evils of prosperity and property while filling their pockets with loot.
As she was leaving Apanlee behind, she saw the grand design. This thing they had unleashed; this monster called the Revolution, sprang from the bloody jaws of hell. It fell on good, kind, meek and honest people, who would not have disturbed a swallow that nested in the furrows. It was unleashed on pacifists who had amassed great wealth! By working hard and plowing deep and watching every kopeck!
How could that have been wrong?
She knew that she would live and die and never understand. Not ever. Never. She would not.
Had not the Revolution come, she would have led a meek and cordial life; she would have kept away from shocking colors and sharp designs such as the swastika. Remembering the blood-soaked night of many years ago - that night that stilled the patter of young feet in the beloved halls of Apanlee - she suffered now as she had suffered when she had tried to gather in her apron the bloody pieces of her kin. She set her jaw. What made her clutch the Führer's flag? Her cherubs, fat with peace!
The Führer said: Help smash the Devil's tanks! Set fire to his hamlets! And when, retreating inch by inch, the Führer took an iron broom and started sweeping mightily the length and width of the Ukraine, she did what any decent human being would have done. She nodded, an obedient woman--she, too, a monarchist at heart. She gave him her support.
"We'll grind the traitors to a pulp between the millstones of righteousness and wrath," the Führer said, and while she did not clap her hands, she did not turn her face from duty. Confronted with a common danger, the Führer needed her as part of a united front. It was a harsh and bitter gospel, but had she ever known a gospel that was not?
These thoughts now echoed in the empty chambers of her heart as she bid her farewell to Apanlee. Her horses were already bleeding at the mouth. The thugs would come again and smash the walls that pride of race had built. She knew the Führer whom she worshipped, the Lord Almighty whom she loved, were fighting side by side, both battling, shield and sword, against the atheistic fiend once more exploding from the gasping heart of Russia and shedding fire from the sky--for now the Jews, if you believed the radio, were running wild across America as well, and kept on fueling the war, and nothing to stop their endeavors!
A child knew that Americans were puppets to the Jews. From their soft lips fell the detested word: equality.
She was not ignorant, nor was she pitiless. They, too, would pay. She knew the balance sheet. It would get worse for them. Much worse. Dead people could be found in any war. Young lives entitled to the smell of lilacs in the spring would fall to ashes and to dust because the world was bafflingly oblivious to where the real danger lay - not with the strong and diligent but with the murky, dark and lazy.
Not with her Führer, verily. He longed for peace. Not war.
Marleen thus walked away from Apanlee for good. She turned around but once, for one last look, by the steep bend where the acacias grew and partly covered the old roof that had housed generations.
"Walls, durable enough to last for centuries--" she muttered to herself.
In the far distance, she heard the sound of weeping, but her own eyes were dry. She saw the gleaming river of work and diligence and piety and passion and deep devotion to the soil--now streaming westwards. Westwards.
She took it in for the last time: the wide-flung wings of Apanlee. The orchards. Silos. Stables.
Here they had lived, the members of the stubborn creed, harmonious in point of view, convinced their world was just. Good, simple people. Pacifists. God-fearing all, obedient all, who flung their seeds into the earth so that the world could eat. And where was their reward?
Equality? She understood equality.
Here was equality for you--to share your work and joy! That needed no translation - and verily not at the point of gun. Foul thought, dressed up in stolen garb, was not equality. The Hebrews could have learned a thing or two from the good maxims of her clan who beat their swords into plowshares, their spears into strong pruning hooks, who held their hard-earned heritage aloft.
As lesser men did not.
Ah, pride of race! She savored it. The tsars had cultivated it. The Elders, to a man, had bolstered it. The Lord Himself approved of it. She knew He did; not anywhere in nature could anybody find equality. She never claimed she was a learned woman, but atavistically she knew: equality was a political ideal, not a scientific fact!
Equality belonged in the hereafter, but surely not on earth!
The Earth had maxims of its own. The earth craved strength. Hard muscles. Potency. Fertility. Tenacity. Willpower and endurance. Equality? A Jewish lie! A fiendish trick. She wanted none of it. She shuddered at the thought.
"I paid," she told the servant who quietly walked beside her.
"You did," Natasha said.
"I paid and paid and paid. The Revolution took from me my all. It took and took and took. Death took a rich, rich harvest."
Natasha's reply was a shuddering sigh. Her jaw started working like mad. It was a riddle with no answer. She sensed that words did not stretch wide enough to summarize why tyranny was virtue now, compassion a fool's weakness. Marleen put both her trembling arms around the horse's glossy neck, and what she said that day lives on in the clan's memory. You hear it still in Winnipeg, in the Dakotas, in Nebraska, deep in the hills of Idaho. Marleen said with a shuddering sigh:
"Here I was born. Here I was married. Here I gave birth to the future, I thought. Here I lived, and here I loved, and here I buried all. I'm leaving. I am leaving all. Why am I shedding not a single tear?"
"You ask, expecting not an answer," her loyal Russian servant said. Natasha walked beside Marleen, grown black with age, in Hein's old boots, already forming blisters."
(end of excerpt)
In months to come, I will pin "Lebensraum!" - the story of MY
people's Holocaust - against the story of the Jewish Holocaust, as drawn
in "Schindler's List."
I will invite the world to read, compare, reflect, and draw their own conclusions.
Once more: Support my ZGrams and the Zundelsite. It is our media vehicle!
I NEED my friends about me with all they have to give in this ever-broadening
intellectual war that will carve the next century's definition of Justice.
Ingrid
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