Discoveries

So as I finished up my book tonight, I realized that I just finished what is pretty much a military history. I never thought I would be into that genre. I feel like King Bidgood playing with battleships in the bathtub. (Reading that phrase as a kid seems normal. Writing that phrase as an adult seems laden with euphemism.) Also, at key points in the narrative, usually when the pompous British author was making some obvious point about the evil of Hitler and the complicity of the German people, all I could think of was this dubbed youtube video. NINE! NINE! NINE! NINE!

Though I definitely like narrative and story and action, sometimes I underline the little details, even in library books. Amidst descriptions of atavistic rape on the Eastern front; 13-year old Hitler youths trading candy and killing Russians; Mongol comrades crucifying women to barn doors; women clutching long-since frozen babies walking bare-foot in a brutal Hungarian winter; and, what was very surreal to read, large herds of cows mooing desperately to be milked as they roved among 2.5 million ethnic Germans fleeing the Russian advance--amidst all this Doctor Graf Hans von Lehndorff stopped to write of his East Prussian home:

Whoever lived these last months with receptive senses must have felt that never before had the light been so intense, the sky so lofty, the distances so vast.

Somehow, seeing it at its worst makes me want to visit it so much more. Next summer. My European trip. I will hit the towns and villages where my family came from. In a cursory search, I couldn't find any alive during this period, although it seems I have some relatives that died fighting the French in WWI.


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