We Are Each Other's Keepers

What can I do to help besides donate? I am doing my best to target specific needs in donations, as our funds are pretty severely limited. But it never seems enough.

Last night I self-comforted by rewatching Leslie Howard's impassioned anti-war and anti-Nazi film Pimpernel Smith. It's all the more poignant considering the toxic hellspew going on now, and doubly so considering that he was shot down in 1943. So he didn't get to see the end that he predicted in a memorable speech in the film's final moments: he tells the German commander about to shoot him that Germany will not prevail, that they will go down an ever darker road until the terrible end. The lighting is suitably dramatic, only one of his eyes visible.

Among the many excellent quotations tossed off during the film is one by Rupert Brooke, who wrote brilliant and impassioned anti-war sonnets and prose before dying in 1915, so he, too, did not get to see the end of that horrible war. (This elegy to Rupert Brooke is worth a listen.)

Though Howard did not live to see the end, his film inspired Raoul Wallenberg to rescue Jews in WW II, which he would have applauded; the people Pimpernel Smith is rescuing are scientists and journalists imprisoned by the Gestapo.

The film is not just anti-Nazi, which is important. But unlike so many American films made at the time, with their guns-out, let's go blast 'em all attitudes, frequently using Nazi to represent all Germans, which was just as false as today's representation of all Americans as Trumpers.

It's worth remembering the Germans who did not support Hitler's regime, and lived in fear of the next horror their government perpetrated, whether on outsiders or on themselves. Many acted, many others froze in place. Kids, bewildered, tried to survive. I knew a handful of these: my friend Margo, who died ten years ago, was a young teen during the forties. Her mother had ceased communication with the part of her family that supported Hitler. She hid the books written by Jews behind the classics in their home library, and exhorted her two girls to be kind, be kind. Until Margo was sent to music camp on a Hitler Youth activity (all kids had to join) came home to find her home rubble, her mom and sister dead somewhere in that tangle of brick and cement after an Allied bombing mission. Her existence became hand to mouth, including what amounts to slave labor. She was thirteen at the time.

Another friend's mom, a Berliner in her mid-teens, had been coopted to work in the Chancellery typing reports for the German Navy, as there were no men left for such tasks. She lived with her mother, walking to and from work in all weather until their home was bombed. They lived in the rubble, drinking rain water that sifted through the smashed walls; her mother died right there, probably from the bad water; there was no medical care available for civilians, only for the army. This friend's dad was in the army--he had been a baker's apprentice in a small town mid-Germany until the conscription. He was seventeen. He was shot up and sent back to the Russian front five times. He survived it; I remember seeing him shirtless when he mowed the lawn. He looked like a Frankenstein's monster with all the scars criss-crossing his body, corrugated from battlefield stitchwork. That pair met and married while floating about in the detritus of the war. No homes, living off handouts from the occupation until the guy was able to get work as a construction laborer. (Few bakeries, though in later life, he made exquisite seven layer cakes and other Bavarian pastries for his family.)

What can we do? Keep on resisting, without taking up arms and escalating things to that level of nightmare. I so admire Minnesotans. I believe they are doing it right.