A Voice from Lake Valley Road: The Writings of Alan Wynzel: December 2013

This all went down for real in my house when Munich hosted the 1976 Summer Olympics

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It was late summer and my mother was very excited. I was very excited because she was: Munchen was having the summer Olympics! The games hadn’t started but already Munchen was on TV every night. Look, there’s the Olympiaturm, my mother cried and pointed. Right there on the news! Remember the Olympiaturm? Now it’s open and people can go up to the restaurant and see all of Munchen. There, there’s the Frauenkirche, and the Rathaus. Remember?

I remembered. I remembered the Frauenkirche cathedral, and the Rathaus city hall, even if I couldn’t pronounce them right. My mother corrected me until I learned it. Like the car BMW. It wasn’t BMW like in English, it was Bay Em Vay: Bayerishe Motoren Werke. Bavarian Motor Works, I told the kids in class. Munchen was in Bavaria, the best part of Germany, and in Munchen they built Bay Em Vays. BMWs, the kids argued. My dad has one! A kid insisted. It’s called a BMW!

Stupid kids in my class, they didn’t know their German. So I corrected them. They got mad and called me a jerk.

The TV news had stories and movies of Munchen getting ready for the Olympiad. All the nations were coming to Munchen. My mother was so proud and happy there were tears in her eyes.

Now the world can see that Germans can do good things too, she said. Now maybe they’ll forget about all this crap with the war. Germans can build marvelous cities, and we Germans can have the entire world come to Munchen for sport and there can be peace and forgiveness.

I didn’t really understand. Why should the world be mad at Germany about the war, when the world smashed Germany to pieces? Shouldn’t Germany be mad at the Americans and the British and especially the Russians?

Then the TV program changed. Instead of movies of the Germany I had visited, with the Olympiastadt, ladies in short short skirts and men with sideburns like hippies, there were soldiers in helmets, smoke, and burning towns. My mother’s face twisted and reddened. Then the soldiers were gone and there were skinny bald people in striped uniforms clutching a barbed wire fence and staring at the camera. They looked sick and dizzy and not caring that there were flies buzzing around their heads. The announcer said a lot of things that I didn’t understand about war and camps and then he said the name Hitler and there was a movie of Hitler. I had seen pictures of Hitler before. He looked funny with his square little moustache and his twisted lemon-eating face. On the TV he was on a platform in front of millions of people in uniforms and he was shouting and waving his arms, slapping his side with a glove. That was the first time I saw a movie of Hitler and I thought, he looks like he’s ranting and raving, which is what my mother called my old man’s screaming fits. My old man did look like that, but so did my mother when she screamed, only not as ugly.

Goddammit! My mother hissed. They can never say anything about Germany without bringing up Hitler and the Nazis! When are they gonna forget about what happened? It’s been thirty years. We suffered too, you know. The whole country was blasted to bits!

My parents liked to take trips up the New York Thruway, to places like Fort Ticonderoga, Lake George, and to visit all the Summer Oktoberfests. We saw a glass blower that summer at one Oktoberfest. I remembered his demonstration now, as I watched my old man’s face shifting like dark glass being worked in the fire, twisting and turning in the flame.

Forget? He barked. The world should forget those murderous sons of bitches and the war they made?

What do you know about it? my mother cried. You didn’t fight, you drove a jeep and got kicked out of the Army for being a lazy bastard. You weren’t bombed or starved, or frozen alive!

Blame your Nazi bastards for that, blame your Hitler and your Goebbels! I should have sympathy when there was Auschwitz and Dachau?

Oh, there goes the Jew with his Dachau! That was years and years ago. And what did we know of Dachau? Nothing! I lived 5 miles from it and didn’t know it existed. That was the Nazis’ doing, that wasn’t the Germans. As for anything else, we were good Germans, fighting a war. And when you fight a war, you do like you are told!

My old man leapt from his chair and stamped his slippered feet on the floor.

Eichmanns, you were, Eichmanns! Only following orders!

Then go to Israel to be with your Jews! With the Nazi hunters who drag poor old men out of bed so they can hang them by the throats! Old men who were serving their country in a war. How many got killed in Dresden by American pilots? And the Americans walk free. Why don’t they hunt Stalin’s butchers? I’ll tell you why: because no Jews were killed. The unforgivable crime. And you Jews won’t let anyone forget. Which is easy for you, pulling strings everywhere, running Hollywood and television. Take the TV away from the Jews, give the TV to somebody else and I bet there’ll be no more talk of Dachau and Auschwitz!

At that moment the false mask of the household War was torn away and its true nature revealed. Like the Wehrmacht’s relentless marches, the unending household battles were a veil hiding a dark agenda. A murderous rage that was the twisted product of betrayal and injustice; kindled by opportunists and manipulated by madmen, it sought out scapegoats and packed crematoria with them. The Krupps, the Porsches and the Generals gave license to the Hitlers and the Himmlers to forge an army of homunculi, an outraged nation, from the dirt of fear and anger. Their march for justice was an uncontrollable stumble down the false path of vengeance, to Bergen-Belsen. And my mother, one such lost homunculus, could do no better to stop herself. She was an open vessel shaped by the songs and marches of the Hitler Youth, burdened by her own pliant grief, twisted, in a bitter cycle, into hate.

My old man stood shivering and silent. He wasn’t supposed to be silent. He was supposed to rant and rave like Hitler. But his angry bluff had failed. And there was little courage to back it up. Not enough to fight the dark force opposing him, let alone stand the shock of its exposure. He wanted a quiet place to put up his feet and draw down the lights of his life, not a battle with an undead evil clutching at his wife’s soul. He saw it clearly then, and he named it.

A monster, he hissed. You’re a monster.

Yes, I’m a monster, my mother screamed, you married a Nazi monster!

My old man marched quickly upstairs. He almost ran. I heard him shut himself inside the bathroom. My mother sat down on the sofa and sobbed. She held her face in her hands. The truth was too much for her, too. I wanted to comfort her, but I was afraid to move. The TV played on and on. The news ended and a movie came on. I heard my old man leave the bathroom. I stiffened, expecting him to charge downstairs. Instead he went to bed. My mother stopped crying and stared at the TV movie.

A Voice from Lake Valley Road: The Writings of Alan Wynzel

Monday, December 30, 2013

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Friday, December 27, 2013

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Friday, December 6, 2013

The Holocaust, revisited via 1976 Munich Olympics: Evil Unmasked