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        Stories & Imaginings >> Cookies & Drabbles >>  Exile Diary
        
(Message started by: edith on Apr 10^th, 2003, 1:10pm)

Title: Exile Diary
Post by edith on Apr 10^th, 2003, 1:10pm

This is a diary entry I've written for Herr Marani from Exile, it's an idea for a story I've had and there'll be more diary entries for Herr Marani. Does anyone else want to write a diary entry for another character from exile?

Herr Marani

Today some of the chalet school girls had to run from the Nazis, including my daughter Maria, Joey and Miss Wilson. My brother in law Gottfried and Herr Doktor Maynard are with them. They had to run because they helped Herr Goldberg, the watchmaker. How can these Nazi’s turn against those who helped them. Herr Goldberg was harmless, if anything he helped these Nazi’s when they were poor and ill. But the Nazi’s do not care for anyone who is not Aryan.
But I’m worried; I am sending away my wife as soon as possible, because I think the Nazi’s will be after me when they see Maria’s gone. I’m surprised they haven’t come here already, I have flaunted them twice, I would not take my daughter away from the school, and now she has disappeared. They will blame me, but I won’t leave Austria. Never, this is my country, it does not belong to the Nazis whatever they say.

Title: Re: Exile Diary
Post by Clare on Apr 10^th, 2003, 6:52pm

I do like that Edith, and it's a good idea about the diaries. I'd love to have a go at writing one, but I'm a bit snowed under at the minute. I will eventually though!!

Also, diaries become very popular during "Problem for", maybe we could try writing accounts from different eras.

Looking forward to your next diary entry...

Title: Re: Exile Diary
Post by edith on Apr 11^th, 2003, 12:56pm

Here it is. It's only very short, but I only want to put up on at a time. This'll be the last one for a fortnight, because it's the end of term, unless someone else will post them for me.

Today the Gestapo came for a professor from the university because he said the wrong thing. I think they are after me, all the time I listen for the knock on the door and the SS man in his grey coat.

Title: Re: Exile Diary
Post by edith on Apr 11^th, 2003, 3:09pm

OK! I finished it, and since I won't be posting over easter because my home computers broken, I'll leave you with the rest of it.

I went out today to visit a friend, I know I was being followed but I couldn’t do anything about it. Afterwards I met a mob attacking an old Jewish woman. I helped the old lady up before going home. I know I am condemned now, but what can I do?

Later. There is a knock at the door, it sounds like a man is trying to knock the door down. Ah well, I’ll have to answer it.

I’ve been arrested, and I am now in a cell in the local jail. I fought back you see.
A Gestapo man came to ask where my family was. I said I didn’t know, and he said I lied. Then I hit him. I am glad my family and the school is far away from here, I would not want them to know what is happening to me…

I have been sent to a concentration camp, it is awful, anyone who is different or could cause trouble for the third Reich is bottled up in a camp. They want us to die, but to die slowly, we have little food, there is no grass near the barracks, it’s all been eaten. Then they expect us to work. Too much work, back breaking, morale sapping tasks. Many men don’t survive, but new ones take their places. I want to go home, back to the days when there was peace. I want to go back to when the school and the san could be ran in peace. I don’t know what is happening in the Tiernsee, I know the san was taken over but nothing else. There are no letters and I can’t write to people.

There is news, we are at war with England. We were told today. I don’t think I can go on much longer. I think I am dying I am ill, starved, overworked. I haven’t much time.

I know I am dying now, it’s strange what happens to people. How I would love to be home now, sitting outside my summer home, I can almost hear fraulein Joey, but she’d be Frau Maynard now, I wish them luck. I can almost feel the sun on my face and hearthe girls by the blue lake, It is so blue, I remember the mountains protecting me, reflected in the lake so blue…

Title: Re: Exile Diary
Post by austriaamy on Jun 3^rd, 2003, 10:01am

It's a good story, but wouldn't they have taken the diary off him in the concentration camp?

Title: Re: Exile Diary
Post by Marianne on Jun 3^rd, 2003, 4:55pm

Alot of jews were rounded up and set to ghettos in poland. They weren't like concentration camps as such but they were filthy, lots died of things like cholera - perhaps he coud have bin sent to one instead of a concentration camp.

Title: Re: Exile Diary
Post by KB on Jun 4^th, 2003, 12:34am

They all ended up in concentration camps in the end. If you want a really good description of life in a ghetto, read "Schindler's Ark" (retitled "Schindler's List" since Spielberg's film), which details a lot about the daily struggles and also the ways in which they were cleared out.

But you're right, Amy, he would have had no chance of doing anything like a diary in the camp. It would have been found and he would probably have been shot. It would also have given the SS grounds on which to bring in all the CS people who had to flee Austria.

Also, in a real situation, helping a Jew who was being pursued by a mob, he probably would have been killed by the mob. EBD idealised the situation with Joey and the others. And if he really hit a Gestapo man, he would have been shot on the spot.

Title: Re: Exile Diary
Post by Marianne on Jun 4^th, 2003, 1:02pm

Of course, tradgically andin a most cruel and evil way all of the Jews were sent to a labour or a death camp many were, as i said, first sent to ghetto's in the first stages of th war. Herr Marani could have contracted fatal disease in such a place due to the flth and starvation. In such a place diaries were possible to keep.

The final solution wasn't synthesised or carried out untill 1944 when the wansee conference took place, although many jews were brutally taken to concentraton camps before then, a mass round up of the jews didn' occur until after this event.

It sn't until the Nzis realised they would have control of many of the eastern euopean jews that they needed a mass slaughter. At first they intended to put them into managascar and the the uals, but this relied on the defeat of the soviets. It was at the Wansee conference that they decided on he use of gs and mass transportation to the camps.

Sorry i have gone off on a tangent, i merely wanted to maintain that he could have been at first taken to a Ghetto and aloud to write in his diary. I do also agree that if he had hit an ss man, he would have been immedatley shot, buit indeed the chances are he would have been shot immediatley for attempting to escape!

I must appologise formy rant, mainly because my hree history exams are in an hour - on of them being on Nazi germany - i do hope i do well after that!

Title: Re: Exile Diary
Post by KB on Jun 4^th, 2003, 1:29pm

But the ghettos in occupied countries were part of the plans laid out at Wannsee. The idea was to prevent the local non-Jews from finding out what was really going on, so they shut them away in these places as one stage of the Final Solution. And the Jews were encouraged to go by being told that they would be safe from persecution and prejudice in the ghettos.

And I'm sorry but I still don't agree that a diary is realistic. I didn't want to say it earlier, when the topic was first started, but after Amy said it, I thought I would put in my 5 cents.

Title: Re: Exile Diary
Post by Marianne on Jun 5^th, 2003, 9:21am

But the jews were encouraged to leave because they were told they were beng moved to do some work. It is possible i am wrong about the final solution and wansee but there is still nothing to suggest he couldn't have had a diary.

Title: Re: Exile Diary
Post by Clare on Jun 5^th, 2003, 9:35am

They had no writing materials in concentration camps, that's a pretty big reason why he couldn't have a diary. The Jews owned nothing, everything they had was taken from them. And they would have been hard pressed to waste paper for writing in the ghettos when they needed it to feed a fire which would have been more important for them to live a little bit longer.

But I do like Edith's diary. It could be Herr Marani's diary if he had been able to keep one, or maybe one he'd written if he'd been able to escape. Just to be diplomatic! :D

Title: Re: Exile Diary
Post by edith on Jun 5^th, 2003, 9:47am

ITS A METAPHORICAL DIARY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I know he wouldn't've been able to write one in a concentration camp, its just what he might have written if he could.

Title: Re: Exile Diary
Post by Raya on Jun 21^st, 2003, 10:46pm

I completely agree with Edith that despite being unable to keep a diary in a concentration camp, HerrMarani could well have kept up a sort of autobiographical narrative in his head -- if only to keep hold of the idea that he was a real person, i.e. the shreds of his pre-incarceration identity and human dignity. Edith is just purporting to read his mind, which EBD did (with other characters) all the time!

As for the ghetto, it was very much a pre-Final Solution means of isolating the Jews from society and only Jews went there. It wasn't a prison (though, of course, not much better than one) in that people were not sent there for purported illegal activity. Rather, it was an extreme form of racial segregation (hence the use of the word "ghetto" to refer to poor, predominantly black areas of American towns).

The concentration camps, on the other hand, were places of punishment to which political prisoners and "malcontents" like Herr Marani, as well as Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals etc., were sent.

Title: Re: Exile Diary
Post by edith on Jun 23^rd, 2003, 3:12pm

Exile diary was a way of expressing the feelings I had at the Holocaust Memorial centre. It did end up shorter than I meant but I wrote what I wanted to.

Title: Re: Exile Diary
Post by Marianne on Jun 23^rd, 2003, 4:26pm

You don't have to justify yourself, it was a well written, thought provoking story, and it can be seen to be Herr Marani's last thoughts.

Title: Re: Exile Diary
Post by Raya on Jun 24^th, 2003, 11:34pm

Go Edith! :D