[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
no response. All night he sent messages, praying for some reply, from anyone,
from anywhere, but still there was no contact.
Giving up all hope, he'd sunk into deep despair, unable to understand what had
caused the disease and why he had survived it. The whole of the next day he
had contemplated ending his own life - not only did there seem nothing to live
for, but his personal guilt at having lived while everyone else appeared to
have perished was crushing. That thought evaporated with the next dawn when he
realized it was his duty to live on, he owed it to his people and to his
Fuhrer.
He made no mention of the Master Race, but it was in my mind. I figured Stern
thought the fittest had survived, so affirming Hitler's attitudes on breeding
and the natural order. Stern was living proof of his leader's theories and to
die now, especially by his own hand, would refute all that.
So, he wandered on, looting grocery stores for food and sleeping in empty
houses. And then he had chanced upon other survivors, a kind of community
living in a tiny village. They'd treated him with suspicion and, on hearing
his accent and learning he was German, they'd driven him off, almost killing
him in the process. It seemed they blamed him in full and personally for what
they called the Blood Death, and he was lucky to get away with his life. For a
long time after that he had lived on a remote farm near the New Forest, first
clearing it of its corpses, then cultivating a few crops as best he could. The
winter of
'47, even worse than the previous year's, had put an end to that.
His food had to come from village stores and shops, and so he lived on the
fringes of these places, alone and, he admitted to us, 'somewhat insane in the
head'. With the summer of '48 the desire to return to the
'Fatherland' returned and his journey began again.
The vehicle he was travelling in soon broke down - lack of maintenance rather
than shortage of gasoline
- and it was while he was trudging down a country lane looking for another
means of transport that the two girls came upon him in their Ford.
Their greeting was different from the kind he'd received two years before, and
he was grateful for that.
As far as Cissie and Muriel were concerned, well, they were just overjoyed to
find another live and healthy human being. His nationality meant nothing to
them, not after all this time, and he certainly felt no enmity towards British
civilians. He agreed to accompany them to the capital, although he told them
that from there he would continue eastwards, possibly using the River Thames
to reach the estuary and the
English Channel. Stopping only once to refill the Ford's tank from a garage
Page 61
ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html
handpump along the way, they soon reached London. And hit trouble. Namely, me.
I put the question to the two girls, not the German. 'Like Cissie said before,
for all you knew, I could've been the bad guy, and the Blackshirts the only
law and order left. So why help me?'
'It was Cissie's decision,' Muriel replied, indicating her friend. I stared at
the dark-haired girl.
She shrugged. 'I didn't like their uniform. I had bad memories of Mosley's
Blackshirts before the war and that lot this morning didn't look any
different.' Another sip of gin and peach juice. 'I told you my mother was
Jewish. Besides, you looked desperate and I like desperate types.' She grinned
at me.
It wasn't enough, but I didn't push it. Before Oswald Mosley, founder of the
British Union of Fascists and Jew-hater, had been interned at the beginning of
the war and his vicious party of bigots broken up, he'd led marches into the
very heart of Jewish ghettos in London's East End just to provoke the people
into riots. He was one bad man and later, as the Allies were taking back
Europe, grim stories of the
Nazis' attempted extermination of the Jewish race reached the rest of the
world and the British public finally understood the full horror of the ideals
Mosley - along with his more discreet ally, Sir Max Hubble
- had aligned himself with. Those ragbag black outfits had meant only one
thing to Cissie and, as she'd been driving the car at the time, her companions
could only go along with her. She was a gutsy lady.
A little juiced by now, they had begun to ask questions about me, but I ducked
them. We still hadn't heard the warden's story.
Albert Potter, his nose a deeper shade of red by this time, was only too
pleased to gab, three years of loneliness and a good few measures of Grouse
loosening his tongue some. Too old to join the British army, he'd volunteered
as an ARP on the very day Neville Chamberlain had mournfully declared war on
Germany, and he had dutifully served through both Blitzes on London, twice
being buried beneath rubble himself. His home was in an LCC block of flats in
the Covent Garden area and when this, itself, was eventually demolished by the
Luftwaffe, he and his family had moved into the basement of a school that was
being used as a Civil Defence HQ. (It was here that he first learned of the
secret bunker beneath
Kingsway, where he later became 'door watcher'.)
He had won three commendations for heroic action during the war years, we were
proudly told, once for single-handedly clearing an entire building of office [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
zanotowane.pl doc.pisz.pl pdf.pisz.pl wyciskamy.pev.pl
no response. All night he sent messages, praying for some reply, from anyone,
from anywhere, but still there was no contact.
Giving up all hope, he'd sunk into deep despair, unable to understand what had
caused the disease and why he had survived it. The whole of the next day he
had contemplated ending his own life - not only did there seem nothing to live
for, but his personal guilt at having lived while everyone else appeared to
have perished was crushing. That thought evaporated with the next dawn when he
realized it was his duty to live on, he owed it to his people and to his
Fuhrer.
He made no mention of the Master Race, but it was in my mind. I figured Stern
thought the fittest had survived, so affirming Hitler's attitudes on breeding
and the natural order. Stern was living proof of his leader's theories and to
die now, especially by his own hand, would refute all that.
So, he wandered on, looting grocery stores for food and sleeping in empty
houses. And then he had chanced upon other survivors, a kind of community
living in a tiny village. They'd treated him with suspicion and, on hearing
his accent and learning he was German, they'd driven him off, almost killing
him in the process. It seemed they blamed him in full and personally for what
they called the Blood Death, and he was lucky to get away with his life. For a
long time after that he had lived on a remote farm near the New Forest, first
clearing it of its corpses, then cultivating a few crops as best he could. The
winter of
'47, even worse than the previous year's, had put an end to that.
His food had to come from village stores and shops, and so he lived on the
fringes of these places, alone and, he admitted to us, 'somewhat insane in the
head'. With the summer of '48 the desire to return to the
'Fatherland' returned and his journey began again.
The vehicle he was travelling in soon broke down - lack of maintenance rather
than shortage of gasoline
- and it was while he was trudging down a country lane looking for another
means of transport that the two girls came upon him in their Ford.
Their greeting was different from the kind he'd received two years before, and
he was grateful for that.
As far as Cissie and Muriel were concerned, well, they were just overjoyed to
find another live and healthy human being. His nationality meant nothing to
them, not after all this time, and he certainly felt no enmity towards British
civilians. He agreed to accompany them to the capital, although he told them
that from there he would continue eastwards, possibly using the River Thames
to reach the estuary and the
English Channel. Stopping only once to refill the Ford's tank from a garage
Page 61
ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html
handpump along the way, they soon reached London. And hit trouble. Namely, me.
I put the question to the two girls, not the German. 'Like Cissie said before,
for all you knew, I could've been the bad guy, and the Blackshirts the only
law and order left. So why help me?'
'It was Cissie's decision,' Muriel replied, indicating her friend. I stared at
the dark-haired girl.
She shrugged. 'I didn't like their uniform. I had bad memories of Mosley's
Blackshirts before the war and that lot this morning didn't look any
different.' Another sip of gin and peach juice. 'I told you my mother was
Jewish. Besides, you looked desperate and I like desperate types.' She grinned
at me.
It wasn't enough, but I didn't push it. Before Oswald Mosley, founder of the
British Union of Fascists and Jew-hater, had been interned at the beginning of
the war and his vicious party of bigots broken up, he'd led marches into the
very heart of Jewish ghettos in London's East End just to provoke the people
into riots. He was one bad man and later, as the Allies were taking back
Europe, grim stories of the
Nazis' attempted extermination of the Jewish race reached the rest of the
world and the British public finally understood the full horror of the ideals
Mosley - along with his more discreet ally, Sir Max Hubble
- had aligned himself with. Those ragbag black outfits had meant only one
thing to Cissie and, as she'd been driving the car at the time, her companions
could only go along with her. She was a gutsy lady.
A little juiced by now, they had begun to ask questions about me, but I ducked
them. We still hadn't heard the warden's story.
Albert Potter, his nose a deeper shade of red by this time, was only too
pleased to gab, three years of loneliness and a good few measures of Grouse
loosening his tongue some. Too old to join the British army, he'd volunteered
as an ARP on the very day Neville Chamberlain had mournfully declared war on
Germany, and he had dutifully served through both Blitzes on London, twice
being buried beneath rubble himself. His home was in an LCC block of flats in
the Covent Garden area and when this, itself, was eventually demolished by the
Luftwaffe, he and his family had moved into the basement of a school that was
being used as a Civil Defence HQ. (It was here that he first learned of the
secret bunker beneath
Kingsway, where he later became 'door watcher'.)
He had won three commendations for heroic action during the war years, we were
proudly told, once for single-handedly clearing an entire building of office [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]