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What are you reading? July 22, 2022 [1]
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Date: 2022-07-22
In WAYR?, I note what I’m reading and comment...you note what you are reading and comment. Occasionally, I may add a section or a link related to books…
I am reading:
End of a Berlin Diary : 1944-1947 by William L. Shirer- Again, didn’t read much of this but what I read was...highly disturbing.
Berlin, Sunday, November 11 Which reminds me of another item in the local press. It tells of the testimony of a fifteen-year-old German lad, the son of the former SS commander of the Mauthausen concentration camp. Questioned about his father, the boy said: “For my birthday, my father put forty inmates at my disposal to teach me how to shoot. I took shots at them until they were all lying around dead. Otherwise, I have nothing else to report about my father.”
(FTR, all of the stories about Siegfried Ziereis, the son of Franz Ziereis, give his age in 1945 as 11.)
I suppose that in accordance with international law nowadays, this child would fit the definition of a child soldier. I’m stuck on his use of the phrase “at my disposal.”
To the GoogleBoomTube I go and I found this story about Franz Ziereis written by Julian Bach, Jr. from the October 1946 issue of Commentary magazine.
In these final hours, Ziereis was trying very hard to salvage some claim to consideration as a human being; when his son entered, he looked at him and smiled. A film of sentiment flickered across his eyes, and in his face there was a hopeful and even an expectant look. But the son marched into the room and up to the dying father’s bedside and stood there stiffly, almost at attention, and there was no expression on his face. “I have been shot. I am dying,” said the father. But the son just looked. “When I die,” said the father, “I want you to take care of your mother. She is at the cottage Pirn. Obey her. Be always kind to her.” But the son just looked. Then quickly, without a word, a handshake, or a tear, he did a series of rapid military movements with his feet and marched out of his father’s room.
Patricia Highsmith: Her Diaries and Notebooks 1941-1955 by Patricia Highsmith and Anna von Planta- Got through a good portion of it this week, from the end of 1944 through the beginning of 1946. Highsmith finally wrote a few things about current events in 1945. It also seems as if she is settling down for the writing/art for the long haul.
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