The Serbs Chose War, Ruth Mitchel 53. "THIS IS GERMAN CULTURE" THOSE PRISON GUARDS: a whole book could be written about them alone and the conflict in their little souls. There was Karl Feth, who had a Russian mother. He was the tallest and far the handsomest. Everything went smoothly for him, without a single ugly word. He soon was drafted to the Russian front. A tear on your Eastern grave, Karl, for a puzzled, decent fellow! Slowly they all went off and were replaced by worse. All of them by now are probably dead. Most of them were merely stupid, some moronic. They grew steadily meaner, more morose and fierce. And yet . . . There was one fellow, piglike in his ugliness, who looked and often was the most brutal of them all. He fancied himself for his thin but sweet singing voice. "Edelweiss" we called him for his favorite song and for the irony of the nickname. That brute, not once but often, stood in our door after light-out, a black, strange silhouette, with his loaded rifle poking up behind his back, gently singing us women to sleep. Next morning he would be screaming, red in the face as usual, the hopeless beast. Do you wonder I found myself beginning to pity almost everybody? We were all caught together, helpless, in a horror there was no escaping and no understanding-an elemental, inevitable doom. As I watched the systematic debasing and vitiation of German youth I had an inspiring thought: If Hitler could in eight years so thoroughly shape German youth for evil, then in the same length of time what wonderful things could be done with Serbian youth! As I watched the young guards getting meaner and meaner, this thought kept returning. As I am writing this, December 17, 1942, a great bell-like siren is playing across Washington that most beloved of all Christmas songs: "Silent night, holy night"-a German song. How can it be that a people who produced such a song, which has brought happiness and the kindliest emotions to millions throughout the world, should now be so bestialized? Surely the message of this Christmas hymn must be a message of hope for humanity-of hope even for the Germans. Good as well as evil must remain latent, to be revivified, renewed, strengthened, until it again becomes victorious. May the "silent night" of defeat and humiliation which now lies before the Germans become, in truth, the "holy night" in which they reshape their souls. One morning there was a yell and counter-yell at the gate. With a crashing of bolts, it was thrown open. There entered, on his hands and knees, what was left of a man, prodded and pricked from behind by a bayonet in the hands of a furiously bawling German. His face was a pulp, and he was so beaten, from his head right down to the flayed soles of his feet, that he could hardly move or breathe. This man, like hundreds of other Serbs, had taken his young sons to see the bodies of the men, young boys, and women hanging down the middle of the main street of Belgrade. And as they watched the corpses slowly, slowly twisting in the breeze, he said to his sons, as hundreds of other Serbs said to their sons: "Look-look, and never while you live forget: this is German culture!" This unfortunate man, however, had been overheard. He was seized, beaten almost to death, kept in prison for a fortnight, beaten again, and thrown out onto the street to die. The children were never seen again. But other Serbian children will survive in spite of every decree of extermination, their hearts beaten into hard flint from which will be struck a flame of undying hatred. That flame shall be struck and it must burn-but the hate with which it shall be fed must be the hatred of all cruelty, all conscienceless greed, all merciless oppression. As their land was the most cruelly oppressed of all, their pride after the war must be to make it the land freest in the world of all hatreds, excepting only the hatred of oppression. Previous Chapter | Content | Next Chapter The Serbs Chose War, Ruth Mitchel