Unlikely Warrior: A Jewish Soldier in Hitler's Army by Georg Rauch

Author:Georg Rauch [Rauch, Georg]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780374301439
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (BYR)
Published: 2015-02-23T22:00:00+00:00

Your Georg

July 2, 1944

Dear Mutti,

The days pass by very monotonously. Always the same activities, the same weather, the same too little to eat (beans, peas, lentils, beans, peas, etc.), and hardly ever any cause for laughter.

I’m working now on the art of being happy and taking delight in very small things. The average person lives here completely without joy. And if there is an occasion for happiness, when it’s repeated it has already lost its effect. Thus, everyone rejoices the first time he sits in a tree full of cherries, but the next time such an experience is sullenly taken for granted. Tempers can even flare up if everything isn’t exactly the same.

The radio is another case in point. I remember it seemed a miracle after three or four months to hear music again for the first time. Now we have a radio that plays half the day, but everyone is so indifferent, no longer capable of rejoicing.

Recently I’ve been trying, with increasing success, to submerge myself into even the least important things and thereby to seize great happiness. Thus, with the necessary concentration and love, you can be transported into the heights of rapture simply at the sight of a tiny bug on the lid of your mess kit. Others perhaps might have thrown him away or squashed him, with a bitter twist of the mouth.

With practice, one can so intensify this feeling that afterward the big things such as war, death, hunger seem very tiny and unimportant. So one doesn’t necessarily have to have a whole pair of pants or a full butter jar. The disagreeable things that bring the monotony so crassly into consciousness every day become so unimportant that it is truly a pleasure to observe how one can defend oneself against those chapters of life. I think the haiku poets are the masters in this, but I can see that it is not impossible to learn. I don’t know whether it also couldn’t have something to do even with religion.

Maybe these lines will seem completely unintelligible to you. In that case, I just haven’t managed to catch hold of the right words. If you do understand, however, what I mean by all this, then you have every reason to be happy that your son is on the point of learning a way never again to be bored, bad-humored, or sad while sitting in a hole in the ground. In this spirit,

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