WWIIAR EAGLES Losing a war and being occupied by a foreign power is something Americans haven’t experienced since colonial days—yet—there are still “Tory” families living in Canada who remember, with bitterness, being driven out of their New England States. I spent three-and-a-half-years stationed in Germany and was very fortunate to have made many German friends; one in particular, Herr Docktor Fritz Hartung. He had been a Fallschirmjager—paratrooper—during WWII and fought both on the Western and Eastern Fronts. Through Fritz, I met a number of absolutely amazing Germans from WWII; Eric Hartmann, who shot down 352 fighter/bomber aircraft and is the highest rated ace in the world; Hans-Urich Rudel who was Germany’s highest decorated military man and Hajo Hermann a famous night fighter pilot along with a dozen more front line soldiers who survived WWII. We talked “soldiering” not politics and I learned a lot from those men about war. I agree with them the real war was fought on the Eastern Front where whole divisions would disappear in a day. Armies would be crushed and a million casualties were not uncommon for a single battle. I agreed with them if they were not fighting on the Eastern Front—we would never have landed at Normandy. Listening to their stories of advancing and retreating in severe weather and then having to face defeat fascinated me. How does a person survive such human tragedy? Many of them spent years in POW camps and when they were released they faced no jobs, destroyed homes and their families killed during the allied bombings. The shame, humiliation in being occupied and the tremendous task of rebuilding their nation piled on top of trying to cope with five years of war really taxed their will power. Fritz’s family was East Germans and had escaped to the west as the Russians advanced. He came from an aristocratic old family and they lost everything they could not carry and had to rebuild from the bottom up. He told me stories of how he and his relatives would sneak across the border into the Russian Zone to retrieve valuables they had buried on their old homestead. Getting caught meant death. Those stories proved a whole chapter in my novel. One of Fritz’s friends told me how he worked his way through university by being a male model for the advanced art classes. They all agreed being in the American Zone was the best, followed by the British—but the French Zone was bad and the Russian Zone absolutely inhuman. So I took many of their stories, converted them into fictional characters and wrote WwIIAR EAGLES. If you want a taste of what it feels like to be defeated in battle, returning to destroyed homes and forced to rebuild your life—enjoy the novel that can be found on amazon kindle books. amazon/WWIIAR-EAGLES-Donald-E-Zlotnik-ebook/dp/B00BKZ0HCU/ref=sr_1_17?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1394215975&sr=1-17&keywords=donald+e.+zlotnik
Posted on: Wed, 10 Sep 2014 10:47:52 +0000
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