Maybe in a millennium

Somewhere in Europe, Lewie took a bullet or two--I never did hear the story--and he was thereafter forever affected. When he came out of the military hospital, people who determined such things told him that he needed a working life that required no heavy lifting, some profession that had him sitting and standing, sitting and standing. I have no idea if it was his idea or some war-time job counselor, but when Lewie came back to town, he went into shoe repair. A sweet, mild-mannered man, he dressed neatly beneath the knee-length leather work apron. I don't know if he suffered bad dreams. If he did, my parents never told me.

Then there was Rusty, who lived out on the edge of town in a little house that scared me, a dark place set a quarter-mile back from the road. It's possible that I was never in his shop when it was sunny, but when I remember the place I see him slowly walk out of a shadowy darkness. He fixed all things electrical, including radios and TVs, but he seemed forever invalided by the war, someone who got our appliances when they didn't work, not because his work was so dependable, but because, well, Rusty needed our business, needed the work. Everything about him in my memory exists in a foggy darkness.

The Jewel Tea Man was a carnival, a traveling showman who came around maybe once a month with a metal basket full of whatever he was trying to sell that round. I think my mother regularly ordered some cleaning supplies from him, not because those cleansers were any better or cheaper than what she could have picked up at the grocery store downtown. When he'd come around in that brown truck he drove, he'd flirt with her--nothing serious, but just enough to make me think of him as a party. Mom did too. I don't think it was unhealthy for her to think of herself as flirt-worthy. He had jokes, and one of them--the only one I remember--was about a Jewish businessman from Sheboygan. The Jewel Tea Man--his name was Gottlieb--said that Jew was so crooked that when he died they had to screw him in the ground. That I remember. My mother told me, back then, that he was a real German. 

I took a class in the German language when I was a graduate student at Arizona State University, the most fun class I took in my graduate program. As far as I knew I was the only grad studying literature, but the class was full of students just like me, grad students who needed to fulfill a language requirement--for all of us, German. The prof was a ball. One day he stopped for a moment and told us a rollicking good story about his war experience. He'd been drafted into the Wehrmacht late in the war, given a uniform and a gun, and put on a train to the front. He was 15. He no sooner arrived and the war ended, he said. The country was in horrifying disarray, so he put his rifle down somewhere and walked home. It was a hilarious, moving story. He said he felt obliged to tell his students about his war-time experience in Germany. 

All these people come back to me now because of a reference Etta Willesum gives to a young kid who worked at the camp at Westerborg, the place where the Nazis and their Dutch National Socialist brethren deposited Dutch Jewry before sending them on to Poland or Germany, places from which they would never return. The Netherlands led occupied Europe in the percentage of its Jews "exterminated" during the German occupation--100,000 of the 140,000 living in Holland in 1940 died.

There was a kid there whose job it was to make sure the Jews sent to the camp at Westerborg were not hiding anything of value on their persons. Willesum says--and the evidence is sound--that as early as 1943, Germany was recruiting ever-younger Dutch Nazis to do their dirty work. This kid, she remarked, seemed very young to be doing anything around the camp at Westerborg, much less something that required the kind of ardor patting down fearful people required, people literally scared to death. When the war was over, when the Canadians came in and freed north Holland, how did a kid like that live with himself? You can't help wonder. Did he just walk home?

Those who are keeping track in Gaza now claim that the war there has killed about 25,000 people, mostly women and children. The effects of that war will resonate for successive lifetimes. If the Israeli people believe that they are cleansing their own lives and fortunes of radical Islam, they're simply dead wrong. 

The war they're conducting will be over, maybe, in a millennium.