Phyllis Zimbler Miller's Blog: Phyllis Zimbler Miller Author, page 2

Prejudice in 2020 and My Novel MRS. LIEUTENANT

When I tried to get my women’s friendship novel MRS.LIEUTENANT traditionally published in 2008, I was told by one NY editor that there was no longer prejudice in the U.S. Frustrated with the book’s rejections, I submitted the novel to the first Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award competition, and MRS. LIEUTENANT was chosen as a semifinalist.

Now 12 years later in 2020, when the U.S. may finally confront the issues of pervasive prejudice, I feel strongly that the self-published novel — inspired by my own experiences as a new Mrs. Lieutenant — could be especially compelling if re-released by a traditional publisher. (The novel received good reviews on Amazon.)

The four POV characters are a Northern Jew, a Southern Baptist, an African-American and a Puerto Rican. The novel’s logline is:

Women’s friendship drama MRS. LIEUTENANT – When four diverse young women arrive at Ft. Knox, Kentucky, as new officers’ wives in the spring of 1970 right after the Kent State shootings, they must overcome their prejudices and bond together in order to survive their new roles during the unpopular Vietnam War.

In the novel the situation of the African-American officer’s wife becomes precarious as the four women practice a skit satirizing the Army to be performed at an officers’ wives’ luncheon. In my actual experience the African-American wife withdrew from the skit without offering an explanation. I fill in this “gap” in the novel by my own knowledge as a Jew of how the actions of one minority group member can be blamed due to prejudice against that entire minority group.

On the MrsLieutenant.com website there is is a Vietnam War history lesson plan for grades 9-12 that includes discussing racial prejudice only six years after the passage of the Civil Rights Act.

And here are two other blog posts of mine that speak to topics of civil discourse in 2020:

“You’ve Got to Be Carefully Taught … to Hate and Fear”
“Social Media Responsibility in the Time of Plague”

Virtual Internships in the Time of Plague and HOW TO SUCCEED Books

During this time of lockdowns — when I told my younger daughter that a large quantity of my book HOW TO SUCCEED IN HIGH SCHOOL AND PREP FOR COLLEGE had been purchased, she asked if the book were still accurate. I replied of course. Then she asked, “What about the internships you recommend?”

And the next day (June 2, 2020) an answer to her question appeared in the print edition of The Wall Street Journal in an article by Nancy Keates with the title “Make the Work-From-Home Internship Work.”

It turns out, as Keates reports, that — with a large dash of creativity — internships can flourish online. In fact, in the article several internship students talked about the advantages of virtual internships.

Keates writes about one student who says “working remotely has helped her overcome the discomfort she has felt in the past at reaching out to adults.” This student feels less intimidated online. Another student noted that otherwise she would never have had all the senior managers’ cellphone numbers.

Why are internships important whether in-person or virtually?

As I discuss in all three of my HOW TO SUCCEED books — HOW TO SUCCEED IN HIGH SCHOOL AND PREP FOR COLLEGE, HOW TO SUCCEED IN COLLEGE AND PREP FOR BEYOND COLLEGE, and HOW TO SUCCEED BEYOND COLLEGE — internships give students and young adults (and even not-so-young adults) an opportunity to “try on” a career before committing years of study and megadollars of tuition.

For aspiring candidates who do not have opportunities for close observation of the pluses and minuses of a particular career path, internships can be invaluable.

And why should companies work to engage interns, especially now when it probably must be done virtually?

Companies often use in-person internships to evaluate potential new hires. Companies will need to continue hiring before and after an effective COVID-19 vaccine is available. If companies cannot evaluate potential new hires in person, virtual evaluations can be the next best thing.

And, in fact, virtual internships may give companies more touch points on which to evaluate potential hires. For example, if an intern cannot write a concise, well-written email, perhaps that intern is not a good candidate for a full-time position. (Tips for effective emails are included in HOW TO SUCCEED IN HIGH SCHOOL AND PREP FOR COLLEGE.)

In conclusion, the lockdowns occasioned by COVID-19 offer opportunities for both companies and potential internship candidates to utilize the best of online tools to move forward with “business as usual in the new normal.”

50 Years Ago: May 1970 — Kent State University and the Vietnam War

May 4, 1970:

Anti-war leaders call for national university strike to protest the Vietnam War …

Ohio National Guardsmen kill 4 and wound 11 at Kent State University …

May 8, 1970:

My husband, Second Lieutenant Mitchell R. Miller, reports for active duty at Ft. Knox, Kentucky. (At the time I don’t connect that exactly 25 years earlier — May 8, 1945 — was Victory in Europe Day. A few months later, in September 1970 when my husband and I are stationed in Munich, Germany, on the front lines of the Cold War, I will begin to learn more about World War II.)

The Vietnam War — the sword of Damocles that hung over my head from my third date with Mitch, when he told me he was going to Vietnam. Ultimately he served on active duty for two years and one week without going to Vietnam, although that account is for another time and place.

(The account of the first nine weeks of my husband’s time on active duty is fictionalized in my Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award semifinalist MRS. LIEUTENANT, which features the wives of the new officers training on tanks at Ft. Knox.)

For those of you too young to remember the Kent State shootings or the national turmoil over the Vietnam War, The New Yorker has an article that includes the titles of several books about the shooting and the anti-war protests. (See Jill Lepore’s article for the May 4, 2020, issue titled “Kent State and the War That Never Ended” )

The pain of that time never goes away for many people. Watching a scene in the film TOLKIEN in which a letter is received about someone who died in battle (WWI), I flashbacked to the summer of 1968. Mitch and I were dating and, while he was at R.O.T.C. summer camp at Ft. Riley, Kansas, I received his mail.

One envelope had stamped on the outside: DECEASED. RETURN TO SENDER. I knew it was the last letter Mitch had written to a close friend in Vietnam who had been killed there. I burned the returned letter and didn’t tell Mitch for years that his last letter to his friend hadn’t reached him in time.

A few months ago I was with my sister (7 1/2 years younger) on a beach in Mexico when she described to a stranger how much she and her husband had enjoyed their recent trip to Vietnam. I saw my own expression reflected in the stranger’s face — we could never visit Vietnam. And then he not unexpectedly told us he’d fought there.

According to Lepore’s May 4, 2020, New Yorker article, The New Yorker had declared this week of May 1970 “the most critical week this nation has endured in more than a century.”

May we all take a moment to remember the Kent State students who died on May 4, 1970, as well as the Americans stationed in Vietnam as reported in a National Geographic article of April 28, 2020:

An estimated 47,434 American soldiers were killed in battle during the Vietnam War, which spanned from 1964 to 1975. An additional 10,786 died in the theater of war, but out of battle, making a total of 58,220 deaths.

 

 

You’ve Got to Be Carefully Taught … to Hate and Fear

The song “You’ve Got to Be Carefully Taught” from the classic musical SOUTH PACIFIC has been buzzing in my head since I received an email from my dear friend Bonnie Bartel Latino in Atmore, Albama. Bonnie shared with me the newspaper article “Second synagogue vandalized with anti-Semitic graffiti in Huntsville” (Alabama).

The April 10, 2020, newspaper article by Ashley Remkus and Lee Roop begins:

Another synagogue in Huntsville has been targeted by anti-Semitic graffiti.

The Chabad of Huntsville, a Jewish house of worship and private home off Governors Drive, was spray-painted with swastikas and racial slurs overnight. It’s the second Jewish facility to be vandalized in the city in as many days. On Wednesday night, as the Jewish Passover holiday began, Etz Chayim, the Conservative synagogue on Bailey Cove Road, was similarly vandalized.

In a recent guest post of mine for author Joylene Butler’s blog I wrote: In a time when we are fragile both physically and emotionally, it is imperative that we take extra care with our words. How more so, then, our actions, whether merely “pranks” or meant maliciously.

Hateful words lead to hateful actions lead to terrible nation-wide policies, such as Nazi Germany’s extermination of six million Jews and millions of others, including Roma (Gypsies), homosexuals, political opponents, mentally incapacitated, and more.

In response to this news from Huntsville, Alabama, I am trying to reach out to the appropriate people there to offer my free theater project THIN EDGE OF THE WEDGE, designed to combat anti-Semitism and hate.

As is often the case, I am reading several Holocaust nonfiction and fiction books at this time.

I just read the Middle Grade novel HITLER’S CANARY: A DARING TALE OF WARTIME ADVENTURE by Sandi Toksvig (current host of THE GREAT BRITISH BAKING SHOW). The novel is based on the true story of her father and his family risking their lives in October of 1943 to save Jews in Denmark from the Nazi roundup.

I also just read WHEN TIME STOPPED: A MEMOIR OF MY FATHER’S WAR AND WHAT REMAINS by Ariana Neumann, who pieced together her Czech father’s Holocaust survival story from the clues he left her after he died.

And, finally, I just watched on PBS (free until May 3, 2020) THE WINDERMERE CHILDREN — an uplifting historical drama of the dedicated volunteers who worked to bring 300 Jewish children Holocaust survivors back to life in the late summer and early fall of 1945. Read about this amazing show now. (There is also a documentary — THE WINDERMERE CHILDREN: IN THEIR OWN WORDS — with interviews of some of these former children now.)

Lyrics for song “You’ve Got to Be Taught”:

You’ve got to be taught

To hate and fear

You’ve got to be taught

From year to Year

It’s got to be drummed

in your dear little ear

You’ve got to be carefully taught

You’ve got to be taught

To be Afraid

Of people whose eyes

are oddly made

And people whose skin

Is a different shade

You’ve got to be carefully taught

You’ve got to be taught

Before it’s too late

Before you are 6 or 7 or 8

To hate all the people

your relatives hate

You’ve got to be carefully taught

Read my guest post for Joylene Butler’s blog — “COVID-19: When Words Are All We Have.”

Read the entire Huntsville, Alabama newspaper article.

From Wikipedia for the musical SOUTH PACIFIC:

South Pacific is a musical composed by Richard Rodgers, with lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II and book by Hammerstein and Joshua Logan. The work premiered in 1949 on Broadway and was an immediate hit, running for 1,925 performances. The plot is based on James A. Michener’s Pulitzer Prize–winning 1947 book Tales of the South Pacific and combines elements of several of those stories. Rodgers and Hammerstein believed they could write a musical based on Michener’s work that would be financially successful and, at the same time, send a strong progressive message on racism.

Mourner’s Kaddish in the Time of Plague

Sept. 8, 2019: Celebrating my husband and my 50th wedding anniversary with my parents Ruth and Al Zimbler: (l to r) Mitch and Phyllis Miller; Jay and Idyth Zimbler

In the early hours of March 19, 2020, my 95-year-old father Albert Zimbler died. Originally I had plane tickets to fly from LA to Chicago on March 17 for a routine visit, and I had already cancelled these tickets due to COVID-19. Of course, by the time he lay dying in a Chicago suburb hospital, it was ill-advised to fly.

What the death of my father during the time of plague has meant for most of my family (my 95-year-old mother, my husband, my three siblings and their spouses, our children and their spouses, my brother’s grandchildren) scattered around the U.S. is that we could not attend the funeral.

Albert Zimbler was buried on March 20 in Elgin, Illinois, where as the oldest child I lived with my parents from six months after my birth. The graveside-only service due to the virus took place in the Jewish section of the Elgin cemetery, a place that as a member of the Larsen Junior High School band I had marched to in a Memorial Day parade.

Other family members and friends have posted beautiful thoughts on social media. I’d rather share two things here —

1) Because of my father’s stories and videos, I still feel his presence — a presence that can be felt in his own written stories of his life in somewhat chronological order — http://www.alzimcomedy.com/true-stories-al-zimbler/

2) Try to describe some of the surreal aspects of Jewish mourning customs in a time when synagogues are only holding online services and some synagogues, such as the Conservative synagogue to which I belong in LA, are completely closed.

Mourner’s Kaddish is the name of the Jewish mourning prayer that is said at the end of the burial ceremony, during the shiva week following the burial, by family mourners at synagogue services for 11 months after the burial, on the anniversary of the loved one’s death, and certain Jewish holidays. In Orthodox synagogues only male mourners say the Kaddish, while in other synagogues female mourners also recite it.

One issue in this time of plague is that, to say Mourner’s Kaddish, 10 adult Jews are required. (Only males in the Orthodox synagogues; adult females count in the other synagogues.) This issue in online-only services and others are being tackled by individual synagogues in innovative ways.

A few hours after my father’s graveside burial in Elgin, my mother, all siblings and spouses, children and spouses, and great-grandchildren along with other close family members and friends were on Zoom for a virtual shiva led by a Chicago Conservative rabbi. (It did help that, as almost everyone was in a locked-down location, we were all available at the same time.)

Now I am saying Mourner’s Kaddish at morning daily minyan and the afternoon/evening minyan via Zoom. Parts of the services must be skipped as there is not a minyan present in the same location, although I and other mourners are being allowed to say Mourner’s Kddish.

As for my having a private shiva, since it would be dangerous to have people come here for the shiva minyans as is the tradition, it is definitely surreal because it just feels as if I am under lock down only due to the virus.

In the future it is to be hoped that family members will be able to physically gather together at the Elgin cemetery for the unveiling of the tombstone, which is another Jewish mourning custom.

May my father’s memory be for a blessing.

COVID-19 Preparations: Make Sure Your Advance Healthcare Directive Is Current

While it is the fervent hope of individuals,
families, governments and countries that you won’t become so ill with COVID-19
that your Advance Healthcare Directive (in some states known as a Healthcare
Power of Attorney or Living Will) may need to come into effect — having an up-to-date Advance Healthcare
Directive is an important part of individual pandemic planning.

Adults of all ages should have a witnessed or
notarized Advance Healthcare Care Directive, and it is particularly important
for those at high-risk from COVID-19.

What is an Advance
Healthcare Directive and what does it allow to be carried out?

The person (or persons) named in your Advance Healthcare
Directive is allowed to make medical decisions for you if you are not able mentally
or physically to make your own healthcare decisions such as whether to have emergency
surgery.

Do think carefully who those people are (reviewing
these people every few years is a good idea). You may not want to ask people who find it difficult to make decisions of
any kind. Nor do you want to ask people who live elsewhere and who would have
difficulty with long-distance consultations.

CONSULT YOUR STATE MEDICAL ASSOCIATION OR YOUR OWN
ESTATE PLANNING ATTORNEY TO OBTAIN A LEGAL ADVANCE HEALTHCARE DIRECTIVE.

Other
documents to consider especially during a global pandemic:

Older people especially should consider whether they want a DO NOT RESUSCITATE order in their medical records.Consider executing a Power of Attorney for someone else to handle your financial affairs if you are incapacitated by illness.

Self-Isolating:
Good Time to Consider Your Long-Term Estate Planning

There is nothing like a global pandemic to remind
us all that so many conditions are out of our control. The one thing we can do
is prepare for the end of our lives so that our ideas, assets and love are
passed on to the next generations as seamlessly as a well-executed estate plan
can provide.

Read this article why a living trust is needed in addition to a will.

And read these other articles on estate planning including business succession.

In the meantime, make sure you have an up-to-date Advance Healthcare Directive that we all hope ends up NOT having to be used!

COVID-19 Preparations: Make Sure Your Healthcare Directive Is Current

While it is the fervent hope of individuals,
families, governments and countries that you won’t become so ill with COVID-19
that your Advance Healthcare Directive (in some states known as a Healthcare
Power of Attorney or Living Will) may need to come into effect — having an up-to-date Advance Healthcare
Directive is an important part of individual pandemic planning.

Adults of all ages should have a witnessed or
notarized Advance Healthcare Care Directive, and it is particularly important
for those at high-risk from COVID-19.

What is an Advance
Healthcare Directive and what does it allow to be carried out?

The person (or persons) named in your Advance Healthcare
Directive is allowed to make medical decisions for you if you are not able mentally
or physically to make your own healthcare decisions such as whether to have emergency
surgery.

Do think carefully who those people are (reviewing
these people every few years is a good idea). You may not want to ask people who find it difficult to make decisions of
any kind. Nor do you want to ask people who live elsewhere and who would have
difficulty with long-distance consultations.

CONSULT YOUR STATE MEDICAL ASSOCIATION OR YOUR OWN
ESTATE PLANNING ATTORNEY TO OBTAIN A LEGAL ADVANCE HEALTHCARE DIRECTIVE.

Other
documents to consider especially during a global pandemic:

Older
people especially should consider whether they want a DO NOT RESUSCIATE order in their medical records.Consider
executing a Power of Attorney for
someone else to handle your financial affairs if you are incapacitated by
illness.

Self-Isolating:
Good Time to Consider Your Long-Term Estate Planning

There is nothing like a global pandemic to remind
us all that so many conditions are out of our control. The one thing we can do
is prepare for the end of our lives so that our ideas, assets and love are
passed on to the next generations as seamlessly as a well-executed estate plan
can provide.

Read this article why a living trust is needed in addition to a will.

And read these other articles on estate planning including business succession.

In the meantime, make sure you have an up-to-date Advance Healthcare Directive that we all hope ends up NOT having to be used!

Author Joylene Butler Offers Me a Soapbox for My Top-of-Mind Concerns

For several years I wrote a monthly guest post for author Joylene Butler’s website about book marketing and other related topics. This run of posts ended when Joylene started a project for a new author website for herself.

Then just before January 2020 Joylene contacted me again. Her beautiful new website was live and she missed my guest posts. But what would I write about?

Joylene had read my December 25, 2019, post here on my own website — “Beware of Social Media Disrupting Family Harmony” — and she offered me a soapbox on her site — a blog on which I could write posts about my top-of-mind concerns.

And here is an overview of the three “top-of-mind” guest posts I’ve written for her so far:

JANUARY 2020 — “RETURNING TO JOYLENE BUTLER’S BLOG WITH AN EXPANDED PURVIEW”:

For this first “return” post and for the start of 2020, I’d like to discuss history. Or rather movies as a way to learn history wrapped up in entertainment.

The new World War I movie 1917 opened in Los Angeles on December 25, 2019, and I saw it that day. It is an excellent portrayal of the miserable trench warfare of what was then called the Great War. The film, directed by Sam Mendes and written by Sam Mendes and Krysty Wilson-Cairns, includes recognition in the end credits of Mendes’ grandfather who served in this war.  (My husband’s paternal grandfather, serving with the British, was gassed by the Germans in this war and never completely recovered.)

WWI started in Europe on July 28, 1914 and ended with the armistice between the Allies and Germany on November 11, 1918. The United States did not enter the war until President Wilson called for war on Germany on April 2, 1917, which the U.S. Congress declared four days later. The story of the movie 1917 takes place on April 6, 1917, focusing on two British lance corporals with no mention of the U.S. entry.

WWI in Europe is known for trench warfare – and Sam Mendes has done a brilliant job of conveying the miserable conditions of such warfare as the two young protagonists struggle to make their way through the crowded British trenches and then through the empty trenches of the Germans and on into no-man’s land.

Read this entire guest post now.

FEBRUARY 2020 — “LEARNING FROM HISTORY PART II: WHAT THE HOLOCAUST CAN TEACH US FOR TODAY”

One and a half years ago I said to my friend and frequent writing project collaborator Susan Chodakiewitz that I felt badly that these particular accounts were lost to history because they were published before the internet. Susan said, “Why not write a play of these accounts?”

And that’s what I did – rewriting and rewriting, choosing which firsthand accounts fit into a timeline of the historic events leading up to Nazi Germany invading Poland on September 1, 1939, and the actions of the Nazi regime intent on murdering every Jewish man, woman and child in all Nazi-occupied territories along with murdering other “undesirables.”

Susan worked alongside me to craft compelling sequences in the play and to develop free content (selected reading list, discussion questions, etc.) to accompany this project. As we worked – and as the rise of anti-Semitic incidents in the U.S. and elsewhere increased dramatically – we realized that this play should be a free theater project for middle and high school students.

In contrast, for example, to elementary and high schools in Germany, where education on WWII and the Holocaust starts at a young age (7 or 8 years old according to one friend of mine in Germany), Holocaust education for high schools is only mandated in a very few states in the U.S. This means that the majority of young Americans have no idea of how one step led to the next step led to the next step until it was too late to stop.

Read this entire guest post now.

MARCH 2020 — “THE PUBLIC SERVICE RESPONSIBILITY OF FICTION WRITERS”

When we write fiction – novels, screenplays, short stories, poems, limericks – we should encourage responsible societal behaviors whenever possible.

Safer sex portrayal:

Unless there is an absolute necessity in your fiction for an unplanned pregnancy, fictional characters should practice safer sex. And even if you need an unplanned pregnancy, it can be attributed, for example, to a defective condom.

Why is this important? Because for many, many people fictional characters are real people, and their fictional behavior encourages emulation by real-life people.

As a fiction writer you don’t want to be responsible for real-life teen pregnancies because you had two teen characters not use easily available contraception.

Protective helmets:

A bicycle helmet saved my father on a bicycle when a car hit him, and a bicycle helmet (or motorcycle helmet or a certified protective helmet worn when skateboarding, rollerblading, etc.) can save others. If you can work it in when your 10-year-old characters ride their bikes or skateboard together, mention their nifty helmets.

Read this entire guest post now.

Belgium and Anti-Semitism

Several years ago at an international coding conference held at UCLA I asked two young men where they were from. One young man said “Belgium” and the other young man said, “The country that other countries’ armies are always invading.”

Given the news I learned today of the grossly anti-Semitic floats at a Belgian carnival parade in Aalst, I recommend that Belgium be invaded by Holocaust education. One starting point? See the selected Holocaust reading list created for my THIN EDGE OF THE WEDGE free theater school project to combat anti-Semitism and hate.

Daniel Boffey in his February 21, 2020, article in The Guardian writes about the Belgian carnival parade:

Last year Unesco removed the Aalst carnival from a list of “intangible cultural heritage”, an inventory of protected practices that includes Irish hurling and Cypriot-Greek Byzantine chant.





The UN organisation said the festival, which has been on the list since 2010, had been guilty of “recurring repetition of racist and antisemitic representations”.

Educating people — and organizations — to stand up to hate is very important. I encourage you to read my recent post for author Joylene Butler’s blog — Learning From History Part II: What the Holocaust Can Teach Us for Today.” The post includes this paragraph:

This understanding of how name calling can lead to beatings to concentration camps to murder is particularly important now. Young people need to learn to be aware of what can happen if, instead of standing up, they allow things such as bullying on school playgrounds to escalate until it is too late.

What are you doing to stand up to hate today?

Thirty Years Ago Stasi HQ Stormed

January 15, 2020, from DW.com: “Stasi HQ storming: German president praises ‘democratic act'”

German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier on Wednesday marked the 30th anniversary of the storming of the Stasi headquarters. On January 15, 1990, large crowds forced their way into the offices of East Germany’s secret police to stop thousands of files being shredded.

Opening the Stasi archives had given reunified Germany a “deep insight into the mechanisms, into the efficacy of a dictatorship,” said Steinmeier during a commemoration at the former Stasi hub in Berlin.

Lessons about the past could only be gleaned when the public knew what had happened and why, added Steinmeier. The president described the storming as a “profoundly democratic act” — in the wake of dissident rallies and the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.

The Stasi or communist-era Ministry for State Security Service, operated a large-scale spying network across East Germany and beyond, using tens of thousands of officers and some 170,000 informants to keep tabs on the then-GDR population.

The screenplay THE WIDOW SPRINGER written by my husband Mitchell R. Miller and myself is a Cold War spy thriller:

 When the Berlin Wall falls, the widow of a Stasi clerk finds herself tangled in a web of intrigue and revenge connected to her dead husband’s death five years earlier.

And our screenplay contains this sequence from the night of January 15, 1990:

INT. STASI HQ — NIGHT

Crawl: East Berlin 15 January 1990

From outside the building complex thousands of voices in unison can be heard chanting.

VOICES
WIR SIND DAS VOLK!

People run around frantically, grabbing files and running them through shredders, destroying equipment.

Others sit at desks or stare out the shuttered windows, stunned and frightened.

Joachim, in work clothes, is here, as are his two buddies from the bar and members of his squad. In the background crowd noises heard from a distance grow louder. A UNIFORMED OFFICER shouts.

UNIFORMED OFFICER

We’ll have to start burning this stuff. Clear out some space and bring everything over here. Krausz, get me some thermite grenades.

People scurry to comply.

INT. FILE ROOM, STASI HEADQUARTERS, BERLIN — MOMENTS LATER

Joachim pounds on a vault door with a crowbar. He gets nowhere. On the floor next to him rests a can of gasoline.

He looks around the office he is in, then sees that in an interior office marked “Commanding Officer” his buddy GUNTHER sits, just staring. Joachim grabs the gasoline can and rushes in.

INT. GUNTHER’S OFFICE — CONTINUOUS

JOACHIM

Gunther? … Gunther! Snap out of it! We’ve got to burn the files!

Joachim grabs at Gunther’s jacket, pulls him out of his chair.

INT. OUTSIDE VAULT DOOR — CONTINUOUS

Joachim drags Gunther to the vault door. Gunther stares at it blindly, utterly lost.

JOACHIM

The combination. Remember the combination. Open the door!

Joachim assumes a military posture and leans right into Gunther’s ear, speaking in a voice of authority.

JOACHIM

Comrade Major Zweifel! Open the vault door at once. We have orders to burn all the files immediately!

Gunther slowly reaches for the lock and dials the combination as though he were acting in his sleep.

JOACHIM

Comrade Major, the party is counting on you to do your duty.

The door swings open. Joachim pushes past Gunther.

INT. STASI HQ VAULT — CONTINUOUS

Joachim enters the vault. He opens files and spills them on the floor.

Gunther enters the room as if he’s in a trance. Joachim thrusts the gas can into Gunther’s hands.

JOACHIM

This will make them burn better. Pour the gas on everything!

The gurgle of a gas can being emptied. Joachim doesn’t look around.

Joachim is not merely throwing files on the floor, he is looking for a particular file. He finds it, stuffs it into his jacket, and continues dumping.

He turns and sees gasoline over everything.

JOACHIM

Let me set these thermite grenades and we can get out of here.

He reaches into his pocket and takes out two can-shaped grenades. He activates the mechanism on one, places it on a file shelf.

He backs toward the door, then rolls the other grenade to a well-soaked pile of papers.

He brushes past Gunther, who just stares at the scene.

JOACHIM

Those grenades will go up any second. Gunther … Gunther!

Just then the grenades do ignite. In seconds the room fills with fire and smoke.

Joachim reaches back to grab Gunther. But Gunther pushes Joachim’s arm away and retreats back further into the flames.

Joachim screams at Gunther.

JOACHIM

You’ve done your duty. The mission is accomplished. Now get out of there!

GUNTHER
I’m finally doing what I should have done all those years ago. Good-bye, Joachim. Lebe’ hoch!

Gunther coughs and gasps for breath.

Joachim tries to reach Gunther. The smoke and flames drive Joachim back and awaken his instinct for self-preservation.

He staggers out of the vault.

INT. STASI HEADQUARTERS CORRIDOR — CONTINUOUS

Joachim collapses against a desk, catching his breath.

Suddenly he realizes that the crowd noise from outside has gotten louder than the noise of the fire.

CROWD
STA-SI Raus! STA-SI Raus! STA-SI Raus!

Joachim grabs his crowbar and runs out of the room.

INT. STASI HQ STAIRCASE — CONTINUOUS

Joachim races down the unused back stairs. It is partially blocked. He scrambles to squeeze through and push things out of his way.

Finally he reaches the door at the bottom of the stairs.

INT. STASI HEADQUARTERS BACK DOOR — CONTINUOUS

Before Joachim opens the door, he checks inside his jacket to see that the file is still held securely.

Then he puts his ear to the door to see if the crowd is outside. He hears nothing.

With his crowbar, he breaks a chain around the door handle, then pries the door partially open. He can barely squeeze through.

EXT. ALLEY BEHIND STASI HQ — CONTINUOUS

Joachim slips through the door, which opens onto a small service alley. He leans against the outside wall to catch his breath.

Just then he sees lights coming near the corner of the building and the crowd noise almost on top of him. He looks around frantically for a way out. There is none.

He whirls and pounds on the door in time with the chant.

JOACHIM

O-pen up! Let us in! O-pen up! Let us in! O-pen up! Let us in!

A column of marchers swings past the alleyway and a few marchers see him. They break off from the main column and in an instant the alley fills with the crowd.

They advance toward him, armed with bricks, tools, heavy staffs, pieces of lumber. Suddenly they take up his chant.

CROWD

O-pen up! Let us in! O-pen up! Let us in! O-pen up! Let us in!

JOACHIM

They’ve blocked the door. Give me a hand with this crowbar.

Immediately several other tools are wedged into the door opening, and many sets of hands pull.

The door flies open and the crowd floods through.

INT. STASI HQ STAIRCASE — CONTINUOUS

Joachim surges a few steps forward from the door with the crowd. Then he allows the others to push past him until he is behind with the stragglers and finally alone.

EXT. ALLEY BEHIND STASI HQ –CONTINUOUS

Joachim ducks out into the alley, then out into a square.

EXT. RAIL EMBANKMENT — LATER

Joachim climbs up and over a railroad embankment and down the other side. He half-sits, half-collapses onto the ground. The crowd chants in the distance.

Joachim is alone, and without a clue as to what to do next.

If any entertainment companies would like to read the complete film script of THE WIDOW SPRINGER, email pzmiller@gmail.com