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They will be pressed into service, channeled to the Eastern Front via Hitler Youth. Serving the country, as if this country can find no better use for its children than to catch bullets in some Russian field.
He might picture himself leading any number of women into every conceivable variety of harlotry and whoredom.
Truth cannot feed your children. Integrity doesn’t keep a man warm.
When her children are starving, a woman will believe any vile promise you whisper in her ear.
The Reich will never fall; it is too strong now, too deeply rooted, fixed in the routine of life. We have accepted. We have moved along, carried on with the business of our lives, and this is what our lives have become.
I cannot help but know it. Against all sense, I believe. Somewhere, beyond the ragged edge of night, light bleeds into this world.
A man of thirty-eight never thinks himself old until he’s pushed from a plane in the dead of night.
And in Riga, by the light of a church on fire, women who were once raped by Russian soldiers raped again by their German liberators.
She smiles up at him with appreciation, with unrestrained pride, and the light of her happiness is the most beautiful sight he has seen since he turned his back on Riga and marched the other way.
How are we to know when our lives are good and when we are blessed, if we have no sorrow, no deprivation for comparison’s sake?
And how do I tell them, he wonders, that the soldiers they revere sweat beneath their helmets and wake screaming in the night?
No matter which way we turn, no matter how we resist, there is a fist of power ready to close around us. The road is straight and unvaried. It leads us on, merciless, toward ash and fire.
Nothing is so unworthy of a civilized nation as allowing itself to be governed, without opposition, by an irresponsible clique that has yielded to base instinct.
