Word: baranowski
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...troubled Protestant army chaplain, hard-bitten Major Kartuschke's bluster, meant only one thing-another German had chloroformed his conscience. In twelve hours, one of Major Kartuschke's prisoners-21-year-old Lance Corporal Fedor Baranowski-would be shot by a firing squad. Curiosity and compassion impelled the chaplain to find out why. Through a long, anguished night, he wrestled with a stack of court-martial papers...
...Corporal Baranowski was guilty enough, but the crime he should have been tried for, as the chaplain saw it, was love. Stationed in the Ukraine, the lonely corporal had become passionately fond of a young Russian widow, Liuba, innocently tipped her off on the moves his outfit made. Condemned to a penal company, he had given his guards the slip, been recaptured and sentenced to death...
While the chaplain puzzles out his last words of comfort to Baranowski, he feels prickles of remorse tingling in the moral numbness around him. A cell guard speaks to the condemned man in kindly words, a clerk smothers an obscene joke, finally the lieutenant in charge of the firing squad offers to disobey his orders. The result, the chaplain sadly reminds him, would be the same: a more inhumane officer would take his place. "Do evil in order to avoid greater evil, is that what you're getting at?" asks the lieutenant. "Are we any better than the Kartuschkes...
...execution time nears, the chaplain writes a letter to Liuba for the quivering Baranowski. He assures the deserter "that eternal love does not refuse him whom this world thrusts out," helps him stumble awkwardly through the Lord's Prayer, gives him the courage to stand erect until the firing squad cuts him down...