Word: gregorer
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...mouths of Nazi babes told what he had heard in the most vivid factual firsthand account of Nazi education yet published outside Germany, Education for Death (Oxford; $2). Its author, whose integrity is vouched for by such authorities as William L. Shirer and Douglas Miller, is Michigan-born Gregor Athalwin Ziemer, 42, for eleven years headmaster of the American Colony School (for U.S. diplomats' and businessmen's children) in Berlin...
...life and war prove even worse than his gloomy forebodings. The war turns his father from a strong patriarch to a cowardly, deceitful, heartbroken old man. Gregor's steady mother expires in a moving death scene; his unloved wife, sick with sorrow over Gregor's infidelity, dies of an abortion; his brother Piotra is shot in cold blood by his Red cousin Mishka; his loose sister-in-law Daria, eaten by venereal disease, drowns herself in the Don; his sister Dunia marries Mishka, who becomes one of those insufferably coldhearted bullies who helped keep together-and poison...
...time Gregor is done he has only his young son left on earth, and almost certain death hangs over him. Long before that he has grown sick to death of war, sure he has lost his way beyond any finding...
...Gregor is a full-length portrait of an average man in war. He is ably supported by hundreds of sharp details of war, family living, nature, and what female readers like to designate as typically "Russian" scenes: a madly loyal Cossack hanging on to a disabled cannon "like a dangerous pig tied to a log"; Red troops who, with a blaring phonograph on a sledge, gallop round & round the streets of a village; some gruesome close-ups (on both sides) of rape, looting, calm and frantic murder; a soldier trying on some fancy drawers he stole for his wife, catching...
Like most Cossacks, Gregor cared no better for the Whites than for the Reds. What he fought for was land he intensely loved-"We're fighting about it as if it was a woman" - and that was what he wanted to return to. But by the time his last, hunted scavenging was done, he knew of his people: "Nobody needs us; we're preventing everybody from living and working in peace." There was no return for him, except to face a firing squad...