Die Internationale

In memory of my grandfather whom I never met, Peter Bussar. Union organizer, socialist, admirer of Leon Trotski.  At the age of 6 he was pulled out of school to be put to work sewing mattresses in a factory. He educated himself and became Germany's first linotype operator. He set type for some of the major national newspapers and did his job proficiently except that that he had the unfortunate tendency of inserting typos when setting type for Hitler's speeches, making the speeches ludicrous ( or even more ludicrous).

With 44% of the American population believing that Jesus is going to come down in their lifetime to take them to heaven, with Muslims and other religious crazies destroying the fragile shell of civilization, Communists look better and better. Of course, Communism is merely another religious faith. Still, I feel that the Chinese Communist government is looking out for my interests when they suppress religious crazies like Falun Gong and the Tibetan Buddhist monks.

My mother would have given her father more than a few grey hairs, if he only had any hair. All her friends were joining the Bund Deutsche Maedel (the Hitler Youth for girls) and they were having ever so much fun.  He however refused to even consider signing the permission slip, permitting her to join. She then simply forged his signature and joined.

Prior to a subsequent Hitler Youth rally, she looked desperately for something pretty to pin on her uniform. She found nothing. She then searched through her father's personal belongings and found a pretty metal badge that she pinned on and rushed off to the rally. She was however intercepted by the local Nazi block warden who angrily marched her back to her house.  It appears that the pretty badge was a Communist Party membership badge. Had she been caught wearing it, it would probably have meant her father being sent to a concentration camp.

The reality of this rotten Nazi ideology though came home in 1937.  It was Kristallnacht. She was walking home when she saw an old family friend thrown through his second story window, to land on the sidewalk as a crumpled bleeding wreck. Horrified, she yelled at the jeering Nazi mob to help her get him to a hospital. No one did anything, so my mother, then a teenage girl, dragged him to the hospital herself. She said that she was suspicious and stayed on at the hospital until she was sure that he was being taken care of. 

This was a life changing event for her in many respects. She decided to become a nurse and won a scholarship to study nursing at the Kaiserswert Institute. She also embarked on a strange double life, saving people from death at the hands of the Nazis.  For example, when my parents first met, they walked past a column of slave laborers. One of the guards laid a slave's head open with the edge of a shovel and left him to die in a ditch. When the column passed, she made my father help cary the man to a barn, where she sewed him back together.  My father said that he was afraid that they would be caught and sent to a KZ (concentration camp). She though was not dissuaded and kept returning to take care of the man until his health returned.  We didn't realize the full extent of her activities until my father taped a full hour of her description of her activities a few years before she died.

M