Posted Chapter 7
Hey, progress. Finally a quiet weekend at home and I got chapter 7 done. This chapter is a flashback covering Joe’s early days and fighter pilot training. Again, I am trying to maintain the basic narrative flow as much as possible and it seems a little awkward to stop and pause here at the gates of Buchenwald but at the same time, with the five days traveling on the train it is not hard to imagine Joe spending a good deal of time thinking about back home and re-tracing his steps to how he got to where he was. I don’t know how it works, you tell me. On the other hand, until the narrative is picked up again in Chapter 8 with his first few days in Buchenwald, I’m not sure if you or I can really tell how much of a disruption this is. Still, if you read this, I’d love to hear from you.
Chapters 5 & 6
As you can see there has been a huge delay in writing and posting new chapters. Chapters 5 and 6 are finally up. Joe has had chapter 5 to review for a couple of months but I completed chapter 6 while on a cruise to Alaska in August.
These two chapters cover the time from Joe being placed in Fresnes prison in Paris to his arrival at Buchenwald. The train ride was unimaginably horrible and I tried to find a balance between describing it accurately and with some sense of the agonies involved, to not being too disturbing. The fact is, we have to really engage our imagination to understand what it would be like to be pushed into a cattle car in the high August heat with 95 other unwashed human beings–a car meant to carry no more than 40 people or 8 cows. One thing Joe always talks about whether the train or Buchenwald is the smell. There are only a few times in life when I have been subjected to unbearable stench and the circumstances were for the most part escapable–such as using the outhouse in a hot berry field. But at least you know you can hold your breath through most of it and then in just seconds escape to the clean air outside again. To be in such stench for not minutes, but days, and weeks and months is impossible to imagine. Sixty years later, the recollection is strong in Joe’s mind.
Please let me know what you think of these chapters, and I’ll try to get at the rest.
