Book 4 - Heidegger's Glasses

The story took place in Germany during WW II. Despite the real life characters depicted in the book, such as Martin Heidegger, Goebbels, and a brief mention of Mengele, the premise of the story was entirely fiction.

A group of polyglots had been picked out of certain death and secreted away to live in a compound. Their sole purpose was to answer letters to the dead. You see, when prisoners arrived in concentration camps, they were made to write letters to their relatives, saying that hei, the camp was not that bad, there were food and people were nice and they even asked the relatives to join them.

Of course afterwards most of them were sent to gas chambers immediately. This amounted to a huge numbers of letters from the dead, all of them unanswered. So, for record keeping and also for a very superstitious reasons, the Reich decided that these letters should be answered in whatever language they were originally written, like answer like, and hence the scribes, living in an underground compound with painted sky and stars and cobblestone street, protected, helped, and fed by their two guardian angels who happened to be SS officers.

I have no idea what to think of this book. Story wise, I supposed it's okay. I mean, if I can enjoy the story about a magical platform in London that would opened up and led to a secretive train station that would carry you to a wizardry school of Hogwarts, I suppose I should be able to accept a premise in which a commandent of a concentration camp let two prisoners walked away, in which not all SS Officers were bad, some of them were actually risking their lives to smuggle people to safety.

But I just can't.

A story about a German businessman who built an SS-sanctioned factory which actually was a sanctuary for the condemned was certainly too wild to be true, but that was exactly what Oskar Schindler did.

Being a Chinese descent who live in Indonesia, learning History in classroom about WW II in the Pacific, listening about the Rape of Nanking from my dad, a seemingly romanticized story about how a Japanese diplomat, in collaboration with a Dutch consul, saved several thousands Jews seemed implausible, until I read about Chiune Sugihara

I'm not so naive to think that the world operates in black and white. I knew there must be more people like Schindler and Sugihara. I would like to read more stories like theirs, for truly their bravery and humanity deserves to be recounted and told over and over again.

But not like the one written in this book.

I tried to put my thoughts in words, but this time I simply can't.

Maybe such sensitive, important, and horrific subject matters are better not to be imagined into fiction.