Arbeit macht frei: - Fredrick Töben

orders. I was not present in court because mother and her four children
and her only daughter-in-law were at Immensee comforting one another
at the tragic but inevitable loss of their husband and father.
In the early hours of 19 October 2009, 2 days before my mother died, I wrote:
My mother, unlike my father, was not happy in what I was doing. This was
largely because one of my two sisters, as a secondary teacher, had let
herself be influenced by Marxist Feminist thoughts. For example, when
father died, she informed mother that after 63 years of married life,
mother was now a free woman. Little did my sister realise who, after such
a long time together, had become the slave. That the concept, slave, in a
loving relationship, is used at all, reflects my sister’s twisted value system.
But my sister went further. She blamed men for for all human ills and
evils that cause personal sufferings. For her, there were no ideals worth
embracing, such as beauty, truth, honour, justice and love. Strangely, none
of these positive virtues, so she maintained, had any reality content. Yet,
she believed hatred and greed were real. Perhaps that is why she
succeeded in persuading mother to disinherit me.
When mother and father were together, it was mother who set the tone
and atmosphere, with father being the enforcer. Without father, there
was a shift in balance, and my sister pushed the anti-revisionist line, that
Germans - Nazis - did gas people. But my sister also pushed the
androgynous line, that although there is no God or Heaven or any form
of transcendence, humans should move from the male-female divide to
the a-sexual androgynous state of being.
Mother found all such thoughts rather demanding and I found when she
yearned for father’s company, she was not helped in coping with his
absence by my sister pushing her hatred-filled ideology onto her.
Ironically, whenever her bully-tactics did not work, my sister was quick
to slip into the victim mentality and plead hurt feelings.
All this reminds me so much of the pattern of behaviour that promoters
of the gassing story employ when their arguments - their narrative is
shown to be a fabrication that crumbles under close scrutiny. It all so
clearly then reveals itself to be pure German hatred. In my sister’s case it
is self-hatred and successful re-education based on ignorance of any
historical facts.
As a final comforting thought I am reminded of what Gerard Menuhin
said at the passing of his father in 1999 - ‘perhaps when parents die, the
children may finally grow up’.
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