The Brockporter Book of The Week - Children and Fire by Ursula Hegi

I have always been fascinated by the question of how the holocaust could occur in a Christian country in the cradle of Western Civilization? How is it that the Germans could methodically kill 6 million people and gain the complicity of many other European nations as well?

In fiction, Ursula Hegi gives us some understanding of answers to these questions. Her first book in the Burgdorf cycle (referring to the fictitious village where her characters live and the action occurs), Stones From The River, begins the story of how fascism fueled by fear and propaganda can insinuate itself into a population and turn them to extreme evil which becomes so common place and widely accepted that it becomes banal.

The setting for the fourth book in the Burgdorf cycle is February 27, 1934, the first anniversary of the staged burning of the Reichstag, the Parliament building in Berlin, Germany. Similar to 9/11 in the United States, this event gives the Nazi government, the excuse it needs to begin its burning of books, its propagandizing the youth, its increasing demonization and discrimination against its Jewish citizens, and its increasing militarization.

The story is about Thelka Jansen who becomes the teacher of 10 year old boys in a Catholic Parochial school. Her young students, whom she tries to protect from the consequences of these misguided policies, become recruited to serve in Hitler's Nazi youth program the "Hilter-Jugend". Thelka justifies her cooperation thinking that Hitler's regime is only a temporary phenomenon and he will pass from power as quickly as he came into power.

As the story continues, Thelka, the result of an out of wedlock pregnancy, learns that her biological father is Jewish. As she has to produce a family geneology she stumbles across the fact that her father is her adoptive father who married her mother to save her from the stigma of being an unmarried mother and having to give up her child to adoption.

Thelka struggles with her ethical sensibilities in the face of societal pressures towards evil policies and the seduction of her students, whom she genuinely loves, into acting out dynamics which those policies not only encourage, but require, in order to avoid significant censure.

The narrative reminded me of Brockport where we have Hometown Heroes banners hanging from our light poles extolling the virtues of the community's young people who have become not only pawns but the agents of immoral policies of torture, pre-emptive invasion, and killing of people demonized as "terrorists" for political purposes advancing the agenda of capitalistic corporations whose bottom line has become more important that human lives and sustaining and promoting a civilization on values of peace, liberty, and justice.

Hegi's books in the Burgdorf cycle are not only enjoyable fiction, but stories with important lessons about how good people do bad things.

I highly recommend Children and Fire by Ursula Hegi which is available at the Lift Bridge Book Shop in downtown Brockport and on the Brockporter Amazon book carousel in the right hand column.

The Brockporter Book Of The Week is a regular feature of the Brockporter Online News Magazine and appears most Fridays.