The Bruners

Untitled by S. Fawad. Image Courtesy: ArtChowk Gallery

In 1919, Klaus Bruner was born in a blue-collar area of Berlin. His father made a good living as a construction worker. When Klaus was nine, however, his father’s boss was using shoddy materials that caused his father to fall through a floor while on a job. The accident severely injured his back. Before his injury, he was a cold and distant father who doled out the occasional hope-igniting scraps of affection and kindness to his son. After it, he became a drunken, unemployed wife-and-child beater who constantly ranted about the Jew boss whose obsessive penny-pinching had caused the accident that had destroyed his life and turned him into a “cripple.” Klaus’ mother was always kind to him, but she was too weak-willed to defend him against his father. Though his mother was able to obtain employment as a maid and he earned money doing odd jobs around the neighborhood, the money they made only paid for the barest necessities. Klaus began to be teased and then eventually bullied at school for his shabby clothes. Though he did everything he could to contribute to the family’s support, his father started threatening to send him to an orphanage if he didn’t pull his weight.

It was with that threat behind him that at age eleven, Klaus sought out the husband-and-wife owners of a new neighborhood tavern and asked if he could work as a dishwasher for them. The couple, Werner and Angelika Amsel, agreed. They had a pair of twins Klaus’ age, Helmut and Uta, who became fast friends with Klaus, and soon the Amsels became a surrogate family to him. The year before, the Amsels had enrolled Helmut in the junior branch of the Hitler Youth and Uta in its sister group and the children loved it. They convinced their new friend to join and he did. It was unsurprising that his father’s boss had been a Jew, Mr. Amsel let Klaus know. His father had been right. Jews’ greed knew no bounds. Even if it meant endangering the very men who sweated for them day in and day out.

Like Helmut and Uta, Klaus loved the Hitler Youth. He loved everything about it—from its uniforms and flag to its physical and military training. But most of all he loved the dream. The dream that if its members worked hard enough, if they were devoted enough to the group, they could become true Aryan supermen. It was even better because his best friends were striving for the same goal. Before joining, he had already felt that the confident, cheerful, attractive twins had brought him into the realm of their own enchanted specialness. Once they pulled him into the Youth, however, the realm expanded.

At fourteen, Klaus and Helmut transferred to the true Hitler Youth. Klaus learned that his three-year crush on Uta was requited and they began dating. At eighteen, they married and conceived a child. But no sooner did they learn Uta was pregnant than Klaus was laid off from his factory job. Unable to find employment in a country that had yet to fully recover from the Depression, they knew that many unemployed Germans had been successful in finding factory work, higher paying factory work at that, in America, so they decided to emigrate.

They settled in the German immigrant area of uptown Manhattan named Yorkville and Klaus got work in the meatpacking district. In 1938, Uta gave birth to a son the couple named Robert, pronouncing the name Rowbeart in the German style. Soon after, a neighbor recruited the Bruners to the local Bund.

The Bund was the name given to the American Nazi Party, founded by Hitler himself through German emissaries. Their decision to join was motivated less by politics than by feeling it connected them with their native country, particularly the family in it, for which they had become so deeply homesick.

The following year, just as war was being declared in Europe, the Bunds ended. Soon after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, Klaus and Uta were arrested.

This was how the couple and their four-year-old son came to reside in Camp Crystal in Texas, one of several internment camps across the country imprisoning Germans, Japanese, and Italians. Though only Germans who were considered a danger to the country were interned, the flimsiest of evidence could deem a German a danger, particularly if he or she wasn’t an American citizen. The Bruners weren’t citizens and were part of the tiny 10 – 15% minority of their fellow German internees who had actually been in a Bund.

The camp wasn’t so terrible, considering they were prisoners. It was largely inmate run and the children got to go to a camp school whose curriculum was the same as the normal public school system. (Robert’s internment was “voluntary” as they neither wanted him sent back to war-torn Germany to live with relatives nor to become a ward of the state.) This did not mean that the couple wasn’t afraid, like many of their peers, that they would be “repatriated” to war-torn Germany. So while many of their fellow ex-Bund-mates tried, often successfully, to convert the non-Nazi Germans who made up most of the German population of the camp, they were careful to keep a low profile.

However, their fears were realized in 1945 when they were informed they were to be sent back to Germany. They were given the option of taking their eight-year-old son back with them, but they didn’t want him to have to return to the desolate country to which they knew they would be returning.

Robert was sent to a boys’ orphanage in the state. The nun who ran it, Mother Agatha, called him “Nazi boy,” a name quickly adopted by the other boys who bullied him even more ruthlessly than she did. On his first day at his new school, his teacher was taking roll call when a student named Robert told her he went by Bobby. When Robert was called a few names later on, he said that he too went by Bobby.

Weeks after entering the orphanage, he finally received a letter from his parents that read that they were living with his grandparents and that he should imagine every night before he fell asleep they were tucking him into bed and telling him how much they loved him. “We know you don’t understand now what we did,” his parents wrote, “but when you are older, you will and you will thank us.”

Several months later, having received no second letter, he saw the pictures for the first time. They were in Life magazine, shoved in his face by one of the orphanage boys.

In one picture, a bald person—a man or a woman, he couldn’t tell—who looked like a skeleton with skin, had his or her body folded up like a filthy blanket in a space that looked only about two feet high.

In another, a huge pile of sticks lay in a bare room. Or at least what looked like sticks. When he gave the picture a closer look, he saw that they were actually dead bodies.

The magazine said these were prisoners in something called Nazi concentration camps.

“This Hitler your parents liked so much, he put Jewish people in ovens, like bread,” the boy hissed.

“That’s a lie!” he retorted.

“Then where did the pictures come from?”

“I—I don’t know! But I know—this country—it does bad things. It makes people think people are bad who aren’t.”

The boy punched him in the face.

He had nightmares about the pictures, but whenever he would wake up he would see his parents crouched by his bed, stroking his hair, telling him the pictures and stories weren’t true, and then he would fall back into a nice dreamless sleep.

Bobby, as he thought of himself now, waited eagerly, then desperately, for another letter. He would ask Mother Agatha more and more frequently if he had received one. Finally, after four months of this, Mother Agatha explained to him with a trace of grim kindness in her voice that they might have been trapped behind “the wrong side” of the Berlin Wall, the East one, which was run by evil people, the Russians, who enslaved their people and turned them into worker robots.

If his parents had met this fate, he would likely never hear from them again.

Though he told himself he would never believe a witch like her, the longer he didn’t hear from them, the more he did.

By the age of fourteen, Bobby had become Bob. No longer the orphanage whipping boy, he had friends, but ones he always kept at arm’s length. In class one day, his history teacher, Mr. Smith, spoke about the prejudices German immigrants and German-Americans faced during World War I. When he began talking about violence against them being lightly or not punished, Bob became so pale and queasy that Mr. Smith asked him if he needed to go to the nurse’s office.

As the class was filing out, Mr. Smith asked him to stay behind.

“You know my name used to be Schmidt, not Smith,” the teacher confided. He spoke of his childhood as a German immigrant during World War I, living among fellow Germans who would suddenly disappear, hearing whispers about “relocation” camps and being hazed by kids at school for being a “kraut.”

By the end of his story, Bob couldn’t take it anymore and with a quavering voice spit out his own story, including what Mother Agatha had said about his parents and his eventual acceptance that she had probably been right.

“I don’t know if I even want them to be alive anymore. Because if they are . . . if th-they are . . . ” he started crying, “then God knows where they could be—in some terrible work camp. Maybe in something like those concentration camps they say that—”

“That they lie about.” Mr. Smith placed a hand on his shoulder. “You need to know that. A bunch of sick lies cooked up by the Allies to placate its people so they wouldn’t be enraged about all the lives lost in that senseless war. So that if their own terrible deeds in the war were to ever come out, they could say, See, we had to commit these atrocities—look at the evil we were up against. And the Jews, they were all too happy to help disseminate this lie so they could be rewarded for their so-called suffering by being awarded their own country.”

Before Mr. Smith sent him on his way with a note excusing his lateness, he reached into his desk drawer.

“Never be ashamed,” the teacher told him, placing a paperback book in his hand.

He looked down at it. The cover read Mein Kampf.

Mr. Smith got him a job working for his brother-in-law who owned a cattle ranch. Bob loved it, partly because he loved the horses and fresh air, but also because of his relationship with Emmett, a twenty-year-old ranch hand who had taken him under his wing. An orphan himself, Emmett understood what questions not to ask and what expectations not to have.

Emmett took Bob to his first rodeo. The boy immediately fell in love, soon spending much of his earnings on shows and his time daydreaming about becoming a rider himself one day. The following year, Emmett took him to a brothel, where he lost his virginity. Though his first experience was uncomfortable and awkward, when he had time to reflect on it, he realized he liked the idea of having his sexual needs taken care of by a prostitute. It lessened the need for a romantic relationship.

At sixteen, Bob dropped out of school, moved in with Emmett, and started working at the ranch full-time. By then, he was pleased enough with his new life that the Holocaust and Mein Kampf stuff was no more than a faint memory.

It was at this point that he also found a girlfriend, or one of sorts. The black-haired, navy-eyed boy had developed into a ruggedly handsome, tall, strapping youth who looked older than his years. He had caught the eye of the thirty-year-old wife of the ranch’s owner the moment he had arrived at the ranch two years earlier, but she had waited two years to actually pursue him. She didn’t have to put out much effort. Not merely because she was pretty, but because the idea of sleeping with a married woman, particularly regularly, appealed to Bob. Having a married lover was the best of both worlds. He could get some of the affection and intimacy that came with having a girlfriend or wife, as well as the validation of sexual desirability that came with free sex, while remaining free of the burden of the questions and expectations that was the price one normally had to pay to get these things. He predicted quite correctly that there would be more married women in his future, just as he had predicted quite correctly that there would be more prostitutes.

At seventeen, he became a professional rodeo rider and by twenty-two, he had become one of the most successful riders on the circuit. At twenty-three, however, the sport left a fellow rider and friend paralyzed, and Bob started thinking of early retirement. He decided to save up for a ranch and at twenty-five, he bought a cattle ranch outside of Dallas.

Being a rancher turned out to be a lonely life for him, so when at aged twenty-seven, his mousy, plain eighteen-year-old maid, Britta, informed him he had impregnated her, he actually felt a twinge of relief. He had to eventually do the marriage and kids things anyway, didn’t he?

When Britta gave birth to a girl they named Bedelia, however, all of Bob’s ambivalence evaporated. He was immediately smitten and only became more so as the golden-haired child became a true beauty, with a dimpled chin, pool-blue eyes, and peony-pink lips. But after she turned three, she began to be a handful.

She threw tantrums at the drop of a hat, bloody tantrums that left her with a raw, hoarse, near non-existent voice. Tantrums that could be instigated by anything from clothing items whose tags were too scratchy against her skin to a meal she didn’t like to her mother telling her they had to leave for nursery school. The nursery school tantrums were so bad that often it was decided she should just stay home, and eventually she stopped being sent all together. They decided to wait until the next year, and the next year they decided to wait for kindergarten.

Bob continued to heap praise and affection on her and tell her how pretty she was and how much he loved her, and saw this as fulfilling his responsibility as a loving parent. When it came time to deal with the hard stuff, however, Britta had to deal with it. But she was the mother. Weren’t mothers supposed to be the ones who dealt with the day-to-day raising of a child? As a result, Britta grew into an anxious, shrewish woman who always resembled a fragile twig about to snap and who rarely spoke in a kind voice to Bedelia. This only made Bob more affectionate when he was with his daughter, but, though he would never admit it to himself, he made sure he wasn’t with her much. As a result, she hated her mother and adored her father, and this only made the whole problem worse.

Once Bedelia became old enough for kindergarten, Bob and Britta knew they had to send her, no matter how bad her tantrums were. To their surprise, her tantrums eventually subsided but no sooner did this problem end then another problem arose. Bedelia started coming home and crying about everyone in her class hating her.

Her teacher called her parents in for a meeting and told them of her concerns about Bedelia. She was learning ahead of her peers and, of course, was an absolutely gorgeous child, but she couldn’t seem to gain the acceptance of her fellow classmates. In fact, she seemed to be producing hostility in them. She would snatch toys away from other children and if they complained, she would tell them that she was a beautiful princess and beautiful princesses were supposed to always get what they wanted when they wanted it. When she would lose games she would throw fits. When kids subsequently started excluding her, she would tell them that they were just jealous of her because she was so pretty and they were ugly.

When they spoke to Bedelia about the meeting, Britta was so nasty and demeaning to her that she broke into tears, and all Bob had the heart to do was to hug her and tell her it would be okay and that she should just show her classmates “the sweet, lovable girl” he knew she was.

Over the next few years, she continued to go to school with academic but no social success. Though the school-avoiding tantrums had subsided, they were replaced by constant complaints of illness. Britta was learning to get tougher with her so even tantrums often didn’t work with her anymore. Eventually, however, she seemed to be getting legitimately ill, often getting these stomach viruses with intense vomiting. One day, however, Britta caught her drinking ipecac syrup. When the school started complaining about her absences, Bob brought up the idea of having her homeschooled, to which Britta replied, “What, so I can deal with her all day long while you’re out playing cowboy?!” before storming off.

One day when Bedelia was eight, he came into the house after a day’s work to find a note in Britta’s handwriting that read she had had to take Bedelia to the emergency room of the nearest hospital because she had fallen while sliding down the banister. When Bob got to the hospital, it turned out Bedelia had a broken nose, a broken arm, and a concussion and her doctor wanted to keep her in the hospital overnight. He also began questioning him in a way that suggested he didn’t necessarily buy the banister story. Fortunately, Bob was able to convince him she wasn’t being physically abused. When he questioned Bedelia alone, however, he eventually got the truth out of her.

Britta had been trying to get her to take a bath, which she had refused to do for three days because the water “felt weird.” She was refusing to bathe once again and when Britta kept barking at her to do so, she started throwing one of her tantrums. Bedelia then tried to run to her bedroom, which she was planning to lock herself in, a common tactic of hers, but Britta chased her. Just as Bedelia was reaching for the door knob, Britta twisted her arm behind her back hard and slammed her face against the door before she abruptly stopped. Dissolving into a fit of tears, she said to Bedelia, “Now look at what you made me do!” She subsequently told her that if she let anyone at the hospital know what had happened, they would take her to an orphanage or a foster home. People would think her father beat her too. If she told her father the truth, he would leave her and her mother, because he would know she was the kind of bad child who would drive her mother to badly beat her.

Bob ended up getting a quickie divorce from Britta, sending her off with a big enough check that she would obey his instructions to quietly exit his and Bedelia’s lives for good.

The first night she was home from the hospital, he was awoken by a hysterical Bedelia banging on his door. She had had a terrible nightmare and asked if she could sleep in his bed. He allowed her. The second night, she asked to do the same as well as the third. Soon she didn’t need to ask anymore. He also decided to homeschool her, at least for the time being.

One Sunday morning, once she was fully healed, he told her he had a surprise for her. He brought her to the barn and led out a brown-speckled, white Paint horse. He told her she could name it whatever she wanted. She chose the name Unicorn.

Unicorn turned out to be a blessing for the both of them. Bedelia became an extraordinary rider and Bob was with her every step of the way. Nearly all of their free time was spent roaming the ranch on horseback, often until the darkest night.

What time she didn’t spend riding Unicorn she still spent involved with his species in some way. If there was a book or a movie that had a horse in it, Bedelia was drawn to it like a fly to a light bulb. She became interested in learning all about horse breeds and developed an uncanny ability for memorization regarding the topic. Sometimes Bob would become concerned that her interest was really an obsession, but then he decided it was irrelevant. Wasn’t any passion an obsession? And wasn’t it passion that made life worthwhile? And since she was still being homeschooled, didn’t she need something to fill the void of not being around kids her own age?

At the age of ten, she began competing in the horse show circuit, where she excelled. Over the next few years, she would go on to win three American Paint Horse Association Reserve World Championships for her age group.

When she was thirteen, she woke up in their bed one morning moaning in pain. She ran into the bathroom and when she returned, she asked if he could cancel her tutors for that day. She felt really sick.

Later he found blood on the sheets.

He talked to her awkwardly about what was happening to her body and what do about it. Then he told her he had decided it would be best if she started sleeping in her own bed again.

This was met with at first shock, then tears, and then anger. She ended up screaming more than she had since she was a young child. Eventually, however, he threatened to deny her use of Unicorn for a week, which succeeded in calming her down. She moved into the bedroom she hadn’t slept in for five years. This didn’t mean she didn’t make him suffer.

Over the next week, she refused to speak to him except when absolutely necessary. He felt as if he were on a desert island whose only other inhabitant had abandoned him, not by leaving the island, but by usually hiding herself from view and treating him as if he were invisible when she did present herself.

As one week turned into two, the pain remained, but sometimes, just every once in a while, it would be replaced by something else: relief. As much as he liked being with her, talking with her was another matter. She would often go on these long minutia-filled monologues about horse breeds or lengthy rambles that he would quickly lose the ability to follow. He would try to sound interested, and then just not aggravated, but he always failed in the end. Still, she could never take the gentle hints he would try to give her and he never had the heart to flat-out tell her he wanted her to stop.

On week three, she forgave him, or at least surrendered, and things went back to normal.

When she was fourteen, she got into a terrible riding accident that left her with an inability to ride and a limp. The doctors said both impairments would probably be lifelong.

This was the first time Bob regretted having her move into her own bedroom. She now used it as a fortress she never left. He could go days without seeing her only to finally spot her shuffling like a zombie into the kitchen to get some food. Sometimes he even left trays outside her door, just to make sure she ate daily. He and Bedelia had had a dream of expanding the ranch into a horse-breeding farm, where he and eventually she could both breed the horses themselves. On the rare occasions when she would talk, or at least listen to him, he told her they could still do that. They could get started now if she wanted. She showed no interest, however, and one of the few times he made it into her room, he found all of her horse books ripped up and defaced.

He found himself going on long drives to escape the house, which felt haunted. The longer the drives the better. Sometimes there would be moments, just flashes of unacknowledged nanoseconds, where he would ask himself, What if I just kept on driving?

It was during one of these drives that he first heard the AM radio show of Reverend Henry Goode.

From him, he would learn that he and Mr. Smith were not alone.

Others, many others, scholars even, also believed the Holocaust was a lie. Some had even written literature about their beliefs. There were people, learned men, asking questions right after the war, just as he and Mr. Smith had. They just weren’t fortunate enough to have known about them. How much pain he, and even Mr. Smith perhaps, might have been spared if they had!

As early as a few years after the war, former French Resistance member and history teacher Paul Rassiner, who had been a Nazi concentration camp prisoner himself(!), was questioning the world’s version of events, becoming the father of Holocaust revisionism with his 1949 book, Crossing the Line and his 1950 one, The Lie of Ulysses: A Glance at the Literature of Concentration Camp Inmates. The former book focused on his experience at Buchenwald, where he claimed the brutalities were mostly committed not by the S.S., but by the Communist prisoners who, in practice, really ruled the camp and ran its internal affairs for their own gain. While this book was a lauded commercial and critical success, his next book, The Lie of Ulysses, was controversial and considered the first true Holocaust “denial” book. In it, Rassiner examined what he considered to be representative accounts of the camps. He criticized other authors who had written about the camps as writing exaggerations. He also described his visits to Dachau and Mauthausen, noting that in both places, he received contradictory stories about how the gas chambers were supposed to have worked and expressed his doubts about whether not only the gas chambers, but the whole Nazi policy of extermination had ever even existed.

In 1974, Northwestern University electrical engineering professor Arthur R. Butz would write perhaps the most famous Holocaust revision book, The Hoax of the Twentieth Century. The book’s key arguments revolved around the ideas that the Nazis’ confessions about gassing at the Nuremberg trials had been extracted through torture, that there had never been a single piece of verifiable evidence that anyone was gassed in the camps such as proof of any functional gas chambers, autopsied bodies dead from cyanide poisoning, or corroborating German documents of gassings, and that the pictures of naked corpses being bulldozed into mass graves were the result of a massive typhus epidemic.

A few years later in 1977, British historian David Irving would pen Hitler’s War. Like pioneering revisionist Harry Elmer Barnes, Irving made his Holocaust revisionist argument only indirectly: by recasting Hitler as a victim. Irving asserted that Hitler was a rational, intelligent politician who merely wanted prosperity for his people and influence in Europe but was constantly undermined by incompetent and/or treasonous subordinates. It was, in fact, Churchill, not Hitler, who was primarily responsible for the war.

In these books, as well as others of their ilk, Bob found again something Bedelia had once given him and now denied him: a sense of companionship in an isolated existence.

A few months after the accident, Bedelia asked him to take her to the library. He did and once they arrived, she told him he could wait in the car. She had brought an empty tote bag with her and when she came back to the car it looked like it was stuffed with books. When he asked her what books she had gotten, she told him flatly that it was none of his “beeswax.”   He didn’t argue; he was just so glad she was actually taking an interest in something.

He would soon realize how dumb he was.

Bedelia had found a new obsession to replace her old one.

The Holocaust.

Specifically, the camps.

When she was with her German tutor one day, Bob went into her room and found tons of books on the subject with notebooks filled with details of the most hideous tortures. She even had a section devoted to Dr. Joseph Mengele.

He decided to confront her.

When he did, he was surprised she did not seem angry at him for going into her room. Instead, she almost seemed relieved he had found out about her secret obsession.

She explained to him how her history tutor, who it turned out was a Jew, had initially introduced her to the Holocaust a couple of years earlier in a watered-down way. A little after the accident, when they were covering World War II, he began teaching her about the camps in gory detail. It had fascinated her so much she asked him to teach her about it in even more depth and suggest books she might read on her own.

Bob asked her what she liked so much about exploring the Holocaust.

She didn’t, she explained. She hated it. Loathed it. It made her physically sick and it gave her nightmares. But she couldn’t stop herself. The uglier the details were that she would find about the subject, the more she felt compelled to acquire more of them.

Bob knew what he had to do.

He had always told her, as he had told her mother, that his parents had died in a car accident. Now he told her the truth. He also shared with her his newfound revisionist literature.

Though he was prepared for her to be resistant, very resistant, it turned out she found this literature as fascinating and credible as he did. She became interested in remembering all the fine points of every book’s argument, as if she would one day have to defend each and every one of them.

He made it clear to her, however, that this had to be their secret.

Though there were others like them, their numbers were small. Very small. Almost all others would never understand. They would look upon them badly. Very badly.

Bedelia began to improve.

Cathy Rosoff is the author of two novels, ‘Feral Little Gods’ and ‘Ravensbone’. This is the second time The Missing Slate has excerpted the latter novel, which was also partially published in Ginokso Literary Journal. The Blue Lake Review and Unlikely 2.0 published stories that eventually led to the writing of the novel. The Stone Hobo and The Write Room excerpted ‘Feral Little Gods’, the former nominating it for The Pushcart Prize. ‘Feral Little Gods’ also passed through the first round of the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award and is now available on Amazon, as well as the Barnes and Noble and Smashwords websites. ‘Ravensbone’ is still in its final polish stage. Her website is www.cathyrosoff.com.