Comrade Anna

Will Sgt. Otto Langner of the Waffen SS-a Treblinka guard and professional hunter of Jewish and Communist reactionaries-win the heart of one of his victims, Anna? Can this mass murderer find redemption? Check out Comrade Anna, my new novel. 

Comrade Anna is now available for purchase on this site via PayPal and Amazon.com (all major credit cards accepted by both hosts). Please order at sidebar.

View several select chapters below. Instructors: for volume orders or to request a complimentary PDF copy, please email me at dorion8@gmail.com

ANNA AND LEBENSRAUM

     “I hate you, you Nazi bastard, you Nazi pig! You will pay for this!” Anna Leibowitz told herself containing her anger deep inside as her eyes flashed hatred. “Yes I would never even hurt a fly but one day I’ll kill this bastard!” she secretly vowed. 
     Minutes earlier, feeling trapped, she left her dead friend’s little girl, Mindy, with her landlady on the first floor of the tenement building and climbed the steep, winding stairway to her flat with Sergeant Otto Langner, of the Waffen SS, a Treblinka death camp guard. Langer had seen Anna and Mindy earlier that day merrily walking hand in hand along Muranowska Street, Warsaw, Poland. Langner, who was skilled in hunting and baiting Jews, saw an opportunity. 
      Now in Anna’s attic apartment on the top level, he was thrilled with himself and with at her anger, her humiliation, her discomfort. Anna remained silent for the child’s sake.
      “How can I get away from him?” she wondered, standing next to the large metal washtub in which he had just ordered her to bathe. She tightly wrapped a towel around her body. Seated at the table with two wooden chairs in the tiny kitchen, Langner, his muddy jackboots resting on one chair, motioned for her to go to the bed in the far corner of the two-room flat. 

The Issue of Revenge

     When it came right down to it, the practical thing to do was not so much about taking revenge upon Germans responsible for murdering and torturing Jews but caring for and organizing the survivors for resettlement to what was then Palestine. This was the primary task of what was left of the Jewish Fighting Organization in Warsaw at the end of the German occupation of Poland in 1945. Revenge was on the agenda but was not the main issue. For others, it was the most important thing.

Yitzhak Zuckerman

     "As for "Revenge", that subject kept me awake nights," stated Yitzhak Zuckerman in his memoir, A Surplus of Memory, "especially since, later, they came and asked me to lead "Revenge". But my notion of revenge wasn't theirs (some of the former Jewish partisans). I was "dying for revenge," but I was remote from their idea, which bordered on madness. Could you annihilate a German nation of sixty million? And if you did kill a thousand Germans, would that make you sleep better?

Resistance and Assassination

     One of the major forms of resistance in the Warsaw  ghetto was assassination. In late 1942 after the "Great Aktion" when most of the ghetto population was "resettled" to the Treblinka death camp and other  camps established by the German Nazis in German-occupied Poland, Jewish underground fighters began targeting Jewish collaborators. They began carrying out death sentences for those Jews who assisted the Nazis in the deception that resulted in fellow Jews going to their deaths. Those Jews went to the Umshlagplatz to board transport trains on the ruse that they were merely being resettled to work camps where life would be better for them.

     No longer could the Jewish Police or Judenrat members act with impunity after the first assassinations in late August, 1942, which sent a shock wave through ghetto and drilled home the message that collaboration that harmed Jews or undermined the Jewish underground would be severely dealt with.

Review of "The Lucky Lobsters"

Review By JESSICA ALMY, http://vegbooks.org/

Life isn’t so lucky for most lobsters. Snatched from their habitats, they are kept in crowded tanks until they’re bought and boiled alive. Given new evidence that despite their simple nervous systems, lobsters may feel pain and I think you’d be hard pressed to find any human who’d be willing to trade their lot for the life of a lobster.

Into this sad state of affairs, enter Gary Dorion’s children’s book, The Lucky Lobsters. Written after he liberated some crustaceans from traps in the Atlantic Ocean, this book looks at life from the lobster’s point of view. The characters in Dorion’s story face the same unenviable fate as so many of their kin, but instead of being boiled alive, they find themselves returned home. Talk about lucky.