Lebensborn by ALbert Russo (best summer books txt) 📕

She began by inquiring about my life in America and asked me if I was happily married. No questions were posed concerning my earlier years spent in Germany. As I was trying to search her eyes through her dark spectacles, she remarked:
“My vision has lately deteriorated and any sort of light, artificial or not, makes me blink, that is why I have to wear them. But I can see you quite well notwithstanding and let me tell you how grateful I am that you have accepted to make this long trip to come here. Our meeting today is short of miraculous”, she said and held her breath, then, in a hoarse and quivering voice, she went on, scanning the garden through the baywindow, “I only pray you will not hate me for what I am about to reveal to you, but, after a long, very long and excruciating hesitation, I believe I owe it to both of us.”
What I heard next seemed to have originated from an X rated tale that I can not even recount in the classical manner:

This person claims to be my mother,
my own flesh and blood
but I don’t want to have a mother,
still so handsome, still so lucid,
the source of my life, LEBENSBORN
she says she was brought by force
to that place where she was paired off with a man
tall and blond and athletic and blue eyed
paired off like thousands of other couples
to create a pure Germanic race that
would reign over the world
during the socalled thousand-year Reich
and I was supposed to be a product
of that magnificent new breed
I, who married a Jew, I, for whom
his beloved cousin could never find space in her heart
you will never know how right you are, dear Judith
LEBENSBORN, a quarter million children of my generation
setting a standard for the superhuman
I bid farewell to this woman,
this mother of a still-born nightmare
though I wish her no harm
no, Mrs Gruber, I am sorry Mrs Gruber
I have to catch the next train back to Zürich
don’t cry Mrs Gruber, too many tears
have already been waisted
why do you think the oceans taste the way they do Imprint

Publication Date: 11-18-2009

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