20th Century Wars

I will relate this story the way I’d first old it to an audience of prison inmates in Lima, Ohio in 1985. Preparing for prison speech, I placed the bitten apple and photo of the woman on a table before them. A black inmate seated in front of me said with a laugh “You’ve come to talk to us with a piece of fake fruit?” “I have, and when you’ve heard this story you will never see an apple again the same in your life!”

I could tell by the way other prisoners related to outspoken black man, he was the alpha inmate in their eyes. I knew I had to get to him with the story. “Now we all know majority of world sees things, people in black and white, ‘good’ and ‘evil;’ like all citizens not in prison are ‘good,’ and all in prison are ‘evil!’ Now as an example of this viewpoint, I will recite a newspaper headline and all of you with gesture of thumbs-up or thumbs-down will judge headlined deed as ‘good’ or ‘evil.’ Headline “WOMAN TWENTY KILLS YOUNG LAD TO GET FROM HIM AN APPLE!” The black inmate quickly spoke up. “Before I judge this act, must know if this is normal twenty-year-old woman?” “Yes.” “And the kid’s just normal kid?” “Yes.” “And only reason she had offed kid was to get his apple?” “That’s it.” Without hesitation, black inmate pushed out hand thumbs-down, with all others following suit, declaring “That act is pure evil, could be nothing but evil!”

Holding up the apple and woman’s picture, I said. “Now I’ll tell you this woman’s story, I’d received from her along with the apple in June of 1984 in Florida. Here is what she told me: “I was a Polish Jew hiding from Nazis in Warsaw Ghetto in Poland in 1944 with my younger twin brothers. I’d gone into hiding after my parents had been captured and shipped to concentration camp. The Nazis had surrounded Ghetto in barbed wire and was starving remaining Jews into surrender. I’d been athlete and dancer before war, my health helping me to survive my state of starvation. My twin brothers in our hiding place were near death with starvation. They were mere skeletons, their body shook with each heart beat. I knew I must sneak out that night beyond the wire and find something to eat for myself, but especially my brothers close to death! I slipped out and searched in vain for any sustenance; but there was nothing! I returned resigned to the fact we were doomed. I went to slip back under the wire, when spotted someone to my left! I ducked back in shadows, took another look… THERE HE WAS! It was a mere boy in an oversized German uniform (all adult males having been sent to the front) his rifle leaned aginst wall. The boy was eating an APPLE! When I saw the apple, the saliva shot from my mouth! The next thing I knew I was franticly eating that apple! I became aware I was sitting on the chest of the young soldier! I realized I must have leapt on him, pushing his helmet up and snapping his neck. The boy was dead. I had killed him for that APPLE!”

I stopped talking. The prison audience just sat there in stunned silence. I said, pointing to the alpha inmate “Now, another vote. This woman, this act is it ‘good’ or ‘evil?’ After short silence, the inmate gazing at the apple, exclaimed “That’s deep stuff, man!” He stuck his thumb out flat, neither up or down.

When in 1984, I’d gone to interview the woman in photo (wishing to remain anonymous), we met in her kitchen. After she’d told me her story, she had taken the false fruit apple from a bowl and took a bite from it. She spit the piece in sink and handed me the apple. “Use this when you retell my story; they will never see an app;e again the same way!” At the door we hugged and I said emotionally, “So you were just an innocent Jewish girl who wanted to be an athlete or dancer, and instead the Nazis turned you into a young girl who killed a boy for an apple… nothing could be worse!”

Tears filled my eyes, as she touched my arm, and sighed “Oh Jim, there is worse…you see my twin brothers died that night without anything to eat; because I had thought to leave some for them, but in such a desperate state of self-survival…I HAD EATEN THE WHOLE APPLE! I had discovered in that moment, the worst thing such hearless fiends like the Nazis do to good people they persecute is to turn those good people into them just to survive!”

Years later I was speaking on the holocaust at a Jewish retirement center, looking down on the apple and woman’s photo on table, and asked “How many of you are holocaust survivors?” It was a sea of raised arms with blue tattooed numbers! After my speech, a young Christian worker (wearing cross) said to me “You have a home in Ohio full of all this stuff showing Man’s inhumanity to Man; I wouldn’t have any of this stuff in my home!” An elderly Jewish resident who stood nearby, turned and said to her, “Darling, none of the Jewish people who’d heard Jim’s speech would have any of these things in their home; but we will all sleep easier tonight knowing Jim’s collected the evidence of the crime, cause without them they’d deny it happened, and do it again. I knew in that moment there would have been no better way to spend my life than the exposure of Man’s inhumanity!