The End

My name is Bruno Prantner, I am 17 years old and until recently I was apprenticed to the notary Mayerhofer. I have started to write down my life story and hope someone finds this and gives it to my mother or Uncle Frieder, who is a lawyer in the Maximilianstraße No. 47. I am tired and have nothing to eat or drink. It is pitch dark and I am cold. And if no one hears my cries for help and I can't somehow get over the bars, I will die here miserably.

I miss my mother very much.

My cries for help went unheard. I don't know if I will ever see my mother, Anni and little Bruno Wilhelm again. I doubt it, because I have been in hiding for over a week in my hiding place, which has become my prison. A prison into which fate and the gods had brought me — I am not angry with Hermes for that.

I screamed until my voice failed me. In desperation, I even agreed to sign up for the resettlement program to the East — they said that one day all Jews will resettle to the East and be able to build a new life there. I thought that was a pipe dream at first, but now all is lost and I am locked up here. Now I would gladly go to the East and settle there as a settler. It would be better than perishing miserably here, anyway.

The last two chapters I have scribbled with a pencil, which I had to sharpen with the teeth, in the hazy twilight. Sorry if you can't read it well, but you can hardly see a hand in front of your eyes here. There was a lot I couldn't tell you about. What it was like when my mother was sick and I took care of her, how I heated up soup for her and went shopping and made her tea. How much she loved me and cared for me when I was sick. How attentively she listened when I learned to read and read to her about the Greek gods and Odysseus and the whole Trojan mess. I would have to tell a lot about Anni, too. I'd like to ask Anni if I was the father Little Bruno, a question I never dared to ask. I'm sorry that it's all over now. I no longer see any chance of getting out of here in one piece.

I'm really sorry for Anni and little Bruno. We have grown together almost like a little family, and Anni really likes me, although she never wanted to tell me who little Bruno's father really is. "Silly, big silly boy!" she only used to reply, fondly tussling my hair. I liked that and kept asking her, even though I knew she wouldn't tell. But she did tickle my hair, at least.

And Willi, the big Lad, I would also have liked to see him again sometime after the war. Maybe I could console him about the fact that he was not Bruno's father, but my dearest friend and a great buddy.

There was one thing that surprised me a lot. Some of the things we learned in the Hitler Youth must have been wrong, fundamentally wrong. Volker, that rotten pig, was Aryan and had black hair and piercing black eyes. Anni, little Bruno and I had straw–blond hair and light blue eyes, mine were more precisely light gray like those of my mother, who is actually my grandmother. She too had once blond hair, which is now ash blond and a bit gray. All the nonsense they told us about racial characteristics and racial affiliation must be complete bullshit. Otherwise, all that would remain would be that the authorities had been mistaken, thoroughly and cruelly mistaken, in not issuing my grandmother and me an ancestral passport, and that we had been turned into Jews.

I miss my mother very much. I can still see her in front of me the last time I saw her. She stood next to Uncle Frieder and leaned her head against his chest. She liked him and felt safe and secure with him, although that may be different now. Nevertheless, she always stood by me and did not betray anything to him either. Again and again she had impressed upon me that people considered it a mortal sin if we fucked each other and that we had to keep it a secret from everyone. She to Uncle Frieder, I to Anni, and we both kept that secret. The uniqueness of our love remained our secret.

I really miss her a lot.

I know that the Gods have guided me here. It always amazed me with what ease and arrogance the gods arrogance the gods interfered in human destinies, they manipulated and cheated for all they were worth. They could sometimes be quite nasty and destroy an earthling, so incidentally and without much fuss. If a God or a Goddess was so really rutting, then the earth man or the earth girl had to serve, all the same whether he or she died thereby. Some days ago in this darkness I imagined quite firmly that I can talk with Hermes. It was because of Leda and there he says nevertheless actually that the girl can count herself lucky and fortunate to have done it with Godfather Zeus himself. That Leda got into quite some trouble because the other people didn't recognize Zeus and only saw that she was fucking with a swan, Hermes didn't care. We then did not speak to each other for a few days. The intrigues and deceptions that the Gods made because of a little sex were often pathetic.

I know that the Gods guided me here, that they directed my destiny and my steps to this dungeon — in the pitch dark dungeon, blinded by the gods, who were jealous and envious of my beautiful love and because of it they have let me become what I have become.

I know that I am the blind Oedipus.