Chapter 24 Strength Through Joy
STRENGTH THROUGH JOY
Ashleigh joined us the next morning for breakfast. Ben was developing quite the gourmet appreciation for cheese, although he still drew the line at Milbenk?se and its mites, and also enjoyed taking the top off his boiled egg with one deft blow of his knife.
We all find pleasure where we can. At the moment, he was saying, “Ashleigh and I produced four more bites last night. We didn’t finish until almost two in the morning, but the stuff is fire. ”
“Pardon?” I asked.
“You know,” he said. “Good. It’s really good. And you know what the view count is now on the first bite?”
Ashleigh said, “Hey! It’s my channel. Let me tell.
Over three hundred forty thousand, that’s how many, across all platforms. I just want to sit there and refresh over and over to watch it go up, but I can’t, because I have to keep getting the bites up there while we’re hot.
You should see the comments, though,” she told me, “on the finding-everybody-dead part. You made so many people cry.“ She sighed happily. “And I didn’t even do the part with the organ yet! Also—” She drummed on the tabletop with her palms for emphasis, an action that made a waiter or two look our way—“I passed the threshold for monetization on YouTube last night! I have over a thousand subscribers—I have over ten thousand subscribers, in fact—and because I had to make the bites longer to get all the juicy stuff in—around ten minutes is the sweet spot, I think—I have enough watch hours, too, and we’ve barely even started!”
“Impressive,” Sebastian said.
“Are you OK with this, Oma?” Alix asked.
“Please say yes,” Ashleigh implored. “Please please please say yes. Because this is so awesome.”
“I don’t quite understand the references,” I said, “but I don’t see what harm it can do. As long as I don’t have paparazzi following me on their motor scooters.”
“Ha,” Ashleigh said. “It means people start advertising on my channel and I get paid actual money, that’s what.
Once it happens,” she told Ben, “I can start paying you, too. I’ll have an employee.
How cool is that? Of course, it’ll probably just be for a week or two.
But hey—we can do a bite on that Augustus the Strong guy, too, don’t you think? With all his palaces and kids?”
“Yeah,” Ben said eagerly. “I could do an equation, in a spreadsheet, like—how many kids the guy had to have each year, and how many, you know—”
“How many woman he’d have had to sleep with!
” Ashleigh said. “Oh, that’s good. Considering fertility rates and everything—how many months it takes a woman on average to get pregnant—because it wasn’t like they were going to a sperm bank or having sex with him every night.
The guy got around. That’s a great idea. ”
I wasn’t so sure about that. It seemed fairly crude to me, but then, I’m a dinosaur.
“We’ll put that in between the tiara-search parts,” Ashleigh went on, “since we have to wait. Kind of a whole—” She waved a slice of toast spread with Boursin cheese, the garlicky wonders of which she and Ben had bonded over.
“A whole saga. We should do Mrs. Stark’s parents, too, the King and Queen, because he was a war hero and in the Resistance or whatever, and she was really beautiful.
I found some old pictures online of her in gowns and the tiara and everything—royal tiaras are mostly on really old, wrinkly ladies, have you noticed?
I mean, I’m sure Queen Elizabeth was great, but she didn’t exactly rock that tiara.
She had the exact same hairdo for about seventy years, and so does the new queen.
Camilla, right? Exact same hairdo she had in, like, 1970.
Must be a queen thing. People love to watch stuff about glamorous, beautiful royals, though, and the Beauty and the Beast part makes it even better. ”
“My father,” I said, aware that my tone was cold, “was no beast.” I didn’t dispute the “old, wrinkly ladies” bit.
Ashleigh was right about that. True European royalty scorns cosmetic surgery, tooth bleaching, those enormous eyelashes women favor nowadays that look as if they’re wearing spiders on their faces, and the rest of the beauty culture so important to those who live by their looks.
Working royals probably still cleanse their faces with Pond’s cold cream, as my mother had done and as I still do, though it makes my daughter sigh in despair.
Alix has developed more along my lines, if not worse.
Self-confidence is the best makeup, though, and she has enough of that.
“No, see, I get that,” Ashleigh said eagerly.
“Your dad was great, obviously. He just looked like a beast. The Beast in the movie is a good guy, too. That’s the point.
And viewers really, really want to know about the tiara, so we have to keep giving them something to watch when they come to check where we are in the search, you see?
We have to make them care about you and hope everybody got away safely and everything.
Tension is really important. I do an update at the beginning of each bite, and a teaser at the end.
It’s so good.” She sighed happily. “I’ve decided I want to be a documentary filmmaker. Seriously. Why not?”
“Why not indeed,” I said. “You certainly have a passion for storytelling.” She looked pleased, but it was no more than the truth. Anybody that excited about her work had surely found her vocation.
“That’ll be cool, to get paid.” Ben looked excited himself, though he was, as usual, eating, so it was hard to tell. “Thanks.”
“Each for each is what we teach,” Ashleigh said.
“Usually I just say that when I want something, but now I kinda mean it, because this is all seriously awesome.” She had her bouncing-squirrel face again.
I do seem to be surrounded by young people with boundless energy.
It’s rather infectious. Now, she asked me, “What was the German Resistance called?”
“I don’t know,” I said, taken aback. “I’m not sure there was anything organized enough to be called that.”
“There weren’t any guerrillas?” Alix asked.
“Yes,” I said, “but they were all on the Nazi side, as far as I know, fighting behind the lines as the Allies advanced at the end of the war. The Werwolves, they were called. Very fanatical.”
“Ooh,” Ashleigh said. “OK, I’m filming now. Say that part again, Mrs. Stark, about the werewolves. Oh, and ask the question again, too, Alix. Please.”
We did, feeling a little foolish, and Ashleigh dutifully recorded it. Ben asked, “People didn’t even try to fight back? Really? They didn’t, like, blow up trains or anything?”
“Not in Germany,” I said. “You must understand how deeply into society the Nazi party had burrowed, and how thoroughly and methodically the state crushed any resistance. How many men will resist if it means the death of their wives, their children, their parents?”
“Not many,” Sebastian said.
“So it has always been with tyrants,” I said.
“There were a few braver souls, though. There are always a few. In the Warsaw Ghetto, the last remaining Jews fought back for nearly a month. From bunkers they built with their bare hands, from the sewers, from wherever they could hide and with whatever weapons they could find. They were defeated, they were killed, but they were going to be killed anyway and they knew it. You can see why one wouldn’t want to go meekly to one’s death. ”
“Yes,” Sebastian said. “You can definitely see that. I’d sure want to take some of them with me.”
“The propaganda on the radio was quite amusing, actually,” I said.
“Goebbels seemed personally affronted that they were so rude and disobedient as not to line up for slaughter. My father couldn’t quite keep his thoughts to himself on that one, although of course he only shared them in private, with my mother and me.
There was the White Rose group, too, who were Aryan and could have kept their heads down and their eyes closed to the worst as everybody else did.
They were distributing anti-Nazi leaflets at Munich University around the same time as the Warsaw uprising, in February 1943.
That was just after the German army was defeated by the Red Army at Stalingrad and lost over a hundred thousand men in the process.
Stalin was profligate with his troops, but Hitler, who didn’t have nearly as many to waste, was more so, and I suspect that had become evident to more than just my parents, though who can say?
Certainly nobody said so. The British and Americans had begun to bomb the cities by then, though, and the German population was finding that war isn’t nearly as much fun as it had seemed at first, when it was all parades and flowers and the bad things were happening only to others.
More fertile ground for opposition, perhaps, though it was little enough. ”
“That’s it?” Ben asked. “One group distributing leaflets? That’s pretty lame.”
“That’s the only one I know of,” I said.
“And it was a very small group, a few students only. They did their work secretly, of course, merely leaving the leaflets out for their fellow students to find. Their activities lasted—oh, weeks, probably, before they were informed upon by a university custodian. As I’ve told you, anyone could be an informant or a plant.
Anyone. From ambition or out of genuine belief, whatever the reason.
Four days after the custodian gave them up to the Gestapo, they faced their trial, which was of course a foregone conclusion, and that same day, the three leaders—a young brother and sister and their friend—were executed by guillotine, having refused to give up the names of any of their compatriots.
And so ended the White Rose. They were very brave, very strong.
Even the prison guards admired them, or so the story goes, but that probably doesn’t mean much when one is about to lose one’s head. ”