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In September of 1965, having lived in Canada for one year, Gudrun Moore read in Time magazine that her father was accused of killing 33,771 Jews in the Babi Yar Gorge outside Kiev. She had known for years that her father had long been expecting some sort of arrest, but she had no idea why. Her mother confirmed the arrest with a letter. "I knew about Babi Yar because I had read Jevgeny Jevtushenkov's poem. [The charismatic Russia poet, Yevgeny Yevtushenko, gave a packed reading at the Vancouver Art Gallery in 1974 and died in Tulsa, Oklahoma, age 83]. I did not understand how my father, who I knew to be intelligent, honest and kind, could be involved in this... When I learned about the Third Reich and its part in German history my soul became mired in outrage and confusion, then pain and shame. I could not understand."
The trial process against August Haefner lasted more than one year. He was sentenced to nine years imprisonment. Thirty years later, in 1996, Gudrun Moore asked him to tell her the story of his life. It was the beginning of a long process to get members of her family to record their lives and experiences. She dug up diaries, journals, letters and nagged them endlessly for more stories. "I wanted to find out why they all had so enthusiastically joined the Nazi Party and been part of everything that happened thereafter. I learned that men and women who became Nazis were ordinary people who wanted a future for themselves and their fatherland out of the miseries of the Depression. I also learned that men who joined the SS were often idealistic young men or just regular men who needed a job. Today I thank my family for their honesty."
Gudrun Moore's subsequent book about two German families and personal responsibility recounts "how three generations were sucked up in the maelstrom of history: first they lived through WWI, the war to end all wars with sixteen million lives lost, then they slid into a terrible world wide depression for which in Germany Hitler promised a way out with hope and honour which sadly resulted in WWII, a scourge that cost another sixty million lives." After WW I, the intellectual Ernst family and the 'burger' Haefner family both struggled through extreme poverty and desolation before falling prey to the rhetoric of Adolf Hitler promising work for all, social justice, equality for women, safety and order, pensions and universal health care. All members of these two families became involved in the dream of National Socialism and the reality of 1939-1945.
Moore called her book A Duty of Remembrance because she believed and saw liberal democratic societies, such as Canada today, are not dissimilar to societies of the 1920s and 1930s, because "the liberal democratic parties, the press, the universities, the unions, the arts and churches are reluctant to come together to assert their moderating positions in a corporate state." This reluctance, she believes, enables the disenfranchised, educated or not, and the poor and the unemployed, to turn towards charismatic demagogues or authoritarian fascist like movements. Trumpism and Nazism, one can suggest, are seeded by liberal complacency.
"I wanted to show that war brings nothing but destruction, suffering and death. There is no glory. War is a waste of material and human resources and it marks everything that is touched by it forever. We still have wars. We still have the disenfranchised, the unemployed and the poor, the very groups a Hitler roped in so easily. Have we not learned the lessons of history? Could it not all happen again?"
Born at the outset of World War, Gudrun Moore was evacuated from Berlin during the Allied bombing. As a child, she was later forced to flee from a house at Lac Constance by French troops in 1945. Her mother, pushing a pram with her sister in it, with Gudrun at her side, spent months as a refugee on the road. They eventually gained sanctuary at Gudrun's grandparents in southern Germany. An education in the Helene Lange Boarding School in Markgroeningen opened her mind to music and literature, as well as "the power of feminism and the possibility of civil disobedience, a new concept after the mental stultification of the Third Reich."
Gudrun Moore studied literature and then medicine in Heidelberg and Munich. Halfway through her medical training program, she met and married Englishman Jim Moore. She immigrated to Canada in 1964; their son Jamie was born in 1965; then both husband and wife taught school at a small Metis colony and later on for twenty years in the village of Hines Creek in northern Alberta. This led them to a live of farming in the Peace River country on their 4,000-acre property, mainly raising Maine Anjou cattle. She very happily became a Canadian citizen in 1970. After selling their farm in 1990, they moved to Hines Creek and adopted two children. Following a year of backpacking through Asia and Europe with their pair of pre-teens, and two dogs, resulting in her first memoir, Borobudar by Chance, they retired from teaching jobs in 1996 to live in Malta, then France.
The Moore family eventually came to the south Okanagan Valley where they built a house on five acres, at Oliver, and started a Bed & Breakfast. "Some of my favourite books are Middlemarch, The Stone Angel, A Fine Balance, The Adventures of Augie March... I enjoy the powers of observation of Georg Lichtenberg and Heinrich Heine, I treasure the poems of Eduard Moerike and Rilke and would make Marcus Aurelius and Thomas Paine mandatory reading for all elected and appointed public servants... I admire people of peace such as Scott Nearing, Tommy Douglas, Nelson Mandela and Grandin Temple."
Gudrun Moore, RR1, S22 C16, Oliver, BC, Canada ph/fax: 250 498 4603
BOOKS:
Borobudar by Chance (Kindle Direct)
A Duty of Remembrance (Trafford, 2010; later Kindle Direct)
568 pages
ISBN-10:142692061X
ISBN-13:978-1426920615
[BCBW 2011] Alan Twigg / HolocaustLit
The trial process against August Haefner lasted more than one year. He was sentenced to nine years imprisonment. Thirty years later, in 1996, Gudrun Moore asked him to tell her the story of his life. It was the beginning of a long process to get members of her family to record their lives and experiences. She dug up diaries, journals, letters and nagged them endlessly for more stories. "I wanted to find out why they all had so enthusiastically joined the Nazi Party and been part of everything that happened thereafter. I learned that men and women who became Nazis were ordinary people who wanted a future for themselves and their fatherland out of the miseries of the Depression. I also learned that men who joined the SS were often idealistic young men or just regular men who needed a job. Today I thank my family for their honesty."
Gudrun Moore's subsequent book about two German families and personal responsibility recounts "how three generations were sucked up in the maelstrom of history: first they lived through WWI, the war to end all wars with sixteen million lives lost, then they slid into a terrible world wide depression for which in Germany Hitler promised a way out with hope and honour which sadly resulted in WWII, a scourge that cost another sixty million lives." After WW I, the intellectual Ernst family and the 'burger' Haefner family both struggled through extreme poverty and desolation before falling prey to the rhetoric of Adolf Hitler promising work for all, social justice, equality for women, safety and order, pensions and universal health care. All members of these two families became involved in the dream of National Socialism and the reality of 1939-1945.
Moore called her book A Duty of Remembrance because she believed and saw liberal democratic societies, such as Canada today, are not dissimilar to societies of the 1920s and 1930s, because "the liberal democratic parties, the press, the universities, the unions, the arts and churches are reluctant to come together to assert their moderating positions in a corporate state." This reluctance, she believes, enables the disenfranchised, educated or not, and the poor and the unemployed, to turn towards charismatic demagogues or authoritarian fascist like movements. Trumpism and Nazism, one can suggest, are seeded by liberal complacency.
"I wanted to show that war brings nothing but destruction, suffering and death. There is no glory. War is a waste of material and human resources and it marks everything that is touched by it forever. We still have wars. We still have the disenfranchised, the unemployed and the poor, the very groups a Hitler roped in so easily. Have we not learned the lessons of history? Could it not all happen again?"
Born at the outset of World War, Gudrun Moore was evacuated from Berlin during the Allied bombing. As a child, she was later forced to flee from a house at Lac Constance by French troops in 1945. Her mother, pushing a pram with her sister in it, with Gudrun at her side, spent months as a refugee on the road. They eventually gained sanctuary at Gudrun's grandparents in southern Germany. An education in the Helene Lange Boarding School in Markgroeningen opened her mind to music and literature, as well as "the power of feminism and the possibility of civil disobedience, a new concept after the mental stultification of the Third Reich."
Gudrun Moore studied literature and then medicine in Heidelberg and Munich. Halfway through her medical training program, she met and married Englishman Jim Moore. She immigrated to Canada in 1964; their son Jamie was born in 1965; then both husband and wife taught school at a small Metis colony and later on for twenty years in the village of Hines Creek in northern Alberta. This led them to a live of farming in the Peace River country on their 4,000-acre property, mainly raising Maine Anjou cattle. She very happily became a Canadian citizen in 1970. After selling their farm in 1990, they moved to Hines Creek and adopted two children. Following a year of backpacking through Asia and Europe with their pair of pre-teens, and two dogs, resulting in her first memoir, Borobudar by Chance, they retired from teaching jobs in 1996 to live in Malta, then France.
The Moore family eventually came to the south Okanagan Valley where they built a house on five acres, at Oliver, and started a Bed & Breakfast. "Some of my favourite books are Middlemarch, The Stone Angel, A Fine Balance, The Adventures of Augie March... I enjoy the powers of observation of Georg Lichtenberg and Heinrich Heine, I treasure the poems of Eduard Moerike and Rilke and would make Marcus Aurelius and Thomas Paine mandatory reading for all elected and appointed public servants... I admire people of peace such as Scott Nearing, Tommy Douglas, Nelson Mandela and Grandin Temple."
Gudrun Moore, RR1, S22 C16, Oliver, BC, Canada ph/fax: 250 498 4603
BOOKS:
Borobudar by Chance (Kindle Direct)
A Duty of Remembrance (Trafford, 2010; later Kindle Direct)
568 pages
ISBN-10:142692061X
ISBN-13:978-1426920615
[BCBW 2011] Alan Twigg / HolocaustLit
