Word: pisar
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...Spring of 1945, as the Allies closed in around Germany, Pisar and his two close friends--Ben and Niko, "the wild Dutchman"--had been sent to the West to dig up body pits to hide evidence. As they were being marched back to Dachau with a column of prisoners they decided to make a run for it and dashed for the woods. Of the 14 who broke from the column, nine were shot. Ben. Niko and Pisar escaped...
...sunny, spring afternoon a few weeks later, holed up in a barn near Munich. Pisar peered through it crack and saw an enormous tank lumbering towards him. Instead of the hateful swastika, he saw an unfamiliar emblem: a small five-pointed white star. "Suddenly the realization flooded my mind that I was looking at freedom, the insignia of the American army. "Pisar recalls I ran towards it through the German machine-gun fire, and as a big Black G. I climbed out, swearing at me. I yelled Heil Roosevelt." He understood. He motioned me to move through the roof...
...really live in a new incarnation," Pisar observes softly. "The new human being who is before you now and leads a life in the glittering capitals is totally and completely different from the one who was given life in Eastern Poland and was meant to give it up at Auschwitz...
...English, finished high school in a year and a half, and relearned the ways of civilization. Ruefully, he recalls his reaction when a boy teasingly slipped a banana peel in his pocket: "I swung a Landsberg jailhouse punch at him," acting "as if he wanted to kill [me]." But Pisar had for gotten how to apologize. "I had been in hell too deeply and too long. The next day presented him with two pounds of bananas...
...shortly after he had entered the University of Melbourne. Pisar discovered that he had tuberculosis. Ironically, this and another remnant of his war years catalyzed his metamorphosis and shifted the direction of his future life: "During the war and after I had acquired my languages trying to survive--English. German, Russian, French, Yiddish and a few other languages Immobilized and put on my back. I began to read and systematically swallowed literature after literature. "Then I recovered, and by then of course. I had become a very thoughtful...