Hans Waldemar Remembers Normandy by Aubrey Taylor

This is a short novelette about a former Nazi soldier now living in the US with his family. It ends leaving the hope of redemption not yet fulfilled. It’s modern times, so he’s in his nineties. His great granddaughter asks him to come to her school and share his experiences in the war. The story starts with Waldi, as he’s known, dreaming of his time in Germany, but most of the story is the interaction between Waldi and his family and the classroom presentation.

This novelette tells a short tale of World War II from a different perspective. As Waldi says, we in the United States are used to hearing about WWII from a certain perspective. We assume all Nazi’s were evil and willingly doing what Hitler wanted. We assume they all had something to do with the Holocaust. This story breaks that glass house and shows us a soldier who was conscripted into the army at age sixteen. He was raised to completely and unquestioningly respect authority. While he doesn’t excuse what he did, he does explain why.

The presentation of the story is interesting. Instead of war scenes, we see two other battles. The internal battle of Waldi trying to determine what to tell a classroom of students about his experiences. And the battle of a family trying to come to grips with Waldi’s former profession.

The story is clean. Much of Waldi’s family is Christian, but Waldi is not yet a believer. The eBook version of this is free on Book Funnel at this link. The paperback version is available on Amazon. For the same reasons, genre and length, this story will not be ranked with the other books I’ve reviewed this year. I recommend you pick it up. It’s only 37 pages long, a short, illuminating read.

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