I have long suspected Melba Charlotte told her only child her grandfather was a Prussian Colony Maker. This is why Victor raised us in his personal colony in the Oakland Hills, and why he told me he considered joining the German Army.
“I joined the Merchant Marines, instead, so I wouldn’t have to shoot my own people!”
Camp Von Victorville was an internment camp. To hear your father quote the motto of Auschwitz, while you loaded his Ford flatbed truck with hundred pound sacks of potatoes, told me my brother and I were destined to right the wrongs of Bismark and Adolph Hitler, who should not have lost any battle against all our enemies – found all over the world! Oakland was crawling with them.
“Arbreit Macht Frei! One must work for your freedom. One must make enemies!”
One of King Victor’s secretaries in his Loan Shark business he ran out of his Lafayette home, titled my father ‘Vic the Nazi’. They were on the Prussian Perk system, and got a Free Lunch that was served out of a big communal pot.
“Who likes squid soup! And, who wants to watch a documentary on the Battle of the Bulge?”
His three college girls would get cumfy on the giant leather sofa, that almost swallowed them, and watched their boss reach for his Solid Gold Nazi video collection. He would put on an Oldie But Goody while his Frauleins poked at their bowl of tentacles – to make sure they were dead!
As the screen filled with the aquiline profiles of young Nazi warriors, Captain Victim lectured his captive audience on how the Third Reich should have won that battle. They were working for ‘The German Forest Master’ to pay their college tuition. His two sons were not raised to go to college. We were sent to work at Acme Produce when we were eight and nine. We were paid a dollar a day, because this company was going to be our legacy. We worked fourteen hours, and were granted a month of summer vacation. We let our peers feel our powerful muscles. At ten and eleven, Mark and I could press a sack of potatoes over our head. We dominated our playmates whose fathers fought the Nazis. My best friend’s father drove a Sherman tank across Germany. Big deal!
No one who worked for the commandant ever thought of making a break for the wire, and go tell someone, some Official, or Man of Law, what was going on in Victorville. Who would believe us, even while under oath.
“He forced me to eat squid soup while he examined me. He gave me a perk after surmising I was good German Breeding Stock!”
“And, what was the nature of this perk?”
“Do I have to answer!”
“Yes!”
“He would give us a new communal credit card he just received in the mail. We squealed with delight as we got in the People’s Car, left the compound, and headed to Nordstroms. We maxed it out knowing Vic would never pay the bill. He had aliases. He told us to throw the bills in the trash.”
“Are you saying you are guilty of credit card fraud?”
“No! I mean – he made us do it. If you didn’t follow orders, things went badly for you! I sassed him once, and he sent me outside to plant Petunias. He shamed me. He shamed – us! There I was, down in the dirt, on my hands and knees, crying my eyes out as my work-sisters watched. They didn’t do anything to help me. They just watched me suffer!”
We held ranks. I did not have a brother. I had a foreman. Von Victor would study his eldest son, how he handled being my superior. With the Creative Bohos out of the way, Mark spent hours on the phone lecturing our surviving sister on right-wing ideology. He would administer a quiz after every long conversation. Victoria was his captive audience. She needed Mark to help wrest away my daughter, get her in their camp, and make me feel suicidal. I had found true freedom, and was talking away, posting forboden family secrets on my blog ‘Royal Rosamond Press’ the rival propaganda machine that sided with the dreaded Rosemary, who sabotaged Victorville around the clock.
After Rosemary drove out our commandant with a little paring knife, the next day she went and bought a set of T.V. trays.
“From now on, you are all individuals, who get to dine at your own table!”
When I would share at my meetings, I would talk about the ‘Food Abuse’ we suffered.
“Food abuse! What is that?”
In Christine Rosamond’s disappeared autobiography, she tells the art world how different I was then my three siblings. I was skinny, and they were chubby. My fingers were long while their’s were short. They fought to keep the pounds off, while I was wasting away. You see, my father saw a Jew lurking in me. He would tell my aunt Lillian I was not his son, but the product of her sister’s betrayal, her infidelity. Victor worked hard to turn Royal Rosamond’s daughters against one another. I never met Royal. I make a picture of him coming home for a visit, and kicking Mr. Presco’s ass. He was, and is, my invisible ally.
Jon Presco
Copyright 2016
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arbeit_macht_frei
After the start of the World War, all Germans in Palestine became enemy aliens. The British authorities decided to intern most of the enemy aliens. Sarona, Bethlehem of Galilee, Waldheim, and Wilhelma were converted into internment camps. Most enemy aliens living elsewhere in Palestine—comprising Gentile Germans,[17]Hungarians and Italians—were interned in one of the settlements, while the inhabitants of the settlements simply stayed where they were. In summer 1941, 665 interned Templers, almost all young families with children, were released to Australia, where they could settle again. Many of the remaining Germans were either too old or too sick to leave for Australia, while a second group, mostly Evangelical Germans, did not want to go there. With the help of the interned Italians and Hungarians, the internees could maintain the agricultural production to feed themselves and supply surplus to market in return for supplies not available within the camps. In December 1941 and in the course of 1942, another 400 Evangelical and Templer internees, mostly wives and children of men, who had followed the calls for recruitment, were released, via Turkey, to Germany for family reunification.[18]
In 1945 the population of Waldheim/Um el Amad consisted of 260 people, and the total land area was 9,227 dunams, according to an official land and population survey.[19] There were 150 Muslims and 110 Christians.[20][21] 170 dunams of land were designated for plantations and irrigable land, 4,776 for cereals,[22] while 102 dunams were built-up areas.[23]
After the Peace of Paris the Italian and Hungarian internees were released from Waldheim and the other camps. But the Britons refused to repatriate the remaining German internees to the British zone in Germany because the British zone was flooded with millions of war refugees and millions more expelled after the war from Poland, Czechoslovakia, and other countries previously conquered by Germany. Also, most of the internees did not want to go to Germany because there was no opportunity to gain untilled land in Germany to settle again as farmers. In 1947 the British authorities and Australia agreed to allow the remaining interned Templers to emigrate to Australia.
On 17 April 1948, armed entities of the Haganah entered Waldheim, with the few British soldiers under camp commander Alan Tilbury unable to impede them, killing two colonists and severely wounding a woman.[24][25] This incident and the end of the mandate forced the Britons to hurry the resettlement, thus all the internees, 51 Germans and 4 Swiss, were transferred to Cyprus, first into a camp of simple tents near Famagusta. By 14 May 1948, when Israel became independent, only about 50 Gentile Germans, mostly elderly and sick persons, were living in the new state. They voluntarily left the country or were successively expelled by the government.[26
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