All Comments on 'Acceptance of Denial'

i love it!

More please!!!

L

I think there is more that could be here .... As in a second part?! Hoping!!!

really hate nazis related stories... but would like to find out what happen to Kristen. Thank you for sharing.

I love historical fiction, and the lesbian content here was a complete add. Gritty, realistic and very hot.

I would love to see another chapter as well! Thank you :)

I'm a woman, queer and Jewish. My Parents are holocaust survivors. My grandparent were gassed and murdered in concentration camps. This story made my skin crawl.

The NAZI movement is racist, misogynistic, and violently hates gays. They murdered millions of Jews, Christians, homosexuals... There just isn't anything redeeming or valuable about Nazis, but I tried to get into this story.

You write well, but the gratuitous portrayal of a SS officer in a lesbian encounter just didn't work for me. There's too much hatred and brutality about Nazism, it's disgusting and nauseating and makes me bristle. Sorry, but I couldn't get into it enough to enjoy it.

Even with the repression and seclusion inherent to homosexuals in that time and place, it's hard to imagine the Kirsten character being so willing a participant. Btw, the NATIONAL SOCIALIST party was highly misogynistic. It would be nearly impossible for a woman to be the equivalent of a lieutenant colonel. I know this is fiction, but it feels like this has no plausibility, whatsoever.

even tho we all hate the nazis we can still like the storyline and want to see them make it to the end.

I think you should make a part 2 to it so that we can continue to read this great story.

not usually liking "historic stories" , "dominance stories" , or "tragic stories" , against my "gut feeling not to read it" I did... And you drew me in with it... Whether it's accurate or not doesn't really matter.... The characters are strong and identifiable , again whether you like em or not isn't important as this story feels like it needs to be told and read..You take us to dark times : wherever you would have been than and on what ever side you would have been it would have been "fucking" scary....

If you offend a certain amount of per-opinionated people , don't worry that proves that the story needed to be told... Holocaust survivors forgiving their tormentors 40-50-60 years after and by being the stronger person , should teach us all... Nightporter with Charlotte Rampling comes to mind...was that an influence???

Hello Everyone,

Just thought I'd mention a couple of things since I've had quite a few responses to this piece so far which is excellent (keep up your constructive feedback!).

I am impressed by the willingness of all of you who have read (and will read) this narrative, especially if the context and subject matter hit close to home-it means a lot that you put the effort in to explain what you thought of this piece and why. I truly appreciate your feedback as it's so valuable to know what kind of influence this story has for us all, especially since it is quite controversial in a number of different respects.

As for the realistic appeal of the story, this is by no means an accurate representation of the era in which the story takes place. It's simply a unique blend of extremely unusual circumstances that combine a whole range of 'not the norm' elements for the time, such as women having higher positions of power in the German military and homosexual (lesbian) relations between an SS officer and detainee.

Also, in response to a reader's question as to whether or not I was influenced by The Night Porter starring Charlotte Rampling, I actually wasn't inspired by it and have only just discovered it thanks to your mentioning. It's definitely an interesting take on situations involving social/relationship aspects of the World War Two era though.

One last thing, I am currently progressing with some possibilities for this story, so it may not have ended yet, but we'll see.

I hope you're all well and once again, thanks for all your feedback!

Take care,

Crimson Gold.

I liked it, let's see part 2.

Fuck You!!

Im an American Soldier!!

So in response to the previous comment, I am an American Soldier as well and this was a fucken outstanding story.

What offended the first American soldier? There was nothing in the story denigrating the US forces. I was a British soldier fifty years ago and I think you've written a very interesting story here. One or two readers seem to have taken offence because the story is set in Nazi Germany but I can't see why. It certainly didn't glorify the regime, far from it. Although you have chosen to set the tale in Hitler's Germany, you could equally have set it in Stalin's Russia, Mao's China, Kim's North Korea, in fact any number of dictatorships, and it would have carried the same message, that people do what they have to do to survive. Well done, CrimsonGold.

I loved this story because it was real. There were young women, Jewish or otherwise, who were coerced - explicitly or implicitly - into having sexual relations with their captors, be they gay, straight or bi. Nazis were typically supreme hypocrites, so on the one hand stated Jews were vermin but on the other hand frequently used them for sex, as housekeeper slaves, childminders, etc. Hitler condemned Jewish musicians but when they raided his bunker in Berlin it is well documented that they found music mostly by Jewish composers. Perhaps more time could have been spent on her dilemma and the mixed feelings she had, but these are short stories not a novel. As a woman, and bi, when I consider her dilemma, I would have probably done the same. Survival and sex are two of our strongest drivers.

I have to wonder if the unimpressed American soldier is aware of their country's part in WW2 prior to Pearl Harbor? If we assume this was set in, say, 1940 then the official stance and public opinion was still "the USA must not involve itself in the war unless provoked", and was still involved in peace negotiations with Japan until the attack at the end of 1941.

I have nothing but respect for those who fought against the Axis forces in that war, however I find this story to contain much the same stance as those American policies: neutral aside the facts. It does not need to explicitly condemn the Nazi party, the described context and protagonist's feelings do so more effectively without getting in the way of exploring the premise of trying to survive and the dilemmas that come with it.

As a story that essentially takes place in a charnel house I found it unbelievable.

It is set at a time when Europe was in chaos, Germany was flexing its muscles, looking threatening to all around it, and must have appeared invincible. Later it would overrun most of Europe and creep into Russia, but with hindsight we know that the Nazi’s were screwed up and under the crazy rule of Hitler, a man prone to base his actions on racial stereotypes rather than sound (and sane) intelligence. The majority of German citizens either knew nothing of what was happening (regarding what they heard as unsubstantiated rumours) and were happy to continue not knowing, or they had a fair idea and decided that as long as it did not affect them it was none of their concern.

The Nazi machine was ruthlessly efficient – while it would be difficult to put a precise figure on the number of people killed in the concentration camps it is easy to state a good approximate figure because of the records that were kept. That is how we know that by the beginning of 1940, when this story is set, there were very few Jews who were not detained and imprisoned; make no mistake – from the descriptions given Kristin would not have been allowed to be free in Germany since she would be regarded as a Jew. It is unrealistic to imagine that, at this point in time, she did not know that she was a Jew nor had she been forced to wear the yellow star of David or had her identification papers similarly marked, even if she hadn’t been detained.

Her forefathers religions would have been traced back for several generations and she would have suffered accordingly; if you are American remember how blacks were treated 50-60 years ago and you would be getting there (more violence, fewer white hoods and lynching’s). She certainly would not have been detained and then called ‘Miss’; she would have been called out by her surname, which would have been shouted at her – no pleases, no thank yous, just orders that she had to immediately obey or have it emphasised to her with a beating. Jews would not have been regarded as being in any way human, so why would anyone care to treat one as human? You would not care what cattle think and Jews were not treated any better than cattle, just not slaughtered for meat.

Germany suffered from fuel shortages: yes, the SS would have had fuel but prisoners were expected to walk, not to have precious petrol or diesel wasted on them. If they were lucky they might get transport to the rail yards in a cattle cart, but that was rare (2 of the earliest bomber crew PoWs in Germany were forced to walk for 3 days to a railway station for transport to their camp; they would have been regarded as more important than Jewish detainees).

I did not recognise the description of the detainment facility – why waste a building like that on ‘scum’ who would be moved on to prison or concentration camps? Jews were rarely even separated by sex when first detained (a bone of contention when the toilet facilities would be a bucket in a corner) and hardly ever detained in solitary cells (unless there was just the one of them). I remember reading of one survivor of a concentration camp tell of dreaming of potatoes, having not been able to obtain them since before the war started; lots of foodstuffs were held back for military supply only and I believe that potatoes were one of these – certainly, later in the war, the only time prisoners of war came into contact with them would be when they had peelings to eat.

Others have mentioned Jews being used for sex. This happened, but not very often – there were plenty of detained prostitutes who would have been regarded as having better status than a Jew, even a beautiful Jewish girl would have been rated as lower than a pig; Jews would not have been able to use their bodies for favours since, to a Nazi, their bodies were already ‘owned’ by the Nazi’s and therefore had no value. Sexual degeneracy was regarded as a suitable reason for detention anyway, and it was illegal to take part in a sexual act with a Jew (at a time when bestiality was not illegal, although highly frowned upon).

In fact there were few jobs considered suitable for Jews within the prison system that other detainees could not do – Oscar Schindler found it difficult to convince Jews to do the work that he had available to them because they considered it beneath them, even when it was saving their lives. Nazi officials told him that they could get him other undesirables who were easier to control, East Europeans and Slavs, but we all know he kept his Jews.

The gay community was not a nice one, at that time. Many had been compromised in the mid 30s, and only allowed to remain at large by informing on each other; as others joined the community their names were given to the police and they were also encouraged to tell on each other (and if some informer was thought to be holding back on informing then that would lead to a concentration camp for being a useless degenerate and, ultimately, death) and the process continued. The assumption that if you informed you were left alone was enough for some to carry on, but it did mean that when the authorities decided to purge the gay community they knew where to go.

Those homosexuals in positions of power were slowly detained or executed (Ernst Röhm was a very close friend of Hitler and commanded the SA, the party’s militia that fought the ‘Reds’ throughout the 1920s and 30s; he was eventually overthrown as part of the Night of the Long Knives and shot for being too powerful for Hitler, as well as his unashamed and very open homosexuality– as were several other senior SA leaders). Few homosexuals were regarded as useful, no matter how senior they might be, and were quickly purged on discovery.

Few women achieved positions of authority, and those that did – as, for example, concentration camp commandants – were regarded as being worse than a man in a similar position.

I did not consider the story to be realistic; it might have been easier to accept had the background been set in a fictional country with a similarly fictional civil conflict leading to the detention of what some might consider to be undesirables and deviants. But it wasn't.