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Dvr H.Adler
PAL/30765
650, G.T.Coy R.A.S.C
“B”Platoon
C.M.F

4 January 1945

Happy New-Year darling. I wish you everything good and beautiful, everything as you wish. A year of victory and of peace, a year when you rejoin your beloved family in your beautiful native land reconquered and free at last …. We are resting for the last days so I have lots of leisure.  Lots of time to dream about you, to think of you. To pine for you… In rare moments, I am perfectly happy. And why not? I have the right to be. I have you and I am conscious that in the moments of mortal danger to all humanity I did all that I could, given the circumstances, to help defeat that danger. It is humanity that is the victor of this war. (See Stalin’s speech on 7 Nov where he speaks of the moral victory of the idea of the USSR. See also the latest developments in Greece) So I am happy in rare moments.

But when I think of you, darling, alone, wasting part of your youth waiting for me, waiting for my return, then, oh no, I am not happy. Not at all. And I can do nothing about it.

It’s already a year and a half since I left. During that time the situation has profoundly changed. During those 18 months the hope for a happier tomorrow has been transformed into a certainty. And this transformation has been paid for by an ocean of blood, by a ruined world, by millions of orphans and widows. And by your suffering too darling. And your suffering for me is not less than the other, the great suffering of humanity. Because I love you darling, just as I love humanity. The men who work, who labour, the men who don’t smell of perfume but whose smell recalls the grease of machines and the seed of the fields. Because I love you like the world, the earth, the sky and the sea, the mountains so mysterious…….

On several occasions they have proposed  “stripes”(Eng) and I have always refused. Now they are starting again. I have sufficient reasons (sentimental and political) for refusing. But I also have reasons for accepting. I don’t know yet what I will decide. But the thought of being able to help you a little more, will always be part of my reflections on the subject.

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