My father, Wilhelm Langbein or “Willi,” was yanked out of his childhood and thrown into war in one of the darkest periods of world history. He managed to survive and pledged his life to building a free, democratic Europe. For years I begged him to share his story with me, but he refused. Soldiers rarely talk about the war, especially men of his generation.
After a career spent strengthening the European Union, his health began to decline and democracy was under renewed threat. His story needed to be told.
Over time, my father had started telling me snippets of the stories of his youth, the “good” parts. I kept bugging him. Finally, when he was in his seventies and had time to reflect on his legacy, he relented. He narrated his story onto 16 cassette tapes, converted them to CDs and sent them to my sister and me in 2007. I listened to them in fascination and put them away in a drawer for the next nine years.
In 2016, I realized with a start that my father was eighty-six years old. He was one of the last surviving soldiers of the WWII generation and his health was rapidly deteriorating. I did not have much time left to ask him questions about his story.
I went to the hutch where I kept those CDs that contained the memoirs he had narrated. The memoirs I had bugged him for decades to document. His traumatic ordeal of growing up in Nazi Germany, being taken from his family at age 13 to be indoctrinated and sent to die at the Eastern front in March 1945 at age 14, to buy the Third Reich a few more days before total defeat. Then, coming home to a destroyed country, discovering that all he had been taught to believe in was a twisted lie.
I was electrified. I had to translate the CDs into English so my children could understand his story and draw their own conclusions; I got to work right away. I bought a CD boombox and headphones. Working nights and weekends, I listened to the story in German, one sentence at a time. I stopped the CD, wrote it in English, and listened to the next sentence. One day, a couple of months after I had started this task, I mentioned what I was doing to a work colleague, who happened to be a writer. He looked at me and said, “you have to publish that story.” I laughed him off, thinking him delusional. How could I possibly? I had never written a lick of poetry or prose, had no formal training, presence or platform anywhere. I was a business manager; how could I get from there to becoming a published author? The odds were ridiculous.
And yet, he had touched a nerve. Something started to nag at me. He was right, the story needed to be told to the public, and it was up to me to make it happen.
Over the next year and a half, I called my father every week in Spain at his retirement home– a place he hated and from which he wanted to escape – and interviewed him. He willingly agreed to talk and was happy that I expressed interest.
In the meantime, in the U.S., my friend had dragged me to his writer’s group, who promptly told me to go learn how to write. In early 2017, I signed up for a memoir class and religiously attended every Saturday for a year. At one point, there was an exercise the teacher had us do. We were to cover a random book with craft paper and write the title of the book we were going to write on the spine and the front of it, willing it into reality. I still have that book in my bookcase, next to the book I did end up writing with a dose of luck, lots of help, a little talent, and a lot of work. I finished the manuscript in 2020, four years to the day after the 2016 election. The book was released in the U.K. for worldwide distribution on October 30th, 2022, and in the U.S. on November 17th, 2022.
In 2017, my father grew very concerned about the turn politics were taking in the world. He was glued to the TV, watching the beginning signs of what he only knew too well. His nightmares started again, right at the end of his life. One day, I walked into his room at the nursing home, and he woke up with a start, grabbed my arm, looked through me, and shouted, “they are coming to kill us with their knives, help!” I shook him awake.
“Papa, Papa, it’s OK, it’s Heidi, you’re safe!”
My father passed away on January 3rd, 2018. He never got to see the book published. I almost felt relieved that he didn’t get to see the path forward he had forged with so much sacrifice being reversed in front of our very eyes.
I felt compelled to write Save the Last Bullet out of concern for the future of democracy. My hope is that the book will be a reminder to not repeat the mistake of letting despots rob us of our freedom through our own inaction, and not to leave our children a world that mirrors our darkest past.
