I was assigned to do a non-fiction book report in highschool. I walked into the school library, headed towards the nonfiction book section. As I perused the books, a small grey hardcover book with a black hand sporting a red bracelet of barbed wire caught my eye. The title in big red blocky letters read: Treblinka. The book; written by Jean-Francois Steiner (the progeny of an Auschwitz prisoner) was a supposed account of a concentration camp located in Poland. There was a prisoner revolt of 640+ prisoners, of which only 40 or so survived.
It is a fictional account "as close to the facts as we may come" (quoted from a feminist in the introductory section of the book). The dramatic account of the book was based off of 3 Treblinka survivors, mainly based off of the testimony of one Eliyajou Rosenberg. Rosenberg swore not one but two affidavits that a notorious guard by the moniker Ivan the Terrible died during the prisoner revolt; beaten to death in his bunk with shovels by multiple prisoners. The book depicts Ivan's death in a one-on-one fight with the main protagonist stabbing him with a knife.
Steiner was supposedly pressured to make Ivan's death more 'dramatic.' Knife or shovel, it doesn't matter; because a Polish retired US autoworker named John Demjanjuk was fingered as being Ivan the Terrible by one E. Rosenberg. The same jew who largely participated in the Eichmann trials, and many others resulting from the Nazi witch-hunts of the OSI. The prosecuting attourneys ammunition against Demjanjuk? The testimony of a jew who swore two affidavits that Ivan the Terrible died during the prisoner uprising and a soviet forged ID card.
Great, I managed to stumble across the one fiction book classified in the Non-fiction section for my book report. I was tempted to title my book report: Can We Trust the Sheep that Escape the Fire? Instead that ended up being the title for an article I was composing on the side about some of the things I had stumbled across after reading and researching that book. I had a Russki for an English teacher who by chance got me suspended the year before I was assigned to her, so you can imagine the friction in that particular class.
[TL/DR par:]
During highschool I was particularly interested in WWII, and shortly after that book report, Totse registration opened up and I could level up from a lurker to a registered user. Totse was introduced to me by another lurker; a classmate of mine who had an affinity for lockpicking. After lurking so long I wanted to create a somewhat innocuous and benign seeming handle, and at the same time would be fairly dark, perhaps offensive but only if one understood the reference. Thus my screen name was born.
