Thread: Penal Units
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Old 10-31-2017, 03:12 PM
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WallShadow WallShadow is offline
Ephemera of the Big Ka-Boom
 
Join Date: Jan 2010
Location: near TMI
Posts: 574
Default Ludwig, a Forced Labor NPC character.

My godfather Uncle Lou was a plutonowy (lance sgt) in the Polish Army, survived the Blitzkrieg because he had a useful pre-war skill (butcher/sausage-maker), was captured and put to work by being shared out to farmers to help with butchering the cattle and pigs. My uncle was a clever and cunning fellow, and was able to wheedle and cadge extra food from the less-vindictive farmers ("We could make you such _good_ sausage, but we are weak; if only we had a little more food...."). When assigned to pour concrete for German fortifications, he made sure there was a little too much water in the mix, so the prisoners would be able to stretch out the relatively less onerous job, because despite how long they raked it, it wouldn't set up. At the end of the war, he was actually driving trucks without guards (where would they go? was the rationale), and he and his co-driver ran into an advancing American column, pulled off the road under a bridge, waited for the column to start past, then got out, with hands in air, yellling "Polski! Polski!" One Polish-American GI translated for them, they were sent to the rear, and my Uncle eventually got shipped to the US.
Feel free to use this as a character, with a few strings: his name was Ludwig "Louie", he was clever, but with a good heart, he was generous and kind to children (he adopted an immigrant child later in life), personable, charming, 5'6" tall, wiry, with short silver-blonde hair, bright sparkling blue eyes, energetic, a little larger than life but not boastful. (Kind of like Popeye if he were Polish and without the squint or pipe.) His English was a little broken (25%--35%) He could garden with minimum requirements (he first taught me about mulching with kitchen scraps), loved the ocean (many summers at the Wildwood, NJ shore), loved dogs, hated cruelty and injustice, was slightly casually anti-Semitic but not to the point of malice or violence just pre-conceived attitudes, and loyal to his friends and faithful to his invalid wife and visited his institutionalized brother-in-law regularly for many years.

If you can do Uncle Lou justice, please include him in your game, perhaps as a subtle Deus ex Machina who knows a workaround, or where to get a needed item, or is buddies with a certain guard.... He has a brother and a niece near Krakow, with whom he has confirmed their safety. He might have a cluster of abandoned kids he's supporting in some previously abandoned house he's helping them make liveable. He has a small nest egg he's squirreled away for urgent necessities, and he doesn't live large, only modestly. He can "make things appear" with a little advance notice: nothing big, just urgently needed. He'd be a great NPC for a group that needed a real "angel on their shoulders".
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Last edited by WallShadow; 10-31-2017 at 03:31 PM.
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