A Summary

’Of Rats And Heroes...’’ BY NICOLAS FOSS (NICOS FOSKOLOS)
A SUMMARY
Werner Libnits is an epileptic social outcast, a maverick kind of a vagrant roaming the streets of pre-war Berlin in a constant search for food _sometimes salvaged from the contents of dumpsters.
Claus Funke is an emaciated and deformed hunchback, malevolent, bitter, and hell-bent in getting even with his gruesome fate and society at large.
Rosa Epstein is the daughter of Professor Epstein, a renowned German-Jew physicist, who, together with some other as prominent members of the scientific society, are just a few agonising breaths away from discovering the properties of the atom’s fission.
An ever... enterprising Claus Funke, once he discovers who Rosa Epstein really is, decides this time around to run the show entirely himself by not reporting to his . Instead he shadows the young woman, until he spots her father’s hideout _Professor Epstein’s name already rates high in the of both the SS and the Gestapo list. Following a stake-out of the safe-house, Claus Funke eavesdrops through an open window to what it transpires between father and daughter, as the unsuspecting former gives away crucial details regarding his research and lab tests that are pregnant with promises for an unheard-of scientific breakthrough.
Werner Libnitz and Claus Funke represent in the most vivid and colourful fashion the everlasting and since-the-inception-of-time struggle between Good and Evil. As Claus Funke keeps on shadowing Rosa Epstein looking for his chance to ask for sexual favours by blackmailing her with divulging everything he knows about her dad to the , Werner Libnitz gets on the hunchback’s tail, as the rescuing of the young woman offers him a worthy cause. Thence the eventual confrontation; the hunchback gets licked good and proper. Following this incident, Werner Libnitz is arrested, tried for resisting arrest, and attempted murder, sentenced, and send to prison to serve his time of twenty years. And so are Rosa Epstein and her father: the young woman is send to an interrogation centre, the old man to a concentration camp.
A few pages later the young woman is freed, thanks to the intervention of Aldo Esposito, Cultural Attache to the Italian Embassy in Berlin, and a protege of Rosa’s step-father, a high-ranking official with the Italian Fascist Party.
Almost immediately after her release , Rosa Epstein once more will find herself harassed and besieged by Claus Funke. Rosa agrees to visit Claus at his house. Once there, a crazed with lust and passion Funke will lose no time in sprawling himself all-over her, leaving her no choice but to kill him.
In the meantime Professor Epstein, while incarcerated in the concentration camp, manages to kill himself.
Hitler’s plan calls for the staging of a major historical show, entailing the use of a good number of German outposts along the borders with Poland must be by . So they have to turn to the inmate population of the country’s correctional institutions.Werner is among those .
When the crucial day comes, Libnitz and his fellow convicts, masqueraded as Polish soldiers are shipped off to the outskirts of a German village by the border with Poland.
Their mission successfully carried out, the convicts retreat to the rendezvous point, just a few hundred yards off the village. There they find themselves surrounded by SS and Wermacht regulars who open fire at them.
Werner Libnitz along with a few more of his comrades manage to survive the carnage as they bolt and scatter.
Werner,By now secretly and desperately in love with Rosa Epstein, tries to locate her. Together with another prisoner, Werner snakes his way back to Berlin, where he pays a visit to Aldo Esposito’s house in his search for the young woman. Indeed Rosa is hiding there.
A motorman working with the German Railways Services agrees to let the three fugitives _Rosa, Werner, and his fellow convict_ hide inside the water-supply tank of the locomotive that pulls the passengeer train on route to Holland. Captured and tortured, Aldo Esposito would inform on Werner to his captors.
A combined SS-Gestapo force blockades the last station before the train crossed over to The Netherlands, though at the end of a fierce showdown, Werner Libnitz and his companions would manage to cross over and set foot on Dutch soil.Rosa suggests that the two of them spend together the rest of their living days. But Werner sends her off to freedom, while himself crosses over, and back to the German side of the border. Werner has some unfinished business to attend to.SS Brigadier Diedrich was the man who most and above all others had inflicted so much sorrow and pain on Werner.
So now Werner decides to pay Dierdrich a visit at his mansion, where the latter throws a party to celebrate the... victorious invasion of Poland by the German Armed forces. Upon entering the mansion, and before settling the score with Diedrich in the most dramatic and... final way, Werner Libnitz literally wreaks havoc.
When finally Werner Libnitz hits the ground, struck by an angry swarm of bullets, and seconds before he passes away, he experiences a feeling of total contentment and inner tranquility, his short journey through life somehow vindicated, and at the same time delivered from an otherwise wretched existence.
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