Prison Letter

Felicity Schnitzler was imprisoned in Holmes chapel Correctional Hospital from 2007-2009 for the manslaughter of Dr Derek Young, a Physics teacher at Arlington High School in Northampton. Presented here, for the first time, is a prison letter dated March 21st 2008 addressed to Ari Ilya. It picks up on a previous letter from Ari. Several communications were sent between Felicity and Ari dating from March 2008 until her release in early 2009

Dear Ari,

I’m starting to find this incarceration therapeutic. Therapeutic in the sense that, it is allowing me to think, to process my ideals and theories into a coherent structure, a solid structure that I can use as a weapon to bludgeon the fascistic state via the power of words rather than weapons. Maybe it’s time to go back to the genesis of the movement and move away from the armed struggle. Who knows?

Have I made mistakes? Would you tell me? I suppose now that I’m locked away, you would. But would you have told me a few years ago when the struggles and demonstrations turned to the righteous socialistic murder of the authoritarian bourgeoisie; the Hypodermic Syringe Model turned flat on its face through the flagrant use of the bullet and the bomb. Were you afraid of what I had become, what you had become? Looking back now, I believe I was thoroughly soaked, even drenched in the sweat of my ancestors’ violent struggles.

You know, I blame my Grandfather; he served with Hitler’s Wehrmacht on the Eastern front – fighting for a cause he did not believe in. He struggled with his fellow Officers over the humanitarian treatment of prisoners. He had to hide his own liberal beliefs, until one day, it got too much, and he shot his units Oberleutnant through the head and escaped into the Russian countryside. He tried objection, he even tried writing a formal complaint to the Generalleutnant. He tried to rally his platoon with speeches and late night chats around campfires about the dire consequences and failures of National Socialism. He tried the peaceable means of protest and it didn’t work for him. So, he turned to the bullet and used violence and murder to make his point. He suffered with the weighty burden of cold blooded execution until his final days. The guilt, the shame, the sorrow; it was all washed away one cold dark night. You’d think the story would end here, that time would heal the wounds and torments of our family. However, it didn’t, the guilt was simply passed onto my Mother Seren and ,through her, me.

And here we are once again, at war with the enemy, using violence to get a point of view into the open, to make a statement so bold that it has to be drenched in blood.

And what do we say of long distance lineage? We are always betrayed by our fathers.

Yours truly,

Fliss x