Let's write about evil Holocaust denial and how quickly some people are blinded to it

This excerpt is transcribed from "No Road Leading Back", by Chris Heath.  An improbable Escape from the Nazi and the Tangled Way We Tell the story about the Holocaust" .

Thank you Ms. Heath.

 A WASHINGTON POST BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR • NATIONAL JEWISH BOOK AWARD FINALIST • CHAUTAUQUA PRIZE FINALIST • This by turns shattering and hope-giving account of prisoners who dug their way to freedom from the Nazis is both a stunning escape narrative and an object lesson in the ways we remember and continually forget the particulars of the Holocaust.

No Road Leading Back is the remarkable story of a dozen prisoners who escaped from the site where more than 70,000 Jews were shot in the Lithuanian forest of Ponar after the Nazi invasion of Eastern Europe in 1941. Anxious to hide the incriminating evidence of the murders, the S.S. later in the war enslaved a group of Jews to exhume every one of the bodies and incinerate them all in a months-long labor—an episode whose specifics are staggering and disturbing, even within the context of the Holocaust.

From within that dire circumstance emerges the improbable escape made by some of the men, who dug a tunnel with bare hands and spoons while they were trapped and guarded day and night—an act not just of bravery and desperation but of awesome imagination. Based on first-person accounts of the escapees and on each scrap of evidence that has been documented, repressed, or amplified since, this book resurrects their lives, while also providing a complex, urgent analysis of why their story has rarely

August 2017 - Ponar (the Nazi killing field in Lithuania) and its story remain half hidden in all kinds of ways, not least literally. Though this place is only a few miles from Lithuania’s capital Vilnius, and though its designated twenty or so acres are currently maintained as a Holocaust memorial, it is fiendishly difficult to find. Occasional signposts do feign to indicate where the site is, but they do not link up in any connected sequence that might actually lead you there. When you do finally arrive, unless you have decided to make arrangement in advance, the small on-site museum will most likely be closed. You may see another car or two in the expansive parking lot, but just as likely you will have the place to yourself.

Today, I am not traveling there alone. In the care with me is Abe Gol, a Florida resident who has retired from his job in the fire industry, shuttling between the United States and Japan.

This is his first visit to Lithuania. The last couple of miles take us along winding roads in which the surrounding forest is broken by industrial buildings and then by the old apartment blocks and houses on Paneriai- an indistinct settlement radiating from the railway junction that doesn’t feel appropriate to describe either as a village or as a small town.

As we drive, Abe mutters quietly to himself, “I pictured this totally differently,”

Getting out of the car, he looks around. Where are the pits?”, he asks.

We are the first of a larger party, who are expected here today, and the museum is open. Abe Gol looks af the list of escapees I had written down on my first visit, the twelve whose stories I am trying to recover.

These are the names:

Josef Gielic

Abraham Blazer

Yitzhak Dogin

Yuli Farber

Shlomo Giol

David Kantorovich

Zulman Matzkin

Leizer Owsiejczyk

Konstantin Potanin

Matke Seidel

Adam Zinger

Peter Zinin* (The names are written as they will be generally used in writing their stories. This list is actually printed in the museum as the names in Lithuanian.)

The fifth name on this list is the reason Abe is here. Shlomo Gol was his father.

We are the first to arrive, but the others- among them Richard Freund and some of the team who found the tunnel, now back in Lithuania to work on other projects- eventually gather.

Freund speaks to Mantas Siksnianas, the guide who works for the museum. “I want the official story,” Freund requests. Mantas begins, “Paneriai is the biggest mass killing space in Lithuania, but Lithuania is just filled with similar places like this one….

Officially in Paneriai they killed about a hundred thousand people, but now historians say it was probably about fifty or seventy thousand, of course we are not sure.”

After a while, Siksnianas leades us over to a pit. Present-day visitors to Ponar can visit a number of these circular pits, all the others are identified as murder sites, but the pit we now approach is different. It has vertical, stone-clad walls and looks like (a picture) – my intrepetation, a flattened labyrinth. Abe stands on the pit edge, taking photographs on his iPad as the guide explains that about eighty Jews, including Abe’s father, lived inside this pit and then dug an escape tunnel. It can be confusing being here, hearing this story, because- as I’ll come to explain- almost nothing in this photo is exactly what it appears to be. Almost nothing helps a visitor to understand what once happened here. Even with all the research I had done, the first time I cam ehere, much of what I thought I understood as I looked into the pit I would later come to realize I had not understood at all.

After Aber and the rest of the party leave the pit area, we walk down a shallow slope and gather next to an imposing memorial. First Richard Freund, then two of the geophysicists who found the tunnel, Paul Bauman and Alastair McClymont, speak. Freund asks Abe Gol whether he would like to share some words.

Abe would. He explains that when he was growing up, his father Shlomo was reluctant to tell him about what had happened here. “But, bit by bit,” Abe says. “I did learn.” Once his father did explain, he continues, it was had for a son to understand how anyone could have gone through that horror, yet come out the other side and appear to be living a normal life. Abe will finish his words this afternoon by saying, “I really appreciate the opportunity to be here. And physically seeing what they had gone through.” And then, he will pause, his voice breaking before continuing. “From my point of view, there is a lot of ache, a lot of emotion…..and maybe closure.”

Before that, though, he refers to a particularly poignant moment in his, and by extension his father’s life. It happened when Abe was a teenager in Florida in the early 1960s. It is a moment that might stand as a stark preview, just off one way that the story about this place might go adrift and tumble through the gaps of history.

Why Did It Take Three Days For X To Remove Holocaust Denial Post?

Abe Gol attended Andrew Jackson High School in Jacksonville, Florida. The year after the Gol family arrived in the United States, when Abe was fifteen the teacher of the English class, Mr. Kelly, assigned the students to write a story in their own words. That gave Abe an idea. He explained to Mr. Kelly about a document of his father’s written in Hebrew in which his father had detailed his wartime experience. Could Abe translate that for this assignment? Would that be okay? Mr. Kelly said that should be fine.

When Abe told his father, Shlomo neither encouraged nor discouraged him. On the allotted day, Abe read out his translation in front of the class, telling his father’s story in his father’s own words.

“We were tasked now to construct living quarters for our own use, and those quarters were to be constructed in one of the bunkers that was not yet used as a mass grave.”

One Abe finished laying out the whole awful truth, Mr. Kelly had a question for the rest of the class.”Does Abe’s story sound believable to you?”. Then he called for a vote. Those who believed the story should raise their hands.

Abe looked around his class mates awaiting their validation for what he had just shared. For what his father, Shlomo Gol, had by proxy also just shared.

Just four hands were raised.

Naturally, Abe protested. “I said this is a true story, a story that had been corroborated by the courts in Nuremberg when the people responsible were put on trial. Do you still not believe me?”

The vote remained the same.

“They thought,” Abe will tell me, “there was no one in the world who could do something like that.”

That evening, Abe will tell his father what had happened at school that day. Shlomo wasn’t surprised. “Not many people believe what happened,” he told his son.

One time- Abe isn’t sure whether it was that evening or another day- his father’s frustration did bubble over, just for a moment. To have lived through such torment only to find that your specific kind of suffering doesn’t match contemporary expectations! To have survived as experience so intense and brutal only to realize that you’d escaped into a world in which your story somehow didn’t seem to fit!

“I guess they would have believed you if you’d brought me to school and I’d shown off the number on my arm,” Shlomo told his son. “I guess I should have gone to ✡️😥Auschwitz or something like that. Maybe then, they would have believed it.”

Let;s write about literary refugees fleeing Nazi occupied Europe. A wonderful book review describes examples of courage

On May 21, 1940, the German Jewish writer Lion Feuchtwanger took a taxi from his home in Sanary-sur-Mer, on the Mediterranean coast, to Les Milles, an internment camp near Aix-en-Provence.

Review of Marseille 1940: The Flight of Litrature* by Uwe Wittstock, published in the New York Review of Books by Maurice Samuels.  

After the fall of France in World War II, many writers and artists fleeing the Nazis ended up in Marseille, desperately seeking a way out of occupied Europe.

From left, Max Ernst, Jacqueline Breton, André Masson, André Breton, and Varian Fry in Fry’s office, Marseille, 1941

It was a last extravagance to ward off reality, because Feuchtwanger knew what awaited him behind the gates. Eight months earlier, during the so-called Drôle de guerre (Phony War) that followed Hitler’s conquest of Poland, France had ordered all Germans and Austrians in the country, including those, like Feuchtwanger, who had fled fascism, to report to camps and detained them briefly. On May 14, four days after the Germans invaded France, an order went out for all “enemy aliens” between the ages of seventeen and fifty-five to turn themselves in once again. This time things were far worse. Even though Les Milles was not a labor or death camp, the conditions were squalid enough to make Feuchtwanger regret not having left for America while there was still time.

Fueled by a new methamphetamine called Pervitin, which it had developed to eliminate the need for sleep, the German army had broken through French defenses and was advancing at a pace that no one thought possible. Eight to ten million people fled in panic, jamming the roads. The situation was particularly dire for the German and Austrian refugees—many of them important writers and artists and many of them Jews—who had sought safety in France following Hitler’s rise to power in 1933, and found themselves once again at his mercy. The country they had escaped to suddenly became a country they needed to escape from. After the signing of the armistice on June 22, 1940, the Germans occupied the northern part of France, including Paris, as well as the Atlantic coast, while the south became a “free zone,” with its capital in the spa town of Vichy and a collaborationist government led by the World War I hero Marshal Philippe Pétain. 

Many of the refugees converged on Marseille, France’s sole port not in Nazi hands, hoping to find a way out.

In Marseille 1940: The Flight of Literature, the German literary critic Uwe Wittstock traces the anguished itineraries of more than a dozen refugee writers and artists and the efforts by a group of courageous Americans—along with many anonymous but no less courageous French people—to rescue them. Told in a series of short, suspenseful vignettes, it is a sequel to his book February 1933: The Winter of Literature, which followed a group of German intellectuals in the days after Hitler came to power.

Some of those whose hasty escape from Germany Wittstock narrated in the first book reappear in the second in even more dire straits. February 1933 struck a chord by charting the shift from denial to panic when Germans suddenly found themselves living in a fascist country, and Marseille 1940 makes another timely intervention: as governments once again shut borders and attempt to turn us against the foreigners in our midst, it helps us understand the plight of those fleeing dangerous or difficult circumstances as well as our responsibility to help them.

Central to the story is Varian Fry, a temperamental American journalist who had witnessed Nazi cruelty toward Jews and other dissidents firsthand while reporting from Berlin in the 1930s and who realized early on the peril that the refugees faced in occupied France. Fry’s story is known to English-speaking readers—less so in Germany—thanks to several historical studies and to Julie Orringer’s novel The Flight Portfolio (2019), which was adapted into the TV miniseries Transatlantic (2023). With the help of associates, including his wife, Eileen, Fry formed the Emergency Rescue Committee (ERC), which raised funds to send him to Marseille with a list of two hundred prominent writers, artists, and intellectuals to track down and save. His efforts to obtain American visas for them received an unexpected boost from Eleanor Roosevelt, who remembered meeting Feuchtwanger on a book-signing tour in the 1930s and who was moved when his American publisher sent her a snapshot of the writer in tattered clothing staring out from behind the barbed-wire fence of Les Milles.

During an election year, FDR feared opposition to such efforts from isolationists as well as from those, like Secretary of State Cordell Hull, who claimed that the refugees would pose a threat to the United States. Applicants for entry were forced to prove that they had sufficient financial resources or a guarantor to support them so they would not become a public burden, to provide certification of their morality or good character (including an affirmation that they had never belonged to a Communist organization), and to submit a biographical sketch indicating the danger they faced at the hands of the Nazis. Despite enormous need, the State Department granted very few visas. However, the First Lady was able to apply pressure on her husband to speed the process for the famous names on the ERC’s list.

Even with American visas in hand, Fry had a difficult task. Locating the refugees on the list was the least of his problems: many sought him out after word spread of his presence in Marseille. 

But, getting them out of France was another matter. After the start of the war the only large transatlantic ocean liners departed from Lisbon, which meant that the refugees needed transit permits to cross Franco’s Spain and Portugal. Obtaining an exit visa from Vichy France was even more difficult, particularly for any refugee whose papers were not in order—as was the case for those who had refused to report to a French concentration camp or who had escaped from one. Fry eventually convinced an intrepid couple, the Hungarian-born Jewish antifascist resistance fighter Lisa Fittko and her husband, Hans, to smuggle frightened refugees over the Pyrenees into Spain.

Drawing mainly on letters, diaries, and memoirs, Wittstock follows a wide cast of characters as they struggle to obtain visas and seek passage out of Marseille. Some of the stories end happily. Hannah Arendt, who later drew on her refugee experience to write her magnum opus, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), managed to escape from the French concentration camp of Gurs with forged papers and miraculously reunite with her husband before eventually obtaining an exit visa from France with the help of Fry and American Jewish groups. The writer Anna Seghers (born Annette Reiling), who could not get a US entry visa because of her Communist affiliations, finally secured one to Mexico and found passage, thanks to Fry, on a cargo ship along with the Surrealist impresario André Breton and the young ethnologist Claude Lévi-Strauss. She channeled her experience into the novel Transit (1944).

Other refugees, such as Heinrich Mann, had a harder time. Once considered more successful than his brother and fellow novelist Thomas Mann, he began to lose his grip after fleeing Germany. Nervous and exhausted, he and his alcoholic wife made it to the US with the help of Fry, but he could not adjust to life outside Europe and never managed to regain his former stature. The philosopher Walter Benjamin did not make it out. In late September 1940, as his Spanish and Portuguese transit visas were about to expire and he was unable to obtain an exit visa from France, he presented himself at the doorstep of Fittko, an acquaintance from Paris, having heard that she was smuggling people across the Pyrenees. After being stopped by officials on the Spanish side of the border, Benjamin swallowed a lethal dose of morphine tablets rather than be turned over to the Gestapo. The next day the Spanish authorities, rattled by his death, let the rest of the party through.

Fry went to a great deal of trouble to help two antifascist Weimar politicians, Rudolf Breitscheid and Rudolf Hilferding, both members of the Social Democratic Party of Germany who had fled to France after opposing Hitler’s rise to power. Hilferding faced the added danger of being Jewish. They refused to be smuggled out of France with forged documents provided by Fry because they believed that such an escape was beneath their dignity as German politicians. Eventually the Vichy government granted them exit visas, and Fry helped arrange passage on one of the ships now traveling from Marseille to Martinique, but Breitscheid refused because the only available berth was in a dormitory below deck. It didn’t matter: in early 1941, shortly before the ship was to leave, they were both arrested by the Vichy police and handed to the Gestapo. Hilferding was tortured to death in custody, while Breitscheid perished at Buchenwald in 1944.

Although Wittstock makes readers feel the refugees’ overwhelming anxiety, he also relieves the tension with comedic moments. Feuchtwanger gets smuggled out of Saint Nicolas, another internment camp, by the American consul in Marseille, who gives him women’s clothes and tells him to pretend to be his mother-in-law when stopped by the French police. The novelist Franz Werfel and his wife, Alma Mahler-Werfel, travel through France with twelve suitcases, some of them containing the original scores of Alma’s ex-husband, the composer Gustav Mahler, which they hope to sell once they reach America to finance their lives in exile. When the precious suitcases go missing in the chaos of the exodus, Alma convinces a besotted hotel keeper to track them down for her. The couple eventually make it over the Pyrenees in the same group as the Manns, their luggage in tow.

Many of the writers and artists who cross Wittstock’s pages are familiar figures, but this glimpse into their flights reveals them in a new light. Marseille 1940 reads like a nonfiction version of Irène Némirovsky’s novel Suite française, which follows a group of (non-Jewish French) characters as they flee Paris after the Nazi invasion.
Like Némirovsky, Wittstock explores how the extreme pressure of the historical moment functions as a kind of magnifying glass, revealing human characteristics that might never have emerged otherwise. Some of Wittstock’s subjects rise to the occasion. This is true particularly of the rescuers: Fry refused to buckle in the face of attempts by both Vichy officials and his colleagues back in New York to end his mission. The Fittkos risked their lives each time they ferried a group to safety. But it’s also true of many of the refugees, including Arendt and Seghers, who displayed a remarkable sangfroid and ability to adapt to rapidly changing circumstances.

Some of them, however, descended into vindictiveness, pettiness, and worse. The catastrophe of France’s fall brought the deep-rooted rivalry between the Mann brothers to the surface and exacerbated tensions among the various Communist exiles. Mahler-Werfel, whose tortured romantic relationships with famous men—not just Mahler and Werfel but also the architect Walter Gropius—have earned her a dubious place in the pantheon of twentieth-century cultural icons, emerges in Wittstock’s account as a Hitler-loving harridan (bossy person) who regrets her marriage to the Jewish Werfel as soon as it puts her in danger. “Now I will have to wander to the ends of the earth with a people alien to me,” she confided to her journal, even as she and her husband engaged in an increasingly madcap folie à deux—lugging their twelve suitcases—through the south of France.

Historians may find fault with certain aspects of Marseille 1940. It lacks footnotes, making it impossible to tell which sources Wittstock used, and the bibliography is far from exhaustive. Some may bristle at the novelistic style. But Wittstock’s narrative method has advantages. By telling the stories of the refugees in the present tense, he forces us to see the world through their eyes. The book is filled with minute details that bring them to life—Feuchtwanger’s taxi to Les Milles, Mahler-Werfel’s suitcases—and allow us to experience the tragedy of France’s fall in a way that more conventional histories do not.

A more serious concern is the book’s focus on a relatively small number of renowned artists and writers. What about all the refugees who did not inspire the sympathy of the American First Lady and did not receive coveted American visas? Wittstock is not oblivious to this criticism. “Alongside every person mentioned in this book stood hundreds or thousands of others who had the same right to be memorialized,” he acknowledges in the epilogue. But the decision by the State Department to grant visas to only a select few is one of the great tragedies of the war, and Wittstock was not obliged to replicate it by keeping his focus so narrow. Aside from his descriptions of the throngs of people on the roads and the long lines at the American consulates, we get little sense of the plight of nonfamous refugees and no access to their inner lives.

Ultimately, though, I discerned a deeper purpose in his decision to focus on a narrow cast of celebrated characters. These are people we already know and care about. Some, like Arendt and Benjamin, are among the best-known intellectuals of our era. By depicting them as impoverished and desperate—denied, as Arendt put it, the “right to have rights”—Wittstock helps us conceive of a kind of suffering that all too often remains abstract when it affects unknown people in faraway lands.

Wittstock is preoccupied with the factors that enabled survival. To be sure, ingenuity and flexibility helped. Seghers turned to Mexico after the US closed its doors to her. Arendt saw an opening and slipped through when the time was right. They survived. Breitscheid and Hilferding refused to bend and did not. But as Wittstock makes clear, chance was a far more important factor. The decision to cross the Pyrenees at one place rather than another meant life or death. Whether refugees fleeing France happened to encounter a hostile border guard or one who was willing to let them through without the proper papers made all the difference: “In the end, whether one ends up with a supporter of Pétain or someone who sympathizes with the adversaries of the Nazis is a matter of luck.”

Even the luckiest refugees, however, would not have survived without a great deal of help from people who took enormous risks. By prolonging his stay in France to continue his work, Fry faced arrest and deportation, along with the dissolution of his marriage. The Fittkos faced certain death for their actions. The fact that Fry and his team—including two intrepid American women, the heiress Mary Jayne Gold, who funded a large part of the operation, and Miriam Davenport, who administered it—were not heralded as heroes after the war is an injustice that has only recently begun to be rectified. Fry published his memoirs in 1945, but as Wittstock points out, “In the euphoria of victory, the American book market was not particularly interested in stories about past wartime suffering,” and many resented Fry’s allegations that the US State Department had made it difficult for Jewish refugees to enter America. He was not recognized by Yad Vashem as one of the “Righteous Among the Nations” until 1994.

And yet, though Fry’s contributions received belated recognition, the contributions of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of French people to saving refugees have received no recognition at all. Over and over Wittstock describes small acts of generosity and quiet heroism by ordinary people who had no idea of the renown of those they were aiding. Vichy’s collaboration with Hitler casts a dark shadow over France in this period, but as Lisa Fittko put it in her memoir:


None of us could have survived without the help of French people in every corner of the country—French men and women whose humanity gave them the courage to take in, to hide, and to feed these displaced strangers.

When Fittko came out of the hospital drained and depleted, a kind butcher gave her an extra ration of meat even though she lacked the proper coupon. When she and her husband were stopped on the street by a French gendarme assigned to arrest foreigners, their landlady vouched that they were her neighbors. “It is astonishing how greatly influenced the populace is by the model set by personages like the prefect or the city’s bishop,” Wittstock writes of the residents of the town of Montauban, who allowed Arendt to live quietly among them. “Their commitment to refugees focuses public attention on how they can be helped, not on how they can be gotten rid of as quickly as possible.”

Wittstock does not explicitly make the connection to the dire circumstances facing refugees in Europe and the United States today, but he doesn’t need to. The parallels are all too apparent. When Fry received notice of his imminent arrest from the Marseille chief of police, he protested that his detention would be a violation of human rights. The Vichy functionary scoffed, “I am aware that they still believe in the antiquated notion of human rights in the United States.” But soon, he predicted, America would jettison such outdated ideas: “We’ve realized that society is more important than the individual. You will also come to understand that.” Now that our leaders are proving that policeman right, the stories of the refugees who flocked to Marseille in 1940 are more essential than ever.

*June 1940: France surrenders to Germany. The Gestapo is searching for Heinrich Mann and Franz Werfel, Hannah Arendt, Lion Feuchtwanger and many other writers and artists who had sought asylum in France since 1933. The young American journalist Varian Fry arrives in Marseille with the aim of rescuing as many as possible. This is the harrowing story of their flight from the Nazis under the most dangerous and threatening circumstances.

It is the most dramatic year in German literary history. In Nice, Heinrich Mann listens to the news on Radio London as air-raid sirens wail in the background. Anna Seghers flees Paris on foot with her children. Lion Feuchtwanger is trapped in a French internment camp as the SS units close in. They all end up in Marseille, which they see as a last gateway to freedom. This is where Walter Benjamin writes his final essay to Hannah Arendt before setting off to escape across the Pyrenees. This is where the paths of countless German and Austrian writers, intellectuals and artists cross. And this too is where Varian Fry and his comrades risk life and limb to smuggle those in danger out of the country. This intensely compelling book lays bare the unthinkable courage and utter despair, as well as the hope and human companionship, which surged in the liminal space of Marseille during the darkest days of the twentieth century.

Let's write about the Heritage Foundation and the Project 2025 manifesto too close to Nazi propaganda

As the world tries to settle in to the surreal resolve about dealing with another Donald Trump administration, this essay published in the New York Magazine Intelligencer section gives the perspective from a reporter who is trying to make sense out of this reality we are now faced with. Echo essay pubished by Sarah Jones: 

Project 2025’s Mastermind Is Obsessed With Contraception
At a book party, the Heritage Foundation’s Kevin Roberts avoided much of what he wrote.

Inside the lobby of New York City's Kimberly Hotel, there is a massive aquarium, and it glows a sickly blue. Whoever designed the tank had wanted it to look so much like an ocean they’d shot past the mark into eldritch territory. I was briefly transfixed, but I was on my way to the penthouse floor, some 30 stories up, where the man behind Project 2025 would be fêted a week after Donald Trump won reelection.

The occasion wasn’t a victory party, but rather a book launch for Dr. Kevin Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation. Roberts joined Heritage in 2021, as the conservative think tank waited out the Biden years and incubated what would become the infamous proposed blueprint for a second Trump administration. On Tuesday night, the crowd skewed young and white, dressed in business casual, and their mood was more relaxed than gleeful: A win for Trump is a win for Heritage, too. Still, the topic of Project 2025 remained so sensitive that Roberts and emcee Brian Kilmeade of Fox News spoke for 20 minutes without directly mentioning it once.

“Without any hubris on behalf of Heritage, we thought we have something to say about the American Dream,” Roberts told Kilmeade, adding that Americans “want to wake up in a normal country again.” A “uniparty” Establishment stands in the way, but it can be broken “by electing courageous men and women to office,” he said, before taking a detour to condemn China and its Communist government. “Of course we should impose tariffs on them,” he said. “Of course there will be economic repercussions on the United States, but a great leader or a great generation of leaders will be able to articulate to Americans that those trade-offs are worth it. Why? Because of self-governance.”

The interview didn’t go into much detail on Roberts’s book Dawn’s Early Light*, but in it he obsesses over abortion, fertility, and contraception. In one passage, he attacks a Washington, D.C., park that is part playground, part dog park. The playground is “caged-in,” he claims, “so that the canine ‘progeny’ of childless ‘dog parents’ can run about,” which in his view “perfectly sums up the antifamily culture shaping legislation, regulation, and enforcement throughout our sprawling government.” J.D. Vance wrote the foreword to the book, and Roberts shares the future vice-president-elect’s fixation on childlessness.

“​​It’s true that contraceptives give families more control over when they have children,” he writes. “But the creators of the technologies wanted to go much further than controlling a natural process; they wanted everyone in our culture, regardless of their beliefs or choices about contraceptives, to believe that having kids is an optional individual choice instead of a social expectation or a transcendent gift.”

Roberts doesn’t call outright for restrictions on “chemical contraceptives,” as he terms them, but his view is clear enough. Of IVF, he writes that while it “seems to assist fertility,” it “has the added effect of incentivizing women to delay trying to start a family, often leading to added problems when the time comes.” He goes on to claim that “infertility specialists say that increased commercial emphasis on IVF and other invasive (and profitable) treatments is creating a generation of doctors who actually don’t know how to perform older, noninvasive, but quite successful methods of restoring fertility.”

Later in the book, Roberts calls for universal school choice, which is about as unpopular as the abortion restrictions he supports. 

Trump may have won, but that doesn’t necessarily mean Heritage has a mandate to do as it pleases; most Americans support the Roe v. Wade standard for abortion rights and don’t want vouchers for private schools, many of which are religious. (Roberts founded a Catholic school in Louisiana.) Nevertheless, attendees were hopeful when I talked to them.

“Honestly, the conservative movement has been in the wilderness since Reagan, and I think this is part of the first time we’re having real conversations about the direction of the movement and who’s included,” said one grad student who gave only his first name, Peter. “I think Trump has given us an opportunity to think about what we do going forward.”

I asked him what he’d like to see from Trump once he takes office next year. “I think there will be reforms to the bureaucracy,” he said. The president could take one of two routes, he speculated, by either “skimming the bureaucracy down and trying to fire more civil servants” or getting “more partisans in and try to remake the bureaucracy.” He added, “I’m just excited to see what wins the day.” Nobody had mentioned Project 2025 at the event, so I asked him about that, too. Liberal attacks didn’t hit because the link to Trump was just too tenuous, he thought. “They made it sound like a conspiracy theory. Very silly,” he said.

Another partygoer, Jackson Paul, said that while he appreciated Roberts’s talk, he wasn’t convinced about tariffs. “How do we have tariffs help strengthen Americans, help strengthen the American economy, help the American worker, help the American working families while still countering the influence of these nations?” he asked. His drinking companion, a woman who would give her name only as Kylie, chimed in to say the book would be her Christmas gift to herself. “I would like to get to know more about the author,” she added. “He mentioned he had a very similar upbringing compared to J.D. Vance.”

Bethlehem Hadgu, a violist and the founder of a conservative chamber-music ensemble, was clutching a free copy of the Roberts book. She said she had great ambitions for Trump’s next term and listed them all: “I would say his revival of the nuclear family; the whole transgender ideology, for that to be disbarred; to drain the swamp of the bureaucracy of the government; to get as many people as fired as possible” that “are reducing the power of the executive” branch. She said she thought Trump would lower grocery prices and inflation and make “America as independent as possible,” an echo of Roberts’s earlier comments about tariffs. She was even more animated when she talked about the organization she founded. “We have the best musicians,” she explained. “Our whole organization is founded on tradition, beauty, truth, and goodness. And so it’s like a community of like-minded people and musicians and philanthropists and patrons, edifying conservative values through concerts.”

With that, I noticed that Roberts had left, and there was no reason to linger. Before Roberts spoke, the party had been polite, almost nerdy, but as drunkenness set in, and it had become almost impossible to hear anyone over the din. The alcohol had unleashed some pent-up energy and, with it, the malevolent truth of the night. On my way out of the hotel, I had to pass the aquarium again, still lit in that blue. One fish broke away from the pack and sped up toward the surface and the air, but there was no escape. 

*Nazi- "Dawn's Early Night", name is close to the title of the Nazi film The Blue Light (German: Das blaue Licht) a black-and-white 1932, film directed by Leni Riefenstahl and written by Béla Balázs with uncredited scripting by Carl Mayer. In Riefenstahl's film version, the witch, Junta, played by Riefenstahl, is intended to be a Nazi sympathetic character. 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Blue_Light_(1932_film)

Let's write about the Jewish underground in Hungary

Echo essay published in the Los Angeles Times by Alon Bernstein:

78 years on, Jewish Holocaust rescuers want their story told:

KIBBUTZ HAZOREA, Israel —  Just before Nazi Germany invaded Hungary in March 1944, Jewish youth leaders in the Eastern European country jumped into action: They formed an underground network that in the coming months would save tens of thousands of fellow Jews from the Nazi gas chambers.

Budapest: Most of the murders along the edge of the River Danube took place around December 1944 and January 1945, when the members of the Hungarian Arrow Cross Party police ("Nyilas") took as many as 20,000 Jews from the newly established Budapest ghetto and executed them along the river bank. (L'Heureux photograph)

This chapter of the Holocaust heroism is scarcely remembered in Israel. Nor is it part of the official curriculum in schools. But the few remaining members of Hungary’s Jewish underground want their story told. Dismayed at the prospect of being forgotten, they are determined to keep memories of their mission alive.

“The story of the struggle to save tens of thousands needs to be a part of the chronicles of the people of Israel,” said David Gur, 97, one of a handful of members still alive. “It is a lighthouse during the period of the Holocaust, a lesson and exemplar for the generations.”

As time passes, historians, activists, survivors and their families are preparing for the time when there will no longer be living witnesses to share first-person accounts about the horrors of the Nazi genocide during World War II. In the Holocaust, 6 million Jews were wiped out by the Nazis and their allies.

Israel, which was established as a refuge for Jews in the wake of the Holocaust, has gone to great lengths over the years to recognize thousands of “Righteous Among the Nations” — non-Jews who risked their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust.

Accounts of Jewish resistance to the Nazis, such as the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, are mainstays in the national narrative but rescue missions by fellow Jews — such as the Hungarian resistance — are less known.

Budapest Synagogue Memorial Park (L'Heureux photograph)

Hungary was home to around 900,000 Jews before the Nazi invasion. Its government was allied with Nazi Germany, but as the Soviet Red Army advanced toward Hungary, the Nazis invaded in March 1944, to prevent its Axis ally from making a separate peace deal with the Allies.

Over the 10 months that followed, as many as 568,000 Jews were killed by the Nazis and their allies in Hungary, according to figures from Yad Vashem, Israel’s official Holocaust memorial.

Gur said he and his colleagues knew that disaster was looming when three Jewish women arrived at Budapest’s main synagogue in the fall of 1943. They had fled Nazi-occupied Poland and bore disturbing news about people being shipped to concentration camps.

“They had fairly clear information about what was happening, and saw the many trains, and it was obvious to them what was happening,” said Gur.

Shoes on the Danube River in Budapest (on the Pest side of the river) -L'Heureux photograph- Shoes on the Danube Bank (Hungarian: Cipők a Duna-parton) is a memorial erected on 16 April 2005, in Budapest, Hungary. Conceived by film director Can Togay, he created it on the east bank of the Danube River with sculptor Gyula Pauer [hu] to honour the Jews who were massacred by fascist Hungarian militia belonging to the Arrow Cross Party in Budapest during the Second World War. They were ordered to take off their shoes (shoes were valuable and could be stolen and resold by the militia after the massacre), and were shot at the edge of the water so that their bodies fell into the river and were carried away. The memorial represents their shoes left behind on the bank.

In fact, Gur oversaw a massive forgery operation that provided false documents for Jews and non-Jewish members of the Hungarian resistance. “I was an 18-year-old adolescent when the heavy responsibility fell upon me,” he said.

There was great personal risk. In December 1944, he was arrested at the forgery workshop and brutally interrogated and imprisoned, according to his memoir, “Brothers for Resistance and Rescue.” The Jewish underground broke him out of the central military prison in a rescue operation later that month.

The forged papers were used by Jewish youth movements to operate a smuggling network and run Red Cross houses that saved thousands from the Nazis and their allies.

According to Gur’s book, at least 7,000 Jews were smuggled out of Hungary, through Romania to ships on the Black Sea that would bring them to British-controlled Palestine. At least 10,000 forged passes offering protection, known as Shutzpasses, were distributed to Budapest’s Jews, and around 6,000 Jewish children and accompanying adults were saved in houses ostensibly under the protection of the International Red Cross.

Robert Rozett, a senior historian at Yad Vashem, said that although it was “the largest rescue operation” of European Jews during the Holocaust, this episode remains off “the main route of the narrative.”

“It’s very significant because these activities helped tens of thousands of Jews stay alive in Budapest,” he said.

In 1984, Gur founded “The Society for Research of the History of the Zionist Youth Movements in Hungary,” a group that has promoted awareness about this effort.

Last month at a kibbutz in northern Israel, Sara Epstein, 97, Dezi Heffner-Reiner, 95, and Betzalel Grosz, 98, three of the remaining survivors who helped save Jews in Nazi-occupied Hungary, received the Jewish Rescuers Citation for their role in the Holocaust. The award is given by two Jewish groups — B’nai B’rith World Center-Jerusalem and the Committee to Recognize the Heroism of Jewish Rescuers During the Holocaust.

“There aren’t many of us left, but this is important,” said Heffner-Reiner.

More than 200 other members of the underground were given the award posthumously. Gur received the award in 2011, the year it was created.

Yuval Alpan, a son of one of the rescuers and an activist with the society, said the citations were meant to recognize those who saved lives during the Holocaust.

“This resistance underground youth movement saved tens of thousands of Jews during 1944, and their story is not known,” he said. “It’s the biggest rescue operation in the Holocaust and nobody knows about it.”

International Holocaust day falls on the anniversary of the Red Army’s liberation of the Auschwitz death camp, 78 years ago. 

January 27, 1945, the Soviet's Red Army liberates Auschwitz Concentration Camp in Poland

Israel is home to some 150,600 Holocaust survivors, almost all of them over the age of 80, according to government figures. That is 15,193 less than a year ago.

The United Nations will be holding a memorial ceremony at the General Assembly on Friday, and other memorial events are scheduled around the globe.

Israel marks its own Holocaust Remembrance Day every spring.

Associated Press writers Eleanor Reich and Ilan Ben Zion in Jerusalem contributed to this report.

Let's remember Solomon Perel- learn a lot in a well written obituary

Obituary echo published in The New York Times by Richard Sandomir:

ISREAL- Solomon Perel, a German Jew who saved himself from death by posing as a member of the Hitler Youth during World War II and later felt gratitude for the Nazi he pretended to be in order to live, died on February 2 at his home in Givatayim, Israel, near Tel Aviv. He was 97.

Solomon Perel (1925 in Germany-2023 in Israel)

His great-nephew Amit Brakin confirmed the death.

Mr. Perel, who was also known as Shlomo and Solly, recounted his survival story in a 1990 autobiography. It was adapted into a German movie, “Europa Europa,” released in the United States in 1991, which won the Golden Globe for best foreign-language film.

Like many other Holocaust survival stories, Mr. Perel’s began with Nazi oppression, which led his family to move in 1936 from Peine, Germany, to Lodz, Poland. After the German invasion on Sept. 1, 1939, they were forced into a ghetto that would house as many as 164,000 Jews. He fled later that year with an older brother, Isaac, in the hope of finding relative safety in Soviet-controlled eastern Poland.

In Bialystok, where he parted with Isaac, Solomon was placed by a Jewish assistance organization in a Soviet orphanage in Grodno (now part of Belarus). He stayed for two years, until Germany invaded the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941; he recalled that the Jewish children at the orphanage were roused from their sleep and told to flee the German attack.

Solomon became one of many refugees captured by the German Wehrmacht in an open field near Minsk.

Fearful that his captors would learn he was Jewish and shoot him in a nearby forest, he dug a small pit in the soft ground with the heel of a shoe and buried his identification papers.

After waiting on a long line, Solomon was asked by a German soldier, “Are you a Jew?” Heeding his mother’s last words to him, “You must live,” but not his father’s, “Always remain a Jew,” he lied: “I’m not a Jew. I’m an ethnic German.”

Not only did the Germans believe him; they welcomed him into their unit under the name Josef Perjell, and made him an interpreter. One interrogation in which he participated was of Joseph Stalin’s son Yakov Dzhugashvili.

“I became a split personality — a Nazi by day and a Jew by night,” Mr. Perel told The Week, an Indian magazine, in 2019. He remained there until his commanding officer sent him to the Hitler Youth boarding school in Braunschweig, Germany, during the winter of 1941-42.

If anyone discovered he was Jewish, “they’d deal with me like cannibals,” he said in “Because You Must Live: The Story of Shlomo (Solly) Perel,” a part of the Survivors Testimony Films Series produced by Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust memorial.

He was relieved that the school’s showers had separate stalls, which prevented anyone from seeing that he had been circumcised.

But, he said, “nobody suspected me because it was impossible to think that some Jewish boy would sneak into the center of that protected country.”

He became, to the young Nazis surrounding him, a true believer, absorbing the lessons of National Socialism, wearing a uniform with a swastika and a Nazi eagle on his chest and preparing for military service.

“I was a Hitler Youth completely,” he said in the Yad Vashem film. “I began telling myself, ‘Wow, I’m part of a force that’s conquering the world.’”

But he could not switch off his real self entirely. In 1943, during the Christmas holiday, he received a holiday pass and took a train back to Lodz. For 12 days, wearing the black winter uniform of the Hitler Youth, he searched for his parents in the ghetto.

He rode a streetcar, which Jews could not board, back and forth. He walked the city’s streets. He saw men rolling carts piled with Jewish corpses.

But he did not find his mother, his father or his sister, Bertha, none of whom he would ever see again. His brothers, Isaac and David, survived.

Solomon Perel was born in Peine on April 21, 1925. His father, Azriel, owned a shoe store. His mother, Rebecca Perel, was a homemaker.

Solomon was nearly 8 years old when Hitler seized power in Germany in 1933, but his life did not change appreciably until two years later, when antisemitic laws stripped Jews of their rights and citizenship. He was expelled from school.

“It was my most traumatic childhood experience,” he said in “Because You Must Live,” “that barbaric expulsion from school because somebody considered me different.”

The family moved to Lodz after his father was forced by the Nazis to sell his store for nearly nothing. Solomon attended a Polish state school for Jews. It was after the Germans invaded Poland and Jewish families were ordered into the Lodz ghetto that he started on the path that led to his lifesaving masquerade as a Nazi.

Simmy Allen, a spokesman for Yad Vashem, said that Mr. Perel’s life as a Jew among the Hitler Youth was more than unusual.

“We know of Jews using false papers and presenting themselves as non-Jews, even Aryans, during the Holocaust in different places throughout Europe, even in Berlin,” Mr. Allen said in an email. “But to be in the heart of the lion’s den, under that level of scrutiny all the time and, in a sense, part of the ideology of the ‘enemy,’ as Shlomo was, is a very unique and rare position.”

Mr. Perel recalled how invested he had become in the Nazi philosophy even as the war turned against Germany.

“I was deeply involved in a world that had been forced upon me, my reasoning powers had finally been completely anesthetized,” he wrote in his memoir, published in English and French as “Europa, Europa,” “and my mental faculties were so befogged that no ray of reality could penetrate. I continued to feel just like one of them.”

As the war neared its end, Mr. Perel was sent to the Western Front, assigned to a unit guarding bridges. When American soldiers arrested him, and his squad and briefly held him in a prisoner-of-war camp, his war was over. He was no longer Josef Perjell. He was once again Shlomo Perel.

Mr. Perel moved to Munich, where he was a translator for the Soviet Army during interrogations of Nazi war criminals. He emigrated to the British mandate of Palestine, fought in the Israeli war of independence and managed a zipper factory.

In 1959, he married Dvora Morezky. She died in 2021. He is survived by a son, Uziel, and three grandchildren. Another son, Ronen, died in 2019.

For many years Mr. Perel put his memories of the Holocaust aside. But in the late 1980s, after a near-fatal heart attack, he began to discuss his past and to write his memoir.

The film adaptation, written and directed by Agnieszka Holland, starred Marco Hofschneider as Mr. Perel. It earned Ms. Holland an Oscar nomination for best adapted screenplay.

In addition to winning the Golden Globe for best foreign film, the movie was named best foreign film by the New York Film Critics

Circle, the Boston Society of Film Critics and the National Board of Review. But the German Export Film Union declined to select it as its entry for an Academy Award for best foreign film — a decision that prompted many of Germany’s leading filmmakers, including Wolfgang Petersen and Werner Herzog, to sign a letter of protest that was published in Daily Variety.

Mr. Perel attended the film’s premiere in Lodz.

Wehrmacht, (German: “defense power”) the armed forces of the Third Reich. The three primary branches of the Wehrmacht were the Heer (army), Luftwaffe (air force), and Kriegsmarine (navy).

In 1992, he reunited with some of his former Hitler Youth comrades and revealed to them that he was Jewish. Some years earlier, he had gotten together with surviving members of the Wehrmacht unit that had accepted him as a German.

He lectured about his experiences in Israel and around the world. “He insisted on including, with every lecture or talk he gave, a message for accepting the other,” Mr. Brakin, his great-nephew, said in a text message, “including the one that is different, and a message against racism in any form it might take.”

But Mr. Perel never fully purged himself of the Nazi identity he had adopted.

“To this day, I have a tangle of two souls in one body,” he told The Washington Post in 1992. “By this I mean to say that the road to Josef, the Hitler Youth that I was for four years, was very short and easy. But the way back to the Jew in me, Shlomo, or Solly, was much harder.”

“I love him,” he said, referring to Josef, “because he saved my life.”

Richard Sandomir is an obituaries writer.

Let's write about Lion Feuchwtanger

 The Road To Hell: Berlin, 1933

Adolf Hitler (1889-1945)

This echo excerpt was published in Persuasion: 

An excerpt from Lion Feuchtwanger’s “The Oppermanns.”

Excerpting from The Oppermanns, a novel written by the Bavarian-Jewish novelist Lion Feuchtwanger in 1933. A reissue of the English translation with a new introduction by Joshua Cohen, the winner of this year’s Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, is published by McNally Editions.

An outspoken early critic of the Nazi movement, and one of Germany's most famous writers, Feuchtwanger fled into exile months before he wrote The Oppermanns. The book is based on his own experience and that of his family and friends, as well as secret reports smuggled out of Germany by anti-Nazi activists. Following its publication, Feuchtwanger and his wife were both imprisoned by the Vichy regime in France. They eventually fled to the United States, where they lived until his death in 1958.

According to the historian Richard J. Evans, The Oppermanns was “the first great masterpiece of anti-fascist literature.” 

Set in the aftermath of Hitler’s rise to power, the novel revolves around the Oppermann brothers: Gustav, a literary critic and the book’s central character; Edgar, a prominent surgeon; and Martin, the manager of the family’s furniture company. With painstaking realism, Feuchtwanger charts the institutionalization of anti-Semitism and the decay of German democracy through the brothers’ desperate attempts to come to terms with a country overrun by “barbarism.”

This scene takes place the night after Martin Oppermann is confronted by Herr Hinkel, an employee of the Oppermann family’s furniture company and a member of the Nazi party, who demands that Martin fire four Jewish workers and replace them with “Aryans.”

— The Editors.

During the night, toward dawn, they arrived at Martin Oppermann’s house in Corneliusstrasse. Thrusting the bewildered maid to one side, one of them entered Martin and Liselotte’s bedroom armed with a revolver and truncheon; he was followed by four or five more, all very young men.

“Herr Oppermann?” inquired the leader in a courteous tone.

“Yes,” said Martin. It was neither fright nor a desire to be disagreeable that made his voice sound gruff, it was merely that he was still half asleep. Liselotte had started up. She stared with wide, terrified eyes at the lads. It was said all over the country that those who fell into the hands of the state police were lucky, but woe to those who fell into the hands of the Nationalists. And these fellows were Nationalists.

“What do you want from us?” asked Liselotte anxiously.

“We want nothing from you, madam,” said the young man. “You are to dress and come with us,” he said to Martin.

“Very well,” returned Martin. He tried to work out the young man’s rank in the stormtrooper army. It was indicated by the metal ornament on the collar, the “mirror” as it was called. The man had two stars, but Martin did not know what the title of his rank was. He would have liked to inquire, but the young man might take the question as a sign of contempt. Martin was very calm. It was common knowledge that many were done to death in the cellars of the stormtroopers’ barracks, their names were known. There were only very few who came out of these cellars entirely without injuries. But, strangely enough, he was not afraid. “Don’t worry, Liselotte,” he said. “I shall soon be back again.”

“That won’t be altogether left to your decision, sir,” said he of the two stars. They put him into a taxi. He sat limply, his eyes half closed.

Lion Feuchtwanger (b. 1884 in Germany- d. 1958 Los Angeles Calif.) author of The Oppermanns, published in 1933.

His guards were carrying on a conversation in low tones. “Will we be allowed to stick him against the wall right away? I hope they let us and not the Thirty-Eighth examine him.” Martin rocked his head back and forth. What a childish way of carrying on. They wanted him to dismiss his Jewish employees. Perhaps they would attempt to bully him into it by ill treatment. Merchants of high standing and directors of industries had been dragged off to Nationalist barracks and concentration camps in order to extort voluntary resignations from them or the renunciation of some legal right. The Nationalists wanted to get possession of the industries that had been built up by the five hundred thousand Jews. They coveted their businesses, their positions, their money. They considered all means toward this end justified. In spite of all that, Martin instinctively felt that he, personally, was safe. He did not believe that he would be detained long. Liselotte would get busy on the telephone, so would Mühlheim1.

He was taken into a dreary room on an upper floor. A man was sitting there with four stars on the collar of his uniform, and there was another seated at a typewriter. The two-starred man reported: “Troop Leader Kersing with a prisoner.” That was it, the two-starred men were called troop leaders. Martin was questioned as to his identity. Then someone appeared in a more ornate brown uniform. He had no stars on his collar but a simple leaf. He sat down at the table. It was a fairly large table, a candelabra with lighted candles on it, as well as a bottle of beer and some books that seemed to be treatises on jurisprudence. The man thrust the books aside. Martin gazed at the candelabra. What a silly setting, he thought, and in the age of Reinhardt too. The chap had a leaf on his collar, had he? As a matter of fact, it wasn’t a leaf but an oak twig. They were very exact in such details.

“Your name is Martin Oppermann?” asked the man with the oak twig. It’s about time they knew that, thought Martin. It occurred to him that the thing was called a standard. Those with twigs on their collars were called standard bearers. That man was quite a big shot, a robber chieftain.

“Yes,” he said.

“You have resisted official regulations?” came the question from behind the candelabra.

“Not that I know of,” said Martin.

“In these times,” the man with the oak twig said sternly, “resistance to the regulations of the Leader is a treasonable act.”

Martin shrugged his shoulders. “I resisted the regulations of my packer Hinkel,” he said. “I am not aware that he has been appointed to discharge any official function.”

“Write that down,” said the man with the oak twig. “The accused denies his guilt and makes evasive answers. Take the man away,” he commanded the guard.

The two-starred man and three others took Martin down the stairs again and then lower still, down badly lit steps. This is the cellar then, thought Martin. They were now in complete darkness. The way led through a long passage. Martin was seized firmly by the arms. “Walk in step, man,” said a voice. The corridor was a long one. They turned a corner, then another. Someone flashed an electric torch into his face. Then they ascended a few steps. “Keep in step, you,” one of them said to him and gave him a push in the back. What a childish way of carrying on, thought Martin.

After he had been marched in different directions for about ten minutes, he was thrust into a fairly large, dimly lit room. Here things looked a bit more serious. Men were lying on boards and on heaps of rags. There were between twenty and thirty of them, half naked, bleeding, groaning, hideous to look at. “Say Heil Hitler when you enter anywhere,” commanded one of his guards, giving him a blow in the ribs.

“Heil Hitler,” said Martin obediently. They pushed through the rows of hideous looking, groaning people. There was a smell of sweat, excrement, and blood in the room. “There’s no more room in waiting room Number Four,” said the man with the two stars.

Martin was taken into another room, which was smaller and crudely lit. A few people were standing in it, their faces to the wall. “Stand over there, Jew-pig,” said someone to Martin. He stood beside the others; a gramophone was playing the “Horst Wessel Song”:

Make way for the boys of the Brown Battalions,

Make way for the boys of the Shock Brigades,

The swastika blazons the hope of millions,

The era of Freedom and Plenty begins.

“Join in the song,” came the order. The truncheons began to swing and the people with their faces to the wall sang. Then a record of one of the Leader’s speeches was played and after that the “Horst Wessel Song” again. “Salute,” came the order. Those who did not hold their arms or fingers stiffly enough in the ancient Roman salute were struck on the offending arms or fingers. Then “Join in the song,” came the order again. Then the gramophone was turned off and perfect silence reigned in the room.

That lasted, perhaps, half an hour. Martin grew very weary. He turned his head cautiously. “Stand still, will you, man,” said someone and struck him across the shoulders. The blow hurt him but not severely. Then the gramophone started again. The needle’s worn out, thought Martin. And I’m dog-tired. Even they will eventually get bored looking at my back.

“We’re going to say Our Father now,” commanded the voice. They recited the Our Father obediently. Martin had not heard it for a long time; he had only a vague idea of it. He took careful note of the words, they were really splendid words. The gramophone proclaimed the twenty-five points of the Party’s program. I’m getting training exercises of a sort now, thought Martin. Liselotte is surely telephoning by now. So is Mühlheim. Liselotte—she is the one I am worrying about most.

To stand for two hours sounds a mere nothing. But it is not easy for a man verging on fifty and unused to any form of bodily exertion. The glaring light and its refection on the wall tortured Martin’s eyes, the squeaking of the gramophone tortured his ears. But finally, after what seemed to him an eternity, though it was actually only two hours, the thing really did get too boring for them. They released him from the wall, drove him once more up and down steps and through dark passages and finally into a small room, which was rather dark.

The young men again took charge of him. Martin would have liked to talk to them, but he was too tired. The next man who spoke to him was Hinkel the packer. He was not in uniform. “I have interceded for you, Herr Oppermann,” he said, scrutinizing him with his mean eyes. “After all, we have been associated for a number of years. I think you would be wiser to give in. Sign a paper to the effect that you will comply with the regulations of the business committee, dismiss those four people and you are free.”

“I have no doubt that you mean well, Herr Hinkel,” said Martin peacefully. “But I cannot discuss the matter with you here. I can only deal with business matters in Gertraudtenstrasse2.” Hinkel the packer shrugged his shoulders.

Martin had a rough pallet in a small room allotted to him. His head ached. Also the place on his back, where he had been struck, was beginning to hurt. He tried to remember the words of the Our Father. But the Hebrew words of the prayer for the dead, which he had so recently spoken, substituted themselves. He was glad to be alone. He was exhausted. But the light had not been switched off and that prevented him from going to sleep.

Before the night was over, he was again taken to the room to which he had first been brought. Behind the table with the candelabra on it there now sat a man who had no twig on his collar, but only two stars. “You can go now, Herr Oppermann,” he said. “There are only a few formalities for you to comply with. Kindly sign this paper.” It was a statement that he had been well treated. Martin read it through, nodding his head. “If, for instance, I treated my employees in such a way,” he said, “I doubt whether they would make such an affidavit for me.”

“You don’t mean to tell me, sir, do you,” snarled the man, “that you have been badly treated here?”

“Don’t I mean to tell you?” Martin asked in turn. “Very well,” he added, “I won’t tell you.” He signed the paper.

“Then there’s this, too,” said the man. It was an order to pay two marks, one mark for lodging and one mark for board and services rendered.

The music was free, thought Martin. He paid and got a receipt. “Good morning,” he said.

“Heil Hitler,” said the two-starred man.

Taken from The Oppermanns (1933) by Lion Feuchtwanger. Translated by James Cleugh and Joshua Cohen. McNally Editions (2022).