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).