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By Root 12534 0

of his colleagues shared the Professor’s extreme ethnic views) Sophie was only vaguely aware of her father’s political beliefs, of his governing rage. He kept that apart from his family, though obviously through the early years of her adolescence she could not remain completely oblivious of his animosity toward Jews. But it could scarcely have been an unprecedented thing in Poland to have an anti-Semitic parent. As for herself—bound up in her studies, in the church, in friends and the modest social events of the time, in books, in movies (dozens of movies, mostly American), in piano practice with her mother, and even one or two innocent flirtations—her attitude in regard to Jews, the greater part of whom were in the Cracow ghetto, wraiths barely visible, was at most one of indifference. Sophie insisted on this; I still believe her. They simply did not concern her—at least until as his dragooned secretary she began to divine the depth and extent of her father’s fiery enthusiasm.

The Professor had compelled her to learn typing and shorthand when she was only sixteen. He may already have schemed at using her. Perhaps he was anticipating the time when he would need her skilled services; the fact that she was his daughter would doubtless provide added measures of convenience and confidentiality. At any rate, although for several years she had labored on various weekends typing out much of his bilingual correspondence having to do with patents (sometimes using a British-made Dictaphone which she hated for the spookily faraway and tinnily sinister sound it gave to his voice), she had never, until the Christmas season of 1938, been called upon to deal with any of his many essays; these had been handled until then by his assistants at the university. Thus she was in the position of having drawn upon her like flooding sunrise itself the whole culminating design of his hate-drenched philosophy when he made her take down in Gabelsberger shorthand, then transcribe on the typewriter in Polish and German, the entire text of his chef d’oeuvre: Poland’s Jewish Problem, etc. She recalled the hectic excitement which from time to time stole into his voice as, champing on a cigar, he paced the damp and smoky study in the house, and she obediently scratched on her shorthand pad the skeletal symbols of his logically formulated, precise but flowing German.

He had a spacious yet discriminative style, flecked with sparks of irony. It could be at the same time caustic and seductively convivial. The language was, in fact, superbly articulated German, which in itself had helped gain Professor Biegański his ample measure of renown in such Olympian centers for the propagation of anti-Semitism as Welt-Dienst in Erfurt. His writing had an idiosyncratic charm. (Once that summer in Brooklyn, I pressed upon Sophie a volume of H. L. Mencken, who was then, as now, one of my infatuations, and I observe for what it is worth that she remarked that Mencken’s scathing style reminded her of her father’s.) She took his dictation with care, but because of his runaway fervor, in some haste, so it was not until she got down to the job of typing it out for the printer that she began to glimpse seething in that cauldron of historical allusions and dialectical hypotheses and religious imperatives and legal precedents and anthropological propositions the smoky, ominous presence of a single word—repeated several times—which quite baffled and confounded and frightened her, appearing as it did in this otherwise persuasively practical text, this clever polemic which voiced with breezily scurrilous mockery the sly propaganda she had half heard more than once over the Biegański dinner table. But this word that so alarmed her was a new departure. For those several times he had made her change “total abolishment” (vollständige Abschaffung) to Vernichtung.

Extermination. In the end it was as simple and as unequivocal as that. Even so, subtly introduced as it was, steeped in the pleasantly spiced broth of the Professor’s discursive, entertainingly acrid animadversions, the word