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By Root 12529 0

—I don’t know the animal in English—a morse on the iceberg, and a big belly. Yes, walrus. He kept walking up and down the room with his pipe—people always listened when he spoke—and he begun to say things such as ‘Nuremberg is a farce, these hangings are a farce. This is only a token vengeance, a sideshow!’ He said, ‘Nuremberg is an obscene diversion to give the appearance of justice while murderous hatred of the Jews still poisons the German people. It is the German people who should be themselves exterminated—they who allowed these men to rule them and kill Jews. Not these’—and he used these words—‘not these handful of carnival villains.’ And he said, ‘What about Germany of the future? Are we going to allow those people to grow rich and slaughter Jews again?’ It was like listening to a very powerful speaker, this man. I had heard he was supposed to keep his students hypnotized and I remember being fascinated as I watched and listened. He had this terrible angoisse in his voice, talking about the Jews. He asked where on earth are the Jews safe today? And then answered himself, saying nowhere. Alors, he asked, where on earth have the Jews ever been safe? And he said nowhere.

“Then suddenly I realized he was talking about Poland. He was speaking how at one of the trials, Nuremberg or somewhere, there have been this testimony about how during the war some Jews escaped from one of the camps in Poland and tried to find safety among the local people but the Poles turned against the Jews and did not help them. They did horribly worse. In fact, they murdered them all. These Polish people just killed all the Jews. This was a horrible fact, Schoenthal said, and it proves that Jews can never be safe anywhere. He almost shouted that word anywhere. Even in America! Mon dieu, I remember his rage. When he spoke of Poland I felt even sicker and my heart begun to beat fast, although I don’t think he was giving me any special thought. He said Poland might be the worst example, perhaps even worse than Germany or at least as bad, for wasn’t it in Poland where after the death of Pilsudski, who protected the Jews, the people leaped to persecute the Jews as soon as they had a chance? He said wasn’t it in Poland that young, harmless Jewish students were segregated, made to sit on separate seats at school and treated worse than Negroes in Mississippi? What make people think this couldn’t happen in America, things like these ‘ghetto benches’ for the students? And when Schoenthal speak like this, of course I couldn’t stop thinking of my father. My father, who helped create that idea himself. It was suddenly like the presence, l’esprit of my father have come into the room very near me, and I wanted to drop through the floor. I couldn’t stand no more of this. I had put such things away from myself for so long, buried them, sweeped them under the rug—a coward, I suppose, but I felt this way—and now it was all pouring out of this Schoenthal and I couldn’t stand it. Merde, I couldn’t stand it!

“So when Schoenthal was still talking I went tiptoe around to Nathan’s side and make a whisper to him that we must go home, remember the trip to Connecticut tomorrow. But Nathan didn’t move. He was like—well, he was like someone who was hypnotized, like one of Schoenthal’s students I had heard about, just staring at him, listening to each word. But finally he whispered back to me that he was staying, that I should now go home by myself. He had this wild-eyed look, I was frightened. He said, ‘I won’t be able to sleep until Christmas.’ He said with this crazy look, ‘Go home now and sleep and I’ll come and get you early in the morning.’ So I left in a very big hurry, stopping up my ears to Schoenthal, whose words were half killing me. I took a taxi home, feeling terrible. I completely forgot that Nathan said we were going to be married, I felt that awful. I felt every minute like I must begin to scream.”

Connecticut.

The capsule in which reposed the sodium cyanide (tiny granulated crystals as characterless as Bromo-Seltzer, said Nathan, and similarly water soluble,