After Dachau (11 page)

“Us!”

“What was the background of the war? Why were the Jews waging war on us?”

This was a bit more challenging. After a moment’s silence, Miss Crenevant fastened her eyes on the dark beauty known as Etta and reminded her that she had written her mid-term paper on this very subject. Even so, it took Etta a few seconds to connect her paper to my question. When she finally had it, it came out almost by rote.

“The Aryan race in its European homeland represented the high-water mark of human evolution. Natural selection had made the Aryans the cream, the elite. The rest, for the most part, were just savages at one stage or another. They didn’t know or care that one race had stepped ahead on the evolutionary scale—except for the Jews. The Jews knew and cared, and they wanted to supplant the Aryans as the elite of the human race. Or if they couldn’t supplant them, they wanted to control them—manipulate them covertly. This is the background you need to have in order to understand the whole story.”

“Okay,” I said. “But this period in history you’re studying begins with the birth of Christ. Why there? What did Christ have to do with it?”

“He was a Jew,” someone noted.

“Certainly, but why begin with this particular Jew? Why not with Moses?”

After a bit of dithering, Sylvia took a stab at it. “At the time when Christ died, the Jews were not a tremendous force in the world.”

“Yes, that’s true, but why does it matter?”

“Because Christianity opened up the world to Jewish ideas.”

“You’ll have to expand on that a little bit,” I told her. “It sounds almost like a contradiction.”

“The original followers of Jesus were Jews living in Jerusalem. They thought of Jesus as one of themselves (which he was, of course), with a message for the Jewish people. Christianity, to the extent that it existed as a separate thing, was a Jewish religion, originally.”

“Go on.”

“It was Paul who thought of exporting it to the Roman world. But to do that, he had to … he had to—what’s the word I want?—he had to revamp it. The religion as it was being practiced in Jerusalem would have been too Jewish for Roman tastes. Paul had to spice it up with ideas Romans would understand and accept. Like the idea of Jesus being offered up as a sacrifice for mankind. The Jews would never have gone for an idea like that.”

“You seem to know a lot about it.”

“I read a book,” Sylvia announced grandly.

“Go on, please.”

“Well, as I say, Paul had to spice it up with Roman ideas, but it was still basically a bunch of Jewish concepts. Like the idea of there being just one God, instead of all the pagan gods the Romans had around, like Jupiter and Venus and so on.”

“Okay. And is this what you mean when you say that Christianity opened up the world to Jewish ideas?”

“Yeah, that’s it. Christianity made the Roman world a more comfortable place for the Jews, because the Romans now worshiped the God of the Jews.”

“How comfortable was it for them? For example, did the Roman Empire ever have a Jewish emperor?”

That got a laugh.

“They weren’t
that
comfortable,” someone said.

“But then the Roman Empire fell,” Natalie said with an air of triumph, as if this might be the chief item in her historical treasury. “That was in 476.”

“Then what?” I prompted.

“The Dark Ages,” someone muttered.

“I
hate
the Dark Ages,” said Sylvia.

“I hate the
Middle Ages
,” said Nanette.

I was glad to see they were beginning to relax.

Ava said, “During the Dark Ages and Middle Ages, that was when the Jews really began to consolidate their power in European culture. At least that’s what I’d say.”

“What was going on in this period?”

Hands shot into the air and I pointed to an overweight child with long, stringy dark hair, who introduced herself as Gilda. “Most of what went on in this period,” she said, “was a reaction to the presence of the Jews in Europe.”

“But what
was
going on?”

The girls traded glances and agreed on an answer:
nothing
.

“It was a period of stagnation on all fronts,” Gilda said flatly.

“Okay. Nothing was going on in this period, and this was a reaction to the presence of the Jews. Is that what you’re saying?”

After a blank moment, Miss Crenevant gave them a hint: “We studied this just before the mid-winter break.”

Nanette’s hand shot into the air, and I nodded.

“The Jews controlled the banking,” she said. “Or was this too early for banking? I guess it really doesn’t matter. What I mean is, they
acted
as the bankers. They controlled the money. I mean, like when two kings wanted to go to war
with each other, both of them had to borrow money from the Jews.”

“They
wanted
to borrow money from the Jews,” Sylvia emended. “They didn’t want to risk using their own.”

“But what does this have to do with nothing happening?” I asked.

Sylvia shrugged. “I guess the Jews didn’t
want
anything to happen. I mean, they controlled the money, and everything was fine as far as they were concerned, so why would they want things to change?”

“Okay. But things did change anyway, eventually.”

“Right,” said Ava. “During the Renaissance.”

“And why did things change during the Renaissance?”

A sea of waving hands sprang up, signaling that they had this one down pat. I pointed to a girl who hadn’t spoken yet, a towheaded child who would be very pretty when her braces came off. She said, “People rediscovered a source of ideas that predated the Jews. They went back to ideas that had been flourishing in classical times, before the Jews began to push their way into Europe. The Renaissance began when the people of Europe reconnected with their Aryan past.”

“Literature, the arts, scholarship, and science flourished,” Ava chirped.

“Galileo,” someone volunteered.

“The Reformation.”

“The printing press.”

They’d found a solid bit of ground, and I let them go on exploring it.

“Michelangelo.”

“Queen Elizabeth.”

“Shakespeare!”

Finally Nanette seemed to deliver the capper. “It was a period of global exploration and commercial expansion.”

I nodded professorially, then stopped them in their tracks by observing that the Jews must have been pretty unhappy about all this.

“Not at all,” Miss Crenevant snapped, unwilling to let her pupils find their own way through this challenge. “Remember
The Merchant of Venice
, girls. The excitement of exploration and of building new trade routes appealed to greathearted men like Antonio. But the free-spirited Aryan adventurers of the era lived at the sufferance of Jewish backers who cared for nothing but their percentage. All the Jews wanted was their pound of flesh—and they usually got it. This is the obvious subtext of the play. But that,” she added portentously, “was only half of it.”

She looked around the room hopefully but was rewarded by blank stares. Finally she relented and gave them a sentence they knew how to complete. “The process of exploration in Africa, the New World, and the Pacific Rim also brought them into contact with …”

“The mongrel races!” the girls chorused triumphantly.

Mallory slid off her stool and headed unsteadily for the door.

“We’ll take a short break,” I said over my shoulder as I went after her.

She was huddled in a corner, back firmly against a wall, arms crossed protectively across her chest.

“I want to go home,” she whimpered.

“Soon,” I said. “Not yet.”

“I
know
all this. I
guessed
all this.”

“That’s not true. You couldn’t have.”

“I mean … I knew it had to be
something
like this.”

I shook my head. “You don’t know
anything
yet.”

“I know it all.”

“You
don’t
know it all. You couldn’t possibly. What’s still to come is beyond anything you could imagine.”

She looked around bleakly. “I don’t need it.”

“You
do
need it. You’ve got to have it.”

“Please,” she whispered.

“No. This is something you’ve got to do. Something
we’ve
got to do.”

She let her shoulders slump in defeat, and I took her arm to lead her back. At the door she stopped and said, “At least let me sit at the back.”

“What?”

“Tell Miss What’s-her-name to clear a row for me at the back so I don’t have to sit there like Exhibit A. I’ll be able to hear just as well from back there.”

WHEN THE GIRLS
were reseated the way Mallory wanted them and had settled down, I said, “Okay, when we broke off, we’d just heard about the mongrel races. What exactly were these?”

This was an easy one, and Gilda of the stringy dark hair stuck up her hand first. “These were the nonevolved races. There were
hordes
of these not-quite-human types who were black and yellow and brown and red—and every mixture.”

“And what’s their significance in this story we’re developing here?”

That was not so easy, and they spent a couple of minutes discussing it in whispers. Finally, Miss Crenevant had to be called in to affirm their judgment, which Ava delivered.

“Christianity first opened the Aryan world to the Jews.
Now it opened the Aryan world to these even less evolved races.”

“How did Christianity do that?”

Ava shrugged. “By sending them missionaries. By making them Christians. As Christians themselves, the Aryans then had to accept them as equals. According to Christianity, God loved everyone equally.”

“Okay, but I’m getting lost here,” I said. “According to what you’ve told me, the Jews had been waging an undeclared war against the Aryans since the time of Christ. Christianity had brought them inside the Aryan world, where they could manipulate and control, but this hadn’t won them the war. Now you seem to be saying that the Jews were developing a new strategy to defeat the Aryans and this new strategy somehow involved these subhuman races.”

Miss Crenevant, becoming impatient with my Socratic method, stepped in to answer my implied question herself. “The height of the missionary efforts of Christians came during the seventeenth, eighteen, and nineteenth centuries, and it was during this period that the Jews began to realize that there was another way to reach their objective. They couldn’t overcome our natural superiority, but they could undermine it by mongrelizing us. They could bring the Aryan race down to their own level by breeding us with Jews and other mongrel races.”

“And how were they going to accomplish this?”

“First of all, by promoting the idea that the mongrel races were just as good. That was the whole point of Christianizing them. If they were worthy of God, then why wouldn’t they be worthy of us?”

“And then?” I asked. “What was the next step in their program?”

“Very simply, the Great War,” Miss Crenevant said. “Everyone could see that this war served no rational political purpose. What they
couldn’t
see—at least initially—was that it served a Jewish purpose, which was to pit the Aryan nations against each other, exhausting them morally and economically and enriching the Jews, who supplied all the combatants with arms and ammunition.”

“Go on. What happened then?”

“Eventually one coalition of Aryan nations won out, but this only paused the war for a few years while the loser—the Germans, basically—recovered. Then they went at it again. But by this time, the Germans knew that the real enemy was the Jews, who had been the instigators and beneficiaries of the war from the start.”

“So the war resumed,” I said. “And did the combatants still not understand why they were fighting?”

Miss Crenevant reflected on this for a moment. “The two sides now had different understandings of why they were fighting. The Germans understood that the real enemy was the Jews, and the Jews were the real target of their enmity. But the Aryan nations allied against them didn’t see this yet. So, in effect, the Germans were fighting two wars, one against their Aryan brothers (who called themselves the Allies) and one against the Jews.”

“So what happened?”

“Finally the Germans scored a decisive victory over the Jews in a small town in Bavaria, essentially turning the tide against them. Once the Jews had been taken out of the war in this battle, the Germans were unstoppable, so much
so that the Allies finally understood what had been going on.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“The battle against the Jews had been a secret one for the Germans, bleeding away their resources year in and year out. But once
that
battle was over, the Allies could see the Germans growing strong again, almost immediately.”

“You mean the Allies finally saw that the Germans had been fighting two wars, one of which the Allies hadn’t even guessed at.”

“That’s right. And at that point the Allies and the Germans made peace and turned their attention to the global elimination of the Jewish plague.”

“A new era had begun.”

“Absolutely.”