After Dachau (12 page)

“There was a general recognition that the Christian era had in fact been a Jewish era.”

“That’s right. The Christian dating system was junked, and a new zero year was adopted worldwide.”

“And what event marked that zero year?”

That was an easy one, of course, and Miss Crenevant let someone else answer it: “The defeat of the Jews at Dachau, that little town in Bavaria.”

“So from that point on we’ve counted our years as years
A.D.:
years After Dachau. And how many—”

“What
I
don’t get,” growled Gilda, “is the
A.D.-A.D
. thing.”

Miss Crenevant began to scold her for interrupting, but I interrupted Miss Crenevant to ask for an explanation.

“The years
before
A.D.
. are
also
A.D.,
” Gilda said.

I looked at Miss Crenevant, and she coolly returned my
gaze, letting me know that if I was going to run the class, I could jolly well run it on my own.

I cleared my throat and blinked twice while assembling my recitation. “The
A.D
. of the Christian era stands for
anno Domini
, a Latin phrase meaning ‘in the year of our Lord.’ If you give the start date of the Great War as
A.D
. 1914, for example, this translates as ‘in the year of our Lord 1914.’ But if you were to give that date as 1914
A.D.
, this would translate as ‘1914 in the year of our Lord,’ which doesn’t make any sense. The placement always lets you know which dates are which.
A.D
. 576 refers to the Christian era but 576
A.D
. refers to our own. Okay?”

Gilda guessed so, but her grimace of disgust let us know what she thought of the dunces who couldn’t manage the affairs of the world better than this.

“I was about to ask how many years After Dachau have passed by now.”

This raised a roomful of laughs, since this was indeed kindergarten stuff.

“Two thousand and two!” they roared, celebrating what finally appeared to be a linking of “then” to “now.”

A voice from the rear interrupted the celebration.

“Dachau wasn’t a battle,” Mallory stated through clenched teeth. “It was a concentration camp.”

The girls twisted in their seats to look at her. They were plainly stunned—not by what she’d said but by the fact that she’d said anything at all.

“What’s a concentration camp?” one of them asked.

“It’s a collection point for people—in this case, Jews destined for extermination.”

Puzzled, the girls turned to their teacher, who seemed to
share their puzzlement. “Certainly many thousands of Jews died at Dachau,” she said.

“But it wasn’t a battle,” Mallory insisted.

“What was it?” the teacher asked.

“It was … it was a campaign of deliberate extermination.”

Miss Crenevant frowned. “I’m afraid the distinction eludes me. Any battle is a campaign of deliberate extermination, surely. Soldiers who are shooting at each other and throwing bombs at each other aren’t just doing it for fun.”

“But that’s just the point. The Jews at Dachau weren’t soldiers, they were unarmed civilians, including women and children.”

Miss Crenevant’s frown was replaced by a look of frank astonishment. “I’d be fascinated,” she said, “to know where you got such a bizarre idea.”

“You actually don’t know, do you,” Mallory said, dazed. “You actually believe it was a battle.”

Miss Crenevant gave her a not unkindly smile. “As much as I believe that Thermopylae or Hastings or Verdun were battles.”

Mallory shrank into her seat.

“HOWEVER,”
I said, “we’ve still got a way to go to bring us from there to here.” I looked around the room and picked a youngster at the back with frizzy blond hair and a wide, humorous mouth. She said her name was Betty.

“Well, Betty, we haven’t heard from you yet. Why don’t you carry us forward?”

She looked alarmed at being singled out in this way, so I lent her a hand. “The Aryan nations of the world had been at each other’s throats for thirty years. Now they shared a new, common understanding of the world situation.”

“Yes, they all knew that the Jews were the enemy, not each other.”

“That’s right. But there was a lot more to it than that. The unevolved peoples you’ve called the mongrel races didn’t just
quietly disappear at the end of the Great War, did they? What had been happening to them during all the missionary centuries?”

Clearly no one had a clue what I was getting at.

“Think,” I said, “about China.”

“Ah-h-h-h-h-h,” they said, catching up at last.

Ava allowed herself to raise a tentative hand, and I gave her an encouraging nod.

“The missionaries had been bringing more to the mongrel races than just God,” she said. “They’d been bringing them improved health care and medical advances from the Aryan nations and improved agricultural techniques.”

“And what was the consequence of all these gifts?”

“Their populations grew.”

“Their populations
exploded
,” someone amended.

Betty again: “This supported the Jewish strategy of world domination.”

“How so?” I asked.

“The idea was to
overwhelm
the Aryans in mongrels.”

“But how would this help the Jews? If the Aryans were overwhelmed, wouldn’t the Jews be overwhelmed as well?”

The girls traded doubtful glances, and after a moment Miss Crenevant stepped in. “I think only more advanced students would be prepared to answer this question. The Jews were famously cliquish,” she said. “They stuck to their own with a kind of fierce, tribal exclusivity.”

“And this explains why the Jews wouldn’t be overwhelmed by the expansion of the mongrel races?”

“Yes. Lacking this rabid cliquishness, the Aryans would eventually be swallowed up in the mongrel flood, but the Jews would continue to hold themselves aloof. When the
Aryans disappeared, the Jews would still be there, the only distinct race of pure blood. This would make them, by default, the master race of the world.”

Mallory groaned and laid her head down on her arms on the desk in front of her. The girls pretended not to notice, but their eyes widened in dismay.

“A vicious plot,” I observed reassuringly. “So what happened next? We still have a long way to go to bring us to the present.”

“The Aryan Council of Nations was formed in 11
A.D.,”
Etta offered.

Now that familiar, solid ground had been reached at last, the class visibly relaxed.

“It would probably be more accurate,” Miss Crenevant interposed, “to say that the Aryan Council of Nations was formally
recognized
in 11
A.D
. In the years immediately following Dachau, not all nations were ready to acknowledge or embrace the reality of the situation.”

“In the old, Christian style of reckoning, when was the Aryan Council formally recognized?” I asked.

For the answer to that, they had to go to their textbooks. “It would have been 1954,” Ava declared after a bit of searching.

I said, “Tell us a bit about the Council. What was its mission?”

This was the sort of question they expected to see in their quizzes, and they began paging listlessly through their textbooks to find the answer. I interrupted to tell them I just wanted a brief summary, a thumbnail sketch. A couple of girls sighed; two or three shuffled their feet. No one cared to volunteer.

I said, “The author of the Council charter refers to the Spirit of Dachau. What did he mean by that?”

Etta shrugged her shoulders. “He meant it was necessary for the Aryan nations to be as cold as ice. Those were the words he used, ‘cold as ice.’ ”

“And what did this mean?”

They stirred sullenly, and I realized I was on the brink of losing them. “Miss Crenevant,” I said. “Maybe you can assist.”

She seemed relieved to take over. “We’d always taken our natural superiority over the unevolved races for granted, much the way we do with our pets and farm animals, and this nearly led to our downfall. The author of the charter was saying it was time for Aryan peoples to suppress their natural magnanimity and do what had to be done next to safeguard the future of the human race.”

“And what was that? What had to be done next?”

“The Spirit of Dachau had to be carried across the entire face of the earth.”

“Meaning what, exactly?”

“That humanity had to purge itself of mongrel strains once and for all.”

“Why?”

“Why? Because at the rate they were breeding, we’d soon be facing another crisis as horrendous as the one we’d just barely survived.”

“How long did it take for humanity to purge itself of mongrel strains once and for all?”

“A long time.”

“And how do you feel about this?”

“You mean … me, personally?”

“Yes, if you don’t mind.”

“No one feels wonderful about it,” she said with a shrug. “It was necessary and, after all, not without precedent.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“The story of human evolution doesn’t follow the same pattern as the evolution of other creatures. When reptiles emerged from the amphibians, they didn’t destroy the amphibians. When mammals emerged from the reptiles, they didn’t destroy the reptiles. But the same is not true of humans. Among humans, each emerging species apparently destroyed the species from which it emerged. This explains why none of those earlier species survived to the present time. In fact, most biologists feel this accounts for the tremendous speed with which humans evolved from lower forms.”

“So we Aryans were only doing what humans have done from the beginning.”

“Exactly,” said Miss Crenevant. “And in fact we made it all the more painful and difficult for ourselves by
refraining
from doing it for as long as we did.”

“Thank you. But I’d like to return to my earlier question. How long did it take?”

“It took at least eight hundred years. So long as we knew it was being done—and systematically done—there was no need to rush. In some parts of the world the process was so gradual that there was virtually no resistance at all. It may even have taken longer than eight hundred years. No one knows exactly when the last non-Aryan disappeared.”

“But in any case,” I said, “this explains why, if you were to visit the bookstores and libraries of the world and assemble all the books you could locate showing photographs of
people—movie stars, fashion models, musicians, workers, farmers, people at sporting events, school children, and so on—you wouldn’t be able to find a single face in them that wasn’t white. For more than a thousand years, there hasn’t been such a face. For more than a thousand years, being human has meant being Aryan and nothing else.”

“That’s correct.”

I held out a hand to Mallory and said, “We’re done.”

As she made her way to the front of the room, I thanked Miss Crenevant and the girls for their assistance. Then I asked if anyone knew how Napoleon Bonaparte had defined history. No one did.

“Napoleon said, ‘History is just an agreed-upon fiction.’ ”

They looked at me as blankly as if I’d just said something in Greek.

“I have a question,” Mallory said to them. “You all talked about the author of the Aryan Council’s charter as if this was a single individual.”

The girls nodded.

“Let me see if I’ve learned anything here today about how you put this history of yours together. I’m going to guess that the author of the charter was the man who turned the tide against the Jews. He’s probably known as the Hero of Dachau.”

The girls were amazed and delighted with Mallory’s evident progress.

“Is his name known?” This question was greeted with giggles and tickled affirmations.

“Let’s see if I can guess it,” Mallory said. Even before the words
Adolf Hitler
were out of her mouth, the girls broke
into congratulatory applause, coming out of their seats in a spontaneous celebration of her recovery. It was manifest that Mallory’s “amnesia” had been triumphantly cured.

As we turned to leave, Miss Crenevant deftly interposed herself between us and the exit. “Dr. Reese asked if you would grant her an opportunity to extend a personal greeting to you.”

“Please convey my apologies to Dr. Reese, along with my sincere thanks,” I told her, “but this has been a more traumatic experience for Miss Hastings than you might be able to guess.”

It was churlish of me, but we Aryans know when it’s time to be cold as ice.