In The Presence Of My Enemies

Good question. He had no answer. He felt empty, useless. What happened to him now was out of his hands. He hoped it was in God's. He knew for certain it was in the Security Police's.

He fell asleep with his glasses on. He never heard the fellow with the cart retrieve his tray, which he'd left by the bars. He stayed asleep till a key clicked in the lock and half a dozen blackshirts burst in. "On your feet, you Schweinehund, you kike, you stinking sheeny!" they screamed.

Blearily, he obeyed. What time was it? Somewhere in the middle of the night, he thought.I have to keep saying no. Whatever they do to me, I have to keep saying no. If they killed him, they killed him. With a little luck-maybe a lot of luck-he could keep his family and friends alive.

The Security Police hustled him along the corridor. His pants fell down. They wouldn't let him pull them up again.

"I'm no Jew. I want a lawyer," he said.

"Shut up!" they shouted in unison. One of them stuck an elbow in his ribs. It hurt. He grunted. He'd never make a cinema hero, laughing at wounds that would kill the average hero. On the other hand, they could have done worse to him than they did.

INTERROGATION, said the sign over the door to the chamber where they took him. It wasn't quite, All hope abandon, ye who enter here, but it was, in the most literal sense of the words, close enough for government work.

They slammed him down into a hard chair and shackled him at wrists and ankles. They shone bright lights in his face. He'd seen this scene at the movies, too. The hero usually mocked his tormentors. Heinrich felt much more like screaming. He managed to keep quiet, which might have been the hardest thing he'd ever done.

"So, Jew…" said a voice from somewhere behind the glaring lights.

"I'm no Jew!" Heinrich exclaimed. "Jesus, are you people out of your minds?" The more offended and horrified he sounded, the better the chance he had…if he had any chance at all.

One of the blackshirts lifted his glasses off his nose. Another one slapped him in the face. His head snapped to the side. His ears rang. He blinked. It didn't do much good. Without glasses, the whole room was blurry.

"Don't spew your lies," the voice said. "You'll only make it worse for yourself."

How could I?he wondered bleakly. "But you've got the wrong man!" he wailed. "I've worked for Oberkommando der Wehrmacht for almost twenty years now, and-"

Another slap. This time, his head jerked the other way. "Tearing down everything the Reich builds up," the voice growled.

An opening! "That'sa lie!" Heinrich said. "Look at my evaluations, if you don't believe me. I've served the Reich. I've never hurt it." That was true. He'd hated himself because it was true, too. Working for the regime might save him now, though. Quickly, desperately, he went on, "Ask the Fuhrer, if you don't believe me."

Raucous laughter from the interrogator. "Tell me another one, Jewboy. As if the Fuhrer cares about the likes of you."

One of the blackshirts who'd frog-marched him into the room muttered to the man behind the lamps. That man, whom Heinrich still hadn't seen, let out a scornful grunt. Then he shifted gears. He started hammering away at Heinrich's pedigree.

That pedigree was, of course, fictitious from top to bottom. The interrogator would have caught out a lot of Jews, grilling them about ancestors they didn't have. But Heinrich was a meticulous man. He knew the ancestors he didn't have as well as the ones he did-maybe better, since more about the fictitious ones had gone down on paper. He had to remind himself to throw in "I don't know"s every so often. How many people really could recite chapter and verse about great-great-grandparents off the tops of their heads? He didn't want the blackshirts to think he'd memorized a script, even if he had.

They slapped him a few more times. It stung, but he endured it. They weren't working anywhere near so hard as they might have to break him. Maybe they weren't sure what they had. Heinrich clung to that hope.

At last, after what could have been half an hour or three hours, the head man said, "Take the kike back to his cell. We'll have another go at him later."

Back Heinrich went. He could have done without that promise from the interrogator. But he hadn't told the Security Police anything. And they still hadn't roughed him up too badly.It could be worse, he thought. On his way out of an interrogation, that would do.

Alicia Gimpel envied her sisters. No matter what the Nazi matrons asked them, they couldn't give anything away. When they denied they were Jews, they believed those denials from the bottom of their hearts. Some of the blackshirts would remember taking them out of school for a long time.