In The Presence Of My Enemies

By then, the teachers had stopped hissing. Once Haldweim's coffin had passed, the cameras turned away from the schoolchildren. They'd served their purpose.Herr Kessler and another teacher started talking in low voices. "I wonder when we'll have a new Fuhrer, " the other man said.

"I hope it's soon," Alicia's teacher answered. "It wasn't like this when Himmler died. I remember that. Back then, everybody knew we'd stay on a steady course. Nowadays?" He shook his head. Disapproval radiated from him.

"They'll make a good choice, whoever it finally is," the other teacher said.

Herr Kessler seemed to realize he might have gone too far. "Oh, I'm sure they will," he said quickly. You never could tell who might be listening. Alicia had learned that long before she found out she was a Jew.

I could report him,she thought. The news always ran stories about heroic children who turned in evildoers they'd discovered-sometimes even their own parents. Getting rid of her bad-tempered teacher was tempting, too.

But the idea died before it was fully formed, for Alicia's next thought was,If I denounce him, they'll probably investigate me, too. She shook her head in horror of her own. How did the handful of Jews at the heart of the Germanic Empire survive? By never drawing any special notice to themselves. Perhaps someone else would report Herr Kessler, but she wouldn't. She couldn't. She didn't dare.

The last unit of brownshirts left the Adolf Hitler Platz. It began to empty, and did so almost as quickly and efficiently as it had filled. People streamed away to the buses and trains that had brought them to the square. The lines were long, but they were orderly, and they moved fast. There was next to no pushing and shoving and shouting, as Alicia's schoolbooks said there was in less enlightened parts of the world.

Again, she wondered,Are my books telling the truth? If they lied about Jews-and she had to believe they did-what else did they lie about? Had there ever been a Roman Emperor named Augustus? Was Mt. Everest really the tallest mountain in the world? Had Horst Wessel been a hero and a martyr? Were two and two truly four?

She muttered in annoyance. She'd checked her arithmetic lessons before, and they held good. But how could she test what the books said about Mt. Everest, which was far away and hard to get to, or about Horst Wessel and Augustus, who'd lived in the altogether irretrievable past? She saw no simple way.

Maybe Daddy knows,she thought as she scrambled aboard her school bus. Her father knew all sorts of strange things, many of them useless but most of them interesting or entertaining. If he didn't know these, she couldn't think of anyone who would.

Herr Kessler got on the bus. He counted the students to make sure nobody had been left behind, then grunted in satisfaction. "Everyone present and accounted for," he told the driver before returning his attention to the class. "Out of respect for the memory of our beloved Fuhrer, you will be silent-completely silent-on the return journey to Stahnsdorf. If you are not silent, you will be very, very sorry. Do you understand me?" He sounded as if he looked forward to making someone, or several someones, very, very sorry.

Alicia didn't expect anyone to respond to what was obviously a rhetorical question, but a boy held up his hand and said, "Herr Kessler!"

"Ja?" The teacher was taken aback, too.

"Herr Kessler, when will we have a new beloved Fuhrer?"

Kessler blinked. "Why, when we do, of course," he answered. Alicia had no trouble figuring out what that meant. It meant he didn't know, either.

Heinrich Gimpel suspected the highest authorities in the Reich would have suppressed the first edition of Mein Kampf if they'd thought they could get away with it. But plenty of old copies were still floating around, and word of the first Fuhrer 's startlingly subversive statements spread too wide and too fast for suppression to have any hope of success. That being so, those in high places simply sat tight, hoping the fuss would die down of its own accord.

"Who would have imagined Hitler wrote such a thing?" Heinrich said at work one morning. He didn't like talking about Hitler at all, but the first edition, despite official silence-maybe because of official silence-was so much on people's minds that not talking about it would have seemed odd. He didn't want to seem odd in any way.

"I know what it must have been," Willi Dorsch said.

"Tell me, O sage of the age," Heinrich said.

"He must have written the first edition before he got the Party fully into his hands," Willi responded. "As soon as he did, then the Fuhrerprinzip took over, and everything ran from the top down, the way it does now."

"That…makes a certain amount of sense," Heinrich said. In fact, it made more than a certain amount. Willi was shrewd, no doubt about it.