Upton Sinclair - Dragons’s teeth

The wife of Johannes Robin didn’t need any warning as to danger; she was back in old Russia, where fear had been bred into her bones. When Irma strolled down the aisle of the great department store, Mama was asking prices, a natural occupation for an elderly Jewish lady. She followed at a distance, and when Irma went out onto the street and Lanny came along they both stepped into the car. "Where is Freddi?" she whispered with her first breath.

"We have not heard from him," said Lanny, and she cried: "Ach, Gott der Gerechte!" and hid her face in her hands and began to sob.

Lanny hastened to say: "We have got things fixed up about Papa. He’s all right, and is to be allowed to leave Germany, with you and the others." That comforted her, but only for a minute. She was like the man who has an hundred sheep, and one of them has gone astray, and he leaves the ninety and nine and goeth into the mountains, and seeketh that which is gone astray. "Oh, my poor lamb, what have they done to him?"

The mother hadn’t heard a word from her son since he had called Lanny, and then written her a comforting note. She had been doing just what Lanny had been doing, waiting, numb with fear, imagining calamities. Freddi had forbidden her to call the Budds or to go near them, and she had obeyed for as long as she could stand it. "Oh, my poor darling, my poor baby!"

It was a painful hour they spent. The good soul, usually so sensible, so well adjusted to her routine of caring for those she loved, was now in a state of near distraction; her mind was as if in a nightmare, obsessed by all the horror stories which were being whispered among the Jews in the holes where they were hiding, apart from the rest of Germany. Stories of bodies found every day in the woods or dragged out of the lakes and canals of Berlin; suicides or murdered people whose fates would never be known, whose names were not mentioned in the press. Stories of the abandoned factory in the Friedrichstrasse which the Nazis had taken over, and where they now brought their victims to beat and torture them. The walls inside that building were soaked with human blood; you could walk by it and hear the screams—but you had best walk quickly! Stories of the concentration camps, where Jews, Communists, and Socialists were being made to dig their own graves in preparation for pretended executions; where they underwent every form of degradation which brutes and degenerates were able to devise—forced to roll about in the mud, to stick their faces into their own excrement, to lash and beat one another insensible, thus saving labor for the guards. "Oi, oi!" wailed the poor mother, and begged the Herrgott to let her son be dead.

Only one thing restrained her, and that was consideration for her kind friends. "I have no right to behave like this!" she would say. "It is so good of you to come and try to help us poor wretches. And of course Freddi would want us to go away, and to live the best we can without him. Do you really believe the Nazis will turn Papa loose?"

Lanny didn’t tell her the story; he just said: "It will cost a lot of money"—he guessed that would help to make it real to her mind. She couldn’t expect any kindness of these persecutors, but she would understand that they wanted money.

"Oh, Lanny, it was a mistake that we ever had so much! I never thought it could last. Let it all go—if only we can get out of this terrible country."

"I want to get you out, Mama, and then I’ll see what can be done about Freddi. I haven’t dared to try meantime, because it may make more trouble for Papa. If I can get four of you out safely, I know that is what Freddi would want."

"Of course he would," said Mama. "He thought about everybody in the world but himself. Oi, my darling, my little one, my Schatz! You know, Lanny, I would give my life in a minute if I could save him. Oh, we must save him!"

"I know, Mama; but you have to think about the others. Papa is going to have to start life over, and will need your counsel as he did in the old days. Also, don’t forget that you have Freddi’s son."

"I cannot believe any good thing, ever again! I cannot believe that any of us will ever get out of Germany alive. I cannot believe that God is still alive."

Oberleutnant Furtwaengler telephoned, reporting that the prisoner had signed the necessary documents and that the arrangements were in process of completion. He asked what Lanny intended to do with him, and Lanny replied that he would take the family to Belgium as soon as he was at liberty to do so. The businesslike young officer jotted down the names of the persons and said he would have the exit permits and visas ready on time.

It would have been natural for Lanny to say: "Freddi Robin is missing. Please find him and put me in touch with him." But after thinking and talking it over for days and nights, he had decided that if Freddi was still alive, he could probably survive for another week or two, until the rest of his family had been got out of the country.

Lanny had no way to hold Goring to his bargain if he didn’t choose to keep it, and as half a loaf is better than no bread, so four-fifths of a Jewish family would be better than none of them—unless you took the Nazi view of Jewish families!

However, it might be the part of wisdom to prepare for the future, so Lanny invited the Oberleutnant to lunch; the officer was pleased to come, and to bring his wife, a tall sturdy girl from the country, obviously very much flustered at being the guest of a fashionable pair who talked freely about Paris and London and New York, and knew all the important people. The Nazis might be ever so nationalistic, but the great world capitals still commanded prestige. Seeking to cover up his evil past, Lanny referred to his former Pinkness, and said that one outgrew such things as one grew older; what really concerned him was to find out how the problem of unemployment could be solved and the products of modern machinery distributed; he intended to come back to Germany and see if the Führer was able to carry out his promises.

A young devotee could ask no more, and the Oberleutnant warmed to his host and hostess. Afterward Irma said: "They really do believe in their doctrine with all their hearts!" Lanny saw that she found it much easier to credit the good things about the Hitler system than the evil. She accepted at face value the idea current among her leisure-class friends, that Mussolini had saved Italy from Bolshevism and that Hitler was now doing the same for Germany. "What good would it do to upset everything," she wished to know, "and get in a set of men who are just as bad as the Nazis or worse?"

One little hint Lanny had dropped to the officer: "I’m keeping away from the Robin family and all their friends, because I don’t want to involve myself in any way in political affairs. I am hoping that nothing of an unhappy nature will happen to the Robins while we are waiting. If anything of the sort should come up I will count upon Seine Exzellenz to have it corrected."

"Ja, gewiss!" replied the officer. "Seine Exzellenz would not permit harm to come to them—in fact, I assure you that no harm is coming to any Jewish persons, unless they themselves are making some sort of trouble."

The latter half of this statement rather tended to cancel the former half; it was a part of the Nazi propaganda. That was what made it so difficult to deal with them; you had to pick every sentence apart and figure out which portions they might mean and which were bait for suckers. The Oberleutnant was cordial, and seemed to admire Lanny and his wife greatly; but would this keep him from lying blandly, if, for example, his chief was holding Freddi Robin as a hostage and wished to conceal the fact? Would it keep him from committing any other act of treachery which might appear necessary to the cause of National Socialism? Lanny had to keep reminding himself that these young men had been reared on Mein Kampf; he had to keep reminding his wife, who had never read that book, but instead had heard Lord Wickthorpe cite passages from Lenin, proclaiming doctrines of political cynicism which sounded embarrassingly like Hitler’s.