Kurt Vonnegut - Mother Night

'How were they recruited?' I said.

'Through my paper,' said Jones, 'but they really recruited themselves. Worried, conscientious parents were writing to The White Christian Minuteman all the time, asking me if there wasn't some youth movement that wanted to keep the American bloodstream pure. One of the most heartbreaking letters I ever saw was from a woman in Bernardsville, New Jersey. She'd let her boy go into the Boy Scouts of America, not knowing that the true name of the B.S.A. ought to be 'the Boogies and Semites of America.' And the boy got to be an Eagle Scout, and then he went into the Army, went over to Japan, and came home with a Japanese wife.'

'When August Krapptauer read that letter he cried,' said Father Keeley. 'That's when he knew, tired as he was, he had to get back to working with youth again.'

Father Keeley called the meeting to order, had us all pray. His prayer was a conventional one, asking for courage in the face of hostile hosts.

There was one unconventional touch, however, a touch I had never heard of before, even in Germany. The Black Fuehrer stood over a kettledrum in the back of the room. The drum was muffled — muffled, as it happened, by the simulated leopard skin I had worn earlier for a bathrobe. At the end of each sentence in the prayer, the Black Fuehrer gave the muffled drum a thump.

Resi's talk on the horrors of life behind the Iron Curtain was brief and dull, and so unsatisfactory from an educational standpoint that Jones had to prompt her.

'Most devoted Communists are of Jewish or Oriental blood, aren't they?' he asked her. 'What?' she said.

'Of course they are,' said Jones. 'It goes without saying,' he said, and he dismissed her rather curtly.

Where was George Kraft? He was sitting in the audience, in the very last row, next to the muffled kettledrum.

Jones introduced me next, introduced me as a man who needed no introduction. He said I wasn't to start talking yet, because he had a surprise for me.

He certainly did.

The Black Fuehrer left his drum, went to a rheostat by the light switch, and dimmed the lights gradually as Jones talked.

Jones told, in the gathering darkness, of the intellectual and moral climate in America during the Second World War. He told of how patriotic, thoughtful white men were persecuted for their ideals, how, finally, almost all the American patriots were rotting in federal dungeons.

'Nowhere could an American find the truth,' he said.

The room was pitch dark now.

'Almost nowhere,' said Jones in the dark. 'If a man was fortunate enough to have a short-wave radio,' he said, 'there was still one fountainhead of truth — just one.'

And then, in the darkness, there was the crackle of short-wave static, a fragment of each, a fragment of German, a fragment of Brahms First Symphony, as though played on kazoos — and then, loud and clear —

'This is Howard W. Campbell, Jr., one of the few remaining free Americans, speaking to you from free Berlin. I wish to welcome my countrymen, which is to say the native white gentiles, of the 106th Division, taking up positions before St. Vith tonight. To the parents of the boys in this green division, may I say that the area is presently a quiet one. The 442nd and 444th Regiments are one line — the 423rd in reserve.

There is a fine article in the current Readers Digest with the title, 'There are No Atheists in Foxholes.' I should like to expand this theme a little and tell you that, even though this is a war inspired by the Jews, a war that only the Jews can win, there are no Jews in foxholes, either. The riflemen in the 106th can tell you that. The Jews are all too busy counting merchandise in the Quartermaster Corps or money in the Finance Corps or selling black-market cigarettes and nylons in Paris to ever come closer to the front than a hundred miles.

You folks at home, you parents and relatives of boys at the front — I want you to think of all the Jews you know. I want you to think hard about them.

Now then — let me ask you, is the war making them richer or poorer? Do they eat better or worse than you do? Do they seem to have more or less gasoline than you do?

I already know what the answers to all those questions are, and so will you, if you'll open your eyes and think hard for a minute.

Now let me ask you this:

Do you know of a single Jewish family that has received a telegram from Washington, once the capital of a free people — do you know of a single Jewish family that has received a telegram from Washington that begins, The Secretary of War desires me to express his deep regret that your son ...'

And so on.

There were fifteen minutes of Howard W. Campbell, Jr., the free American, there in basement darkness. I do not mean to suppress my infamy with a casual 'and so on.'

The Haifa Institute for the Documentation of War Criminals has recordings of every broadcast Howard W. Campbell, Jr., ever made. If someone wants to go over those broadcasts, wants to cull from them the very worst things I said, I have no objection to those culls being attached to this account as an appendix.

I can hardly deny that I said them. All I can say is that I didn't believe them, that I knew full well what ignorant, destructive, obscenely jocular things I was saying.

The experience of sitting there in the dark, hearing the things I'd said, didn't shock me. It might be helpful in my defense to say that I broke into a cold sweat, or some such nonsense. But I've always known what I did. I've always been able to live with what I did. How? Through that simple and widespread boon to modern mankind — schizophrenia.

There was one adventure in the dark worth reporting, though. Somebody put a note in my pocket, did it with intentional clumsiness, so that I would know the note was there.

When the light came on again, I could not guess who had given me the note.

I delivered my eulogy of August Krapptauer, saying, incidentally, what I pretty much believe, that Krapptauer's sort of truth would probably be with mankind forever, as long as there were men and women around who listened to their hearts instead of their minds.

I got a nice round of applause from the audience, and a drumroll from the Black Fuehrer. I went into the lavatory to read the note. The note was printed on lined paper torn from a small spiral notebook. This is what it said:

'Coal-bin door unlocked. Leave at once. I am waiting for you in vacant store directly across street urgent Your life in danger. Eat this.'

It was signed by my Blue Fairy Godmother, by Lionel Frank Wirtanen.

My lawyer here in Jerusalem, Mr. Alvin Dobrowitz, has told me that I would surely win my case if I could produce one witness who had seen me in the company of the man known to me as Colonel Frank Wirtanen.

I met Wirtanen three times: before the war, immediately after the war, and finally, in the back of a vacant store across the street from the residence of The Reverend Doctor Lionel J. D. Jones, D.D.S., D.D. Only at the first meeting, the meeting on the park bench, did anyone see us together. And those who saw us were no more likely to fix us in their memories than were the squirrels and birds.

The second time I met him was in Wiesbaden, Germany, in the dining hall of what had once been an officers candidate school of the Engineers Corps of the Wehrmacht. There was a great mural on the wall of that dining hall, a tank coming down a lovely, winding country lane. The sun was shining in the mural, The sky was clear. This bucolic scene was about to be shattered.

In a thicket, in the foreground of the mural, was a merry little band of steel-helmeted Robin Hoods, engineers whose latest prank was to mine the lane and to implement the impending merriment with an anti-tank gun and a light machine gun.