A Jewish Story. Sheldon Cohen

way to hide what’s on one’s mind than screaming it out in a book for the whole world to see. And to meet his goals, he had to get the Jews out of the way.”

      “You were right. He’s starting to try isn’t he?”

      “Yes, as soon as he became chancellor in thirty-three. He’s not just trying, he’s succeeding. We’re seeing a chipping away for Jews of rights guaranteed all citizens, and I’m afraid it will get worse. He’s been in control for three years now and if we can believe what he says, Europe—and the world—is his goal. This could mean war, and if it ever comes to pass, God can only know what will happen to the Jews. From my reading of Mein Kampf, I fear the worse.”

      “What do you mean by the worse?”

      “If we’re lucky we’ll be sent out of Germany someplace. If we’re not and if another World War starts it could mean…well, I hate to think about it,” he said staring at the floor.

      “He’ll kill us?” said David without hesitation. Then in an ever-increasing loudness, he said. “Never, I’ll take a bunch of them with me if that happens. Wouldn’t you?”

      “I would hope I would be able to. I would hope to fight back, but with what? People want to live; they hang on to hope up until the last minute. By then it might be too late. How do you fight back by yourself? How do you organize resistance? How do you get weapons? What about your family and reprisals? Your reaction is the reaction of the young. Fighting back is the thing to do, but you have to plan with people you can trust, with weapons, in secret. Where does one hide? What does one do?” Your enemies are powerful: an organized army with two-hundred years of experience. We have nothing.”

      “Yeah, I knew that was coming,” said David. Some of my friends have already left Germany. Max and his family went last week.” He slumped back in his chair.

      Ben continued, “If worse comes to worse we have to be ready. The only one outside of the family I talked to about this is my friend in Munich who served with me in the world war and sent me Hitler’s book. I’ve tried to talk to a few others, but they look at me like I’m nuts. One minute into the conversation, it’s clear to me how they’re thinking, so that’s the end of it; no sense going on. No one wants to believe there is such a possibility. The Russian Jewish and Polish citizens like my parents and relatives who lived in the Pale of Settlement in Russian-controlled Poland have known anti-Semitism, that kills. Let’s pray that we never experience what they have gone through.”

      “What’s the Pale of Settlement?” asked a quizzical David

      “That’s a good question. I’ll answer it as best as I can and it will give you an idea

      of what happened to Jews. So—let me think…yes, it was 1772 that they divided Poland between Russia, Austria and Prussia. They did this in three stages over twenty-three years, but the effect was that all of a sudden—bang—our ancestors from Poland found themselves part of Russia. The Russians now had a few million Polish Jews inside their boundary. Most of the Jews were poor, and some were in the middle class. The place where Jews had to live was called the Pale of Settlement, which was an area including parts of Poland, Russia, Byelorussia, Lithuania and Ukraine. As time went on the Czar made different boundaries, and the population of Jews in the Pale increased to almost five million by nineteen hundred.

      “At first the Russian government tried to ignore their new Jews even though it was against government policy to have them in their country, but then they found Jews handy for them because they could blame the Jews for the terrible position of the poor peasants. So what do you think happened?”

      “I guess it got bad for the Jews?”

      “You got that right. Russian citizens persecuted the Jews, and the government handcuffed them with all kinds of unfair laws. Jews lived in shtetls, the Yiddish name for small towns. There were certain places they could live and plenty of places they could not. The fact that the Jews kept to themselves and spoke a strange language, Yiddish, caused the other citizens to see them as foreigners. This caused a lot of tension between Jews and Christians, but in spite of the fact that the Jews lived under a Czar who hated them, they had a democratic form of government in their communities. I guess this must be one of the reasons that Hitler blamed the Jews for that bad word…democracy.

      “Christians in the towns beat Jews on the streets and Jewish homes were looted. I remember my grandfather telling me that Jews learned to stay behind locked doors during the Easter and Christmas seasons because armed and drunken peasants took revenge against the ‘Christ killers.’”

      “Okay, I get it,” said David. How come you never told me about this before?”

      “Well, I’m telling you now, because you might need some background to use for future decisions. May God see to it that you never need it.”

      “This Hitler guy scares the heck out of you, that’s for sure.”

      “Yes he does, and if you don’t want to believe me then listen to his own words. I copied them down when I read the book. But first do you remember when I said that Hitler sees Jews and Communists as one and the Same?”

      “Yes.”

      “Do you know any Jewish Communists?”

      “No.”

      “I don’t know any either.”

      “Are there any Jewish Communists?”

      “I’m sure there are.”

      “And I’m sure you’re right. I suspect there are even Jewish Fascists. I’m certain that most Jews are democratic like the Weimar Republic was before Hitler overthrew it. So, as a doctor, I have to wonder if Hitler’s thinking does not mean that he’s paranoid, he feels that others are against him, or, if not that, then he is looking for a scapegoat to occupy the people’s mind just like the Czars of Russia did to turn thinking in the direction they want. Anyway, here is what he said. I’ll read it to you.” Ben turned a few pages in his notebook, found what he was looking for, settled back in his chair and started reading. ‘The Jewish doctrine of Marxism—that’s his word for Communism, he names it after Karl Marx, Communism’s founder— rejects the aristocratic principle of Nature and replaces the eternal privilege of power and strength, by the mass of numbers and their dead weight.’ You see, David? He is saying that he hates democracy. He states that it is a mass of big numbers with its dead weight of all those people who cannot run a country. He believes that the power and strength of one man is what countries needs...that’s what he means by the aristocratic principle of nature and the eternal privilege of power and strength. Then he says, ‘Thus it, he means democracy, denies the value of personality in man, contests the significance of nationality and race, and thereby withdraws from humanity the premise of its existence and culture.’ Again, you see, he says that democracy is wrong because it does not want the strong man, it does see people as equal, which he does not, and that a democratic system will destroy a country. He sees democracy as the ‘end of all order,’ and he says, ‘this doctrine would bring about the end of any order intellectually conceivable to man.’ Then he goes on to say, ‘and as, in this greatest of all recognizable organisms, the result of the application of such a law could only be chaos; on earth it could only be destruction for the inhabitants of this planet.’ Is that taking it far, or not? Here’s how he ends up. ‘If, with the help of his Marxist creed, the Jew is victorious over the other peoples of the world, his crown will be the funeral wreath of humanity and this planet will, as it did thousands of years ago, move through the ether devoid of men. Eternal Nature inexorably avenges the infringement of her commands.’”

      Ben continued, ‘Follow the Jew,’ he says, ‘and it will be the end of life on earth.’ And if all that isn’t enough, here’s his final statement. ‘Hence today I believe that I am acting in accordance with the will of the almighty creator: by defending against the Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord.’

      “Wow, so God’s giving him orders?” said David, shaking his head.

      “No, not that, but in his warped brain he can read God’s mind, so to speak. Is