Sophie's Choice - William Styron [204]
“You see, they were all listening to the radio about the hangings in Nuremberg. It was some special shortwave broadcast, but actual—you know, direct—and I could hear this CBS reporter in the static sounding very far-off describing everything at Nuremberg just as they were doing the hangings. He said that Von Ribbentrop had already gone, and I think Jodl, and then I think he said Julius Streicher was next. Streicher! I couldn’t stand this! I suddenly felt clammy all over, sick, awful. It is difficult to describe, this sick feeling, because of course you could only be, I mean, insane with gladness that these men were being hanged—I wasn’t sick at that—but because it just reminded me again of so much I wanted to forget. I had this same feeling last spring, like I told you, Stingo, when I saw that picture in the magazine of Rudolf Höss with a rope tied around his neck. And so in that room with these people listening about the hangings at Nuremberg, I just wanted suddenly to escape, you know, and I kept saying to myself: Won’t I ever be free of the past? I watched Nathan. He was still on his incredible high, I could tell from his eyes, but he was listening like everyone else to the hangings and his face was very dark and aching. There was something frightening and wrong about his face. And the rest. Everything that was fun, that was truly gay about the party had disappeared, at least in that room. It was like being at a Mass for the dead. Finally the news stopped or maybe the radio become turned off or something and the people all began talking very seriously and with this sudden passion.
“I knew all of them a little, they were friends of Nathan. There was one friend especially I remember. I have talked to him before. His name was Harold Schoenthal, Nathan’s age I guess, and he taught I think it was philosophy at the college. He was very intense and serious but he was one of the ones I liked a little more than the others. I thought he was really a very feeling person. He always seemed to me very tortured and unhappy, very conscious of being Jewish, and he talked a lot, and this night I remember he was even more in this high key and excited, though I’m sure he wasn’t high on anything like Nathan, even beer or wine. He was quite, well, arresting-looking, with a bald head and a droopy mustache like—I don’t know the animal in English—a morse on the iceberg, and a big belly. Yes, walrus. He kept walking up and down the room with his pipe—people always listened when he spoke—and he begun to say things such as ‘Nuremberg is a farce, these hangings are a farce. This is only a token vengeance, a sideshow!’ He said, ‘Nuremberg is an obscene diversion to give the appearance of justice while murderous hatred of the Jews still poisons the German people. It is the German people who should be themselves exterminated—they who allowed these men to rule them and kill Jews. Not these’—and he used these words—‘not these handful of carnival villains.’ And he said, ‘What about Germany of the future? Are we going to allow those people to grow rich and slaughter Jews again?’ It was like listening to a very powerful speaker, this man. I had heard he was supposed to keep his students hypnotized and I remember being fascinated as I watched and listened. He had this terrible angoisse in his voice, talking about the Jews. He asked where on earth are the Jews safe today? And then answered himself, saying nowhere. Alors, he asked, where on earth have the Jews ever been safe? And he said nowhere.