clutching their Jewishness to them they should have made plans to escape. Failing that, they should have been prepared to fight the Nazis when the final day came. “The steps leading up to that miserable attic should have been red with Nazi blood-and that of the Frank family,” Dr. Groteschele argued bitterly.
“If each Jew in Germany had been prepared to take one SS trooper with him before he was sent to the camps and the gas ovens, precious few Jews would have been arrested,” Emil Groteschele argued. “At some point Hitler and the SS would have stopped. Face it. If every Jew who was arrested had walked to the door with a pistol in his hand and started shooting at the local heroes, how long would the Nazis have kept it up? At around a few hundred they would have started to think twice. At a few thousand they would have started to shake a bit. If it got to twenty thousand, they would have called it off. But the first Jews who shuffled quietly off to death camps or hid like mice in attics were instruments of destruction of the rest.”
Groteschele knew that his father considered all of life a battle. He was a complete Darwinian; so much so that he never expressed self-pity for his fall from master surgeon to journeyman butcher.
“It’s a new environment. I’m not as efficient as the Americans,” the muscular determined man said in a pitiless voice, as if he were talking of someone else. “The American was bred for this environment; the weak ones disappeared long ago. I was bred for a softer environment: Jewish ladies with too much fat, rabbis with ulcers, people who ate too much sour cream, lox, matzoth balls.” He stared at his son. “Every group protects itself, just as the individual does. Don’t waste time whining. Be good enough to get into the group you Want.”
His son had taken the advice seriously. He attacked knowledge as if it were an enemy. By the time he was a senior he had won every academic honor in the Cincinnati public schools.
When Groteschele went off to a small Ohio college he had three separate scholarships and not the slightest notion of what he wanted to study. His first year he took liberal-arts courses and studied his classmates. It was reassuring. They were uncertainly motivated, pleasant, anxious about dates, inattentive to lectures, obsessed with material objects-cashmere sweaters, convertibles, record players, stolen college banners. They were the new Jews, Groteschele thought, binding themselves with the invisible links of possessions, but they lacked the drive and ability to absorb punishment that the real Jew had.
Grbteschele majored in mathematics. He went about making the choice systematkally. He learned nothing from talking to his classmates. Instead he. sought out the brightest professors on the campus and questioned them. He pushed them on what American industry would be like in five years. Their advice was unanimous. The nation would be at war or finishing a war and science would be going through a new surge of progress. It would be sparked by mathematics. He was a Phi Beta Kappa in his junior year and summa cum laude at graduation; and did not, literally, know the names of more than a dozen of his classmates.
Before Groteschele could find a job, waves of Japanese planesawept over Pearl Harbor and changed all of our lives. By now Groteschele had developed a prescience, a hard intuition, about what would happen in the future. He did it by the elimination of hopes and the substitution of the calculation of realities. He applied his father’s Darwinism in a methodical and tough manner. He was no Cassandra but he tended always to look carefully and cautiously at where he would be in five years and to move with what was inevitable. His calculation led him to volunteer at once for military duty.
He was selected for OCS and when he finished he was assigned to a group of officers who interviewed German prisoners as part of their processing before being sent to POW camps throughout the country.
At first the job had a delicious undertone of vengeance to it and Groteschele did not deny this to himself. Day after day the men who had bullied Jews in the comfortable little towns of Germany, had swaggered in their party uniforms, had roared and lusted for war, now paraded in front of him. They were bitter-eyed, frightened, uncertain, homesick. Groteschele found them a disappointment and he was surprised at his own reaction.
After a few weeks the interviewing became dull. It was impossible to stay angry at lines of potato-fat men with vacuous eyes who were slack and weary from the Atlantic crossing, who always whined their ignorance of concentration camps. “Konzentration camps, ach nein, Herr Leutnant,” eyes bulging with fake surprise. “Impossible. I never heard of it.” And then the inevitable statement about being a little man, a man in the ranks, a man who carried out orders, a man who did his duty, a man who was secretly anti-Nazi.
After a few months Groteschele, because of his skill In German, was able to get himself transferred to the section which interviewed SS troopers. These interviews were longer, more concentrated, more meaningful. The interviewing officer could, in fact, question an SS man as long as he wished. Groteschele always guided the conversation to the Jewish question. The SS men stared back at him, unafraid and their faces expressionless, and said, “Rabbits. The Jews are like rabbits, but without the speed of a rabbit.” Always it was a rabbit or an undernourished rat or a mouse to which they compared the Jews.
It-was during this time that Groteschele found himself trimming off excess weight and taking daily exercises. Finally he was doing hours of bar-bell exercises, pushups, and road-work every day. He became as physically tough as the SS troopers, his belly as flat, his face as expressionless. Always, just before the interview was over, Groteschele let slip the fact that he was a Jew. Never as a direct admission, always slyly and as if the prisoner had known from the start.
It was the only thing that made the SS troopers crack, even a little. They would stare at Groteschele’s well- muscled body, his inscrutable face, lila bard eyes. Then, for a moment in time, Groteschele could see fear in their eyes. It was gone instantly, the eyes shut, the expression lost. But it was enough for Groteschele. They had seen a different kind of Jew and it frightened them.
By the time the war was over Groteschele had developed a new interest. It was the study of politics. Americans had mastered technology and the scientist would continue to be a hero for some time. But the real decisions, the real power would lie with those who understood politics. Competence in pglitics would be the ultimate sanctuary, although partisan elective politics would be as volatile as ever. He must, he reasoned, be an expert in politics but not subject to popular opinion. He calculated that with the GI Bill and the money be had saved he would be able to get a Ph.D. at an Ivy League college an, still be a few thousand dollars ahead.
His father had only one piece of advice. “If you are going to become a professor change your name to Groth,” he said. “American universities have too many German Jews. They will lose their tolerance for them.”
Groteschele had not changed his name. It was the first time he had rejected his father’s advice, but now he was surer than his father about some things: the character of Americans, for instance, and the favorable attitude toward the Jewish intellectual in the academic world. This did not mean that he was insensitive to names. In fact he found them fascinating. He had, for example, noticed that his name was considered by most to be German and he knew that his appearance was not distinctively Jewish. He considered the possibility that he might even suffer somewhat from anti-German feeling, but he also remembered the guilty conscience which Americans had had over their anti-Getinanign after World War II. All in all, when everything was added up, he calculated that he would benefit by sticking with his name and identity.
Once this decision was made the plan was simple. He knew that it would take some luck, but he was also determined to do everything possible to minimize the importance of that element.
The first thing was to become a protege of Tolliver. Groteschele sensed that Tolliver had an ego of formidable proportions. This was what led him to work in the area of great sweeping diplomatic moves, intricate military strategies, and it was also what led him to an instantaneous and ferocious defense of his views.
For the first year in graduate school Groteschele made no move toward Tolliver. He sat quietly in his classes and read every book and article the man had written. He watched the other graduate students as they slowly learned the pitfalls and terrors of the academic world. By the end of the first year none of them regarded it as “the ivory tower” any more. By then they - bad learned it was more like Kafka’s Castle: a place of enormous tension, the scene of ununderstood conspiracies, a place of stalking and frantic flight from an unseen enemy. Groteschele watched some of the others break and remained impassive. Groteschele was certain that he would not be one of those who broke. He had been prepared for the fact that the big beautiful buildings and the book-lined studies and the quiet seminar rooms would really be scenes of battle.
At the end of the first year Groteschele’s chance came. Tolliver published a book called Models for the Future War. The title had been a mistake. It suggested that Tolliver was, somehow, advocating war. The reviews of the book were generally negative, some of them, scathing. Groteschele read the reviews carefully. Finally he found one in a liberal monthly in which it was clear that the author had not read the whole book but had skimmed the first few chapters and then used that much as a platform to expound his own theories about “the rising tide of militarism.”
Groteschele wrote a 2,000-word letter to the magazine. It was a model of careful and biting analysis. The
