The check list was complete. The day was under control.
Groteschele stepped on the bathroom scales—185. He had weighed 165 when he was twenty-one. He knew some men who refused to weigh themselves, were afraid to get the bad news. Groteschele weighed himself every day of his life. As he stepped off the scales he even forced himself to think what the additional fat meant. Face reality, he told himself with a quiet pride. Facing reality was what had gotten him where he was.
As he showered, rubbing his body with a rough natural sponge, he ran over the physical differences between twenty-one and forty-eight Then he had been lean and muscular. Now there was an overlay of fat about the torso. Not gross, but noticeable in a suit. Softer. Around the waist the flesh was a bulge. Where it showed most was in his neck and face. His collars were usually tight and bit into the flesh, making his face slightly pink. As he shaved he calculated whether or not it would be possible to exercise the fat off. The calculation did not take long.
He did not have time for exercise.
Only once during his five-stage (car, train, taxi, plane, taxi) trip from Scarsdale to Washington did Groteschele’s mind relax and think of anything except the briefing he would present It was in the taxicab from Grand Central to La Guardia. There was something about the luxury of a taxicab, to ride alone while others rode in buses, that made Groteschele think of his youth. Briefly he permitted himself the luxury of letting his mind, wander.
Groteschele’s father was a tough, brilliant, and hardworking physician, a highly skilled surgeon. He was also a Jew, unfortunately in Germany. Early in the 1930s he had seen what was coming. He had argued withother Jews in his native Hamburg that there were only two alternatives: arm and fight, or leave Germany. The great majority of his friends and relatives, anchored by their possessions and inured to the prospect of suffering, stayed in Germany. Many of them died in gas ovens.
Walter Groteschele was fifteen when his father abandoned his medical practice and moved from Hamburg, via London and New York, to Cincinnati. Before his father could practice medicine in America it was required that he take two years of residency and pass a series of examinations. He was never able to get enough money ahead to do the two years’ residency. Emil Groteschele worked first as a ditchdigger for a utilities company. He could not, however, stand the calluses and the coarsening of his surgeon’s hands. Eventually he wound up as a butcher in a kosher butcher shop. This was an irony, for Emil GroteSchele was a Reform Jew and anything but devout. But the work did allow him to use his hands in somewhat the fashion for which they had been exquisitely trained.
Emil Groteschele was not an embittered man. He had understood clearly what his prospects were when he left Berlin. He was saving his life and the lives of his family. Nothing more. One of the few times that his son had seen him angry was when the subject of the Diary of Anne Frank came up. Emil Groteschele had offended the Jews of Cincinnati by arguing that Anne Frank and her family had acted like imbeciles. Rather than hiding in an attic and 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.