“But there was another aspect to the camps. Hitler and a good many of his henchmen had conceived a deep and abiding hatred of Jews and gypsies, both of which they considered to be races, although many people of that time thought the Jews, at least, to be a religion, not a race. Of all the various races of the Untermenschen, the Nazis considered the Jews to be the very dregs, the lowest of the low, undeserving of anything but enslavement and eventual death. Hitler had written as much in a book he produced while he was imprisoned on one occasion.
“When the Nazis first came to power, the more astute of the German Jews, the born survivors, recalled the words of that book, that savage blueprint for genocide, and got out of Germany with their families and as many of their assets as they could easily bear away. But those were only a few. Most remained, for they considered themselves to be good Germans, whose religion had nothing to do with their German nationalism, and not a small number of them were and had been early supporters of the anti-Communist National Socialist German Workers Party, harboring fully as much desire as any other good German man or woman to once more have their country for their own and at peace internally, freed of the oppressive, foreign yokes of slavery and the totally disruptive radical terrorists spawned by the loss of the war and the subsequently depressed economy.
“But as the Nazis consolidated their power, their stranglehold upon the German nation and people, being a Jew gradually became a crime within the borders of Germany and, a little later, Austria. All of the privations and humiliations heaped upon the German nation and people by the cruel, ill-considered treaty that had followed the war were laid, by the Nazis, at the doors of the Jews, invoking amongst the German people the latent anti-Semitism that had lain just below the surface for generations.”
“What is anti-Semitism, Milo?” asked Arabella.
“Another term for hatred of Jews, my dear. I suppose that its genesis was in the theology, the teaching, of the early Christian Church. Jesus Christ was born a Jew, it is said, but it also is said that he was arrested, condemned and executed at the behest of the Jews, and a frequent epithet referring to Jews was ‘Christ killers.’ ”
“Be that as it may, the bulk of the too-long downtrodden, despised but proud German people undertook the persecution with a vengeance, overjoyed to have a group of scapegoats on whom to vent the angers and frustrations that they had for so long endured in helplessness. At that juncture, emigration of Jews from Germany and Austria was being officially encouraged, and many Jews took advantage of that encouragement to get out, though most of those emigrants were allowed to go only at the cost of almost everything that they owned of any value.
“Now, by this time, many German and Austrian Jews had already been killed—murdered, beaten to death on streets and in jails, convicted on trumped-up charges of capital crimes and then executed with the semblance of legality—but large numbers of them were also beginning to be gathered up and shipped off to the aforementioned labor camps without even the mockery of a trial—old and young, men, women and even children, of every station and occupation, rich and poor. The story given out was that they were being collected to be resettled on the lands that the German armies were then conquering in the countries to the east of Germany—Poland and Russia—but that story was never anything more than a lie designed to prevent resistance and ease the intended transition from living Jews to dead Jews, courtesy of the National Socialist German Workers Party.
“Arabella, in that war and its aftermath, between twelve and thirty millions of human beings died, the numbers only dependent on which nation’s figures you credit. Now this is not a large figure, true, not when compared with the losses worldwide caused by the last world war, but it still was a shocking, an almost unbelievable number for those long-ago days and times. And, Arabella, three to six million of them were Jews. So many of the European Jews either emigrated or were killed that, for a long while, Jews were rare in most of Europe and almost unheard of in Germany itself.
“And all of this slaughter and horror and misery because an aggregation of powerful fanatics, trying to practice an insane theory, striving toward a patently impossible goal, were allowed by the people of an unbelieving world to enforce their will upon those over whom they happened to hold sway.
“Can you now understand, comprehend my feeling of loathing, my fear for the liberty and safety of those who depended upon me when I had to listen to Bookerman’s oration, that night, my dear?”
“I … I think so, Milo. But what ever happened to him? Did you finally have to kill him, after all?”
Once more, Milo opened his memories to the Lindsay girl.
Not much felt could be made that winter, for it was stormy and extremely cold, and consequently the sheep and goats and cattle and horses and mules needed their coats of hair and wool for the maintenance of life-giving body warmth. But with the spring, the shearing and the wide-ranging collection of other hair began in earnest. Parties of hunters and those who carted out to gather wild plants and roots bore along bags for the collection of stray wisps of shedding winter coats from the bodies of wild beasts. All of these many and varied contributions went into the heaps and piles of washed wool and hair—hair of horse and hair of mule, hair of cattle and hair of goats, hair of dogs and even hair trimmed from the heads of men, women and children.
Milo and Harry Krueger and old Wheelock handled all of the mundane affairs of the people, leaving Bookerman free to do nothing but supervise and work with those who were engaged in turning the mountains of fur and wool and hair into sheets of felt.
The physician experimented constantly with mixtures and concoctions of many and sundry natural plant extracts and animal products in search of fullering and hardening agents other than the old and increasingly rare man-made chemicals for which he sent cart expeditions to the empty towns and villages along the route they had traversed as far westward as the outskirts of nuked Denver. He knew that these would not always be available to the fledgling nomads and that even were they now to obtain large stores and cache them away somewhere or try to bear them with the caravan, they would deteriorate sooner or later—probably sooner, for they already were at least forty years old. The records that he meticulously kept of each and every experiment with mineral, animal and vegetable substances were eventually to prove invaluable to Milo and the people of the group that would one day call itself the Horseclans.
But they found themselves unable to stay in the little town for long after the arrival of the warmer weather and new growths, for their herds quickly exhausted the graze around and about, and their repeated incursions against the wild game soon drove those herds beyond their reach. So it was load up and move on again, though this time without old Colonel Wheelock, who had died when the spring was but two weeks old.
By midsummer, they had finally reached the city of Salina, from which the decision had been made to bear due south, if the southbound interstate was still as passable as was the eastbound one. Meanwhile, they camped in the buildings, grazed their herds in the overgrown parks and scavenged, as usual, among the dilapidated, often dangerously decrepit structures.
Two men and a woman were killed and several more people suffered injuries of varying degrees of seriousness when the ground floor of a onetime store collapsed into the cellar below and the remainder of the rickety two-story frame building crashed down atop them all. It required most of two days to dig out the dead and the still-living from the ruins, and, fearing repetitions, the council proclaimed that thenceforth scavenging would be done only by experienced and organized teams of men and women under the overall command of a member of the council. Naturally, there was some grumbling at the announcement of the new rule, but when the councillors presented a united front backing their decision, the people at last seemed to accept it.