Polite laughter for Paul’s overcritical estimation of himself. Although balding and sporting a scholar’s stooped shoulders, Paul Bronski had sharp and handsome features.
“Despite the blunder of the High Command in calling me into the army, I predict that Poland will somehow survive.”
In the back of the auditorium, Dr. Franz Koenig stood motionless, looking into the sea of faces. Bronski’s leaving filled him with an exhilaration he had never known. His long, patient wait was almost over.
“I leave this university both heavy-hearted and joyous. The prospect of war is enormously real and it saddens me. But I am content for the things that we have done here together and I am happy because I leave so many friends.”
Koenig didn’t even hear the rest of it. They would all be dripping tears, he knew. Bronski had that faculty to put a tremor in his throat that never failed to move the recipients of his milky words.
They were all standing now, and unabashed tears flowed down young cheeks and even grizzly old cheeks of professors in a sloppy indulgence of sentiment as they sang school songs and anthems, which sounded like school songs and anthems everywhere.
Look at Bronski! Engulfed by his adoring staff. Shaking hands, slapping backs until the end. The “beloved” Bronski. “The University of Warsaw without Paul Bronski is not the University of Warsaw.” “Your office will remain untouched until you return to us.”
Your office, Koenig thought. Your office, indeed.
Dr. Paul Bronski, the “beloved” Paul Bronski, had finished the last of his instructions, dictated the last of his letters, and dismissed his weeping secretary with an affectionate buss.
He was alone now.
He looked about the room. Paneled walls covered with the symbols of achievement that one would gather as the head of a great medical college. Diplomas and awards and photos of students and classes. A billboard of glory.
He shoved the final batch of papers into his brief case. All that was left was a photo of Deborah and the children on his desk. He slid that into the top drawer and locked it. And he was done.
A soft, almost apologetic knock on the door.
“Come in.”
Dr. Franz Koenig entered. The little gray-haired man with the little gray mustache advanced timidly to the edge of the desk. “We have been together for a long time, Paul. Words fail me.”
Paul Bronski was amused. A magnificently understated phrase ... a lovely play on words. Dr. Koenig was a humorless man who could never believe his sincerity was doubted.
“Franz, I’m going to recommend you fill my office—”
“No one can fill—”
“Nonsense ...”
And more garble ... and another farewell.
Franz Koenig waited in his own office across the hall until Paul left, and then he re-entered. His eyes became fixed on the leather chair behind Bronski’s desk. He walked behind it and touched it Yes, tomorrow he would move in and things would look good from here.
My chair ... dean of medicine! My chair. Bronski gone. Quick-talking, teary-voiced Bronski. Ten years he had waited. The board was blinded by Bronski. They were entranced by the fact they could put a graduate of the university as the dean of medicine for the first time in six decades. That’s why they chose Bronski. A whispering campaign against me because I am a German. They were so eager to make Bronski the dean, they even closed their eyes to the fact that he is a Jew.
Franz went to his own office again and got his homburg and tucked his cane over his arm and walked in his half trot down the long corridor. The students nodded and doffed their caps as he sped by.
He approached the big ornate wrought-iron gates. A knot of students blocked his way. For a moment everyone stood still, then the knot dissolved and he passed through, feeling their eyes on him.
How differently they reacted these days, he thought. No longer the vague indifference. He was a man to be respected, even feared. Fear me? The thought delighted him.
Even his fat nagging Polish wife behaved differently nowadays. He approached the big ornate wrought-iron gates, continuing the fast pace in rhythm to his tapping cane in the direction of Pilsudski Square.
He was happy today. He even made an attempt to whistle. The end of a long, long journey was at hand.
Like most of the million ethnic Germans, Franz Koenig had been born in western Poland in a territory formerly German-occupied, then freed to Poland after the World War. In his youth his family moved to Danzig, which was located in a geographical freak known as the “Polish Corridor.” It was a finger of land which split East Prussia away from the German mainland in order to give Poland access to the sea. It was an abnormal division. Danzig and the Polish Corridor filled with ethnic Germans and Poles became a thorn in German pride and the object of bickering and threats from the beginning.
Frank Koenig came from a good merchant family. He had received a classical education in medicine in Heidelberg and in Switzerland. He was a man of total moderation. Although raised in the furor of Danzig, he considered himself neither German nor Polish nor much of anything but a good doctor and teacher; a profession, he felt, that crossed the bounds of nationalism.
Franz Koenig was an adequate man. His appointment to the University of Warsaw was adequate. The Polish girl he had married was adequate. He lived his life in a mild and inoffensive manner, delighting most in the privacy of his study with good music and good books. The early marriage ambitions of his Polish wife failed to stir him. She gave up in disgust and grew obese.
When the Nazis came to power, Franz Koenig was embarrassed by their behavior. In an outburst, rare for him, he referred to the SA Brown Shirts as “thick-necked, pinheaded bullies.” He thought himself fortunate to be in Warsaw and clear of the havoc in Germany.
All that changed.
There was a month, a week, a day, and a moment.
The office of dean of the College of Medicine was open. By seniority, competence, and devotion, the position was his. In anticipation of the appointment which should have been routine, he constructed a dull but adequate speech to accept the chair. He never delivered the speech. Paul Bronski, fifteen years his junior, was appointed.
He remembered Kurt Liedendorf, the leader of Warsaw’s ethnics, snorting in his ear.
“It’s a blow to us—all us Germans, Doktor Koenig. It is a terrible insult.”
“Nonsense ... nonsense ...”
“Now maybe you understand how the Versailles Treaty has made the German people anonymous. Look, you ... Heidelberg ... Geneva. A man of culture. You have been made anonymous too. You are a victim of Jewish cunning. All us Germans are victims of Jewish cunning, Herr Doktor. ... Hitler says ...”
Jewish cunning ... Bronski ... Jewish cunning ...
All that Franz Koenig ever wanted for a world he served well was to be the dean of medicine at the University of Warsaw.
“Come and spend the afternoon with us, Herr Doktor.
Be with your own people,” Kurt Liedendorf said. “We have a special guest from Berlin who will give us a talk.”
And the guest from Berlin told them, “Perhaps the methods of the Nazis are harsh, but to rectify the injustices heaped upon the German people takes men of strong will and vigor. Everything we do is justified because the goal to restore the German people to their rightful way of life is justified.”
“Ah, Herr Doktor,” Liedendorf said, “Good to see you here. Sit here, sit up front.”
“Hitler has seen to it that the German people are not anonymous any more. If you declare yourself as a German, you will not be anonymous!”
He came home from the fourth meeting, and the fifth and the sixth, and he looked at his fat Polish wife and all that was around him. Feudal gentry, universal ignorance. “I am a German,” Franz Koenig said to himself. “I am a German.”