The room was pitch dark now.
'Almost nowhere,' said Jones in the dark. 'If a man was fortunate enough to have a short-wave radio,' he said, 'there was still one fountainhead of truth — just one.'
And then, in the darkness, there was the crackle of short-wave static, a fragment of each, a fragment of German, a fragment of Brahms First Symphony, as though played on kazoos — and then, loud and clear —
'This is Howard W. Campbell, Jr., one of the few remaining free Americans, speaking to you from free Berlin. I wish to welcome my countrymen, which is to say the native white gentiles, of the 106th Division, taking up positions before St. Vith tonight. To the parents of the boys in this green division, may I say that the area is presently a quiet one. The 442nd and 444th Regiments are one line — the 423rd in reserve.
There is a fine article in the current Readers Digest with the title, 'There are No Atheists in Foxholes.' I should like to expand this theme a little and tell you that, even though this is a war inspired by the Jews, a war that only the Jews can win, there are no Jews in foxholes, either. The riflemen in the 106th can tell you that. The Jews are all too busy counting merchandise in the Quartermaster Corps or money in the Finance Corps or selling black-market cigarettes and nylons in Paris to ever come closer to the front than a hundred miles.
You folks at home, you parents and relatives of boys at the front — I want you to think of all the Jews you know. I want you to think hard about them.
Now then — let me ask you, is the war making them richer or poorer? Do they eat better or worse than you do? Do they seem to have more or less gasoline than you do?
I already know what the answers to all those questions are, and so will you, if you'll open your eyes and think hard for a minute.
Now let me ask you this:
Do you know of a single Jewish family that has received a telegram from Washington, once the capital of a free people — do you know of a single Jewish family that has received a telegram from Washington that begins, The Secretary of War desires me to express his deep regret that your son ...'
And so on.
There were fifteen minutes of Howard W. Campbell, Jr., the free American, there in basement darkness. I do not mean to suppress my infamy with a casual 'and so on.'
The Haifa Institute for the Documentation of War Criminals has recordings of every broadcast Howard W. Campbell, Jr., ever made. If someone wants to go over those broadcasts, wants to cull from them the very worst things I said, I have no objection to those culls being attached to this account as an appendix.
I can hardly deny that I said them. All I can say is that I didn't believe them, that I knew full well what ignorant, destructive, obscenely jocular things I was saying.
The experience of sitting there in the dark, hearing the things I'd said, didn't shock me. It might be helpful in my defense to say that I broke into a cold sweat, or some such nonsense. But I've always known what I did. I've always been able to live with what I did. How? Through that simple and widespread boon to modern mankind — schizophrenia.
There was one adventure in the dark worth reporting, though. Somebody put a note in my pocket, did it with intentional clumsiness, so that I would know the note was there.
When the light came on again, I could not guess who had given me the note.
I delivered my eulogy of August Krapptauer, saying, incidentally, what I pretty much believe, that Krapptauer's sort of truth would probably be with mankind forever, as long as there were men and women around who listened to their hearts instead of their minds.
I got a nice round of applause from the audience, and a drumroll from the Black Fuehrer. I went into the lavatory to read the note. The note was printed on lined paper torn from a small spiral notebook. This is what it said:
'Coal-bin door unlocked. Leave at once. I am waiting for you in vacant store directly across street urgent Your life in danger. Eat this.'
It was signed by my Blue Fairy Godmother, by Lionel Frank Wirtanen.
32: Rosenfeld ...
My lawyer here in Jerusalem, Mr. Alvin Dobrowitz, has told me that I would surely win my case if I could produce one witness who had seen me in the company of the man known to me as Colonel Frank Wirtanen.
I met Wirtanen three times: before the war, immediately after the war, and finally, in the back of a vacant store across the street from the residence of The Reverend Doctor Lionel J. D. Jones, D.D.S., D.D. Only at the first meeting, the meeting on the park bench, did anyone see us together. And those who saw us were no more likely to fix us in their memories than were the squirrels and birds.
The second time I met him was in Wiesbaden, Germany, in the dining hall of what had once been an officers candidate school of the Engineers Corps of the Wehrmacht. There was a great mural on the wall of that dining hall, a tank coming down a lovely, winding country lane. The sun was shining in the mural, The sky was clear. This bucolic scene was about to be shattered.
In a thicket, in the foreground of the mural, was a merry little band of steel-helmeted Robin Hoods, engineers whose latest prank was to mine the lane and to implement the impending merriment with an anti-tank gun and a light machine gun.
They were so happy.
How did I get to Wiesbaden?
I was taken from a Third Army prisoner-of-war pen near Ohrdruf on April 15, three days after my capture by Lieutenant Bernard B. O'Hare.
I was driven to Wiesbaden in a jeep, was guarded by a first lieutenant whose name is unknown to me. We didn't talk much. I did not interest him. He spent the entire trip in a slow smoldering rage about something that had nothing to do with me. Had he been slighted, insulted, cheated, maligned, grievously misunderstood? I don't know.
At any rate, I don't think he would be much help as a witness. He was carrying out orders that bored him. He asked his way to the camp, and then to the dining hall. He left me at the door of the dining hall, told me to go inside and wait And then he drove off, leaving me unguarded.
I went inside, though I might easily have wandered into the countryside again.
Inside that melancholy barn, all alone, seated on a table under the mural, was my Blue Fairy Godmother.
Wirtanen was wearing the uniform of an American soldier-zippered jacket; olive-drab trousers and shirt, the shirt open at the neck; combat boots. He had no weapon. Neither did he wear any symbol of rank or unit
He was a short-legged man. When I saw him sitting there on the table, he was swinging his feet, and his feet were far off the floor. He must have been at least fifty-five then, seven years older than when last I'd seen him. He was bald, had put on weight
Colonel Frank Wirtanen had the impudent pink-baby look that victory and an American combat uniform seemed to produce in so many older men.
He beamed at me and he shook my hand warmly, and he said, 'Well — what did you think of that war, Campbell?'
'I would just as soon have stayed out of it' I said.
'Congratulations,' he said. 'You lived through it, anyway. A lot of people didn't you know.'
'I know,' I said. 'My wife, for instance.'
'Sorry about that' he said.
'I found out she was missing the same day you did,' he said.
'How?' I said.
'From you,' he said. 'That was one of the pieces of information you broadcast that night'
This news, that I had broadcast the coded announcement of my Helga's disappearance, broadcast it without even knowing what I was doing, somehow upset me more than anything in the whole adventure. It upsets me even now. Why, I don't know.