Poor Fellow My Country

by Xavier Herbert

  News of the pogrom broke over the radio the night before train-day; so that Jeremy came in to the township fairly raving, that is according to those who watched his conduct and commented on it. ‘For godsake, what a world!’ he cried. ‘The Spanish Inquisition, the Slave Trade, Van Diemen’s Land . . . they’re horrors of human cruelty you can forgive somewhat, because of the times, the general ignorance. But this . . . this frightfulness, in the Age of Reason, as it’s called, as a legal enactment endorsed by the leader of what’s supposed to be one of the most advanced communities of mankind, and a man being looked on by most of the rest of the civilised world as a genius in social leadership . . . For godsake, what a world!’

  Tom Toohey, sounding a bit fed up with it at last, commented, ‘This Jew business’s really got you in, Jerry . . . no doubt about it.’

  Jeremy blazed at him: ‘Christ . . . how can anyone with common feelings of humanity ignore it?’

  ‘I’ve heard you say the same thing about the treatment of the blacks.’

  ‘What the bloody hell’s that got to do with it?’

  ‘Well . . . remember when they started settlin’ them White Russians, you said: ‘Why’n’t they do sumpin for the blacks instead?’

  ‘Don’t tell me you’ve joined the mob who’re up against the Jewish Settlement?’

  Toohey flushed. ‘You know I’m always for the poor bastard’s bein’ trod on. I’m only surprised see how you’ve changed lately.’

  ‘How’ve I changed?’

  ‘Well . . . you’ve always preached charity begins at home, reckoned our first responsibility’s to the Aboriginal race we robbed, said keep the land from bein’ spoilt by settlin’ people in it who don’t give a damn for it, except to exploit it for cash.’

  ‘You’ll never hear me say anything different.’

  ‘Then what about this Jew settlement you’re makin’ out the Lagoons?’

  ‘Eh? Who says I’m making a Jewish settlement out there?’

  ‘Well . . . you got them Jews there for months . . . you’re expectin’ more. People naturally wonder. Jews’re smart people, what I been readin’ about ’em lately. The general idea is they’ll pick the eyes out of the land, and that you’re helpin’ ’em . . . Now, don’t get off your ’orse, man . . . I’m only just sayin’ what people’re sayin . . . as yo’ mate.’

  Jeremy panted, ‘What if the Jews do pick the best of the land? Why should it go to Vaiseys and the like, who don’t even live here, and treat the native born for what they bloody well are . . . semi-slaves?’

  Tom let it go at that, except to make that remark privily to his wife.

  There was no doubt about a general sympathy for Jews suffering under Hitler. That was shown readily enough to Kurt and Rifkah, when at the siding people off the train they didn’t even know nodded in a way to indicate their feelings, and some went so far as to address them: ‘Things gettin’ pretty crook for your mob over the other side. Sumpin ought to be done to stop them square-’ead bastards.’

  Yes, there was sympathy aplenty. Elsewhere it was so vocal that the wide world rang with it. Sympathy and protest. But what more? Even the effectiveness of the protesting was soon being undone by making debate of it. For example, the BBC arranged a special broadcast in which a Mr Barney Sugarman, Member of the House of Commons, told of what he had seen of the condition of Jews in Germany during a tour of investigation from which he had just returned; while a Herr Sigismund Keitelling, an official of the German Embassy at London, was given the opportunity to counter with what he called the Facts.

  Young Clancy heard this broadcast while at home in the bosom of his family. Already he had caused eyebrows to be raised here through his excessive concern for the reported plight of Jews. The session began with a statement by the compere that the BBC’s sponsoring it in no way committed it or the British Government to an official stand in the matter.

  Mr Barney Sugarman, MP, told of how, being refused entry into Germany under his true identity, had got in with a false one, ostensibly as a sailor ashore from a British ship. However, he had taken precaution to have his true identity tattooed on his person and make arrangements with British consular officials to check on his movements should he not report back within a certain time. He stated frankly that he had got round many obstacles with heavy bribery. He had a list of Jews to search for in several cities and towns. He found none of them, scarcely even a trace of any but a few. Jewish districts were to all intents and purposes completely depopulated, their former residents now herded into compounds in railway yards, to live like animals while awaiting shipment as the same to unknown destinations. He had got amongst them and talked. Some believed they were going to forced labour camps, others that it was to alpine border regions where they would be kicked out into someone else’s country, a few that it was to their deaths, this last a logical enough conclusion, since Der Führer had declared it his intention to rid the earth of the like of them in that book of his, Mein Kampf, written back in 1925.

  These people were all branded with numbers and many with the Shield of David, the latter as a mark of shame to those who put it there, but of great pride to the wearers: the Magen David, the Shield of David, the Star of Hope. They were permitted to travel in nothing but old clothes and with absolutely no possessions, these having all been stripped from them, often with torture for their disclosure. Every Jewish home and business in the land had been ransacked, not only by the Gestapo and other official thugs, but by many of the civil population, who according to the news, when questioned by foreigners, swore they didn’t know that was going on under their noses. ‘Wonderful people these Germans,’ said Barney Sugarman, speaking with a Cockney-Jewish lisp. ‘So innocent of guilty business when you charge ’em with it . . . but so happy to hold up hands dripping with blood when they can get away with it. You going to be taken in by the Germans again? I don’t like Winston Churchill; and he doesn’t like me; but he does say some smart things at times, and one of the smartest things was what he said of the Germans as a nation: “They are either at your throat or at your feet.” Don’t forget they are the people who invented those two very important words in war . . . Strafe, which means to destroy, annihilate, like the Wrath of God . . . and Kamerad, which is the cry for quarter, for mercy, the first to be shouted while they’re at your throat, the second to be whimpered when they’re licking your boots . . . The Boche, the Hun, Ach! Anything good he has ever done, the Jews have shown him how to do. Germany wasn’t properly civilised when the Jews came into it. That’s why they hate ’em. They hate ’em too much. Who thought of Einstein as a Jew first, till now? Of Ehrlich, Hertz, Wasserman, Mendelssohn, and all the rest of the geniuses who’ve made German science and art the best in the world? You know where Einstein is now? That wonderful man had to fly for his life to America. You know where the books and music of those other wonderful men are now? Torn to pieces, burnt in the streets. Judenhassen they call it . . . Jew-hate . . . and they are proud of it! Do you know that before this bloody business began, it was estimated that in three generations at most there would not be a practising Jew in Germany, so few were they in number, and so easily assimilated into the Fatherland? So much have the Jews loved the Fatherland that they adopted the old Gothic German language and adapted it to Hebrew script and usage to make the language called Yiddish, in which there is a great and beautiful literature. You know how many Jews were in Germany before this business started? I will tell you . . . three hundred thousand. How many Germans? Seventy-two million. If you’re good at your arithmetic you’ll see that makes less than one-half per cent of the total population. So if the Jews have been making all that trouble for the Germans that Hitler says, then that is one half a Jew making trouble for one hundred German Supermen, and those Supermen must be all meat and no brains, don’t you reckon? Maybe that’s why Hitler declared anybody a Jew under the Nuremberg Laws who had any Jewish ancestry as far back as the year 1800, the best part of one hundred and fifty years, or five generations — so his
New Germany won’t look silly, eh? Makes you want to laugh, doesn’t it? That was one of the troubles with the Jews there . . . they did laugh too much at first. But, my friends, it isn’t a laughing matter, as I shall tell you from what I saw with my own eyes. Now . . .’

  Sugarman went on to tell how every synagogue, school, orphanage, aged people’s home, hospital, even cemetery, that had been Jewish had been reduced to ashes or rubble. Anyone who resisted the rapine or even protested was shot or clubbed to death, grannies, babies, whole families before each other’s eyes, most aged and infantile, because they’d been systematically dragging away the younger folk for years. He had gone into quarters where a few desperate souls were still trying to fight it out, had heard the shots, the shouts, the screams, had seen bloodied victims hurled into the streets from upper stories, to have the life kicked out of them, if any remained, by proud-looking young men in smart uniforms, who shouted Heil Hitler and flung up their arms, as if invoking a god’s approval of their carnage.

  No one was immune; unless having enough gold or jewels on his person and the luck to strike someone worn out with slaughter, to buy respite, and maybe even a chance to get out. He had gone to a couple of border points where the lucky ones were getting away from it. It needed an awfully high price, because business was too brisk for those raking in the riches to be bothered with trifles. A handsome woman often had to pay with her body as well as with her jewels. Both sides of the frontiers were benefiting. Yet it was the Jew who had the reputation for demanding the Pound of Flesh!

  Thus for several days of intense investigation; until Sugarman himself fell foul of the Gestapo and was taken to some chamber of horrors where, to the accompaniment of the shrieks and howls of others, he couldn’t see, he was beaten black and blue, in an attempt to make him confess that he was what the bullies believed he was, an agent from Britain there to gather hidden Jewish wealth and smuggle it out of the country. No matter his proof of British citizenship. As far as they were concerned he had no citizenship of any sort. He was a Jew. At what looked like the last moment, his arrangements with the British officials saved him. He was put aboard a special aircraft and whisked home.

  But what did he strike at home? His parliamentary colleagues for the most part listened to him eagerly enough when he reported the horrors, but for the most part fled from him when he asked them what they were going to do about it. There were even some Jews who did the same. ‘And what are you going to do about it?’ he demanded of his worldwide audience now. ‘You are mostly kindly people. You believe that charity is the first virtue. You believe what St Paul said: “And though I speak with the tongue of angels and have not charity I am as a sounding brass or a tinkling cymbal.” Then what are you going to do about this extermination of a breed of your fellows whose only offence against the world is to stick to a way of life that they have followed with satisfaction for five thousand years and more and that has never done any harm to anybody — whose only crime is that they are Jews? If you can’t think of what to do I will tell you. Start by demanding from your governments that they make official protests to this nation of bullies, and if nothing is done, for them to confer in the matter and take action even to the point of forceful entry into this den of inhuman monsters and the rescue of their victims. Will you do this . . . in the name of humanity? Or have you no more humanity than those German civilians who cannot see what is happening under their nose because it is happening to a Jew? Oh . . .’ His voice broke in a sob, to be heard again in a hoarse cry, ‘Shemah Israel!’

  Clancy, flushed and breathing hard, demanded of the company, ‘Yes . . . what are we going to do about it?’

  The faces of the others first looked surprised, then furtive. His brother Martin cleared his throat: ‘There’s the League of Nations, isn’t there . . . sanctions and all that?’

  Clancy snapped, ‘What’s it ever done, the League of Nations? Besides, Germany doesn’t recognise it. It’s like he said. Everybody must protest to their government. And if that doesn’t work, an international brigade of some sort . . .’

  His mother cut in: ‘The International Brigade was Communist.’ Then, as the compere began to announce Herr Keitelling, she held up her finger for silence.

  Herr Keitelling spoke smoothly, suavely, in excellent English, with more Oxford accent in it than German. He began by denouncing Mr Sugarman as a Left Wing Socialist, which was to say an unconfessed Communist; and as everybody knew, Communism was the first enemy of the Third Reich, and basically, as the Führer had proved, a Jewish plot to enslave the world. Actually the recent actions taken against the Jews in Germany had been precipitated by the Jews themselves. Previously, their dispossession and deportation, in accordance with the Nuremberg Laws of Shame of 1936, had proceeded smoothly. But the Jews were vengeful vicious people. They wanted violence, wanted to stir the world to war on their account. Hence the assassination of Herr vom Rath of the Paris Embassy, revealed as the beginnings of a Jewish plot to stop legal proceedings against Jews in Germany through intimidation of German officials abroad, then within it, while crying of persecution to the world. The Jews had had plenty of time to remove themselves from the Fatherland, it being ten years and more since Der Führer had published to the world his manifesto that these mongrel people could be no part of the Reich that was to Stand for a Thousand Years — Heil Hitler! But they had hung on, still living like the parasites they were by ineradicable nature on what they had sucked from broken defeated Germany during the post-war years. Certainly Jews were being deprived of their property; and why not, when they had come by it through cheating decent Germans? But as to these tales of wholesale terror, the very fact that they were reported from regions where criminal elements congregated showed them for what they were: punitive actions by police against criminals, not necessarily Jews, but degenerate Germans who co-operated with them, and Communists. Not only had these criminals resisted lawful removal, but had fought amongst themselves for hidden spoil. Anyway, the world had only the word of dispossessed Jews for this terror. Had Einstein, Freud, Bruno Walter, complained of being beaten and robbed? They had not. Certainly they had been driven from Germany, because Der Führer showed neither fear nor favour in his determination to rid the nation of the insidious influence of their kind. After all, was not the British Union, led by the Baronet, Sir Oswald Mosley, and supported by so many of the British aristocracy and upper classes, in complete agreement with German Nationalist Socialist Party policy in the matter of dealing with Jews? The manifesto of the British Union declared that when it came to power all Jews in Britain and the British Empire would be declared aliens, and those who were known to have put the interests of Jewry before those of the King and Empire, would be instantly expelled.

  It showed, said Herr Keitelling, what sort of person this Jew Sugarman was when he freely admitted having entered Germany on false papers, procurable only through criminal channels, and had made his way by bribing criminals, until lawfully brought to book. Much of what he had stated in his broadcast was lies to be expected of a Jew. New Germany had nothing to be ashamed of in her treatment of these people. Let no one think that. What she was doing was actually purging herself of shame she had suffered ever since foolishly, out of misplaced kindness, committing herself to the cancerous evil of Judaism by admitting Jews in their flight into Europe during the Crusades. ‘No . . . Germany is not ashamed. On the contrary, we have never felt so proud as we do today . . . Heil Hitler!’

  That furtive look in the eyes of the rest of the Beatrice Big House company had disappeared as Herr Keitelling delivered himself, to become at last an answering challenge to Clancy’s continued glowering. His mother put the challenge into words as the delivery ended: ‘Well, there . . . you see!’

  ‘See what?’ growled Clancy.

  ‘That these Jews have brought it all on themselves.’

  Clancy sneered, ‘What . . . by being Jews?’

  Lady Rhoda replied stiffly, ‘I’m afraid, my son, you’ve been seeing too much of
those Jews who’re trying to wish themselves onto us, too.’

  Clancy flamed: ‘If you saw more of the unfortunate people, and heard what they’ve been through, and came to understand their natural intelligence and kindliness, you wouldn’t be taken in by the lies of murderous Huns!’

  ‘Are you sure you haven’t been taken in yourself . . . by a pretty face?’

  Crimson now, Clancy leapt up and left the drawing room. Embarrassment was spared the others by the radio, from which lively music burst forth: Orpheus in the Underworld, surely a subtle British refutation of impartiality in the matter just dealt with, since the anathematisation of all things Jewish by Hitler had declared the gay music of Offenbach the most morally insidious of it.

  Next day Clancy was busy from dawn with the trucking of breeding bulls up country aboard the continuing train, and did not see his mother till she sent for him to join her at morning tea. Evidently she wanted to make amends for the contretemps of last evening. However, he remained sulky till she asked, ‘Did your Jewish friends go back to Lily Lagoons or are they still around?’ When he looked at her sharply, she added: ‘I’d like to express my sympathy for what’s happening to their people. Would you like to ask them for lunch?’