The Museum of an Extinct Race

By Jonathan Hale Rosen

"The Museum of an Extinct Race" is a soul-shaking tale of faith and resurrection in the face of crushing persecution. The novel resonated with me long after I reached the last page."

Claire Wachtel, Editor Emeritus, Harper-Collins

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In a world too impossible to imagine... A future too possible.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Atmosphere Press
• Release date: Jun 25, 2021
• ISBN: 9781639446353

Book preview

PART I

CHAPTER I

November 9, 2016

In Prague’s central square, as everywhere in the Reichdom, 30 years after his death, Hitler’s statue looms undisturbed. His rigid pose—pigeon-dropping stained—stands merely 61 meters, 247 steps, from the front door of Dano Adamik’s apartment house. Similar statues are mandated in virtually every town square in the known world—Hitler’s pale, implacable face barely noticed now by passersby, as if he were just another of the wrecked, relic buildings the government refuses to renovate. Occasionally overnight, a bold youngster throws splashes of yellow or red paint onto the memorial, a crime still punishable by death. No one has ever been caught or prosecuted for this crime. Adamik does not wonder why.

Yet, the Führer’s influence still dominates the landscape, like a volcanic eruption that occurred a century prior. The black lava may have faded to gray under the relentless sun while an occasional plant breaks through, greening the ashen surface. The violence of the original eruption has become a tale handed down from grandparents to children, almost a fable now. 

As always, Adamik is awakened by dawn breaking through the blinds he leaves cracked open in place of an alarm clock, the horror of his dream evaporating. He feels his face for a moment to assure himself there are no rat-bite wounds. The view from his bed exposes not only Hitler’s statue, but one spire of St. Vitus Cathedral, the iconic center of Prague. The Reich purposely left St. Vitus undisturbed, as with all the old religious paraphernalia. The masses can have religion as long as the Reichdom dictates the context, as long as it controls the message. 

Adamik struggles out of bed and heads toward the window, careful to avoid the frayed, wooden plank that a month ago had left a stubborn splinter in his foot. He had chosen the one-bedroom, one-bath walk-up just south of Old Town only for this vantage. The apartment is a mere 45 square meters, with fissured ceilings and a galley kitchen hiding an oven used just twice. Stains blotch the bathtub, obsessive scrubbing can never remove. The lessor commented more than once at the showing and then three times prior to Adamik’s signing the lease, Are you positive this is for you? Surely you can afford better. The windows, though, were large enough to spy on the world, adequate to serve his needs. One adornment Adamik has added—two pictures on the wall taken surreptitiously of Eva—one walking toward him, one of her back, heading away.

Daily, he forces himself to look out at the square to interrogate Orloj, the astronomical clock and the square’s prime tenant since 1410. Most often now surveying that brick tower, he ignores the two central timepieces, the astronomical dial and the zodiac ring that dominate the tower’s façade. Adamik’s focus after five years of ritualized study is centered on the four, wood-carved figures flanking the clock-face—Vanity, Lust, Greed and Death. Always the Skeleton, Death’s icon, absorbs him most. At each hour’s strike, the Skeleton, holding an hourglass in one hand and a bell in the other, rings that bell, signaling the others. In unison, they shake their heads, No, perpetually responding, We are not yet ready to go. One time, just once, Adamik imagined them nodding their heads up and down, answering, Yes, we will disappear. Going on half a decade, he has not yet surrendered that hope.

In the square, a local policeman rounds up a group of nighttime squatters, beating them into retreat. These offspring of the SS rule a reluctant planet with iron-fisted fear and paranoia that perfectly fits human psychology. However, no matter what other lessons Adamik has learned over the years, one fact rises above all else: People are people. Hate and prejudice and fear last just so long as motivators and then life goes on. The masses need to earn a living and feed a family. In the face of those pressures, world domination becomes not so much fun.

Not simple, the ministers rail, trying to control the erratic people of Korea from 10,000 miles away or the volatile, explosive Muslims or even the ever-inebriated, unruly Russians lurking at our doorstep. Add to that, the former United States is unrelenting—freedom injected into their marrow. No manner of oppression and suppression seems able to quash their spirit. And now, their recent invention—the Unterstreichung—what they call the Internet, but what the Reich has termed the Underline—so innocuous-appearing at first. The mindless bureaucrats were forever too myopic to realize that their centrally generated propaganda now served only to numb the masses. The Internet’s million messages emanating from a million random sources shouted out the priorities of the individual, sowing the seeds for inevitable revolution. 

Adamik turns to his bookshelf, picking out a book hidden behind two others and wrapped in a fake cover, disguised as a cookbook. Until this morning, he has managed to ignore the novel—a banned book he had found ten years prior while searching amongst the relics buried in a trunk confiscated from a Jewish family in London following the war. At age 40 then, he had devoured the book, amazed at how a book such as Nineteen Eighty-Four could possibly have been published right after the end of the war. Great Britain had been under special surveillance and monitoring during those first post-war years. A three-tiered hierarchy controlled all publishing: newspapers, magazines, all publications had to be scrutinized—any item containing a particle of criticism of the Germans or the Führer. Nineteen Eighty-Four somehow had managed to tunnel through that blockade.

At the time, Adamik had speculated that the rigid, concrete bureaucrats likely interpreted the novel to be a condemnation of Communism, not realizing that George Orwell’s salvos targeted all totalitarian regimes. Six months after its publication, Strum Denitz, the Minister of Culture in Berlin, got hold of the novel, trying to ascertain the root of the book’s overwhelming popularity. Denitz must have realized Orwell was attacking the Fatherland as much as Communists, and immediately halted publication. All known copies had to be surrendered on penalty of a minimum of ten years’ incarceration. Ultimately, Orwell had been hanged in 1949 in front of Westminster Abbey and left there rotting, crows devouring his tubercular corpse.

Adamik turns to the final chapter, the scene that had reverberated in his head on awakening this morning. He forces himself to re-read the climax, the hero tortured by his greatest fear—rats encaged around his face, eating away at his eyes. Day after day, Adamik has felt his conscience similarly attacking him. What was conscience anyway, but merely society’s veil cloaking everyone’s brain? That rationalization has done little to assuage his nightmares.

Outside in the square, the last nighttime squatter fends off the policeman’s blows with nary a complaint, perhaps used to the abuse. Another grinning officer, a few hundred meters further down the road, adds one last kick that again sends the squatter sprawling, the last pin down in a game of bowling. An exact replica of the scene might have taken place a hundred years before. That is, until that officer, likely frustrated with the squatter’s sluggishness, takes out his Luger and shoots the creature between the eyes. The policeman moves on without a glance back, leaving the sanitation crew to soon dispose of the remains. Adamik is sure that particular climax would not have taken place a hundred or a thousand years before—not with a gun or a sword or a crossbow.

The quandary of conscience festers. Or possibly what gnaws relentlessly at Adamik’s own eyes has nothing to do with conscience at all. Perhaps the merciless throbbing he is subjected to is merely obsessive lust—lust for the unobtainable.

CHAPTER II

Fifteen months before, Adamik was in the balcony section of his museum when he first noticed Eva. He frequently occupied that position, secretly observing the museum’s operation and the steady throng of visitors to this incongruous memorial. His regulation gray uniform with a tunic buttoned to the neck and his hierarchical number—127—emblazoned on the sleeve, helped camouflage him behind the wooden gray pillar. Adamik was forever amazed, even after ten years as the founding curator of the museum, at the hordes that this bizarre scheme of the Führer’s, hatched in his last years, still attracted. 

Hitler’s final will and testament outlined in intricate detail where and how and with what The Museum of an Extinct Species would be created. Somehow his obsession with the Jews never could be stifled even as all evidence held that, for at least the fifteen years prior to his death at age 79, he had erased the religion from the face of the Earth. His successors’ desire to perpetuate Hitler’s legacy of hatred had birthed the seeming anachronism. 

How the Führer managed to wipe the Jews from the planet was a testament to both his compulsion and his compulsiveness. 

In 1946, Hitler announced that the War of Aryan Freedom had ended, and the Aryan race could now, as destiny foretold, lead the planet. He commanded the citizens of all the conquered countries to pledge their allegiance. In those early years, the Allies had surrendered after Germany dropped the first atom bombs on Liverpool and Stalingrad, and then Miami and Minneapolis. Great Britain, Russia and the United States had no choice but to surrender. For good measure and to enslave the world, the Führer added Brisbane, Damascus and then Peking, ending all resistance throughout the planet. As the history books extolled, Germany had completed its nuclear program mere months prior to the time the United States would realize their own capability. 

The humiliated nations turned over half their gold reserves to German coffers. Then the conquerors assigned an Aufsichtsgouverneur to each country to manage the population. 

Eventually, Hitler again turned his attention to the Jews. Collecting and exterminating all the Jews in Europe in just the six short years after the War of Aryan Freedom—KAF, Krieg Arisch Freiheit—began had been truly a mind-boggling accomplishment. But that feat was simple addition compared to the advanced calculus of ridding the entire planet of the vermin. Hitler’s options were either to round up all the Jews scattered throughout the world and then erect a network of local, newly constructed concentration camps, or else resurrect the camps in Europe that he had already built during the war and move all the world’s Jews there. Even the Führer hesitated at either daunting course of action.

Hitler and his cohorts also realized eliminating Jews might not be as simple in foreign lands as it had been in Europe. In Eastern Europe, he had tapped into the long-festering hostility toward the Jews and enlisted local populations to aid in their extermination. In other parts of the world, the Jews might be considered benign entities, more like pets than the diabolical threats the Germans forever broadcast. Ultimately Hitler decided, based on his experience with the Sonderkommandos during KAF, that rather than rounding up all the Jews and executing them one by one, the Jews could much more simply be used as the agent to wipe out themselves. If nothing else, Jews were survivors. And at the threat of their own extermination, they could be manipulated into destroying each other along with their religion. A nice paradox, the Führer often chortled to confidantes, as if he had invented it. Germans well knew that this strategy was the legacy of Reinhard Heydrich. That ideal Nazi had realized humans, Jews more than most, would turn on their brothers to save themselves.

In 1951, Hitler chose as his prototype an American city, Atlanta. Though it had nowhere near the largest Jewish population, their bigotry was a familiar construct. On May fifteenth, the appointed American Aufsichtsgouverneur, Hugo Simmelstein, issued to the residents of Atlanta an edict via a notice on all public buildings and in all mailboxes ordering one thousand volunteer Jews to assemble the following Saturday at Atlanta City Hall. He would then repatriate the volunteers to Europe to help resettle those Jews who had survived the war. Ostensibly, they were to aid in transporting the last dregs of concentration camp survivors to Madagascar, off the coast of Africa, to a purported new Jewish-only settlement. Incentivizing the Atlanta population to participate in this voluntary sacrifice, Hitler promised to spare the rest of the city’s Jewish population. However, if they did not produce a thousand Jews, Germany would then target Atlanta for another A bomb. Hitler’s masterstroke thus set the entire Atlanta population against the Jews and then the Jews against themselves. 

The Jews in Atlanta did not fall for this charade. They knew all the volunteers would be exterminated. In response, a thousand of the most frail, elderly, decimated Jews appeared at the City Hall that day, limping up the concrete steps with their canes, stooped over and beaten. The volunteers—Jews who had no family left or whose lives were near an end or who despaired of the world as it had become—were the willing sacrificial lambs, trying to spare the rest of the city and its Jews. 

Adamik kept televised videos of the event in the museum archives, bringing them out for special showings when dignitaries visiting the museum craved the historical record of the Jews’ elimination. That late May day was brilliantly sunny, though the burst of flowers usual in years past had not yet recovered from the nuclear assault on the planet. In those days, the early morning sky still oozed a thick, iridescent-orange glow with lingering radiation that permeated the air for thousands of miles distant from the original bombing. 

That morning, one huge, orange cloud hovered over the City Hall, a bursting cow’s udder of a cloud, seeming about to shower radioactive material on the masses below. Stores at the time were stocked with potions and lotions and masks and eye protectors, futilely designed to fend off the radioactive rays from penetrating everyone’s skin, bones, organs, cells and ultimately their DNA. The scars of a generation now aging and saddled with grotesque deformities still testifies to the futility of those measures.

A small crowd of sympathetic Jews gathered outside the monolithic, concrete building as their frail surrogates trudged up the eighty-five steps. The spectators silently watched and wept. The rest of the city hid in their homes. With no warning, a twenty-five-year-old observer in a black suit, tassels hanging from his waist, a yarmulke on his head, broke from the crowd and ran up the stairs, imploring the victims to not let themselves be shepherded this way. If one of us surrenders, we all surrender, he cried. 

At the top of the stairs, a pair of pumped-up, newly recruited USS officers holding bullhorns watched the scene unfold. In short order, the new government had assembled similar Nazi converts across the country from thousands of militaristic applicants. It never seemed difficult to enlist fire-breathing, aggressive youths, eager to bully their elders. One officer raised his bullhorn and shouted, You on the stairs… you have ten seconds to move away from the crowd and go home! The interloper Jew froze in place for barely a moment. 

Adamik, after watching this film a dozen times, could read the lips of what the officer said next to his compatriot: This should be fun. Without waiting the ten seconds, the policeman picked up his automatic weapon and annihilated the Jew with a flurry of gunfire, wiping out a few of the aging Jews in the process. The bullet-ridden body tumbled down the concrete steps, a clatter of black and white stained by his own blood, finally collapsing in a heap at the bottom of the stairs.

In the twenty seconds it took to watch this young man cascade to his death, the crowd froze in place, silenced. And mustered no further objections. With any resistance quashed, the military collected the volunteers and gathered them inside. Theaters throughout America and then the world replayed the scene, multiplying its message exponentially. Hitler did not care that the only sacrificial lambs the Jews had offered up to him were the aging and dying. The point was that they came voluntarily and that the rest of the Jews, the rest of the city, and the entire country succumbed with minimal protest. Passive Jews fostered passive Southerners, who in turn bred passive Americans. Afterwards, the joke that spread through the states: What’s black and white and red all over? A bullet-ridden Jew!

The American SS transported those thousand crushed Jews to a ship that crossed the Atlantic and landed in Marseille, never to be heard from again. The prototype had been established. 

Chancellor Hitler let the effects of this unmanned invasion settle for several months, almost lulling the population into thinking that nothing further would transpire to disturb their fragile security. But the next edict, six months later on November ninth, spelled out Hitler’s intent. The rest of the Jewish population in Atlanta would have to relinquish any shred of Judaism in their lives. They must sign an oath of allegiance to any of four acceptable alternative religions. They then would have to attend services weekly at the church of their choice, with attendance strictly monitored. Any Jewish paraphernalia, icons, or symbols in their personal possession including prayer books and copies of the Old Testament would have to be surrendered. Afterward, they had to strip their synagogues of all like material, including Torahs, and turn them in at a central location. Then, another volunteer team of Jews incinerated their own synagogues, reducing the holy sites to heaps of blackened ash. Amazingly, the populace organized not a single protest against this assault on what had been lauded as American values. Not a whimper from the Jews and not from the Christians and not from the local governments and not from Washington. The Reich’s efficient machine had sucked out all the spirit and backbone of the population. The world meekly followed suit.

*

Some 60 years later, Adamik was stationed at the second-floor balcony of the Museum that had once housed the Old-New Synagogue—Altneushul—centered in Prague’s old Jewish quarter, when he first became aware of Eva. A few weeks before, a co-worker had found Adamik at this spot behind the balcony’s wooden pillars and asked, Direktor Adamik, may I help you? Are you lost?

Embarrassed at being caught, Adamik had merely answered, No, no. I’m fine. I’m merely trying to make sure the docents are doing their job properly.

Were he to answer his underling truthfully, Adamik might have said, Actually, Herr Steiner, I find myself forever amazed, curious and perpetually guilty that this archaic brainchild of the Führer’s, with me as its architect, truly exists. Sometimes I imagine and might welcome some natural disaster or even more so, some act of God to annihilate this building—to give evidence that a smidgen of justice still exists in the world. Of course, no such words ever crossed his lips. 

That day he spied Eva, she was leading a compacted, huddling group of visitors who were shuffling through the arched bay separating an anteroom from the central exhibit. The group entered the central chamber, dominated by a golden sculpture suspended from the ceiling. This monstrosity, created by the much-extolled Austrian sculptor, Bernd Fasching, graphically depicted Christ’s betrayal at the hands of the Jews. Fasching had created a life-sized, fallen, beaten and bleeding Christ being feasted upon by a pack of blood-hungry, rat-like Jews. Adamik had lost the battle to stop the sculpture from being even included in the museum’s works. Instead, the work received center stage display and served its purpose—to incite the museum’s visitors into a frenzy. No matter that Christ was now worshiped as an afterthought, an aging relative long since consigned to a nursing home. 

Crossing the threshold of the chamber, at the head of the tour of perhaps twenty-one tourists, Adamik spotted a woman leading, her back to Adamik. 

Leading did not adequately describe Eva’s performance. She did not so much lead the visitors in her circle as choreograph them. That day and each time after that Adamik watched, Eva glided through the museum. She wore the mandatory bodice-hugging, black knit top, and black, ankle-length, flowing skirt, both emblazoned with an italicized swastika. As if by design, spotlights above staged her. Her movements were ballet-like—twirling and streaming from one exhibit to another. She approached near, and then withdrew from her audience, encircling them as if in an embrace, then stepping back almost seductively. All the while her wild, black hair floated away from her like an ebony sail buoyed by the wind. Ever since, that indelible image has pursued Adamik.

 Several weeks later at that same spot, waiting patiently for Eva to reappear, Adamik found carved into his pillar a Hebrew word that must have escaped the meticulous renovators whose mandate was to leave only state-sanctioned remnants of Judaism. Once noted, Adamik obsessively ran his fingers over the misshapen letters, wondering what instrument had been used to engrave them on the pillar. He finally got an answer to that question when his fingernails grew long enough to fit exactly into each groove.

Later on, Adamik looked up the engraved word. SHEMA. Literally, hear. He discovered that Shema was the start of the Hebrew Liturgy. Hear O Israel, the lord our God, the Lord is One. Had the original carver never finished the message? Had the rest been erased over time? Or did the author just literally want to hear or perhaps to be heard? Hear his God speak? Or have his God hear him?

For the next month, Adamik persisted watching and waiting—passively, obsessively hoping for Eva to re-enter his purview—a 52-year-old, divorced man who had not dated a woman for over twelve years—Adamik whipped himself. He could find no excuse for his behavior as the vaunted Museum Director and officer of the Reich. Yet Adamik never once considered ceasing.

CHAPTER III

Dano Adamik’s mother died when he was nine. Her death changed his life forever after, not so much because he missed her, since she was a shadowy presence, absent more often than present. A series of nannies managed his upbringing. They were warm enough but never hot and loved him in word and deed until in succession they left with not a look back after. I will call and come visit at least once a week, huge Ida said when he was five as she hugged him good-by, trying to quell his tears. Later on, he knew enough to stop believing them. Instead, after his mother’s death, what changed were his classmates, his schoolteachers, the rest of the world. 

Adamik’s father did not permit his nine-year-old son to attend his mother’s funeral. He gave Dano one brief explanation the night after her death. Dano woke in the middle of the night, his menagerie of stuffed animals protecting him all knocked to the floor as if lain waste by an assailant. Unable to stifle himself any longer, Dano began to whimper, then wail. 

His father rushed into the room. Dano, what is the problem? What is wrong? His father stood at the end of Dano’s bed in his dark blue pajamas and robe, the smell of pipe tobacco wafting off of him. Are you having a bad dream? as Dano continued to wail. 

Dano halted his sobs long enough to cry, My zoo friends, all attacked by some outsider. I think he must have come in from the window. Look at them! 

His father picked up each of the stuffed toys and tossed them back on the bed. No outsiders possible here, Dano. See, the windows are all locked tight. He went to the window and raised the shade, the cloth flapping against its roller like a spent movie film on its spool. You must have been thrashing in your sleep again. Your animals are all safe and sound, even the ratty squirrel that your mother wanted you to throw out years ago. His father realized his error as soon as the words left his mouth, for Dano began to wail once again. 

For one of the few times in Dano’s memory, his father stroked his forehead to soothe Dano. When he again calmed down, Dano asked directly for the first time, So how did she die? I don’t understand. She wasn’t even sick last time I saw her. She said goodbye and kissed me good night before she left on her trip and didn’t say anything was wrong. When his father switched on the night-table light, his shadow filled the entire wall opposite Dano.

His father heaved a deep sigh, gearing himself up. No, your mother was not ill. She died from an accident in a country called Thailand. They are not so careful there as we are, and accidents are common. His father offered no further explanation. 

An accident? Like from a car accident?

Yes, something like that. The details don’t matter. Now time for sleep, giving Dano one last stroke of his hand. That was the end of their discussion.

Over the next several days, a series of visitors to their home expressed a quick word of condolence to Dano, and then retreated into his father’s study for whispered conversations that he could only catch snippets of. The few words Dano could make out, he could not understand. But they brought into focus the shadowy world of his parents’ existence, a world which Dano had unconsciously noted, but up to then, presumed normal. Dano was unaware his father was anything more than a minor functionary in the Czech government offices. 

An only child, Dano spent that week after his mother’s death in his home reading. TV, with its constant prattle of party dogma, could not distract him from his grief or unresolved curiosity. The TV shows—cartoons and serials—recycled daily the story of stout-hearted Nazi soldiers rescuing downtrodden peasants or helpless maidens from the hands of the remaining Jews or the Huns from the East. Even at nine, Dano rejected their shallowness. 

However, wandering alone in his father’s study that week, he found a copy of a book, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, by an American, translated into German from before KAF. The book was forbidden, though, at the time resting on his father’s bookshelf, and even later, Dano could imagine nothing harmful to the Party within it. For a nine-year-old boy with few friends and a family in disarray, the book was a revelation. Dano became Tom, running away with Huck and Joe Hardy, dodging Injun Jim, hiding out secret caves. Finally, mimicking Tom, Dano was inspired to visit a graveyard at night, specifically his mother’s.

Denied the option of going to her funeral, five days after her burial, he decided to sneak off to find his mother’s gravesite. At two a.m. that night, he crawled out the basement window. Even though Dano had some inkling as to the direction of her cemetery, a nine-year-old at night on Prague’s dark, foreboding streets with the wind whipping at his scarf and the occasional auto speeding by, its lights blinding him, proved no match for the elements. Three hours into his quest, when he had circled back somewhere near his home for the fourth time, a huge bearded man in a black uniform with leather boots grabbed him by the collar and dragged him home. How the officer knew who Dano was or where he lived, Dano had no idea. The officer deposited Dano on the steps leading to his home and rang the bell. When his father answered in his nightclothes, the man merely said, Found your ulicnik wandering. Said he was looking for his mother’s grave.

Dano’s father let him in, asking no questions. His only response. Tomorrow you return to school.

Dano’s first day back at school brought reality home. Boarding the bus, he felt the stares and heard the whispers of the other kids as he passed each row. When he tried to sit at his usual seat next to Malek, one of Dano’s few friends, Malek blocked his entry, not even acknowledging Dano. Dano took a seat alone in the back of the bus and watched as, in unison, the heads of the other children turned back to him. He felt from their icy stares and scattered grins no pity for his loss, just disdain. 

At school, Dano found a similar scenario. His usual desk-mate, Stefan, no longer sat next to him. That seat remained empty. The teacher barely acknowledged Dano. One afternoon in the playground, a week into Dano’s exile, Malek gave Dano some modicum of an explanation. Why, Dano asked, "has everyone been treating me as if I have cooties? Why won’t even you play with me anymore?" 

Was there a note of sympathy in Malek’s answer? My parents and the teacher have told me not to be friends with you any longer. Your mother was a traitor to the Reich. You have her blood. He walked away.

Dano stared at his retreating back, and then at the rest of the kids in the playground, surrounding but ignoring him. 

His mother, a traitor?! Not possible. He knew she was always abroad, always in exotic lands. She had told Dano she was helping the natives of distant countries get used to the Reich’s rulers and rules and regimens. Teaching them the three R’s, she always said. Each time she returned, she brought him a gift native to that country—a piñata from Mexico, a model of Buckingham palace, a pair of snowshoes from Norway. Were these adequate substitutes for an absent mother in her eyes? Dano had hoped not. 

After days of inner turmoil, Dano finally confronted his father. Was it true what everyone at school was telling me? Was my mother a traitor to the Reich?

They were in his father’s study. When his father was at home, Dano never ventured into his father’s sanctuary. But this time, Dano didn’t even knock on the door. He merely entered and stood before his father, who was perched behind his huge wooden desk, the smoke from his pipe curling skyward and enveloping him in a cloud. His father looked up, not surprised at Dano’s presence or at his question. He stroked his chin, called Dano to his side and sat Dano on his lap, something he had not done for perhaps the prior five years. 

I will tell you, Dano, since you are almost ten and old enough to hear the truth, though maybe not old enough to understand. Your mother was a kind woman. I suspect too kind for a society such as ours. She felt other people’s pain and tried to help them. On her trips abroad, she would help teach the natives new ways, get them to adjust to our order and the ‘Teutonic Imperatives.’ These are the rules you’ve learned in school that we all abide by every single day of our lives. His father’s grip on Dano’s shoulders tightened as he stared off into the distance. Dano bit his lip to stop himself from crying out in pain.

Sometimes the natives, the people of other countries and other societies, did not like those rules or did not adjust to them well. Your mother was helping them adjust. His father took a huge sigh and then shuddered. The Reich says that after a while she was not helping the natives adjust so much as helping them rebel. To help them organize and rebel against the Reich. They told me that during a rebellion in Shanghai, China she had helped organize, one of our soldiers killed her. That is why they have called her a traitor. We have no choice but to accept that explanation.

Dano whimpered. Yes, but was she truly a traitor? Did she deserve to die? 

Dano’s father—for one of the few times in his life—did not scold him for crying. A traitor is only defined by who they are traitor to, by whose ideals they are betraying. Someday, somewhere others may judge her not a traitor, but a hero. 

That was the one moment of doubt Dano ever heard his father utter. Only when Dano reflected on that conversation long afterward did he truly recognize that statement as doubt.

*

Three years after his mother’s death, Dano’s father remarried. After six months of conflict and barely disguised disdain between Dano and his new stepmother, his father sent Dano off to boarding school for the rest of Dano’s secondary school education.

In reality, Dano’s upbringing in no way mirrored this Cinderella-like scenario. Compared to most, Dano was free from the trauma of external forces—poverty, starvation, fear, terror, and persecution. Yet, as with most people, Dano was much more likely to bemoan the sty in his eye rather than proclaim joy that he had none.

Though Dano did have a wonderful memory of an episode at the beach when he could not have been more than four-years-old. He could never recall which beach they were visiting, and no picture recorded the event. Dano was playing on the sand while communing with a pelican resting nearby. The pelican was standing solid and still on a craggy rock above crashing waves, mostly staring down at the surf below searching for dinner. Yet, at intervals he rotated his head and stared over at Dano smiling, his pointed beak greeting Dano. Even after diving into the surf to catch a fish, swallowing it whole so Dano could track the fish’s course down the outline of the pelican’s neck, he returned to the same spot to sun. And then to turn his gaze toward Dano to bask in his victory and to receive applause. Dano clapped and laughed in appreciation. Maybe the pelican took a bow.

Two days in a row, this happened. The pelican perched at the exact spot while Dano and he bonded. Dano called him Peli. Once he squawked at Dano, but it sounded nothing like Dano. When Dano told his mother, who had been sitting in her lounge chair behind him each day reading and watching, that he wanted to bring Peli home with him, she laughed and said she thought he might prefer to stay at the seashore. Dano understood.

Later that last day, Dano fell asleep under their tilted umbrella enfolded in his mother’s arms, his head pressed against her breast, listening to the beating of her heart. Suddenly a shadow above, blocking out the setting sun awoke him as a bird, maybe Peli, flew overhead. Dano shuddered in fear and began crying that Peli was leaving him and would never return. Dano’s mother soothed him, telling him Peli was just returning to his family and would come back the next day after they were gone. But they would see Peli again the following year. She then said, Dano, never be afraid of things above you in the sky and heavens. Maybe the things below, but never those above.

Was that true? Dano believed her then. Later in life, those things above frightened him the most.

CHAPTER IV

At eighteen, his father enrolled Dano