came bored with the trial of himself, Hans Reber, Lieutenant Colonel SS (retired), for crimes against the Jewish people.

The trial dragged on during the two hottest months of the year. There were accounts of the conditions of European Jews during the Nazi regime, there were statistics pertaining to their butchery, there were pictures showing piles of corpses, and there were documents signed by himself which authorized the exterminations. There was a lot of talk about personal honor, the degree of one's responsibility to the state, and whether or not Hans Reber had been metely a cog in the administrative machinery; and at the end of the two months he was found guilty and sentenced to be hung on the first day of September.

The verdict had been announced late in the day. When they brought him back to his cell, he found his supper waiting for him-iced tea, a fruit salad, and weiners and sauerkraut. Beside his tray was a German paper, two days old and neatly folded. As he started in on the salad, he heard a noise and looked up to find Avram, his youthful guard, standing outside the cell. It took him a little by surprise, and for a moment the sight of the young man's swarthy skin and hooked nose and bushy eyebrows made him feel as though he were back in his old position as supervisor of mass liquidations, and he felt a surge of pleasure at the notion of committing Avram to the gas chambers.

Avram was smiling.

"Well, mein Colonel, so now it is your turn, eh?"

Reber said nothing. He continued to eat his salad.

"I'll bet you're terrified," Avram pursued. "They say Rudolf Hoess was truly scared before they executed him. And that guy who had charge of all the camps... what was his name?”

"Pohl," said Reber, turning to the sauerkraut. "Oswald Pohl." The sauerkraut had become cold.

"Yes. Well, they got him too, and they say he was very scared. It must be a horrible thing to have nothing to look forward to but your own hanging." "Why don't you go away?" Reber said.

"Go away? But sir, I won't be off duty for another six hours." He hesitated, then laughed. "Besides," he continued," I'm interested in you. I've never seen a man just after he's been condemned to death. It's a very moving thing, like something you'd read in a poem.”

Reber flipped open his newspaper. One of its front page stories concerned an episode in Miami, Florida, where some ninety-four homosexuals had been arrested simultaneously and given prison sentences of five to ten years. "What are you reading, mein Colonel?” asked Avram eagerly. "Nothing," said Reber. "Go away, you dumb kike."

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The young man blushed crimson, stung by the insult. "Why you... you pig!" he stammered furiously. "You think you're so god damned superior. Well, just wait till they slip the old noose around your neck."

"Have you a reserved seat?"

"You're damn right I do! I'll be right beside you, laughing my head off. Any man who slaughters innocent people...you can bet I'll be there, old man!"

For the thousandth time, Reber smiled at the irony of the situation: less than thirty years ago it had been fashionable to detest and brutalize the Jews; now, such persecution had been denounced as a crime; now, because he had been an organizer of the persecution, it was fashionable to detest and murder him. How strange and amusing it was, the way fate had completely reversed itself.

During the two weeks remaining before the date of his execution, he entertained himself by reading a couple of books about the history of World War II, though he spent most of his time dictating his memoirs onto a tape recorder provided him by a leading American magazine. In return for the privilege of first publishing rights on his memoirs, the American magazine agreedto pay a generous sum to his wife, who still lived in Chile.

As he recounted those events from his point of view, he naturally tried to justify himself as fully as he could without sounding ridiculous, and this led him into tortuous by ways of speculation. He was not to blame for the massacre of the Jews-at least not he alone, or just he and the other leaders. Such persecutions were a sociological phenomenon. Frustration and hatred lay coiling in the bosoms of all people at all times. The desire to strike out, to destroy someone else in atonement for one's own shortcomings and misfortunes is ever present; and, as in the case of the German people, when the pressure is strong enough, it requires but the slightest suggestion, a mére hint that the Jews or some other minority are at the bottom of it all, to cause the serpent to lunge forth, fanged by that instinctive urge to kill that keeps the hunters pacing nervously until the opening of the new season when they can take their weapons into the woods-to lunge forth and convulse an entire nation with wholesale frenzy and bloodshed.

He switched off the tape recorder, a little embarrassed at the unoriginality · of the thoughts he had just uttered. They were precisely what his attorneys had stated in pleading his case before the court. But had he no more insight than they? Was there nothing else he could add that would clarify all, and make his guiltlessness as shining and clear as a Mediterranean noon? Why did the truth have to sound so mediocre and unextraordinary?

He could have told more, but it would only have obscured the issue and made his innocence less obvious. For, contrary to one of the basic prem-