Across from Gerstein sat another 
-man, watching him searchingly. At last this comrade said kindly: Never mind, Gerstein. I myself vomited after my first execution.
His wife implored him to resign from the for her sake and the sake of the children. She took him by the hand and drew him to a mirror, murmuring: Look at yourself, Kurt! Look at what this is doing to you!
Proudly he said: I myself have chosen this road.
Then she said: How can you, a man of honor and a sincere Christian, stand by and watch these things?
His face hardened into helmet-flesh and he replied: I am glad to have seen these atrocities with my own eyes, so that one day, God permitting, I may be able to testify about them.
She laughed at him.
Then he swung round as though he were about to strike her; and he said: Perhaps I ought to sue for divorce. What do you think? That would save you, should anything happen to me…
No, Kurt, no—
Very well then. We mustn’t just think of ourselves.
But wasn’t that precisely what he was doing? The next time he went to Theresienstadt, on another secret mission for “Clever Hans” Günther, there weren’t as many boxcars as usual so he completed the registration early. Detraining at Prague, he thought to buy something for his family. He was an -man; he could go anywhere he chose! Czechs and Germans alike, everyone gazed at him with fear, which made him long to scream. Smiling coldly, he flicked an imaginary granule of dust from his death’s head cap. He called himself a spy for God. In those curving streets walled high with watchful windows, swastika banners hung down on either side with perfect regularity just as in Berlin, so quite often he could see three ahead on his left, three more on his right, until the street arrived at a squat black archway like a grave. Following a stone bridge across the Vltava, the Moldau we call it now, he came to a street where an old woman was selling honey. She was sitting on the cobblestoned curb, drowsily humming to herself. Something about her face reminded him of the Catholic nurse who’d cared for him in his childhood; she was the only one who’d been kind to him. When his shadow fell on her, she looked up and screamed.
The Anglo-Jewish Bolshevists label us “totalitarians,” and it’s true that all over our Reich, even at Wolf’s Lair itself, we express ourselves by means of the same signals; for example, the preliminary end of an air raid alert is represented by three high-pitched sounds within a one-minute interval; then, once the cessation of the enemy threat has been verified, a tone of the same pitch shrills out steadily for one minute; we have found this consistency to be quite convenient. I’d be surprised if the enemy didn’t have their own equally “totalitarian” system! For much the same reasons, we’ve elected to school every German boy, every decent one, that is, in the Hitler Youth; so that his response in these times of racial threat can be relied on.
Frau Hedwig’s twins, Erich and Edmund, were among the decent ones. They had just been studying the Teutonic Knights. When he entered the room, Edmund was reading aloud: Long and wide went the forest through which he must make his way were he not to shun the combat to which, through no fault of his own, he had been called.
Laying his hand on the boy’s shoulder, Gerstein asked him how he understood what he had just read. Edmund replied: Hard times, hard hearts! That’s our Word of the Week. When a war gets foisted on us by international Jewry, we don’t have a choice. We have to fight. That’s what it means for us today.
Correct! laughed good blond Kurt Gerstein. By the way, have you dreamed about that dark forest?
Never, said Edmund.
Erich?
No, Herr Gerstein. Perhaps we don’t understand your question. It’s about good versus evil, isn’t it?
Clearly. Now read it again.
Long and wide went the forest through which he must make his way…
Would you boys like to be knights?
Oh, yes! Like you, Herr Gerstein!
Continue.
Were he not to shun the combat…
Against whom?
The Jews, Herr Gerstein.
And who else?
There is no one else! cried the handsome boy, proud to have solved the trick question. The Jews are our misfortune. The Slavs and Anglo-Americans merely follow them. Isn’t that right, Herr Gerstein?
That’s right, he said gently, remembering that time back in ’35 when the Hitler Youth insulted our Lord in their performance of Wittekind by Edmund Kiss. When the blond young actor on stage jeered: We’ll have no Savior who weeps and laments! Kurt Gerstein had stood up to shout: We shall not allow our faith to be publicly mocked without protest!—They kicked him to the floor, and kept kicking. That was when he’d lost three of his teeth.
Hadn’t he done everything he could? Wasn’t he still doing it? He told the boys the tale of Simple Hans, whose princely brothers despised him for a fool but who won the princess in the end because he saved the ants, ducks and bees from harm, a favor they requited by coming to his aid when he was set humanly impossible magic tasks in the castle of stone effigies: The ants gathered up and counted all the scattered pearls, the ducks dove down to find the lost key, and the bee queen tasted the lips of each sleeping princess to find out which girl was the most charming.