The maid opening the door for us, a middle-aged rustic innocent who has served them for a long time, is visibly abashed and embarrassed. When Stella asks after her health, she is taciturn, though she normally melts under Stella’s sumptuous gratuities. To our astonishment, we find the parlor filled with people. A slightly awkward circle has formed; from its center, at our entrance, a count towers up. The bearer of a grand name closely identified with the most glorious defeats of the Austro-Hungarian army, he is the host’s childhood friend and classmate from the Theresianium. He too admires Stella and has known John for ages. His handshake is warm. He is wonderfully elegant in his folk-costume suit, gigantic in his corpulence. An antediluvian breed of man.

We are introduced to the others. To judge by their names, noses, and accents, they are all undeniably Jewish. Berlin Jews, rich ones, who fled to Salzburg before the Anschluss and are now trapped here. One exception is an extremely dapper, crisply stylish man in his mid-forties who must have come to Austria from Lemberg or Kecskemét. The host and hostess let on that these are not expected guests; the events of the previous night have brought together people who are more or less strangers, a sort of catacomb community.

The events are discussed in great detail, and the count is of the opinion that such outrageous vandalism would not have occurred without the annexation of Austria’s much fiercer anti-Semitism to that of Germany. When contradicted, he heatedly insists upon his view, as though defending a privilege that may be taken away from Austria, which has already been shamefully pruned and now even incorporated into a despised Germany. But soon he lapses into silence, intimidated and visibly disgruntled, as the Berliners inundate him with a torrent of horrifying examples of pure-German cruelty, launching into a sort of contest as to who can come up with the most fearful atrocities. The elegant room, decorated with Alpine art objects, fills up with dreadful tableaux of gorilla-like SA men putting out their cigarettes on naked female breasts (“and such lousy brands too!” quips the Kecskemét dandy, who can barely stay in his chair, he’s so eager to get a word in). They forget about His Lordship. This is private shop talk. We three Gentiles—the count, the host, and I—are soon excluded from the animated conversation about hair-raising cruelties. To be sure, it is not so easy to picture them in their full terrifying measure: the people who are narrating them (and who are also identifying with the victims) are physically intact, indeed obviously mindful of their bodily well-being; they are well groomed, luxuriously nourished, expensively dressed. It would take a very active imagination to visualize them cowering under riding-crop lashes in latrine ditches or kicked into bloody mush under boot heels. The host (quite reserved anyhow) occasionally ventures to ask, “Did this happen to you personally?” Or, “Did you witness it?” And each time, he is put in his place by an indignant retort in Berlinese: “Oh God no, but these are the facts mister, everybody back home knows all about it!”