On the stage the comedian, Schotter, began telling jokes. He was a thin man, and stood with his hands thrust into his armpits. His shoes turned up at the end. “Horowitz called on the telephone. That’s not his real name. But his real name also begins with ‘H.’ Horowitz wants to talk to his Governor-General of Poland, to find out what he had done to the Jews. So the governor says, ‘We took away their money, and we’re going to make them work on the canals.’ ‘Not enough,’ Horowitz tells him. Then the governor says, ‘We banned ritual slaughter, and pretty soon they won’t have a potato to eat.’ Still Horowitz isn’t satisfied. What else? he wants to know. Then the governor mentions his new ten-point plan: ‘First, we have set up a Jewish self-help organization—’ ‘That’s it! Stop!’ Horowitz interrupts him. ‘You don’t have to go further than that!’”

People did laugh, but not loudly. It was a daring joke. It made one breathless to hear it.

“A Jew runs up to another Jew and says, ‘Good news!’ Naturally, the second Jew wants to hear what it is. ‘I was walking down Alexsandrowska,’ says the first Jew, ‘and I saw where someone scribbled on a wall: Beat the Jews! Down with ritual slaughter! Beat the Christ Killers!’ ‘You call that good news?’ says the other Jew. ‘What’s good about that?’ The first Jew replies, ‘Don’t you understand? The old days have returned. The Poles are in charge again!’”

A real burst of laughter at this one. Schotter rocked back and forth on the rounded bottoms of his shoes. He tipped so the crowd could see the hairless spot on his head. He told one more.

“Horowitz has a wonderful idea to save on petroleum, so he calls the Prime Minister of England on the phone. ‘Listen, Churchill,’ Horowitz says. ‘Why should we bomb each other? All that flying back and forth is a waste of gas. Let’s make an agreement. You bomb London, and we’ll bomb Berlin!’”

The whole crowd—waiters, orchestra members, everyone—was aghast. The reason for this was that even before the joke was over, four of the Others had come through the door. Two of these were in uniform, the black ones, Death’s-Headers; the other two men wore civilian clothes. The gray-suited man, the one who put on the show in the square, spoke first. “Jew, who is the owner of this club?”

Popower, the waiter, was the person closest by. Fear gripped him. The dumplings, the calves’ feet, slid off his tray.

The second civilian addressed the crowd. This was F. X. Wohltat, a native of the town—the same little Franz, in fact, who had once put his hand in Trumpelman’s fishbowl. The Volksdeutscher had grown up. He was the head of a big coffee business. But even though the Occupying Power had made him an important and powerful figure, the head of the whole Civilian Authority, he still took his hat off when he spoke to the Jews.