It was a normal day in the Mosk Works buttonhole section. The men bent in rows as far as the eye could see. They wore their caps, or didn’t wear them, just as they pleased. They snapped the thread with their teeth. At eleven o’clock, after hours of work, the buttonhole makers lined up for their ration of soup. The finishers were already there. Like finishers everywhere, they were loudly complaining.

“My friend Mister Pipe has broken his needle. But they won’t give him a new one. He’s too shy to say anything.”

Pipe hung his head and merely murmured, “Without a needle I can’t sew.”

But Sheftelowitz, the friend of Pipe’s, spoke, even louder. “They want him to pay for it. They say it’s a needle tax.”

Then Kleiderman, a finisher with a toothpick completely inside his mouth, shouted out, “That’s not all. I know for a fact there will be all sorts of work taxes. I learned this from Luftgas himself. For instance, they are going to take away our chairs. If you want to stand, you can stand. Otherwise the chair tax will be fifteen zlotys a week.”

“Fifteen zlotys!”

“Each week?”

Pipe, white-haired, said smiling, “But my knees are too weak to stand.”

“That’s because of the food allotment. The soup is practically water. There is no meat in it. No potatoes. Only peels from potatoes.”

“And where is it, the soup? Mister Marx is here. Mister Kemp is here. I see Mister Trilling. We are here, but the soup isn’t.”

Sheftelowitz stood on a chair. “Jews! Finishers! Luftgas says there is plenty of work and plenty to eat. Don’t laugh! It’s true! There’s plenty of food—”

“For him!” the workers replied.

“And there’s plenty of work—”

“For us!”

From this demonstration the buttonholers, with their tin cups, stood apart. “Shhh, shhh,” some of them said. “You’ll get us in trouble.”

But the fiery finishers—Bundists, many of them, Socialist thinkers—continued to shout. “No chair taxes! Luftgas! We’re human beings!”

“Thank goodness,” said an elderly buttonhole maker. “Here at last is the soup.”

The doors opened and a huge steaming kettle, placed as usual on a platform with wheels, came rolling in. What wasn’t usual, what made the finishers fall silent and the buttonhole experts drop back a step or two, was the fact that the two ladlers were missing and in their place stood a Warrior, along with Trumpelman, the Elder of the Jews.

The latter was bareheaded, with lines that ran from his nose to his mouth. He leaned with both hands on his cane. By the time the tureen arrived at the front of the room, the workers saw that the other man wasn’t a soldier at all. It was Luftgas, the supervisor, wearing one of the new uniforms. More of these uniforms were piled at the edge of the platform. Luftgas threw up his arms, as if the crowd were still demonstrating.

“Finishers and buttonhole makers of the Mosk Works,” he began. He pulled the brim of the Hauptsturmführer’s cap over his eyes. He struck the top of his boot with a little whip. “A serious situation has arisen. Jews, you’re involved, so pay attention.” What Luftgas did was button his green-colored jacket. He got halfway to the top when one of the buttons burst. “You see?” he said. “What did I tell you?”