Free A Jew Must Die by Jacques Chessex Page B

agitates, denounces, caricatures and calls for a conspicuous example to be made. A familiar figure in the Nazi legation in Berne, and supported by it financially and logistically, this strange man of God interweaves in his diatribes enumerations of recent bankruptcies of honest, indigenous industries and the Torah, police reports and the business register, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the mythologies of ancient Europe and the theories of Alfred Rosenberg, the fascination of Dr Josef Goebbels and, above all, Mein Kampf. Again he calls for an example. Vengeance! Parasites! Kill the rats!
    His public understands that a clean sweep is required to rid them without further delay of the breed responsible for their humiliation. Shouts and applause. Deutschland über alles! Die Fahne hoch! The recording of the Nazi anthem, which Lugrin has brought along in his little suitcase, crackles and booms from the bistro’s gramophone. Tonight, behind closed frontiers, Europe lies in Hitler’s
grip. Stalingrad is still far off. Here, on the peaceful plain of La Broye, in the Café de la Croix Blanche, Le Cerf, or the Winkelried, every meeting held by Pastor Lugrin ends with a clicking of heels and the stiff-arm salute. Death to the Jews! Heil Hitler! O Führer, may you rule a thousand years over your resurgent Europe!

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    In Payerne the speeches of the Hitlerite pastor have fallen on fertile ground. Holding more and more meetings, stirring up the rancour and frustrations caused by the crisis, the efforts of the tempter Philippe Lugrin are crowned with success. In the back rooms where we have seen him at work, and often at night in disused sheds or abandoned brickworks, sometimes in a clearing in Invuardes forest lit by torches or adapted motorcycle headlamps, the cleric’s lean frame, brusque gestures, head with slicked-down hair, little Goebbels-style spectacles, and then his words, coolly spoken but with a burning conviction you can sense beneath their icy surface, have galvanized his audience of the unemployed, embittered, disappointed peasants and impoverished, impotent,
hot-headed swaggerers now keen to settle scores with the Jewish canker, the octopus, the tentacular monster, the international plot that is undermining our trade, taking over our banks, allied with Moscow, New York and London to erode our integrity, strangling us a day at a time.
    In these remote countrysides the hatred of the Jew has a taste of soil mulled over in bitterness, turned over and ruminated, with the glister of pig’s blood and the isolated cemeteries from where the bones of the dead still speak, of misappropriated inheritances, suicides, bankruptcies and embittered, frustrated bodies a hundred times humiliated. Hearts and groins have oozed a heavy broth into the black, age-old earth, mingling their thick humours in the opaque soil with the blood of herds of swine and horned cattle. The mind, or what remains of it, inflamed by murky family and political jealousies, is looking for a scapegoat to blame for all life’s injustice and suffering, and finds it in the Jew, so different from us, with his prominent nose, olive complexion and crinkly hair on his broad skull. A Jew has a bank account and a big belly - nothing surprising in that. The Jew and
his circumcision. The Jew that doesn’t eat the way we do. The Jew grown fat from robbing us with his banks, pawnbroking and dealing in the cattle and horses he sells to our army. Our army!
    A hereditary blending of the blood from animal and human carcasses bound to their rural destiny, dissolving in the earth of neglected graveyards. Lives brought to naught, dead folk who have never left this unbounded landscape, imprisoned, stupefied, ruminating: “I’ve been exploited. Robbed.” Words full of hate.
    How strange that these words should be heard again and again in the transparent light of these hills, in the idyllic radiance of early spring. At the base of the yellow limestone abbey church, the town goes