But I’m not going to join them, for all that. I saw the dread that came over Anna this morning, and Trudel; I’m not going to participate in something like that. I don’t want a mother or bride to be put to death on my account. I want no part of this business…

So Quangel tells himself. In the meantime, the room has filled to the very last chair. The table is occupied by brown jackets and black uniforms, and on the podium is a major or colonel (Quangel has never learned to distinguish different uniforms and badges of rank), speaking about the state of the war.

Of course it’s going splendidly, victory over France is duly proclaimed, and it can only be a matter of weeks before England is crushed. Then the speaker gradually gets to the point he wants to make: with the front making such great strides, it is all the more urgent that the home front do its duty. What now follows sounds as though the major (or captain or colonel or whatever he is) has come directly from HQ on behalf of the Führer to tell the workforce of Krause & Co. that they will have to up their productivity. The Führer expects them to increase it by 50 percent within three months, and to have doubled it within six. Suggestions from the floor as to how the target could be reached are welcome. Anyone not participating will be viewed as a saboteur and treated accordingly.

While the speaker pronounces one final Sieg Heil to the Führer, Otto Quangel is thinking, So England will be defeated within a few weeks, the war is done and dusted, and we’re going to double our productivity inside six months. Who comes up with this nonsense?

But he sits down again and looks at the next speaker, a man in a brown uniform whose chest is thickly bespattered with medals, orders, and decorations. This Party speaker is a completely different sort from his army predecessor. From the get-go, he speaks in a sharp and aggressive way of the poor attitude that still prevails in some industries, in spite of the tremendous victories won by the Führer and the Wehrmacht. He speaks so sharply and aggressively that he seems to scream, and he doesn’t spare the moaners and the pessimists. The very last of them are to be eradicated. They will be ridden over, they’ll get smacked so hard they’ll be looking for their teeth. Suum cuique, it said on the belt buckles in the First War, and To each his own over the gates of the labor camp. There they’ll be reeducated, and anyone who helps get a defeatist man or woman put away will have done something for the German nation, and will be a man after the Führer’s heart.

“But all of you sitting here,” roars the speaker in conclusion, “foremen, department heads, directors—I make you personally responsible for the healthy condition of your works! Healthy condition means National Socialist thinking, and nothing else! Anyone who is weak-willed and mealy mouthed and doesn’t immediately denounce anything and everything wrong will wind up in a concentration camp himself. I swear, whether you’re directors or foremen, I’ll get you knocked into shape, if I have to kick the feebleness out of you with my own boots!”

The speaker stands on the rostrum a moment longer, his hands clenched with fury, his face is purple. At the end of this outburst the auditorium is silent. Everyone looks sheepish, all those who have effectively been asked to spy on their fellow workers. Then the speaker stomps off, the decorations on his chest tinkling slightly, and Director Schröder gets up and inquires palely whether anyone in the audience has anything to say.

The assembly draws a deep collective breath, shifts about in the seats—it’s as though a nightmare has come to an end and the day can begin. No one seems to have anything to contribute, everyone wants to leave the hall as soon as possible, and the general director is about to close the meeting with a Heil Hitler! when a man in a blue work tunic gets up near the back and says that as far as the productivity of his team goes, there is a perfectly simple remedy. They just need such and such machinery, and he lists the items and explains how they have to be set up. Yes, and then six or eight people will have to be laid off the team—unproductive wastrels and layabouts. If he were given those conditions, he would be able to reach the productivity targets in three months, not six.

Quangel stands there, cool and calm: he has taken up the fight. He can feel them all staring at him, the simple worker, out of place among these natty gents. But he has never cared about them especially, and he doesn’t care that they are staring at him now.