The Winston Affair by Howard Fast

Winston more than yourself that motivated you. If you had changed that report, all hope for Winston would then be gone. In effect, you would have consigned Winston to death. I don’t think you were able to do that, Major Kaufman.”
    â€œAdams,” Kaufman said slowly, “aside from my medical duties, there was no reason for me to lift a finger to help Winston. I’m a Jew.”
    â€œYou say that as if it should carry some special and hidden meaning for me, Kaufman. It doesn’t. I am a Protestant, but that doesn’t make me insensitive or indifferent to what Nazism and Fascism have done to this world. The only Jew I suppose I knew in my childhood was a Colonel Cramer. He was a friend of my father’s and a dinner guest on many occasions that I remember. I never knew that he was a Jew, until one evening at dinner he brought up a quotation we had need for. It stayed with me—‘Ye are the salt of the earth: but if the salt have lost his savour, wherewith shall it be salted?’ After dinner my father expressed some surprise that Colonel Cramer had come up with the quotation so readily. ‘Why?’ I asked. ‘Because he knows his Testament?’ ‘Because he is Jewish and because the lines are from Matthew,’ my father told me. He left it at that. You see, Major, I don’t believe in these different worlds that we inhabit, and if I had any such beliefs, they were beaten out of me in Africa and in Italy. I’ve been in this land only three days, as you mentioned, but I don’t feel its strangeness any longer.”
    â€œYou haven’t convinced me that I want to save Winston,” Kaufman said.
    â€œI don’t have to convince you, because as you made plain to me, Winston cannot be saved. I think you want to save something else even more important than Winston, and I think you know what I mean, Major Kaufman.”
    â€œI know what you mean,” Kaufman said dully and hopelessly. “I’m no hero. I can’t be a hero.”
    â€œUnless,” Adams pointed out with deliberate cruelty, “the world you value is well aware that you are a hero. But if your wife and your friends and all the people whose opinion you value here and at home don’t see you as a hero at all, but just consider you a damned fool—well, then yes; why be a hero?”
    â€œThat’s a lousy thing to say.”
    â€œYes.”
    â€œWhat skin off your back is it if I live with myself?”
    â€œNobody lives with himself alone, Major. Whatever it was back there in Rivington Street that made you the man you are today, it wasn’t the dirt and poverty. There were other things that you have to remember and live with.”
    â€œDo you really think you can win this case?” Kaufman demanded. “Don’t you know that Winston must die? Don’t you realize that nothing you can do will alter the verdict? How can you sit there and talk as if any action of mine would make a difference?”
    â€œBecause it would make a difference.”
    â€œAdams—tell me, isn’t unity and harmony in this theater of action more important than the life of a pathological murderer?”
    â€œYou don’t buy unity with a man’s life or with injustice or with a fixed verdict.”
    â€œHow can you be so damned sure of yourself?”
    â€œBecause I’m unsure of myself. It’s not what I believe, Major, it’s the fact that I am trying to believe.”
    â€œAnd you really think you can win?”
    â€œI can fight—and if I have weapons—well—yes, damn it, I could win!”
    Major Kaufman got up and strode to the door. Opening it, he called out, “Orderly!” When the orderly came, Kaufman barked at him, “Didn’t it ever occur to you to pick up the dishes?”
    â€œBut, Major, you’re still drinking your tea.”
    â€œDon’t give me that! Take that tray and get out of