by Herman Wouk
“No, no, no.” Foxy shook his head. “We’d have to put all that on the wires to London and Moscow. Weeks could go by in more arguments.”
“Foxy, without documentation that release is just a propaganda broadside. Mere boiler plate. That’s how the press will take it. Milktoast stuff anyway, compared to what Goebbels puts out.”
The division director spread his hands. “But your material all comes from Geneva Zionists or London Poles, doesn’t it? The British Foreign Office raises its hackles at any Zionist material, and the Soviets foam at the very mention of the Polish government-in-exile. You know all that. Be practical.”
“No backup, then.” Slote struck a fist on the desk in frustration. “Words. Just words. The best the civilized nations can do against this horrible massacre, with all the damning evidence in hand.”
Foxy got up, slammed his door shut, and turned on Slote, thrusting out a stiff arm and forefinger.
“Now look here. My wife is Jewish, as you know”— Slote didn’t know it —“just as Mr. Hull’s is. I’ve given this thing agonized thought, sleepless nights. Don’t wave off what we’ve accomplished here. It will make a hell of a difference. The Germans will think twice before proceeding with their barbarities. It’s a signal to them that’ll sink in.”
“Will it? I think they’ll ignore it or laugh it off.”
“I see. You want a world howl, and a big rescue push by the Allied governments.”
“Yes. Especially of Jews piled up in neutral countries.”
“Okay. You’d better start thinking in Washington terms again.” Foxy slumped in his chair, looking irritated and sad, but he took a cool even tone. “The Arabs and the Persians are already over on Hitler’s side, as you well know. In Morocco and Algeria right now there’s hell to pay about our so-called pro-Jewish policy, simply because our military authorities removed the Vichy anti-Semitic laws. The Moslems are up in arms. Eisenhower’s got Moslems all around his armies and up ahead in Tunis. If a world howl leads to a popular push to open Palestine for the Jews, that will really kick over the crock in the whole Mediterranean and Middle East. It will, Leslie! What’s more, it’ll alienate Turkey. It’s an unacceptable political hazard. Do you disagree?”
At Slote’s scowling silence, Foxy sighed and talked on, ticking off points on his fingers. “Now. Did you follow the elections while you were over there? President Roosevelt almost lost control of Congress. He squeaked through in both houses, and that nominal Democratic majority is riddled with rebelliousness. There’s a big reaction gathering force in this country, Les. The isolationists are feeling their oats again. There’s a record defense budget coming up. Big Lend-Lease appropriations, especially for the Soviet Union, which aren’t popular at all. Renewal of price controls, rationing, and the draft, vital things the President must have to fight the war. Start a cry in this country to let in more Jews, Les, and just watch the counterblast in Congress against the whole war effort!”
“Well delivered, Foxy,” Slote all but sneered. “I know the line well. Do you believe a word of it?”
“I believe all of it. Those are the facts. Unfortunate but true. The President saw Woodrow Wilson frustrated and his peace plans blown to hell by a Congress that got out of control. I’m sure the spectre of Wilson haunts him. The Jewish question is right on the red line, Leslie, in this government’s basic political and military policies. The working room is narrow, fearfully narrow. Within those cramped limits, the document’ s an achievement. The British drafted it. Most of what I did was fight to keep the substance. I think I succeeded.”
Suppressing the old sense of hopelessness, Slote asked, “Okay, what do I do next?”
“You have an appointment at three with Assistant Secretary Breckinridge Long.”
“Any idea what he has in mind for me?”
“Not a clue.”
“Fill me in on him.”
“Long? Well, what do you know about him?”
“Just what Bill Tuttle told me. Long recruited Tuttle to organize the Republicans for Roosevelt in California. They both raced thoroughbred horses, or something, and that’s how they got acquainted. Also, I know Long was ambassador to Italy. So I guess he’s rich.”
“His wife’s rich.” Foxy hesitated, then gave a heavy sigh. “He’s a man on a hot seat.”
“In what way?”
Foxy Davis began to pace his small office. “All right, short curriculum vitae on Breckinridge Long. You’d better know these things. Gentleman-politician of the old school. Fine Southern family. Princeton. Lifelong Missouri Democrat. Third Assistant Secretary of State under Wilson. Flopped trying to run for the Senate. In electoral politics, a washout.” Foxy halted, standing over Slote, and poked his shoulder. “BUT — Long’s an old, old, old Roosevelt man. That’s the key to Breckinridge Long. If you were for Roosevelt before 1932 you’re in, and Long goes back to 1920, when FDR ran for Vice President. Long’s been a floor manager for him at the conventions. Ever since Wilson’s time he’s been a big contributor to Democratic campaigns.”
“I get the idea.”
“Okay. Reward, the post in Italy. Record, so-so. Admired Mussolini. Got disillusioned. Got recalled. Ulcers was the story. Actually, I believe he behaved ineptly during the Ethiopian war. Came back and raced his thoroughbreds. But of course he wanted back in, and FDR takes care of his own. When the war came, he created a job for Long — Special Assistant Secretary of State for emergency war matters. Hence the hot seat. The refugee problem is smack in his lap, because the visa division is his baby. Delegations in an unending parade — labor leaders, rabbis, businessmen, even Christian clergy — keep urging him to do more for the Jews. He has to keep saying no, no, no, in polite doubletalk, and he’s too thin-skinned for the abuse that’s ensued. Especially in the liberal press.” Foxy sat down at his desk. “That’s the drill on Breck Long. Now, until you get set, if you want an office—”
“Foxy, is Breckinridge Long an anti-Semite?”
A heavy sigh; a prolonged stare, not at Slote but into vacancy. “I don’t think he’s an inhumane man. He detests the Nazis and the Fascists. He really does. Certainly he’s not an isolationist, he’s very strong for a new League of Nations. He’s a complicated fellow. No genius, not a bad guy, but the attacks are hurting and stiffening him. He’s touchy as a bear with a sore nose.”
“You’re ducking my question.”
“Then I’ll answer it. No. He’s not an anti-Semite. I don’t think so, though God knows he’s being called that. He’s in a rotten spot, and he’s overburdened with other work. I’m sure he doesn’t know half of what’s going on. He’s one of the busiest men in Washington, and personally one of the nicest. A gentleman. I hope you go to work for him. I think you can get him to eliminate some of the worst abuses in the visa division, at the very least.”
“Good Lord, that’s inducement enough.”
Foxy was looking through papers on his desk. “Now. Do you know a Mrs. Selma Ascher Wurtweiler? Formerly of Bern?”
It took Slote a moment to remember. “Yes. Of course. What about her?”
“She’d like you to telephone her. Says it’s urgent. Here’s her number in Baltimore.”
Heavily pregnant, Selma came waddling behind the headwaiter to Slote’s table, followed by a short red-faced almost bald young man. Slote jumped out of his chair. She wore plain black, with one brooch of big diamonds. Her hand was as cold and damp as if she had been making snowballs. Despite the huge bulge of her abdomen, the resemblance to Natalie was still marked.
“This is my husband.”
Julius Wurtweiler put warm force into the banal greeting, “It’s a pleasure to meet you!” As soon as he sat down, Wurtweiler called the waiter and began ordering the drinks and the lunch. He had to see several congressmen and two senators, he said, so he would eat and run, if that was all right, leaving Slote and Selma to chat about old times. The drinks came, with tomato juice for Selma. Wurtweiler lifted his glass toward Slote. “Well, here’s to that Un
ited Nations statement. When’s it coming out? Tomorrow?”
“Ah, what statement would that be?”
“Why, the statement about the Nazi massacres. What else?” Wurt weiler’s pride in his inside knowledge glowed on the healthy face.
Better let the man disclose his hand, such as it was, Slote quickly decided. “You have a private line to Cordell Hull, I gather.”
Wurtweiler laughed. “How do you suppose that statement originated?”
“I’m actually not sure.”
“The British Jewish leaders finally got to Churchill and to Eden with some incontrovertible evidence. Terrible stuff! Churchill’s heart is in the right place, but he has to buck that damned Foreign Office, and this time he did it. Of course, we’ve been kept informed.”
“We?”
“The Zionist Councils here.”
Before the food came — it took a while, because the restaurant was packed — Wurtweiler did a lot of talking over the loud chatter all around them. His manner was forceful and pleasant, his accent faintly Southern. He served on several committees of protest and rescue. He had given scores of personal affidavits for refugees. He had twice been in Cordell Hull’s office with delegations. Mr. Hull was a thorough gentleman, he said, but aging and rather out of things.
Wurtweiler was not in total despair about the massacres. The Nazi persecution would prove a turning point in Jewish history, he believed. It would create the Jewish homeland. The political line of the Jews and their friends, he said, now had to be strong and single: Repeal the White Paper! Open Palestine to European Jewry! His committee was thinking of following up the Allied statement with a massive popular descent on Washington, and he wanted Slote’s opinion of this. It would be called the “March of the Million.” Americans of all faiths would take part. It would present a petition to the White House, signed with a million names, demanding — as the price of continuing Lend-Lease to the British — that London repeal the White Paper. Many senators and congressmen were ready to support such a resolution.
“Tell me candidly what you think,” Wurtweiler said, attacking a cheese omelette while Selma picked at a fruit salad and gave Slote what seemed a warning glance.
Slote put a few mild questions. Assuming the British yielded, how could the Jews in German-held Europe actually be moved to Palestine? No problem, retorted Wurtweiler; plenty of neutral shipping was available: Turkish, Spanish, Swedish. For that matter, empty Allied Lend-Lease ships could carry them under a flag of truce.
But would the Germans honor a flag of truce or release the Jews?
Well, Hitler did want to clear Europe of Jews, said Wurtweiler, and this plan would do it, so why shouldn’t he cooperate? The Nazis would demand a big ransom, no doubt. All right, the Jews in the free countries would beggar themselves to save Hitler’s captives. He would himself. So would his four brothers.
Slote found himself, to his surprise, thinking in Foxy’s “Washington terms” about the matter, in a reaction to this man’s naive self-assurance. He pointed out that such a large transfer of foreign currency would enable the Nazis to buy a lot of scarce war materials. In effect, Hitler would be bartering Jewish lives for the means to kill Allied soldiers.
“I don’t see that at all!” Wurtweiler’s answer shaded into impatience. “That’s weighing remote military conjectures against the certain deaths of innocent people. It’s a plain question of rescue before it’s too late.”
Slote mentioned that Arab sabotage could close the Suez Canal overnight. Wurtweiler had a brisk answer to “that old chestnut.” The threat to the canal was finished. Rommel was running away from Egypt. Eisenhower and Montgomery were closing a nutcracker on him. The Arabs veered with the winds of victory, and they wouldn’t dare to touch the canal.
They were now talking over coffee. As pleasantly as he could, Slote cautioned Wurtweiler against the charm of this one big simple answer, the “March of the Million” to open Palestine. He did not think the British would do it, or that there was any way for Jews in Nazi Europe to go there if they did.
“You’re a total pessimist, then. You think they must all die.”
Not at all, Slote replied. There were two things to work for: in the long range to destroy Nazi Germany, and in the short range to frighten the Nazis into stopping the murders. In the Allied world there were many thousands of sparsely settled square miles. Five thousand Jews, to start with, admitted to twenty countries — perhaps even including Palestine — would add up to a hundred thousand rescued souls. There were more than that many piled up in neutral lands. A concerted Allied decision to give them haven at once would jolt the Germans. At the moment, the Nazis kept jeering at the outside world, “If you’re so worried about the Jews, why don’t you take them in?” The only answer was shamed silence. That had to end. If America would lead, twenty countries would follow. Once the Allies showed they really cared about the fate of the Jews, that might scare Hitler’s executioners, and slow down or even stop the killing. Agitation to open Palestine was futile and therefore beside the point.
Wurtweiler listened, his brow furrowed, his eyes intent on Slote, who thought he was making some headway. “Well, I get your point,” he said at last, “and I completely disagree with you. A hundred thousand Jews! With millions facing doom! Once we support such a program, with the little strength we’ve got, it’ll mean the end for Palestine. Your twenty havens would back out at the last minute anyhow. And most Jews wouldn’t want to go to them.”
With the friendliest farewell, Wurtweiler left after paying the bill, kissing his wife, and urging Slote to come to dinner soon in Baltimore.
“I like your husband,” Slote ventured, as the waiter poured them more coffee.
Selma had eaten almost nothing, and she had turned very pale. She burst out, “He has a wonderful heart, he’s given a fortune to rescue work, but his Zionist solution is a dream. I don’t argue any more. He and his friends are so full of plans, meetings, projects, demonstrations, marches, rallies, this, that! They mean so well! There are so many other committees with different plans, meetings, rallies! He thinks they’re so misguided! These American Jews! They run in circles like poisoned mice, and it’s all too late. I don’t blame them. I don’t blame the Congress, or even your own State Department people. They aren’t bad or stupid, they just can’t imagine this thing.”
“Some of them are pretty bad and pretty stupid.”
She held up a protesting hand. “The Germans, the Germans are the killers. And you can’t even blame them, exactly. They’ve turned into wild animals driven by a maniac. It’s all too hopeless and horrible. I’m sorry we spent our whole lunch discussing it. I’ll have nightmares tonight.” She put both hands to her temples, and forced a smile. “What’s happened to the girl who looked like me? And her baby?”
Her expression hardened at his reply. “Lourdes! My God! Isn’t she in terrible danger?”
“She’s as safe as our own consular people are.”
“Even though she’s Jewish?”
Slote shrugged. “I believe so.”
“I’ll dream about her. I dream all the time that I’m back in Germany, that we never got out. I can’t tell you what awful, awful dreams I have. My father is dead, my mother’s sick, and here I am in a strange country. I dread the nights.” She looked around the restaurant in a stunned way, and gathered up bag and gloves in some agitation. “But it’s a sin to be ungrateful. I’m alive. I’d better get my shopping done. Will you accept Julius’s invitation to come to dinner in Baltimore?”
“Of course,” Slote said too politely.
Her look was skeptical and resigned. On the sidewalk outside she said, “Your idea about refugees is not bad. You should push it. The Germans are losing the war. Soon they’ll start worrying about saving their individual necks. Germans are very good at that. If America and twenty other countries would really take in a hundred thousand Jews now, that could worry those SS monsters. They might start looking for excuses to save Jews, so they could show
good records. It’s very sensible, Leslie.”
“If you think so, I’m encouraged.”
“Is there any chance of it happening?”
“I’m going to find out.”
“God bless you.” She held out her hand. “Is it cold?”
“Ice.”
“You see? America hasn’t changed me so much. Good-bye. I hope that your friend and her baby will be saved.”
Walking back to the State Department under a clearing blue sky, leaning into a frigid wind, Slote paused and stared through the White House fence across the snowy lawn, trying to imagine Franklin Roosevelt at work somewhere inside that big edifice. For all the fireside chats, speeches, newsreels, and millions of newspaper words about him, Franklin Roosevelt remained for Slote an elusive man. Wasn’t there a trace of fraud about a politician who could seem to Europeans a great humanitarian deliverer, yet whose policies, if Foxy was right, were fully as cold and inhumane as Napoleon’s?
Tolstoy’s grand theme in War and Peace— so Slote thought, as he hurried on — was the sinking of Napoleon in Pierre Bezukhov’s mind from liberal deliverer of Europe to bloodthirsty invader of Russia. In Tolstoy’s dubious theory of war, Napoleon was a mere monkey riding an elephant; an impotent egomaniac swept along by time and history, mouthing orders he couldn’t help giving, winning battles that were bound to be won, because of small battlefield events that he didn’t know about and couldn’t control; then later losing wars with the same “strokes of genius” that had brought him “victories,” because the stream of history had changed course away from him, stranding him in failure.
If Foxy was accurately reflecting Roosevelt’s policy on the Jews, if he wouldn’t even risk a clash with Congress to halt this vast crime, then wasn’t the President Tolstoy’s monkey after all — an inconsequential man, inflated by history’s strong breath into a grandiose figure, seeming to be winning the war only because the tides of industrial prowess were moving that way; time’s puppet, less free in confronting the Hitler horror than a single frightened Jew escaping over the Pyrenees, because that Jew at least was lowering the toll of murder by one?