by Herman Wouk
Major Rahm tells the Elders to sit down. From the head of the table he addresses them, feet apart, black swagger stick clutched behind him. His opening words are an amazement. He means to make Theresienstadt the Paradise Ghetto in fact as well as in name. The Elders know the town. They know their departments. It is up to them to give him ideas. Present conditions are disgraceful. Theresienstadt is run-down. He is not going to tolerate it. He is initiating a great beautification (eine grosse Verschönerungsaktion).
Jastrow is struck by this Eichmann phrase. Rahm’s entire speech echoes what Eichmann said two months ago. Under Burger too there was talk about “beautification,” but the idea was so preposterous, and Burger himself seemed so uninterested, that the Elders took it as just one more mendacious German façade of words; and the Board of Three gave only desultory orders for cleaning up the streets and painting some huts and barracks.
Rahm is talking a different language. “The Great Beautification” is going to be his prime concern. He has issued important orders. The old Sokol hall will be rebuilt at once as a community center, with studios, lecture halls, and an opera house and theatre with fully equipped stages. All Theresienstadt’s other auditoriums and meeting halls will be smartened up. The cabarets will be enlarged and newly decorated. More orchestras will be created. Operas, ballets, concerts, and plays will be scheduled, also various amusements and art exhibits. Materials for costumes, settings, paintings, and so forth will be provided. The hospitals are going to be spic-and-span. A children’s playground will be built. A beautiful park will be laid out for the old folks’ leisure.
As Jastrow listens to this astonishing harangue, wondering whether it can be serious, the catch in the whole business becomes clear. Rahm is not mentioning any of the things that really make Theresienstadt a hell instead of a paradise: the starvation diet, the hideous overcrowding, the lack of warm clothes, of heat, of latrines, of care centers for mental cases and for the old and crippled, all generating the terrible death rate. Of these things, not a word. He is proposing to paint a corpse.
Jastrow has long suspected that Eichmann made him a figurehead Elder, and possibly even sent him to Theresienstadt, in anticipation of a visit from the Vatican or the neutral Red Cross. Something like that must be in the wind now. Even so, Rahm’s approach seems simpleminded. No matter how laboriously he renovates the buildings and grounds, how can he conceal the overwhelming squalor, the crowding, the sickly faces, the malnutrition, the death rate? A little more food, some attention to health, would quickly and easily create a sunburst of happiness in the ghetto that would fool anybody. But the concept of treating the Jews themselves any better, even to create a brief useful illusion, seems beyond the Germans.
Rahm finishes up and asks for suggestions. Around the table eyes shift in gray faces. Nobody speaks. The so-called Elders — in actuality department heads of varying ages — are a mixed lot: some decent, some corrupt, some narrowly self-seeking, some humane. But all hug their posts. Private living quarters, exemption from transport, the chance to give and receive favors, outweigh the tension and guilt of being SS tools. None will risk opening his mouth first, and the silence grows nasty. Outside, a gray sky; inside a gray silence, and the ever-prevailing Theresienstadt smell of dirty bodies. Faintly from afar one can hear “The Beautiful Blue Danube”; the town orchestra is starting the morning concert, off behind the fence in the main square.
Jastrow’s department does not deal in the vital things Rahm has ignored. He will do nothing that might hurt Natalie and her child, but for himself, since the encounter with Eichmann, he is strangely unafraid. The American in him still finds this European nightmare in which he is caught disgusting and ludicrous; and the miasma of fear all around him, pathetic. For the barking fat-faced mediocrity in the stagy black uniform he feels chiefly contempt, modified by caution.
He raises his hand. Rahm nods. He stands up and salutes. “Herr Kommandant, I am the stinking Jew, Jastrow — ”
Rahm interrupts, pointing a thick finger at him. “Now then! That kind of shit will cease at once.” He turns to Haindl, who is smoking a cigar in an armchair. “New regulations! No more idiotic saluting and removing of caps. No more ‘stinking Jew’ talk. Theresienstadt is not a concentration camp. It is a comfortable and happy residential town.”
Haindl’s malevolent face twists in surprise. “Jawohl, Herr Kommandant.”
Surprise, too, on all the Elders’ countenances. Hitherto, failure to pull off one’s head-covering and to salute in a German’s presence has been a major ghetto offense, punishable by instant clubbing. Sounding off as a “stinking Jew” has been mandatory. The reflexes will take much unlearning.
“I beg leave to mention,” Jastrow goes on, “that in my department the music section badly needs paper.”
“Paper?” Rahm’s face wrinkles up. “What kind of paper?”
“Any kind, mein Kommandant.” Jastrow is speaking the truth. Scraps of wallpaper, even of linen, are being used to note down music. It is a small harmless item, worth a try. “The musicians will rule it themselves. Though of course, ruled musical score paper would be best.”
“Ruled musical score paper.” Rahm repeats this as though it were a foreign language. “How much?”
Jastrow’s deputy, a cadaverous orchestra leader from Vienna, whispers from the seat beside him.
“Mein Kommandant,” says Jastrow, “for the kind of great cultural expansion you are planning, five hundred sheets to start with.”
“See to it!” Rahm says to Haindl. “And I thank you, sir. Gentlemen, that is the kind of idea I want. What else?”
One by one the other Elders now timidly rise with innocuous requests, which Rahm receives warmly. The atmosphere improves. On cue, the day brightens outside and the sun shines into the room. Jastrow rises again. May the music section also request more musical instruments, of better quality? Rahm laughs. By all means! The Central Registry in Prague has two big warehouses stuffed with musical instruments: violins, cellos, flutes, clarinets, guitars, pianos, the lot! No problem at all; just put in a list.
Not one Elder mentions food, medicine, or living space. Jastrow feels capable of bringing up these things, but what good could come of it? He would quench the sunny moment, bring trouble on himself, and accomplish nothing. Not his department.
When Rahm and Haindl leave, Eppstein rises. On his face the fixed obsequious smile fades. There is one more thing, he announces. The new commander has found the overcrowding of the town most unhealthy and unsightly, so five thousand Jews must at once be transported.
In an ordinary town of fifty thousand, struck by a tornado that wiped out five thousand inhabitants, the people might feel somewhat as the Jews do at a transport.
There is no getting used to this intermittent scourge. Each time the fabric of the ghetto is torn apart. Optimism and faith dim. The sense of doom rises again. Though nobody is sure what “the east” really means, it is a name of terror. The unlucky ones move around in shock, making their farewells, giving away what meager belongings they cannot pack into one suitcase. The Central Secretariat is besieged by frantic petitioners pulling every string and trying every loophole to get exemptions. But an iron proscenium of number frames the tragedy: five thousand. Five thousand Jews must get on the train. If one is exempted, another must take his place. If fifty are excused, fifty who thought themselves safe must be struck as by lightning with gray summons cards.
The Jews who run the Transport Section are a sad harried lot. They are their brothers’ keepers, saviors, and executioners. It is a ghetto joke that in the end Theresienstadt will shrink to the commander and the Transport Section. Everybody smiles on them; but they know they are cursed and despised. They have life-and-death power they never wanted. They are Sonderkommando clerks, disposing of Jews’ living bodies with pens and rubber stamps.
Are they to blame? Many desperate Jews stand ready to seize their places. Some of these transport bureaucrats belong to the communist or Zionist undergrounds, spe
nding their nights in vain plots for uprisings. Some never think of anything but their own skins. A few brave ones try to correct the worst hardships. Some wretched ones show favoritism, take bribes, satisfy grudges.
In this spectrum of human nature blasted by German cruelty, what man can say where he would have fit? What man who was not there can judge the JudenrÄte, the Central Secretariats, and the Transport Sections? “God pardons the coerced,” says an ancient Jewish proverb, distilled from bitter millennia.
A parody of German thoroughness, the Central Secretariat reaches everywhere with its gray summons cards. In half a dozen different catalogue systems, Jews are indexed and cross-indexed by other Jews. Wherever a body can lie down for the night, that space is catalogued, with the name of the body occupying it. Each day a roll call of the town is taken. The dead and the transported are neatly crossed off the cards. Newcomers upon arrival are indexed as they are robbed. One can get out of the card catalogues only by dying or “going east.”
The real power in Theresienstadt under the SS is not Eppstein, or the Board of Three, or the Council of Elders; it is the Central Secretariat. Yet the Secretariat is nobody you can talk to. It is friends, neighbors, relatives, or just other Jews. It is a Bureau, bureaucratically carrying out the orders of the Germans. The Complaint Section of the Secretariat, a row of sour Jewish faces behind desks, is an impotent mockery; but it provides a lot of jobs. The Secretariat is monstrously overstaffed because it has been a refuge. Yet this time the gray cards strike even inside the Secretariat. The monster is starting to eat its own bowels.
The strangest thing is that a few people actually apply to go in each transport. In a previous shipment their spouses, parents, or children have gone. They are lonesome. Theresienstadt is not such a bed of roses that they should want to stay on at all costs. So they will brave the unknown, hoping to find their loved ones in the east. Some have received letters and postcards, so they know that those they seek are at least still alive. Even from the mica factory, the most reliable refuge in Theresienstadt, several women have volunteered and gone east. That is one request about which the Germans are invariably gracious.
When Natalie meets Udam outside the children’s home after work he stuns her by showing her his gray card. He has already been to the Secretariat. He knows Eppstein’s two deputies. The head of the transport section is an old Zionist pal from Prague. The bank manager has intervened. Nothing helps. Perhaps the SS got irked by his performances. Anyway, it is all finished. Tonight they give their last show. At six in the morning he must collect his daughter and go to the depot.
Her first reaction is cold fright. She too has been performing; has a gray card come to her apartment during the day? Seeing the look on her face, Udam tells her he has inquired, and there is no summons for her. She and Jastrow have the highest exempt classification. If nobody else is here when “the cousins arrive from the east and the west,” they will be. He has some new topical jokes for Frost-Cuckoo Land, and they may as well rehearse, and make this last show a good one.
She lays a hand on his arm as he starts inside, and suggests that they call it off. Jastrow’s audience will be small and in no mood to laugh. Maybe nobody will come. Aaron’s lecture subject, “Heroes of the Iliad,” is heavily academic, and hardly inspiring or cheering. Aaron requested the puppet show because he has never seen it, but Natalie suspects that professorial vanity dies hard, and that he really wants to draw an audience. It is his first lecture since he became an Elder, and he must know that he is unpopular.
Udam won’t hear of cancelling. Why waste good jokes? They go in to the children. Louis greets her with the usual wild joy, in the great moment of his day. During their meal, Udam talks optimistically about “the east.” How much worse can it be, after all, than Theresienstadt? His wife’s postcards, coming about once a month, have been short but reassuring. He shows Natalie the last card, dated only two weeks ago.
Birkenau, Camp II-B
My dearest
Everything is all right. I hope Martha is well. I miss you both. Much snow here.
Love,
Hilda
“Birkenau?” Natalie asks. “Where is that?”
“Poland, outside Oswiecim. It’s just a village. The Jews work in big German factories around there, and get plenty of food.”
Udam’s tone does not match his words. Natalie passed through Oswiecim with Byron years ago, on the way to the wedding of Berel’s son in Medzice. She barely remembers it as a flat dull railroad town. There is remarkably little talk in the ghetto about “the east,” the camps there, and what happens there; like death, like cancer, like the executions in the Little Fortress, these are shunned topics. Nevertheless, the word “Oswiecim” vibrates with horror. Natalie does not press Udam. She does not want to hear any more.
They rehearse in the basement, while Louis romps with the playmate he will not see after tonight. Udam’s new jokes are pallid, except for the touch about the Persian slave girl. The Frost-Cuckoo minister has brought her for the king’s pleasure. She comes in, a veiled waggling female puppet. Natalie puts on a husky sexy voice for the billing and cooing she does with the amorous king. He asks her name. She is coy and reluctant. He teases it out of her. “Well, I’m named after my home town.” “And that is?” She giggles. “Tee-hee. Tehran.” The king shrieks, the icicles fall off his nose — a standard trick Natalie has worked up — and he chases her off the stage with a club. That will go well. Reports of the Tehran Conference have much cheered the ghetto.
Afterward Natalie hurries back to the new apartment, still fearing a gray card may be there. Who was safer than Udam? Who had more inside contacts? Who could have felt more protected? But she sees at once on Aaron’s face that there is no gray card; though he says nothing, merely looking up and nodding, at the quite decent desk where he is marking his lecture notes.
The luxury of these two rooms and a bath still makes Natalie uneasy. Ever since Jastrow reversed himself and accepted the post and privileges of an Elder, there has been a coldness between them. She saw Eichmann accept his refusal. He has-never explained why he changed his mind. Did his old selfish love of comfort overcome him? Being an SS tool does not seem to trouble him at all. The religiosity is the only change. He puts on phylacteries, spends a lot of time over the Talmud, and has withdrawn into a quiet frail placidity; perhaps, she thinks, to shut out her disapproval, or his own self-contempt.
Jastrow knows what she thinks. He can do nothing about it. The explanation would be too terrifying. Natalie already lives on the brink of panic; she is young, and she has the baby. Since his illness he is reconciled to dying when he must. Let her go about her business, he had decided, not knowing the worst. If the SS chooses to pounce, her scurrilous performances have already condemned her. It is now a race against time. His aim is to last, until rescue comes from the east and the west.
She tells him about Udam, and without much hope asks him to intercede. He replies drily that he has very little influence; that it is a bad business to venture prestige and position on a request likely to be refused. They hardly talk again until they set out together for the barracks where Aaron is to lecture in the loft.
A large silent audience has gathered, after all. Usually there is lively chatter before the evening’s diversion. Not tonight. They have turned out in surprising numbers, but the mood is funereal. Behind the crude lectern, off to a side, stands the curtained puppet theatre. As Natalie takes the vacant seat beside Udam, he gives her a little smile that cuts her heart.
Aaron places his notes on the lectern and looks about, stroking his beard. Softly, in a dry classroom manner, speaking slow formal German, he begins.
“It is interesting that Shakespeare seems to find the whole story of the Iliad contemptible. He retells it in his play, Troilus and Cressida, and he puts his opinion in the mouth of Thersites, the cynical coward — ’The matter is only a cuckold and a whore.’”
This quotation Aaron Jastrow cites in English, then with a prudish lit
tle smile translates it into German.
“Now Falstaff, that other and more celebrated Shakespearean coward, thinks like Emerson that war in general is nothing but a periodic madness. ’Who hath honor? He that died o’ Wednesday.’ We suspect that Shakespeare agreed with his immortal fat man. Troilus, his play of the Trojan war, is not in his best tragic vein, for madness is not tragic. Madness is either funny or ghastly, and so is much war literature: either The Good Soldier Schweik, or All Quiet on the Western Front.
“But the Iliad is epic tragedy. It is the same war story as Troilus, but with one crucial difference. Shakespeare has taken out the gods, whereas it is the gods who make the Iliad grand and terrible.
“For Homer’s Hector and Achilles are caught in a squabble of the Greek deities. The gods take sides. They come down into the dust of the battlefield to intervene. They turn aside weapons hurled straight to kill. They appear in disguises to make trouble or to pull their favorites out of jams. An honorable contest of arms becomes a mockery, a game of wits among supernatural, invisible magicians. The fighting men are mere helpless pieces of the game.”
Natalie glances over her shoulder at the listeners. No audiences like these! Famished for diversion, for light, for a shred of consolation, they hang on a literary talk in Theresienstadt, as elsewhere people do on a great concert artist’s recital, or on a gripping film.
In the same level pedantic way, Jastrow reviews the background of the Iliad: Paris’s awarding of the golden apple for beauty to Aphrodite; the hostilities on Olympus that ensue; the kidnapping by Paris of Helen, the world’s prettiest woman, Aphrodite’s promised reward; and the inevitable war, since she is a married Greek queen and he a Trojan prince. Splendid men on both sides, who care nothing for the cuckold, the whore, or the kidnapper, become embroiled. For them, once it is war, honor is at stake.