by Herman Wouk
20 May 1945
Dear Byron:
I am a little better. Berel came to Theresienstadt and got Louis last July. Then later I received a picture of him on a farm outside Prague. He looked well. Avram says they will find him. I love you.
(Dictated to Nurse Emily Denny, First Lieutenant USANC)
The shaky signature was in green ink.
Avram Rabinovitz’s long typed letter on flimsy onionskin paper was signed with the same pen.
17th May 1945
Dear Byron:
I speak better than I write English, and I am also very busy. So I will make this short and give you what happened. The important thing is that she is over the typhus. Now she has to build up, she is in very poor condition. The interviewer from the War Refugee Board was a stupid woman so Natalie sounds stupid in the affidavit. Her mind is now clear and she talks nicely, but she cries a lot, and she does not like to talk about what happened. She ran a fever for three days after the interview. That is not being allowed any more. She has asked me to write to you. As you will see, her handwriting is unsteady and she is weak. Also she does not want to remember and write things down.
To make it short, I am based in Paris with a rescue organization, I won’t go into too many details. We are cleaning up the Nazi wreckage, putting the Jews who are wandering homeless and starving into camps, in order to get their health back and go to Palestine. It is terrible work. When Germany was falling apart the SS didn’t know what to do with the Jews they had not yet killed. It all happened too fast to kill them all and cover up the camps, although they tried. They marched them around or moved them sealed in trains, no orders, no destination, no food or water, and when the Americans or the Russians came the Germans just ran and left the Jews where they were, I don’t know how many thousands of them like that, all over Europe. Our people found Natalie in a train that came from Ravensbriick which was a women’s concentration camp, and was stalled in a forest outside Weimar, just standing there. Probably it was heading for Buchenwald. Natalie was under the train, lying on the railroad bed. She crawled out because women were dying all around her in the car. I was with a different unit, we talked on the telephone at night and they told me they had found a woman under a train who said she was an American. A lot of Jews claim they are Americans to get better treatment. These fellows couldn’t talk English, so I drove over from Erfurt, never expecting to find your wife, God knows, but even stranger things have happened to me in this work. She was not very recognizable, skin and bones, and she was delirious, but I knew her and besides she kept talking about Louis and Byron. So I went to the American Army HQ and told them we had an American woman. This was in the middle of the night, and they sent a field ambulance for her right away. The treatment the army gave her is marvelous since she is an American.
They are trying to move her to Paris and I think they will succeed. There is a fine American hospital there in which Natalie worked for a while. The administrator remembers her and although it’s crowded he is willing to take her in. However, the red tape is tremendous, for instance the army officials are still trying to get her a new passport, but all that will be all right. Now about your son there is really no news. You will read in the affidavit how they got separated and Natalie did the right thing. That was very brave. However, it is not easy in Prague, because the Russians are occupying it, and they are not cooperative. Still, our people have been checking around Prague with no results yet. Just before the Russians arrived there was a lot of disorder in Prague, an uprising, Germans killing communists and so forth, and when the Germans retreated they looted a lot of the farms around there and set fire to them, so there is no telling what happened. Chances are your boy is certainly alive, but finding him is “looking for a needle in a haystack.” The homeless Jewish children are a problem in themselves, hundreds of thousands of them are roaming Europe, and some of them have become savages, wolves, their parents were killed and they learned to live by stealing. What the Germans did will never be repaired enough. Big card indexes are being assembled in Paris and Geneva by Red Cross, UNRRA, the Joint, and other organizations, but so far it is only a drop in the bucket. I have given the information on your son to our people who visit the files but they are swamped. It will take time. So that is the story, and I am sorry it is not a pleasanter one, but Natalie is alive at least, and she is beginning to look better. She has no appetite or she would recuperate faster. Letters from you would be a big help, and you had better send them to me, I’ll see that she gets them. Be as cheerful as possible when you write, tell her you believe your son is alive and we will find him.
Yours truly,
Avram Rabinovitz
The affidavit was a smudged faint single-spaced carbon copy, so poorly written that Byron could hardly follow some of it. It sounded nothing like Natalie. The interviewer obviously had taken notes, then typed them up in a hurry. The story began in peacetime in Siena, describing her entrapment by the Pearl Harbor attack and everything that had followed. Up to their meeting in Marseilles Byron knew most of it. The long Theresienstadt narrative, especially the scene in the SS cellar, made him cringe (though she or the interviewer had omitted the sexual details). The heading of the affidavit said there had been three interview sessions, but from Theresienstadt onward the narrative became sparse. The last words about Aaron Jastrow were oddly flat.
When we were getting on the train, an official of the Transport Section separated us. I never saw my uncle again. I heard later that all the Prominentein the transport went to the gas. He was an old frail man. They only picked a few young strong ones to live, so I am sure he is dead.
That was all. Her Auschwitz narrative after that rambled: how it felt to have her head shaved and a number tattooed on her arm, the rags she was given to wear, the conditions in the women’s brick blockhouse, the sanitary and feeding arrangements. A man called Udam, a friend from Theresienstadt, had obtained work for her in the warehouses of looted Jewish belongings. She had been assigned to the section of children’s toys, taking apart dolls, teddy bears, and other stuffed toys in search of money and valuables, then restoring them for sale or distribution to children in Germany. The most vivid passage in the whole affidavit described a punishment at this job.
I got very good at disassembling and reassembling the toys. There were mountains of them, and every one meant a little child murdered by Germans. But we stopped thinking about that, we were numb. Many toys were identical, from the same manufacturers. Occasionally we found something; jewelry, gold coins, or currency. There was pilfering, of course. We risked our lives when we kept things, because we were searched every afternoon when we left Canada. The warehouse section was called “Canada” because Polish people think Canada is a land of gold. We had to steal, because we could trade loot for food. Whose property was it, after all? Not the Germans’! I was never caught, but once I was beaten almost to death for nothing at all. I took apart a worn-out, ragged teddy bear with nothing in it. There was just no way to repair it. It fell to pieces in my hands. The supervisor was a loathsome Greek Jewess who strutted around dressed like an SS woman guard. She hated me because I was an American, and she jumped on the chance to make an example of me. She reported me to the SS. I was sentenced to twenty strokes of the cane on my bare skin, “for criminal destruction of Reich property.” The sentence was carried out at a roll call of all the workers in Canada. I had to bend over a wooden frame naked, and an SS man flogged me. I have never known such agony. I fainted before he was finished. Udam and some of my women friends carried me to the blockhouse, and Udam got me into the hospital. Otherwise I would have died from loss of blood. I couldn’t walk for a week. I found out how strong my constitution is, however. I healed up and went back to the same job. The Greek woman acted as though nothing had happened.
The narrative passed into incoherent generalities about life in Auschwitz: the smell from the mass graves where the bodies were being dug up and burned, the black market, the exceptional steadfastness of Jehovah�
��s Witnesses, a kindly SS man, having an affair with a woman in the blockhouse, who had brought them much good food. It described the rumors of the Russian approach, the distant sound of the guns, the three-day march of thousands of women in the snow to a railroad terminal, the train ride in open coal cars to Ravensbriick. She had gone to work in a clothing plant, living in terror of Ravensbriick medical experiments, of which she had heard rumors even in Auschwitz. Field whores for the Wehrmacht, also for SS brothels, were recruited from this camp; but about this her comment, even filtered through the interviewer’s mind and style, was pitiful.
That was one threat that did not concern me. I had once been considered attractive, but a few months in Auschwitz had fixed that. Anyway, they only recruited the youngest, freshest Jewish girls. Some of the Hungarian Jewesses who came to Ravensbriick were really delicate beauties. Moreover, in Ravensbriick I had no way to get extra food, and I was shrinking to a skeleton, as I am now. Also, I would never have passed the physical examination because of the scars. The German men wouldn’t have enjoyed the sight.
In April thousands of us were loaded onto trains. We had heard that the war was almost over, that the Russians and the Americans were about to join hands, and we were counting the days and praying to be liberated. But the Germans stuffed us into sealed cattle cars and sent us God knows where, with no provision whatever for food, water, or health. Typhus had already broken out in the camp. On the train it spread like wildfire. I remember very little after I left Ravensbriick. Just how horrible it was on that train, worse than anything yet. My car was a morgue, practically all the women were dead or dying. They tell me I was found under the train. I don’t know how I got there, and I can’t understand how it is that I’m still alive. If anything kept me going all these months it was the hope of one day seeing my son again. I think that was what gave me the strength to get out of that car. I can’t tell you who opened the door or how I got out. I have told you all I know.
99
ASTRONG child can hold fifteen pounds or so in his two hands, if the stuff is not bulky: say, two lumps of the man-made heavy element, plutonium. If the child holds the lumps far apart nothing will happen. If he can clap his hands together very fast, and if he is a big-city child, he can make a “critical mass” and kill a million people; that is, in theory. Actually no child can move his arms that fast; at worst he would make a fizzle that would kill him and cause a bad mess. One needs a device that zips the little lumps together, for an atomic blast and a city-destroying blaze of light.
This fact of nature, so earthshaking in 1945, is an old story now. Still, it remains strange and frightening. We prefer not to think about it, as we prefer not to think much about the attempted murder of all the Jews in Europe by a modern government. But these are ruling realities of the way we live now. Our little earth contains traces of the primordial ash of creation, powerful enough in handful sizes to wipe us all out: and human nature contains traces of savagery, persisting in advanced society, which can use the stuff to wipe us out. These were the two fundamental developments of the Second World War. Obscured in the dustclouds of conventional history kicked up by the great battles, they emerge plain as the dust settles. Whether in consequence the human story, like this tale, is entering its last chapter, nobody yet knows.
To go on with the story: the first time plutonium lumps blazed out in the new light, Sime Anderson was there.
“What on earth?” Madeline muttered, as the alarm went off at midnight.
“Sorry,” he said with a yawn. “Duty calls.”
“Again? Gawd,” she said, turning over.
Sime dressed, went out in the chilly drizzle, and boarded one of the crowded buses carrying selected Los Alamos scientists and engineers to the test ground. Sime had been a small fish in the vast effort, but he was going with Captain Parsons, a large fish. The weather was bad for the test. For a while postponement was in the air, and the hour of the shot was delayed. The spectators waited in the dark many miles from the test tower, drinking coffee, smoking, and making airy or somber conversation. Nobody knew exactly what was going to happen when the shot went off. There was some talk, not quite persiflage, about the possibility that the explosion would set fire to the atmosphere, or start a process that would disintegrate the earth. There was nervous talk too about a fizzle.
That was the point of the test. Laboratory tickling of uranium 235 had satisfied the scientists that it would certainly go off with a proper bang in a critical mass; and so it did over Hiroshima without a previous test. The trouble was that the mountainous Manhattan Project had labored and brought forth only one small lethal mouse of U-235, just enough for a single bomb. Plutonium had turned out to be relatively simpler to produce, and there was more of it. But it was touchier stuff. Nobody could be sure whether it would not pre-detonate — that is, fizzle — as the lumps came together. There had to be a test of a device, worked out by the world’s best brains, to whisk the lumps into an explosive mass in an eyeblink. The rain and wind abated, and the test went on. It worked. Flying from San Francisco to Washington on a night plane held up by weather, Byron saw the vague flash in the sky to the south, but he thought it was lightning. There were many electrical storms in the American West that morning. His sister, like most Los Alamos wives, slept straight through the test.
It did not look like lightning to Sime Anderson, of course. Standing twenty-five miles away, he saw through dark glasses a glare never before viewed by men on the earth’s surface, though they had always seen it burning in the sun and twinkling in the stars. Sime fell on his face. It was instinct. When he got up, the cloud of fire — which reminded Dr. Oppenheimer of the apparition of Vishnu in the Bhagavad-Gita — already towered many miles high. A brigadier general and a scientist stood near Sime, paper coffee cups in hand, staring through goggles.
“There’s the end of the war,” he heard the scientist say.
“Yes,” he heard the general say, “once we drop a couple of those on the Japs.”
At the Andrews airfield, Pug and Pamela met Byron. After the warm letter Byron had written from Guam, Pug expected a bearhug, but it was his son’s embrace of Pamela that gave him the feeling of a won war. Byron hugged and kissed his new stepmother, held her by the shoulders, looked her up and down, and shouted over the roar of a MATS plane just taking off, “You know what? I’m damned if I’m going to call you mama.”
She burst into a joyous laugh. “How about Pamela?”
“No change,” said Byron. “Easy to remember. Dad, is there any news?”
“Since you called from San Francisco? None.”
“When does she go into the convalescent home, did you say?”
“Day after tomorrow.”
“I’d like to see Rabinovitz’s letter.”
“Here it is. There’s another one from her.”
Byron read his mail as Pamela drove wildly back to Washington. “She sounds better. Dad, I can’t get on a plane to Europe. I was on the phone for hours in San Francisco, trying to wangle a priority.”
“How much leave have you got?”
“Thirty days. Little enough.”
“I’m flying there myself tomorrow.”
“Where to?”
“Berlin. Potsdam.”
“God, that would be perfect. I have to report to Swinemünde before my leave starts. Can I bum a ride?”
Pug’s mouth wrinkled in a reluctant smile. “Let me find out.”
Lunch with his mother at Foxhall Road was pleasanter than Byron had anticipated. Brigadier General Peters was not there. (He was, in fact, the general who had spoken at Los Alamos of dropping a couple on the Japs.) Janice showed up in a straight skirt, a plain brown blouse, and glasses, carrying a briefcase. She would not drink. She was working “on the hill” in a summer job, and did not want to get sleepy. She had put on weight, she wore little makeup, and her hair was pulled straight back. She was genially talkative about her plans after law school. When her eyes met Byron’s he saw there only alert
friendly intelligence. Her snapshots of little Victor, so much like Warren’s kindergarten pictures, hurt Byron, but Rhoda made sweet grandmotherly noises over them.
“Mom’s drinking too much,” Byron said to his father that evening at the apartment.
“She has spells. What do you call too much?”
“Two Scotch-and-sodas before lunch, two bottles of white wine with the chicken salad. She polished off most of the wine herself.”
“That’s too much. I know she was tense about seeing you. She told me so.”
“What about that plane ride?”
“Pack up in the morning and come with me. All they can do is bounce you.”
“I haven’t unpacked.”
A courier in a special plane was rushing papers and pictures from Los Alamos to Secretary Stimson and President Truman in Potsdam, and Pug was going in that plane. This news was not being entrusted to the telephone or telegraph. It was still a secret of secrets. Only a short, enigmatic cable had been sent to the President, announcing the arrival of a healthy “baby,” and he had informed Churchill. So these two knew. Most likely Stalin did too, since a leading scientist at Los Alamos was a faithful communist spy. Otherwise it was a secret of secrets. So Byron got rapid transportation to Europe on the courier plane, which turned out to make a great difference. As they say, it’s an ill wind.
“There’s no reason why he shouldn’t be alive,” Rabinovitz said. “She got him out of the Germans’ hands. She took a hell of a chance, and I give her credit.”