War and Remembrance

by Herman Wouk

  “How do I go about finding him?”

  “That’s another question. Very tough.”

  They sat drinking coffee at an outdoor café in Neuilly, waiting for Natalie to wake from her afternoon sleep. “Don’t go into that with her,” Rabinovitz said. “And don’t stay too long, not this time. It’ll be hard for her.”

  “We’re bound to talk about Louis.”

  “Keep it vague. Just tell her that you’re going to search for him. Twenty-five days isn’t much time, but you can make an effort.”

  “Where’s the best place to start?”

  “Geneva. You’ll find the big card files on kids there, the Red Cross, the Joint, the World Jewish Congress. They’re starting a cross-index there, too. After Geneva, Paris. We have some files here. And I can give you a list of the D.P. camps that have a lot of children.”

  “Why don’t I go straight to Prague? He ought to be around there somewhere.”

  “I went to Prague.” Rabinovitz slumped over the coffee like an old man. He needed a shave, and his bloodshot eyes in sunken sockets were puffed almost shut. “I went to all four centers where they’ve got kids. I checked the card indexes and looked over the four-year-olds. I think I’d have recognized him, though they change a lot in a year and a half. Now as to the farmhouse, the name Natalie had, it’s burned down and everything’s overgrown and wild. Most of the neighbors are gone. Only one farmer would talk. He said he remembered a little boy, and he said the people weren’t massacred, they got away. The Germans looted an empty house. Anyway, that was his story, and there you are. So it’s tough. But kids can endure a lot, and Louis is a strong kid with plenty of spirit.”

  “I’ll go to Geneva tomorrow.”

  Rabinovitz looked at the clock on the wall. “She’s awake now. Do you want me to come with you?”

  “I think so. Just to start with, you know.”

  “I can’t stay long anyhow. Byron, she said more than once to me that if she ever finds Louis she’ll take him to Palestine.”

  “Do you think she means that?”

  Rabinovitz’s shrug and look were skeptical. “She’s not well yet. Don’t get into an argument over it.”

  They gave their names at the reception desk, and waited in a flowery garden where patients sat about in the sunshine, some dressed, some in bathrobes. She came out and walked toward them with something of the old swing, in a dark dress, her hair cropped short. She was smiling uncertainly. Her legs were thin, her face gaunt.

  “Well, Byron, so it’s you,” she said, holding out her arms. He embraced her and got a shock. Her body felt nothing like a woman’s. The chest was almost flat. He was holding bones.

  She leaned back in his arms, staring with strange eyes. “You look like a movie star,” she said. Byron was wearing his dress whites and ribbons, because, as he had told Rabinovitz, the uniform helped him squelch fools behind desks. “And I look ghastly, don’t I?”

  “Not at all. Not to me, God knows.”

  “I should have gone with you in Marseilles.” She recited the words dully, a rehearsed apology.

  “None of that, Natalie.”

  She glanced at Rabinovitz, who stood stooped near them, smoking a cigarette. “Avram saved my life, you know.”

  Rabinovitz said, “You saved your own life. I’ll go about my business, Byron.”

  Jumping at Rabinovitz, Natalie kissed him with much more feeling than she had shown Byron. She said something in Yiddish. Rabinovitz shrugged and walked out of the garden.

  “Let’s sit down,” Natalie said to Byron with effortful politeness. “Your father has written me lovely letters. He’s a fine man.”

  “Did you get any of mine?”

  “No, Byron. Not that I remember. My memory is not too good, not yet.” Natalie was speaking in a groping manner, almost as though trying to remember a foreign language. Her great dark eyes in shadowed hollows were scared and remote. They sat down on a stone bench by blooming rose bushes. “Not real letters. I dream, you know. I’ve dreamed a lot about you. I dreamed letters, too. But your father’s letters, I know they were real. I’m sorry your parents broke up.”

  “My father’s happy, and my mother’s all right.”

  “Good. Of course, I knew Pamela in Paris. Strange, isn’t it? And Slote, what about Slote? Do you know anything about Slote?”

  For Byron, this conversation was starting very strangely. Her recent letters had been more affectionate and coherent. Now she seemed to be saying whatever came into her head, to cover fear or embarrassment; nothing that mattered, nothing about Louis, nothing about Aaron Jastrow, nothing intimate, mere forced chatter. He went along with it. He told her at length how Slote had ruined his career trying to get State Department action on the Jews, and about his end as a Jedburgh agent, what he knew of that from Pamela and his father. Natalie’s eyes became more normal as she listened. Some of the alarm faded. “My heavens. Poor Slote, a parachutist! He couldn’t have been very good at it, could he? But you see, I wasn’t wrong to like him. His heart was in the right place, for a Gentile. I sensed that.” She did not know how she brought Byron up short with those words. She was smiling at him. “You really do look so imposing. Were you in much danger?”

  “You ask me that?”

  “Well, there’s danger and danger.”

  “I had narrow scrapes, sure. Ninety-nine percent of it was boring dead time. At least when I got in danger I could fight.”

  “I tried to fight. Maybe it was foolish, but that was my nature.” Her mouth quivered. “Well, tell me about your narrow escapes. Tell me about Lady Aster. Is he a big hero now?”

  Byron talked of Aster’s exploits and his death. She seemed interested, though her eyes sometimes wandered. Then a silence fell between them. They sat in shade, in the fragrance of blooming roses, looking at each other. Natalie said brightly, “Oh, I finally got my new passport. It came yesterday. Lord, that little book looked good, Byron!”

  “I’ll bet.”

  “You know, I managed to keep my old one for a long, long time. Right into Auschwitz. Would you believe it? But there they took all my clothes away. One of the girls in Canada must have found it. She probably traded it for a nice big chunk of gold.” Natalie’s voice began to shake, her hands to tremble, her eyes to brim.

  Byron decided to break through all this. He clasped her in his arms. “Natalie, I love you.”

  She clutched him with bony fingers, sobbing. “Sorry, sorry. I’m not in good condition yet. The nightmares, the nightmares! Every single night, Byron. Every night. And all the drugs, I get needles night and day —”

  “I’m going to Geneva tomorrow to start looking for Louis.”

  “Oh, are you? Thank God.” She wiped her eyes. “How much time have you got?”

  “About a month. I’ll come to see you, too.”

  “Yes, yes, but the main thing is to look for him.” She seized his arm with both thin hands, her dark eyes widened, and her voice became an intense hissing whisper. “He’s alive. I know he is. Find him.”

  “Darling, I’ll give it the old college try.”

  She blinked, then laughed as she used to do. “ ‘The old college try.’ How long since I’ve heard that!” She put her arms around his neck. “I love you, too. You’re much, much older, Byron.”

  A nurse approached them, pointing at her wristwatch. Natalie looked surprised and rather relieved. “Oh, dear, already?” When she stood up, the nurse took her elbow. “But we haven’t even talked about Aaron, have we? Byron, he was brave. The worse things got, the braver he was. I could tell you about him for hours. He wasn’t the man we knew in Siena. He became very religious.”

  “I always thought he was, the way he wrote about Jesus.”

  Leaning on the nurse, Natalie frowned. At the entrance she again hugged him weakly. “I’m glad you’re here. Find him. Forgive me, Byron, I’m in lousy shape. I’ll do better next time.” She kissed his mouth with dry rough lips, and went in.

  “Lousy.” The Ame
rican slang word, ringing so naturally, slightly reassured Byron. He hunted up the chief doctor, a prissy old Frenchman with a Pétain-like white mustache. “Ah, but she is doing very well, Monsieur. You have no idea. After the liberation, I worked for a month in the camps. Wreckage! Wreckage! Dante’s Inferno! She will get well.”

  “She wrote me about scars on her legs and back.”

  The doctor’s face twitched. “Not pretty, but ah, Monsieur, she is a lovely woman, and she is alive. The scars, eh bien, plastic surgery, and so forth. It is more a question now of mental scars, of restoring her flesh, and her spiritual balance.”

  After two weeks of combing the Geneva cards, and visiting displaced persons’ camps, broken by one trip to see Natalie, Byron despaired. He was swamped. In an index book of his own he had compiled the leads under three categories:

  Possible.

  Remote.

  Worth a Try.

  There were over seventy “possibles” alone; four-year-olds scattered over Europe, who from hair and eye color and languages understood might be his son. He had gone through some ten thousand listings of homeless children. No card showed a Louis Henry — nor a “Henry Lewis,” a brainstorm which had come to him during a sleepless night and sent him running around to all the card index centers again. Following up these leads might take months. Years! He had days. Rabinovitz was not expecting Byron when he showed up in the shabby office on the Rue des Capuchins over a very ill-smelling restaurant.

  “I’m going to Prague,” Byron said. “Maybe it’s a long shot, but I’m starting over.”

  “Well, all right, but you’ll butt up against stone walls. The Russians are tough and uninterested, and they’re in complete control.”

  “My father’s in Potsdam. He’s President Truman’s naval aide.”

  Rabinovitz straightened up with a squeak of his swivel chair. “You didn’t mention that.”

  “I didn’t think it was relevant. He’s had duty in the Soviet Union, and he speaks Russian in a fashion.”

  “Well, that could help you get around Prague. If the Military Governor receives word from Potsdam about you, the wheels will turn. At least you’ll satisfy yourself whether he’s there or not.”

  “Why should he be anywhere else, if he’s alive?”

  “He wasn’t there, Byron, when I searched, though God knows I could have missed something. Go ahead, but talk to your father first.”

  Rabinovitz worked with an organization taking Jews into Palestine in defiance of the British immigration laws. Briefly relaxed at the first exposure of the Nazi horrors, these laws had tightened up again. He was grindingly busy. Natalie Henry was not a main concern of his. He felt compassion for her, and a wistful trace of the old hopeless love; but compared with most Jews in Europe, she was now out of danger, a convalescing cossetted American. With the arrival of Byron he put her from his mind, and did not visit her again. When a couple of weeks later the telephone rang in his Paris flat at two in the morning, waking the three men he shared it with, and the operator said, “Hold for London, please,” his sleepy mind ran through many dealings he was having with London, most of them illegal and risky. He did not think of the Henrys.

  “Hello. This is Byron.”

  “Who?”

  “Byron Henry.” The postwar connection to London was not good. The voice wavered. “… him.”

  “What? What did you say, Byron?”

  “I said I’ve got him.”

  “What? You mean your son?”

  “He’s sitting here in my hotel room.”

  “Goddamn! He was in England?”

  “I’m bringing him to Paris day after tomorrow. There’s a lot of red tape still, and —”

  “Byron, what’s his condition?”

  “Not so hot, but I’ve got him. Now, will you tell Natalie, please? Let her get used to the idea that he’s found. Then when she sees him it won’t upset her too much. Or him. I don’t want him upset. Will you do that?”

  “With the greatest pleasure in my life! Listen, what’s the story? What shall I tell her?”

  “Well, it’s complicated. The RAF flew a bunch of Czech pilots back to Prague right after the war. A British rescue outfit got them to bring homeless kids back in the empty planes. I found this out last week in Prague. Pure luck. The records there are unbelievably rotten, Avram. I heard a guy in a restaurant talking about it, a Czech pilot, telling it to a British girl. It was luck. Luck or God. I followed it up and I’ve got him.”

  It was raining hard in the morning. Rabinovitz telephoned the convalescent home, and left a message for Natalie that he would come at eleven with important news. She stood waiting for him in the lobby when he arrived, shaking rain from his trench coat.

  “I thought you must have gone to Palestine.” Her face was taut. Her hands were clasped in front of her, the knuckles white. She was filling out; there were hints of curves under the dark dress.

  “Well, I am going next week.”

  “What’s your important news?”

  “I heard from Byron.”

  “Yes?”

  “Natalie.” He held out his hands to her, and she seized them. “Natalie, he found him.”

  His grip on her hands was not firm enough. She grinned crazily and dropped to the floor.

  The strong child brought the two little lumps together over Hiroshima that day. The new light seared more than sixty thousand people to cinders. The lone plane headed back to Tinian, radioing, Mission successful.

  The controversy will go on while human life survives. Some of the arguments:

  The Japanese would have surrendered anyway, without being bombed by radioactive lumps. They had sent out peace feelers. The American code-breakers knew from their diplomatic messages that they wanted peace.

  Yet the Japanese rejected the Potsdam ultimatum.

  Truman wanted to keep the Russians out of the Japanese war.

  Yet at Potsdam he did not waive Stalin’s commitment to attack Japan. He had Marshall’s advice that the Russians could not be kept from attacking if they wanted to.

  An invasion of Japan would have caused far more Japanese deaths, let alone American ones, than the Hiroshima casualties. The Japanese army leaders controlled the government, and their plan to fight invasion called for a bloody scorched-earth battle to the last like Hitler’s. The bomb gave the Emperor leverage to force a decision for the peace party in his councils.

  Yet the B-29 bombardments and the submarine blockade might have done so too, in time to scrub the invasion.

  If not, and if the Soviet Union had materially aided an invasion, the Red Army would have occupied part of the land. Japan might have ended partitioned like Germany.

  Yet whether the Japanese think the deaths at Hiroshima were an acceptable price for warding off that possibility is far from certain.

  This much is certain.

  The uranium weapon had been perfected barely in time for use in the war. There were two bombs available; only two, one of U-235, one of plutonium. The President, the cabinet, the scientists, the military men, all wanted the bomb rushed into combat. Harry Truman later said, “It was a bigger piece of artillery, so we used it.” There were worried dissenting voices: few, and futile. The momentum of all that expenditure of money, manpower, industrial plant, and scientific genius was irresistible.

  War scares nations, by murdering their people, into changing their politics. Here was the ultimate expression of war, after all, a child’s handfuls murdering a city. How could it not be used? It did scare a nation into changing its politics overnight. “Greatest thing in history!” said President Truman at the news of Hiroshima.

  Greatest thing since canned beer.

  Byron came through the plane gate leading by the hand a pale small boy in a neat gray suit, who walked docilely beside him. Rabinovitz recognized Louis, though he was taller and thinner.

  “Hello, Louis.” The boy looked solemnly at him. “Byron, she’s fine today, and waiting. I’ll drive you there. Did you hear abo
ut the atom bomb?”

  “Yes. I guess that’s the end, all right.”

  Walking to Rabinovitz’s very decrepit Citroën, they made the common talk being repeated all over the world, about the terrific news.

  “Natalie says she’s ready to go home, now that you’ve got him,” Rabinovitz said as they drove. “She thinks she’ll recuperate better there.”

  “Yes, we talked about that last time I saw her. Also she has property. Aaron’s publisher has been in touch with her. There’s quite a lot of money. And that villa in Siena, if it’s still standing. His lawyer has the deeds. It makes sense for her to go back right now.”

  “She won’t go with you to Germany, that I can tell you.”

  “I don’t expect her to.”

  “How will you feel there yourself?”

  “Well, the U-boat men are just professionals. I’ve got a job to do with them.”

  “They’re murderers.”

  “So am I,” Byron said without rancor, stroking Louis’s head. The boy sat on his lap, soberly looking out of the window at the sunny flat green fields outside Paris. “They’re the conquered enemy. We study their equipment and methods as soon as possible after surrender. That’s standard.”

  Silenced for a minute or so, Rabinovitz said abruptly, “I think she’ll stay in America, once she goes there.”

  “She doesn’t know what she’ll do. First she has to get well.”

  “Would you come with her to Palestine?”

  “That’s a tough one. I know nothing about Zionism.”

  “We Jews need a state of our own to live in, where we won’t get massacred. That’s all there is to Zionism.”

  “She won’t get massacred in America.”

  “Can the Jews all go there?”

  “What about the Arabs?” Byron asked after a pause. “The ones that are there in Palestine already?”

  Rabinovitz’s face as he drove became grave, almost tragic. He looked straight ahead, and his reply came slowly. “The Arabs can be grim, and they can also be noble. Christian Europe has tried to kill us. What choice have we? Palestine is our traditional home. Islam has a tradition to let the Jews live. Not in a state of our own, not as yet, that’s a new thing in their history. But it will work out.” He glanced toward Louis, and caressed the quiet boy’s cheek. “With a hell of a lot of trouble first. That’s why we need him.”