The Kindness of Strangers

by Salka Viertel

  My only hope is that Dusko will now work more intensely and not rely upon Salka’s checks. This was the main reason for my leaving. I would gladly travel third-class on the Trans-Siberian but they say at the Embassy that I would not be able to stand eleven days and eleven nights on a hard wooden bench. However, my trip from Lwow to Moscow (two days and two nights third-class) was not bad at all.

  The young lady at the Embassy, a Russian Jewess from Odessa, saw from my passport that I was born in Mogilev and the name Rafalovicz impressed her. Now she comes every day to take me to lunch. I am really very grateful, because it is sad to be so alone. I am counting the days till our reunion, my dear children.

  The letter arrived while the Nazis were rapidly advancing toward Moscow. I sustained my faith in Russia by reading War and Peace.

  In August a telegram from Washington confirmed that the “visa case Augusta Steuermann had been approved by the Interdepartmental Committee,” and Moscow notified. In the bombed city my mother still waited for permission to leave the country. Finally, in early September, Steinhardt cabled me that she would leave on the Trans-Siberian to Vladivostok, and from there on a steamer to the United States. I assumed that she had a cabin on one of the new Lend-Lease ships.

  It took two months of anguished waiting before a telephone call from the Immigration Office in Seattle reached me at the studio, and a friendly voice requested me to stay on the line because “a very dear person” wanted to talk to me. As it was unusual for the Immigration officers to call a passenger “a very dear person,” I knew that it could only be my mother. It was her seventy-fourth birthday; she had just disembarked after a six weeks’ sea voyage and ten days on the Trans-Siberian train. Her voice sounded gay and fresh, as if it had been the shortest trip she had ever made.

  As Soviet ships crossing the Pacific could not send radio messages, my mother had not been able to let me know when and where she would arrive, and I could not meet her. But the new Soviet-American friendship had prompted the Immigration authorities to welcome her, a Soviet citizen, with warm-hearted, American hospitality and to give a birthday party for her. The Polish interpreter, Madame Jasny, put her on the train to Los Angeles, and two days later with my sons and Etta, I was waiting for her at the station.

  I cannot describe what I felt when I saw an emaciated, old woman emerge from the Pullman and recognized that it was my mother. She had been strong and vigorous when I had seen her in Switzerland, now I was holding a trembling, worn-out creature in old tattered clothes. The most pitiful sight were the “new” shoes she had bought in Moscow. They alone told the heartbreaking story of the suffering of the Soviet people.

  After we had calmed down, Mama explained her trembling: “The bombings—” she said, apologetically. “First at home and then in Moscow. It is the most horrible experience, believe me. Imagine what the people go through in London!”

  I couldn’t wait to feed and dress and pamper her. When she began to gain weight and to recover her strength, her trembling subsided, although it never completely left her. California enchanted her. She admired the flowers, the ocean, the abundance of fruit, “and what a blessing that you never have snow.” But Dusko, Hania, Viktoria, Adam, and her old friends were constantly on her mind. During her stay in Moscow, until the German invasion, she had been in steady contact with them. “They wanted me to leave,” she told me, “because if anything happened it would be easier for them to move. After all, I was a burden, and then I wanted to see you, Rose and Edward before I died.”

  She assumed that once the German advance was achieved, a local Ukrainian administration would take over Sambor. An independent pro-Nazi Ukraine was one of Hitler’s aims. My mother hoped that Viktoria, who had married a young Ukrainian, would be able to protect Hania and the boy. But the Jews were doomed and Dusko could do nothing but flee with the retreating Russians.

  She liked to talk about her two years under Soviet rule. She had attended courses teaching the Soviet constitution, which she found idealistic and which promised people a better future. “However,” she sighed, “as in all religions, on paper everything looks different than in practice.” The population was told to choose whether they wanted to be Polish or Russian, and luckily she, Dusko and her household opted for the Soviets. Those who opted for Poland were immediately deported to unknown places. The Russians had “nationalized” Wychylowka, depriving her of the house and all her possessions, but such was “the system.” Otherwise, she found them friendly, good-hearted and severely punishing anti-semitism.

  When the news spread that I had got my mother out of Russia, friends and acquaintances wanted to hear about her experiences and I had to give a big tea party. Everyone brought friends. The ladies crowded around Mama, expressing admiration for her English, which she was just learning to speak; but after a while I noticed that only Bertolt Brecht and his wife Helli were paying attention to her. Some others even neglected to say good-bye to her. Old age even gallantly borne frightened them.

  Brecht and Helli (the actress Helene Weigel) with their children, Stefan and Barbara, had arrived in California in July, preceding Mama by three months. Their journey from Finland, Moscow and Vladivostok, then on a Swedish ship via the Panama Canal to San Pedro, was even longer than hers. This was the disastrous summer of Hitler’s victories and we spent many evenings together trying not to abandon hope. Hanns Eisler, whom I had known in Vienna when he was studying with Schoenberg, was an old friend of Brecht and he and his dark-haired, petite wife Lou were often with us. They were already acclimatized to Hollywood, and popular in American literary circles: Eisler because of his brilliant mind and jolliness, Lou because of her humor and intelligence.

  The high rank Brecht now occupies in world literature does not need any restating in these personal recollections. His work and its influence are discussed every day in newspapers, essays and critical works. Books about him are written in many languages and his plays are performed everywhere in the East and West. It was not so in Hollywood. Life was hard: “Every morning to earn my bread I go to the market where they buy lies. . . .” he wrote.

  After the Reichstag fire Brecht and his family had fled first to Denmark, where they were guests of the venerable Karin Michaelis, whose novel The Woman of Forty had shocked my mother’s generation. When Hitler invaded Denmark and Norway they went to Finland, where they got their U.S. visa and, as the Nazis were then marching into Russia, Brecht and Helli with their two children left for America. Brecht’s friend and secretary Margarete Steffin, Karin Michaelis and Ruth Berlau, a Danish actress, went with them. The hopelessly ill Margarete Steffin died in Moscow.

  The Brechts rented an old wooden bungalow on Twenty-sixth Street in Santa Monica. It was very simple but spacious. Of the two large rooms on the first floor, one became Brecht’s frugally furnished workroom, the other the living room. At the back of the house was a lovely garden with flowers and fruit trees.

  Neither Brecht nor Helli had changed much since our Berlin days. His black hair, combed down and cut straight above the forehead, made his thin face resemble a Chinese sage, although the aquiline, fine nose remained irrefutably Caucasian. The mouth, with its thin, tight upper lip over rather bad teeth, had a deceptively mild expression; behind glasses, the dark deep-set eyes looked sceptically humorous. The leather jacket he used to wear in Berlin was replaced in California by a gray flannel shirt with a straight collar and was tailored by Helli. She had acquired many skills and had become the all-around working woman and mother: sewing, cooking, gardening and washing. After a long day’s chores she would stay up half of the night, serving tea and homemade cakes to visitors who came to discuss the war and to quote Brecht later. Hollywood actresses who met Helli at the Chaplins’ or in my house were amazed when I told them that she was their distinguished colleague. “She certainly doesn’t look it,” concluded the flighty ones, after they had scrutinized her face and straight hair pulled back in a tight knot. Exile, hard work and the difficult, although unswerving, relationship with
Brecht had left their mark on the bony, strong features which never wore make-up.

  To the “film colony” the Brechts were strangers, an odd European couple who did not speak English (although Brecht understood everything and could follow discussions). But he refused to express himself stumblingly in an alien tongue, unlike Hanns Eisler who, unconcerned about grammar and his atrocious accent, enlivened the dullest parties.

  Brecht’s contribution to the Hollywood output was very small indeed. The Hangmen Also Die, a Fritz Lang film for which Eisler wrote the music, went through the usual grind, and Brecht withdrew his name from the screenplay. The Visions of Simone Marchand, on which he collaborated with Feuchtwanger, was sold to MGM but never made into a film. However he worked on his poems and the plays, Mother Courage, Arturo Ui, The Caucasian Chalk Circle, Schweik and The Good Woman of Tse-Tsuan.

  •

  The German colony was divided into several groups, but Thomas Mann remained the representative, towering literary figure, his influence reaching as far as Washington D.C. Bruno and Liesl Frank had been close to the Mann family for many years and the friendship continued in Hollywood. The Feuchtwangers, Franz and Alma Werfel, the Bruno Walters and Liesl Frank’s famous mother, the musical comedy star Fritzi Massary, belonged to this circle, also the Dieterles. Then there was a devoted admiring group around Fritz Kortner.

  The Polgars who did not belong to any group, spent their Sundays on Mabery Road. Max Reinhardt and Helene Thimig were preoccupied with the Workshop and the planning and preparing of its productions. They entertained rarely but these occasions were usually exceptionally pleasant. One evening I was invited with Sam Behrman, Franz Werfel and Alma, Mr. and Mrs. Erich Korngold and Gottfried. The Stravinskys came later, missing a marvelous dinner. They had never met Alma before. Remembering her position in the musical world, and forgetting Werfel, she rushed toward Stravinsky, announcing: “I am Alma Mahler.” She was an imposing woman, still blond with large blue eyes and the old-fashioned charm of a Viennese beauty. The two great composers, Stravinsky and Schoenberg, avoided each other ostentatiously, and in fact only shortly before Schoenberg’s death did they mutually acknowledge their importance. Later Stravinsky paid great homage to Schoenberg and to his music.

  During his first years in Los Angeles, Schoenberg was teaching counterpoint at the University of California. His classes were crowded not only by students but also by jazz musicians of whom many also took private lessons from him. Edward used his summer vacations in Santa Monica to rehearse and prepare performances of Schoenberg’s compositions, one of which, the “Pierrot Lunaire,” took place in our living room, with Schoenberg conducting and the lovely Erika Wagner (Mrs. Fritz Stiedry in private life) speaking the text. All the literary and musical elite was present, among others three famous conductors: Bruno Walter, Otto Klemperer and Fritz Stiedry. The applause was not unanimous, but it was led by Thomas Mann, clapping his hands heartily while Bruno Walter whispered into his ear, obviously disapproving. That same winter Leopold Stokowski conducted Schoenberg’s piano concerto in New York, with Edward as soloist. It was an almost unopposed success for everyone concerned.

  The German invasion of Russia and the help America was sending to the Soviets had changed the attitude of the American Left, split during the Stalin-Hitler pact. In November, when the Germans had reached Sevastopol and Rostow, gloom settled on everyone. But in December the Soviets reconquered Rostow, relieving Moscow, and their offensive gave hope that the tide was turning. To this hope my mother and I clung persistently and desperately, praying for Dusko, Hania and Viktoria, and the millions of Slavic and Jewish people.

  On one of the gray December afternoons I left the studio quite early and trying to fight my dismal dejection, I drove to the Santa Monica pier.

  The clouds above the horizon had broken up and become purple, mauve, pink and silver-gray; the sun in their midst was like an enormous orange. I walked down the deserted pier, watching the orange ball disappear in the clouds, then suddenly come out blood-red and sink into the dark water. At the very end of the pier a young girl was sitting on the wooden planks, her legs in torn, faded jeans dangling through the railing. She wore a man’s shirt, wide open, showing firm, round breasts. In one arm she held a fat baby which was sucking avidly; in her other hand a fishing rod, its line stretched far out in the water. She was watching the float with great concentration. I could not tear myself away from this sight of complete calm and satisfaction.

  Next morning I took my mother for a drive in the open car along the Pacific and we listened to the Sunday concert from New York, which came over the radio. It was a combination of two of Mama’s great pleasures. Arthur Rubinstein was just finishing the first movement of the Tchaikowsky Piano Concerto no. 1, when the broadcast was interrupted and the announcer said that early in the morning Japanese airplanes and submarines had attacked and sunk the American fleet in Pearl Harbor.

  36

  ALL THE JAPANESE LIVING IN CALIFORNIA were sent to concentration camps or, as they were politely called, “internment centers.” Then Hitler declared war on the United States, and German refugees had to register as enemy aliens and to observe an 8 P.M. curfew. Thomas Mann and Albert Einstein appealed to the President: “The earliest and most far-sighted adversaries of the totalitarian governments, who have risked their lives by fighting and warning against forces of evil are now subjected to a humiliating treatment.”

  Strangely enough, there was no curfew in the East, where the “Bund” and the “Silver Shirts” had an impressively large membership of racists and pro-Nazis of German origin. In Hollywood most refugees goodnaturedly accepted the restriction of their liberty. They observed the blackouts and spent their evenings at home, convinced that a “fifth column” existed and caution was necessary. My former colleague from the Reinhardt theaters, Alexander Granch, used the time to write his moving memoirs. The younger men rushed to enlist in the army, which automatically made them American citizens.

  Many of my friends, among them Annie von Bucovich, left Los Angeles to work at the Office of War Information. The Coordinator was our friend John Houseman, a producer at MGM.

  I was visited several times by the FBI—strong, handsome young men, who would have served their country better in the Marines rather than in harassing the refugees. I specifically remember their inquiry about Annie:

  “Is the lady a communist?”

  “No, she is not.”

  “She is a Russian . . . ?”

  “She is neither a Russian nor a communist.”

  “She is anti-fascist?”

  “Yes, she is.”

  The FBI man shook his head disapprovingly. “Oh, you people,” he said with a deep sigh. “You are anti-fascist but I have never heard one of you say: I am anti-communist.”

  “Whom do you mean by ‘you people’?” I asked belligerently. “The refugees? They were the first victims of the Nazi horror, the first enemies of the regime with which the U.S. is at war. And aren’t the Russians our allies?” But I realized that my outburst was a waste of time and energy, so I assured him once more that Annie was not and had never been a communist and had never read a word of Das Kapital.

  •

  Gottfried was in uniform almost immediately. The Army could not be persuaded of his usefulness in “intelligence” or “psychological warfare” and after basic training, he was assigned to the Signal Corps to write scenarios for films glorifying the building of latrines, rifle cleaning, prevention of V.D., and all things vital to warfare. The only redeeming feature of this uninspiring but necessary work, was that his outfit was stationed at the Astoria Film Studios in Long Island, and he could live in Manhattan.

  When the United States entered the war Peter was under contract to David Selznick, but loaned out to write a film for Warner Brothers. He did not wait to be drafted but enlisted in the Marines. I was greatly distressed that he had chosen the toughest branch of the U.S. forces and blamed Oliver for influencing him. Oliver denied it but said that h
e approved of Peter’s decision. “The Marines are our elite corps,” he told me. “Their training is rough, long and severe, but it provides greater safety and more opportunity for individual initiative.” I was skeptical about the “safety” and the words “individual initiative” made my blood freeze.

  Oliver had married again, but this time he had made a more congenial choice. Charlcie was an attractive Southerner from Alabama, generous, warm-hearted and not as competitive as her predecessor, except when they played Bridge. They had moved into a house on Mabery Road and we saw each other often. I could not share Oliver’s enthusiasm about the Marines, not even after I had received an impressive gilded certificate that my son had passed successfully the “mental, moral and physical examination required for a Marine . . . On behalf of our President, Secretary of the Navy, Commandant of the Marine Corps and Officer in Charge of Western Recruiting Division.” I was heartily congratulated “for being able to furnish a son who measures up to the high standard required for enlistment in the United States Marine Corps.”

  The words “son” and the “two” of the date 1942 had been typed in.

  Berthold, in New York, reacted better to Peter’s enlistment than I expected: “Peter wrote me a very moving letter, which depicts clearly the fixation under which he labors, as, more or less, we all do. He cannot divert his eyes from Hitler’s gorgonian features, he is compelled to face the monster, man to man, as in a duel, otherwise his own existence will become worthless to him.”

  All this was true and irrefutable and, as always, we both felt alike; still it was hard for me to control my growing depression and anxiety and continue writing scenarios. It tortured me to think that Peter had become a tiny, passive particle in an immense, grinding mechanism, never knowing where and how it might evolve and—I pushed away the thought that he could be killed—how it might change him. I loathed people who said: “The Marines will make a man of him.” The training alone: this teaching of killing, of brutality, the drill sergeants demanding that it be done enthusiastically, was amply gruesome. I had seen war and fervently hoped never to see it again. Now a demented maniac, and the endemic German nationalism forced me to admit that this one had to be fought and suffered to the bitter end. And I had “furnished” a son to participate in it.