Journal 1935–1944

by Mihail Sebastian

  In the afternoon I went with Ceacăru to a few Jewish homes to collect beds, clothes, and linen. Painful and sad. I don’t have the courage to insist and give way as soon as anyone protests. I shan’t forget a doctor’s “waiting room” on Strada Polizu: a wretched provincial interior, with shabby old furniture. Plush, mirrors, flowers—everything sordid and dispiriting.

  “Take a seat,” said the doctor’s assistant, who did not know why we had come.

  The doctor was some five minutes late, then suddenly appeared from an adjoining room. All the time I was tortured by the thought that he might think we were patients, and that the truth would come as a great disappointment to him.

  The Germans have announced that Leningrad is now completely encircled. Today’s papers again say that occupation of the city is imminent. In the central sector, it seems, the Russians are continuing to attack and to make some advances. Timoshenko’s4 plan is to attack the flank of the German armies in the north, forcing them to disengage from Leningrad. It would be an operation on a grand scale, but I don’t think the Russians are capable of carrying it out at the present stage of the war.

  Thursday, 11 September

  There is no news from the front. Neither the official communiqués nor the press telegrams say anything. In the last few days German propaganda has focused almost entirely on Leningrad, which it considers to be completely encircled. But it also hints that the city is more likely to fall through a siege, however long, than through a direct attack.

  Emil Gulian (whom I met today at Margareta Sterian’s) told me that the German officers at his office said that the main pressure is actually on Moscow, which will fall more quickly than Leningrad and even sooner. Nothing is being printed any more about Odessa. They wait in silence, and with a certain embarrassment, for a battle to end there.

  Rosetti (who returned yesterday from Cîmpulung) saw en route some long German military trains heading from Timişoara toward the Danube. He also said that Dobrogea is full of German troops. They keep trickling through Giurgiu toward Bulgaria. It would seem, though, that the Germans are going to attack Turkey (though in the last few days the question has no longer seemed immediate).

  The Lereanu family. A commission from the Community went to see them yesterday, to ask them for bed linen, clothing, and money. . . . Their answer: “We won’t give any. We don’t belong to the Community.” And as they nevertheless had some things to donate, they sent them directly to a hospital—just so that they would not be giving them as Jews. Under the Legionaries, however, I think it cost them hundreds of thousands of lei to escape from a difficult situation.

  This morning a Jewish merchant from Strada Blanari (an honest man, basically), whom I had visited with Ceacâru for him to sign our contributions list, said to me: “So you see, that’s how it is. Now you’re a Jew! And if things are put right tomorrow, you’ll forget it again.” He too had heard that I had written a book (“The Year 2000”!?), that I had had a big argument, that I had become a renegade. After so many years, the wretched business is still continuing.

  Gunther, the American envoy (says Rosetti), told someone yesterday that at the peace conference the Romanians would not be forgiven two things: that they crossed the Dniester, and that they behaved as they did toward the Jews.

  Friday, 12 September [1941]

  Today they disconnected my telephone, after leaving it on (probably by mistake) for two months. “If Mr. Sebastian is Jewish, the telephone will be cut off,” someone phoning from the company told Mama today. Two hours later it was all over.

  “The German army is also prepared for a winter campaign,” states a Rador telegram from Berlin that appeared in today’s Universul.

  It seems that Roosevelt’s speech last night was extremely forceful. We had no way of listening to it, but a lot can be gathered from the little that comes through in the DNB5 account. In fact, the declaration that the American navy will attack German ships sailing in American “defensive waters” is a step toward war—especially as the concept of “defensive waters” is rather elastic.

  I read with pleasure, almost emotion, a copy of the Tribune de Genève. I even closely read the cinema announcements and the small ads. Street names bearing a kind of nostalgic sadness. I found the rental advertisements especially moving. There are numerous vacant apartments: Rue Neuchâtel 4, Rue Carouge 46, Rue des Grottes 17, etc. I could live in any one of them. A holiday ad depressed me: “Jura Vandois. Pension famille à la campagne. Alt. 600m. Situation tranq. Gd. verger. Cuisine soign.6 Prix 5.50. Reverolles-sur-Marges (Vand.) ” What refuge there!

  Today I remembered (I wonder how and why) the days I spent in Ploieşti in Autumn 1931, at the Lupeni trial.7 The hotel room there seemed like a theatrical setting—and I saw a play rapidly taking shape around that business. Very vague as a dramatic idea, but the temptation to write is immediate.

  Sunday, 14 September

  The 14th of September. The day Napoleon entered Moscow. From now on, Hitler is lagging behind the 1812 schedule.

  The lack of a telephone is a real nuisance: it severs the few contacts I still have with people. But I’ll soon get used to that too.

  Monday, 15 September

  The Germans have crossed the Dnieper at Kremenchug, roughly halfway between Kiev and Dnepropetrovsk. It is a major blow that puts Kiev and Kharkov in danger. London does not hide the gravity of the situation. It also admits that the threat to Leningrad is growing.

  Rain. I ate at Alice’s and returned a short while ago—a little before midnight. The streets look sinister in the cold, the rain, and the dark. Everything smells of November.

  Yesterday and today I tried to define more clearly the plan for a play that I glimpsed the other day. I got down to writing, though everything is so obscure. I hoped that with pen in hand I would be able to carry further my first vision of things. I wrote the stage settings and the first few words of Act One, but then I had to stop. It doesn’t work—and there’s no way it can. It’s too little, and too unclear. Yet I feel that some of the knots could be untied. There isn’t—or isn’t yet—a subject, but there is a milieu, an atmosphere, a framework. I have started to reproach myself: I leave too many projects hanging; they grow old, lose all meaning, shrivel, and die. The war is an excuse for me to abandon too many things. I have resigned myself to treating it as a long hibernation, but around me there are people who still live, who still work and stir themselves. Why can’t I too come back to life?

  Wednesday, 17 September

  The Dnieper seems to have been crossed not only at Kremenchug but at several points downstream from it. There is talk of a great outflanking maneuver, endangering both eastern Ukraine and the Caucasus. After three weeks of relative standstill, the war is entering another dramatic phase. But the key problem remains the same. Will the Russian army collapse or not? Can the Germans avoid a winter war? Are they in a position to settle matters now?

  A day stupidly spent on Calea Văcăreşti, between temple and synagogue, waiting for news about the “requisitioning on the spot.” This morning, unexpectedly, the schedules presented by the Community were rejected. Tomorrow we are supposed to report again to the recruitment office. Disorder, confusion, uncertainty. And yet I don’t know why I am so calm. Probably I have become so numb.

  On this evening three years ago the dress rehearsal of my play was performed. I remember everything very well: the darkened auditorium, the raised curtain, the incomplete stage settings, the few people in the audience, the meal late that night at Mircea’s. Had I known then all that would follow in the next three years, there would still have been time for me to run away, to escape. Today I feel half dead: indifferent, insensitive, with no desires, hopes, or expectations.

  Thursday, 18 September

  London reports that, according to a German news item (which I haven’t seen in the Bucharest papers), the isthmus linking the Crimea to the mainland has been occupied—and adds that, if this is true, the Russian armies in the Crimea will be cut off and unabl
e to receive help. I look at the map and realize that if things are so, Kherson has virtually fallen. In fact, they have all “virtually” fallen: Odessa and Kiev and Leningrad. For the moment, though, they do not fall. How much longer can this “moment” last?

  It had been announced that police raids would take place today, to catch Jews who are not performing their obligations for “labor useful to the state.” But the raids seem to have been postponed. Why? how? until when?—no one knows. I have been told that I am one of the few teachers excused from labor for the time being (everything is for the time being). I don’t know anything—but on this matter I am calm and more or less resigned.

  I have dropped the play about the trial in Ploieşti and returned to “Freedom.” I couldn’t say that I am in the mood for writing, but I’d like to finish at least one of those theatrical projects of mine that have been losing all point through neglect. I think I’ll add a Jewish banker (the Hillel Manoah or Davicion Bally type8) to the dramatis personae. I have already fitted him into the plot and can clearly visualize his entrances in all three acts. If I were persevering, I could wrap up the whole thing in a few weeks. But I am not persevering, and I have lost the habit of writing.

  Friday, 19 September

  I have reread yesterday’s note. Kherson fell three weeks ago (at the same time as Nikolaev and Dnepropetrovsk), but I had forgotten. As to Kharkov, it is farther away. The situation in that region is certainly very difficult for the Russians. The German offensive is breaking a deadlock there, and I don’t know how things will look afterward. I should give up following the different phases of the war. I should understand that these are all episodes and wait for the end (which, at such moments, again seems a long way off). From day to day the war is hard to bear. Let’s see what it will be like in a month, in three months, in a year.

  Belu9 is very, very disheartened—he who is usually so optimistic. He thinks the British should land now in France—otherwise everything may be lost. But to believe in the possibility now of a British landing strikes me as childish.

  Titel Comarnescu. I hadn’t seen him since June, when I was prepared to bet anything that there wouldn’t be a war with Russia. He hasn’t changed: still voluble, confused, agitated. In his view, the Russians will be beaten, the British will conclude a compromise peace, and the Germans will organize Russia. He talked of the Slav danger, from which no one other than Hitler can save us. Hitler is the devil—but he is doing Europe a huge service. In any case, between the Russians and the Germans, he prefers the Germans. Not even the British have anything left but to accept a compromise.

  Sunday, 21 September

  Kiev has fallen. It would seem (even from the way in which the German communiqués of yesterday and the day before were drafted) that there is still street-fighting in the city. But one way or another, the city is lost. That’s another chapter ended. The Germans have now drawn an arc all the way from Gomel to Kremenchug, where a great Soviet army (estimated by London at 750,000 men) is encircled. The next immediate objective will be Kharkov, which, after yesterday’s announcement of the capture of Poltava, cannot hold out much longer. One gets an impression of rout and haste. Until now the Russians seemed to be in control of their movements, and to be somehow limiting their defeats. Now, however, you sense for the first time that they have lost their grip on the helm. The Germans are complementing their military offensive with a new propaganda barrage. The catastrophic headlines that have not been seen for a while are again appearing in the papers. “Collapse of Soviet Armies Inevitable”—says a banner headline in today’s Universul.

  The German losses for the period 2 2 June through 31 August were given in today’s official communiqué: 84,354 dead, 292,690 wounded, 18,921 missing; airmen: 1,542 dead, 3,980 wounded, 1,387 missing; aircraft lost: 725-

  Monday, 22 September

  Benu came back from Fierbinti yesterday evening for a couple of days. Fie is suntanned, healthy, and handsome. The open-air life, even in a labor camp (where the word “open” seems a mockery), has done him good. What a false, mindless, suffocating life we lead here! In the past, skiing, the sea, and the mountains helped me get away from it.

  Three months of the German-Russian war. If the powerful offensive in the south does not settle matters, if it does not break all the Soviet resistance (and I don’t think it can), the war will continue with the same alternating rhythm of blows and pauses, until the first major snowfall. In any event, after the Germans have polished off the whole Ukraine and occupied the Crimea, they will find a new field of operations in the Caucasus. And meanwhile, they might also launch the attack on Turkey that has been expected for such a long time.

  A pleasant afternoon at Tudor Vianu’s: with Şerban Cioculescu, Eugen Ionescu, Pippidi, Victor Iancu, Professor Rusu from Sibiu,1 Ciorănescu.2 We talked about literature—as if it were not September 1941.

  I read with emotion a splendid play by Priestley, Time and the Conways. I, who for some time have been obsessed with the idea of growing old, entered their sad comedy as one of the characters.

  Rosh Hashanah. I spent the morning at the temple. I heard $afran,3 who was nearing the end of his address. Stupid, pretentious, essayistic, journalistic, shallow, and unserious. But people were crying—and I myself had tears in my eyes.

  Tuesday, 23 September

  A strange dream last night. I was with Aristide Blank and (?) Octavian Goga in a small, crowded hotel, where we were looking for somewhere to sleep two or three to a room. We found a kind of lumber room, with a shower or a fountain in a corner among the junk. When I turned the tap, water gushed out to both right and left; I was surprised and distressed, not knowing how to stop it.

  An autumn day, grey, cold, and gloomy. I don’t know what is happening at the front, nor do I want to know. A bitter taste, as in the grim days of June 1940. But I mustn’t be like this. I mustn’t.

  Benu has left again for Fierbinţi- I seemed to find the parting more difficult than last time. And I think that a lot of bitterness lay hidden beneath his apparent good humor.

  I have no money, and I don’t know where to get any. The rent must be paid in three days (if the landlord wants to renew the contract), and then I don’t know what I’ll do. I’ll have to try speaking to Zissu one day— but with what chances?

  Wednesday, 24 September

  “It is hard for a man to say: all the world is mistaken but himself. But, if it be so, who can help it?” (Defoe)

  Today I began teaching 7th and 8th Years at the liceu. A wretched place, with uninteresting, impudent pupils. I’m not cut out for this job.

  I heard yesterday at Vianu’s, and had it confirmed today by Rosetti, that an electric power station has blown up in Iaşi. Looks like sabotage. Thousands of arrests. I am terrified to think what consequences this might have for Jews.

  I don’t know how things are going at the front. For the time being they are still winding up the Kiev sector; each German communiqué publishes incredible figures. Meanwhile, a blow is apparently being prepared against Turkey. The pretext has already been found. The Italian navy has a right to pass through the straits into the Black Sea, flying Bulgarian colors. Legally speaking, Turkey has no right to refuse, since Bulgaria is formally a neutral country.

  I have come up with a good ending for “Freedom.” But I haven’t found the right tone for the first scene. I’ll wait for it to become clearer, then try to write.

  Thursday, 25 September

  The landlord wants 93,000 lei to renew the lease. I’ll accept, of course, because it is impossible to move now. The rent office probably does not even consider cases involving Jewish tenants. I have heard that new leases for Jews are only possible in the Black Sector4 (Dudeşti-Văcăresti). I am completely at the mercy of my landlord, who can ask any amount and force me to pay any amount. I talked with him for half an hour, trying to get a reduction. It was painfully humiliating and depressing. I left with my nerves on edge. As I returned home, I’d have liked to be able to shout out and weep.
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  This journal is not much use to me. I read it over sometimes and am depressed by its lack of any deep resonance. Things are noted without emotion, dully and inexpressively. Nowhere is it apparent that the man writing it goes from day to day, hour to hour, with the thought of death alongside him, inside him. I am frightened of myself. I run away from myself. I avoid myself. I prefer to turn my head, to change the subject. Never have I been so old, so flat, so listless, so unyouthful. Broken threads, pointless gestures, deleted words.

  Friday, 26 September

  A sleepless night, then a whole day of fretting, despondency, weariness. A sense of collapse. I feel as if I’ve hit rock bottom, with no way back up. I don’t even feel any curiosity about what will happen. How will the war end? How will we get out of the nightmare? I don’t know; I don’t want to know. I must resign myself to living. But never have I felt so down on my luck.

  Saturday, 27 September

  “Oh, the dreaming! the dreaming! the torturing, heartscalding, never-satisfying dreaming, dreaming, dreaming, dreaming.” I copy these lines from Shaw (John Bull's Other Island,)- how well they suit me! I live, as always, in a mindless series of dreams, passing from one to the other, incapable of waking up to reality. Around me are so many people—including the most simple and ordinary (Ficu Pascal, Willy Seianu, Nene Zaharia, Nene Moritz, Manolovici, Ficu Cahane, Iosi Rosen)—who, with the same hardships and obstacles, manage to clear some space for themselves, to keep their heads above water, to earn money, to live. Only I sink to the bottom, defenseless, defeated, resigned, incapable of any gesture or effort. I feel too disgusted, too full of loathing, and in an attempt to forget things and bear up, I take open-eyed refuge for days on end in all manner of ridiculous dreams. I see myself in Geneva with a million Swiss francs (or sometimes only 300,000 or 100,000 or even 30,000); I settle into my old room in the Cornavin,5 or into an apartment on the lake (Igiroşeanu’s apartment) at Lausanne or Nyon. I see myself in London, as an editor at the BBC for forty pounds a month, or working all day at the British Museum and spending misty holidays somewhere by the sea. I see myself at the Russian front as the special correspondent of an American or London newspaper, where I am naturally an editor. I see myself in New York, and then—weary of all the noise—in a quiet provincial town, where I write smash-hit plays for Broadway without feeling curious enough to go and see them. I stay alone at home, with a powerful radio, an automatic gramophone, and hundreds of records of Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven. I have a car and travel around unknown parts of America. I see myself with Nadia in New York or California, but I have some problems because I don’t get on too well with her parents. I see myself on a yacht headed for Alexandretta, Egypt, Palestine, the Pacific—a small yacht on which there are only ten or twelve of us. We are poor but hardy, and in every port of call we are met with sympathy and curiosity. In a letter to the president of the PEN Club, I point out that, as a writer in exile who is a member of the association, I have been called upon to give a lecture (for a lot of money) about our life on board, and that I shall repeat this lecture in each port of call.