Journal 1935–1944

by Mihail Sebastian

  I saw Steaua fără nume yesterday evening.

  What a splendid auditorium the Comoedia has! At the Alhambra everything gets lost, as in a huge barn. But here the whole hall is like a wonderful sound box.

  A surprise: Tantzi Cocea.2 She has quite a few false touches, but (though everything is rather “dreamed up”) also a mixture of frivolity and emotion which is quite similar to my Mona’s.

  Monday, 21 August

  The Soviet offensive in Moldavia and Bessarabia has been under way for two days. Apparently Ia§i has fallen.

  The war is coming toward us. It is not the war that has weighed us down for five years like a moral drama; now it is physical war. Great turnarounds can occur at any hour or minute. Again our lives are on the line.

  Everything is possible—and nothing is easy. Military resistance (however quickly things are over) means destruction, perhaps forced evacuation, perhaps starvation. Capitulation means (who knows!) a repressive German response, in the style of northern Italy.

  In both cases, moreover, a pogrom once more becomes possible at any time. Our relative quiet is now a thing of the past. We are moving toward the center of the fire.

  In keeping with their familiar practice, the Russians are attacking in the south now that their offensive has slowed somewhat in the center and north. They will push here as strongly and as fast as they can. The Balkans are ripe for things to be wound up; all the pieces are in place. Turkey is ready. Bulgaria (after the amazing coup de théâtre of Bagrianov’s speech3) is prepared for any change in the game. Together with Tito, and possibly also an Anglo-American landing (which is hardly necessary as things stand), the Russians can push the whole German front toward the Carpathians, Hungary, and Austria.

  It cannot be expected that the Germans will rapidly pull back of their own accord. They will try to resist. I don’t know how much longer they can keep it up, but it may be enough for them to exterminate us.

  In France the Anglo-American assault is continuing in the south and the north. Everything is unclear in the south: there is no front as such; Anglo-American thrusts have made deep inroads, but it is not said exactly where. The Maquis is a real force, with Annecy and Grenoble apparently in French hands.

  In Normandy the battle has shifted right over to the Seine in the east. Paris may fall within the next few hours.

  Tuesday, 22 August

  Toulouse has been captured by French forces of the Maquis. Poldy may by now be a free man. But I still fear for him. I’m not sure how firmly the city can be held until Allied regular troops arrive.

  Tuesday, 29 August

  How shall I begin? Where shall I begin?

  The Russians are in Bucharest.

  Paris is free.

  Our house in Strada Antim has been destroyed by bombs.

  I am as tired as a dog. It is my lot not to be able fully to rejoice at the overwhelming events.

  I am writing these lines in a house where some of us have managed to take shelter with whatever belongings we could save from Strada Antim. We have set up here as best we can—for how long, I don’t know. The owners of the house could return at any moment and make us leave.

  It would have been impossible to keep a regular journal of the events. It was all quite extraordinary—and then horrifying. Last Wednesday evening we started down an unlikely slope to we knew not where—either to salvation or to disaster.

  That night from Wednesday to Thursday—which we spent with Pâtrâscanu,4 Belu,5 and so many others in the house (the “historic house”) on Strada Armeneasca, immediately after the coup d’état6—was a night of frenzy. All over the city, people shouted with delight. Antonescu had been overthrown in five minutes, the new government formed, and the armistice accepted. We hadn’t had time to drink a glass of champagne to Paris (now back in French hands) when the true avalanche of events reached us.

  All night I wrote for the edition of Romania Libera that was due out at dawn. I was glad that events were making me a journalist on the very night of the victory.

  In the morning I went to bed dead-tired and hoping to catch up on some sleep. But then the sirens began to wail: the Germans had launched a bombing attack on the city. We then had an unfamiliar kind of air raid, uninterrupted, with no alert or pre-alert, which kept us in our shelters for sixty hours until Saturday evening. And at the last hour, toward Saturday evening, our house was hit. We found ourselves victims just as we were about to cross the finish line. But we are alive.

  How afraid we were on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday that the Germans might return to Bucharest, if only for an hour! A single hour would have been all they needed to exterminate us. Each one of us. No one would have escaped.

  There are thousands of things to be said. Maybe tomorrow, or the day after tomorrow. Right now I don’t feel capable. I want to sleep. From Wednesday until Saturday evening I didn’t sleep a wink. From Wednesday until Monday I didn’t take my shoes off once. From Wednesday until yesterday evening I didn’t lie once on a bed. I only writhed about on the floor, wherever I could.

  Wednesday, 30 August

  I can’t write today either. I am too tired, disfigured with tiredness. My poor stamina is not up to such trials. I’d have to sleep several days on end—to have a schoolboy’s holiday—to recover from it all.

  Everywhere there is a terrible (morally terrible) jostling, as people hurry to occupy positions, to assert claims, to establish rights.

  I can’t do it. It doesn’t interest me. I don’t want to know. The best thing is to wait. You can’t speak now, only shout. It is true that for years I awaited the moment when I would finally be able to utter a cry of revenge—after so much nausea, so much disgust.

  One day I’ll write a book. That is still the best thing for me to do. I’m not a person for meetings and committees. Everyone is summoning me to one—at school, at college, at the writers’ gatherings. What should I do there? What I have to say I’ll say when the time comes. Certainly not today, when nothing can be heard above the shouting.

  Thursday, 31 August

  A parade of Soviet heavy tanks on Bulevardul Carol, beneath the windows of the house where we have taken refuge. It is an imposing sight. Those tired, dusty, rather badly dressed men are conquering the world. IIs ne payent pas d’apparence7—but they are conquering the world.

  Afterward a long column of trucks full of Romanian soldiers: former prisoners-of-war in Russia, now armed and equipped and fighting in the Red Army. They are young and happy, with excellent equipment. You can see they are not coming from battle. They are a parade unit, probably kept in waiting for the entry into Bucharest.

  People in the street are still bewildered. Great explosions of enthusiasm, but also a certain reserve. Many passersby look askance at “the applauding yids.”

  Romania will regain its senses when the problem of responsibility is posed in earnest. Otherwise it would all be too cheap.

  I myself am still unable to take a direct role in what is happening. To be a disaster victim is much graver than I used to think when I passed burnt-out houses and hurriedly glanced at them in sympathy.

  A house is a factory. You find everything in its place, as you would a screw or a part of a machine. When this organization collapses, you are surrounded by chaos.

  I don’t know how, when, and where I’ll be able to rebuild any kind of normal life, one that allows me to concern myself with other matters. For the time being, everything is in abeyance.

  I am happy that my experience at Romania Libera ended quickly, before I signed up for anything. I’d have found it impossible to work in that regime of secret committees. Indoctrinated stupidity is harder to take than the ordinary kind. Patrascanu attracted me for his human side. When we reached agreement about the paper four weeks ago, at Ulea’s farm,8 I can’t say I didn’t feel some regret that I would be returning to journalism. But I welcomed it insofar as it gave me an immediate way of saying aloud all the things I had kept silent about, gritting my teeth, for five long years. />
  In three days, after Graur and his crew pushed their way in,9 I realized that I would be joining an editorial committee terrorized by conformism. No, no, it’s better for me to write plays.

  Then my house was bombed. I rang up to say what had happened, and haven’t set foot there since. Later I informed them through Belu that I was pulling out for good.

  Friday, 1 September

  Bewilderment, fear, doubt. Russian soldiers who rape women (Dina Cocea told me yesterday). Soldiers who stop cars in the street, order the driver and passengers out, then get behind the wheel and disappear. Looted shops. This afternoon three of them burst into Zaharia’s, rummaged through the strongbox, and made off with some watches. (Watches are the toys they like most.)

  I can’t treat all these incidents and accidents as too tragic. They strike me as normal—even just. It is not right that Romania should get off too lighdy. In the end, this opulent, carefree, frivolous Bucharest is a provocation for an army coming from a country laid waste.

  Toward evening an order printed in Russian and Romanian, on sheets of paper the size of a cinema program, imposed a nine o’clock curfew and instructed everyone to hand in their radios.

  They seem like standard texts drawn up before the 23 rd of August, which have not been revoked as a result of the new situation. Probably everything will be explained soon enough.

  In the end, the Russians are within their rights. The locals are disgusting—Jews and Romanians alike. The press is nauseating: Mircea Damian, Cristobald, and so on.1

  This morning I made the stupid mistake of going to Dorian’s,2 where I had been invited to a “writers’ conference.” I helplessly witnessed the constitution of “the Union of Jewish Writers,” with Benador,3 Călugăru,4 and Dorian at its head. Unknown figures, nonentities—a mixture of desperate failure, thundering mediocrity, old ambitions and troubles, all drawing fresh life from impudence and ostentation.

  I won’t forgive my cowardice at not having shouted out all they deserved to hear. But that’s the last time I let myself be caught in such snares.

  Saturday, 2 September

  Without a home, I feel things as provisional. It is as if I were in a strange city, on a platform between two trains.

  I have no books and no working hours. I don’t know where to find people who might interest me—and they certainly don’t know how to find me.

  I am exhausted and unoccupied.

  I went to the cinema this afternoon. A Soviet film had been billed at the Scala, but there were no tickets for the four o’clock show. So I went to the Aro to see Intermezzo again after all these years, with Leslie Howard and Ingrid Bergman.

  What a pleasure it was to hear and understand English; to see a film so technically subtle and accomplished. All the German and Italian wares were good for nothing. How human is Leslie Howard, how decent in his humanity!

  On the way out I passed the Scala again and this time found rear balcony seats for Benu and myself at six o’clock.

  The newsreel was fascinating. It showed a parade of German prisoners in Moscow. Huge columns of tired, dirty, shabby animals, with nothing recognizable from the sportily provocative elegance of the Hitlerite troops who paraded in Bucharest. Troglodyte faces, as if taken from anti-Semitic or anti-Bolshevik propaganda photos in Das Reich. How easy it is to turn a human face into an animal’s! Those clean-shaven, well-dressed, bathed, groomed, and polished young men, who used to reside at the Ambassador Hotel, did perhaps sincerely believe that the Jews lying in mudheaps and pools of blood in Poland and Transnistria were a lower species of dog that anyone could shoot with impunity.

  How stunned, how humble were the German generals in today’s film, as they marched between bayonets at the head of the column!

  In that one vengeful image you can see the reality of victory.

  The main feature was a film with a war theme: naive, rather crude and childish. Mais le coeur y est.5

  This morning I saw a small Soviet tank chasing a private car with intent.

  The street incidents continue. Passersby are jostled until they hand over their watch. The watch seems to be the Russian soldier’s idée fixe.

  Yesterday’s order appeared in all today’s papers: a nine o’clock curfew; radios to be handed in. It’s not a very clear sign of freedom—and people will find it hard to understand. But if it proves a lesson for Romanians, who spent four years pillaging the Jews, then it won’t do any harm.

  Tuesday, 5 September

  Still the same wearying impression that things are provisional. I am out and about all day—even I don’t know why. I desperately rush around looking for somewhere to live, hesitating between all kinds of “solutions” that would not actually solve anything. Should I repair the apartment in Strada Antim? Should I wait for the Basdevants to leave, and take over theirs?

  The complications will grow with each day that passes. For the moment I have some money, but its value is falling all the time. Inflation and devaluation will be catastrophic. With the ruble at one hundred lei, and with thousands of soldiers who buy anything (when they don’t pillage) and pay any price, money no longer means anything.

  If I had a house like everyone else, I would find the spectacle interesting. After all, hunger might not kill me. But with my present sense of living in the street, everything is becoming too uncertain.

  Camil Petrescu, pale and scared, has naively fastened onto Belu and myself. I feel sorry for him. He is cracking up with fear. He would like to make some demonstration, justify and protect himself. Others, no less “fascist” than he, have the nerve to make a profession of democratism and intransigence. But poor Camil tries to exculpate himself. That is what he has always done—under Carol II, under the Legionaries, and under Antonescu.

  I met Cocea by chance.

  “You brought the Germans here,” he shouted at me, “you Cuvântul people.”

  “No, it was you who worked with the Hitlerites,” I replied in the same coin.

  It had an impact. He was fuming, in quite a state. I may have made myself an enemy.

  But I’ve had enough of that, for God’s sake! Will I be “one of the Cuvântul people” till the end of my life?

  I’d like to write my book about the war—fast, so as to get it off my chest and calm down.

  Thursday, 7 September

  It amuses me that one of the phrases I composed for the manifesto of the National-Democratic Bloc—“History makes no gifts”—is making a career for itself. When I wrote those four words I didn’t know that I was giving birth to a historical judgment. The phrase has been taken up by Radio London. Universul has written a whole commentary under the same title. And yesterday I read in Semnalul: “History, a great Romanian statesman said recently, makes no gifts.”

  Friday, 8 September

  Yesterday at the cinema, a film about the war in Ukraine. The horror exceeds everything. Words and gestures are no longer of any avail.

  These Russian soldiers who walk the streets of Bucharest, with their childlike smile and their friendly churlishness, are real angels. How do they find the strength not to set everything on fire, not to kill and plunder, not to reduce to ashes this city that houses the mothers, wives, sisters, and lovers of those who killed, burned, and laid waste their country?

  Only the total extermination of Germany could, in the ideal scales of justice, make up for all or at least part of what happened.

  I had lunch with Carandino at the Capşa, where he had asked me to come and talk about “business.”

  He suggested I become editor of a paper he is planning to bring out with Zaharia Stancu, under their management. I told him that I don’t do journalism. But why didn’t I say how impudent the proposal seemed to me? What the hell! Is that my “value” as a writer? Maybe Carandino thinks it natural for him and Stancu to put me on their payroll? It’s very disturbing.

  I met Ion Barbu in the street. It was the first time we had greeted each other for six or seven years. For six or seven years he simply did no
t recognize me. But today he hurried over to me, opened his arms wide, and effusively held out his hand.

  “You were right!” he shouted to Carandino and myself.

  (That’s all: “You were right!”—as if it were a game of chess or checkers in which he had made the wrong move.)

  But he added with melancholy, with regret:

  “The mistakes they made were too great. Hitler proved a dilettante. They shouldn’t have left him in charge. If they hadn’t removed Brauchtisch. . .”

  Tuesday, 12 September

  A letter from Titel Comarnescu:

  “To Mr. Mihail Sebastian, writer and editor at the Revistă Fundaţiilor Regale,

  "Dr. Octavian Neamt.u and colleagues at the R.F.R. invite you to resume your post as editor at this review. Would you please come to the Foundations on Wednesday at 4 p.m. (Bd. Lascăr Catargi), where you will make contact with the management committee.”

  I haven’t replied—but I don’t think I’ll accept. I have been in doubt all day. (Mauvais signe!)6 I asked Belu, Aristide, and Zissu what they thought. (Autre mauvais signe.) If your mind is made up, you don’t ask anyone else. Is it possible that I have the slightest hesitation? Isn’t the disgust in me strong enough to stifle any remaining doubt?

  I feel incapable of writing there again. It’s dead, and that’s how it should remain.

  When I met Şerban Cioculescu by chance, he took from his pocket a memorandum signed by thirty members of the SSR, the Writers’ Association; it calls for the holding of a general meeting to elect a new committee (democratic, of course) and to reintegrate Jewish writers.