Kingdom of Twilight

by Steven Uhly

  30

  August 31, 1945

  White House

  My dear General Eisenhower,

  I have received and considered the report of Mr. Earl G. Harrison, our representative on the Intergovernmental Committee on Refugees, upon his mission to inquire into the condition and needs of displaced persons in Germany who may be stateless or non-repatriable, particularly Jews. I am sending you a copy of that report. I have also had a long conference with him on the same subject matter.

  While Mr. Harrison makes due allowance for the fact that during the early days of liberation the huge task of mass repatriation required main attention he reports conditions which now exist and which require prompt remedy. These conditions, I know, are not in conformity with policies promulgated by S.H.A.E.F., now Combined Displaced Persons Executive. But they are what actually exists in the field. In other words, the policies are not being carried out by some of your subordinate officers.

  For example, military government officers have been authorized and even directed to requisition billeting facilities from the German population for the benefit of displaced persons. Yet, from this report, this has not been done on any wide scale. Apparently it is being taken for granted that all displaced persons, irrespective of their former persecution or the likelihood that their repatriation or resettlement will be delayed, must remain in camps—many of which are overcrowded and heavily guarded. Some of these camps are the very ones where these people were herded together, starved, tortured and made to witness the death of their fellow-inmates and friends and relatives. The announced policy has been to give such persons preference over the German civilian population in housing. But the practice seems to be quite another thing.

  We must intensify our efforts to get these people out of camps and into decent houses until they can be repatriated or evacuated. These houses should be requisitioned from the German civilian population. That is one way to implement the Potsdam policy that the German people “cannot escape responsibility for what they have brought upon themselves.”

  I quote this paragraph with particular reference to the Jews among the displaced persons:

  “As matters now stand, we appear to be treating the Jews as the Nazis treated them except that we do not exterminate them. They are in concentration camps in large numbers under our military guard instead of S.S. troops. One is led to wonder whether the German people, seeing this, are not supposing that we are following or at least condoning Nazi policy.”

  This is particularly true given that the German people at large do not seem to have any sense of guilt with respect to the war and its causes and results.

  At many of the camps and centers including those where serious starvation cases are, there is a marked and serious lack of needed medical supplies.

  One Army Chaplain, a Rabbi, personally attended, since liberation, 23,000 burials (90 percent Jews) at Bergen Belsen alone, one of the largest and most vicious of the concentration camps, where, incidentally, despite persistent reports to the contrary, fourteen thousand displaced persons are still living, including over seven thousand Jews.

  Although some Camp Commandants have managed, in spite of the many obvious difficulties, to find clothing of one kind or another for their charges, many of the Jewish displaced persons, late in July, had no clothing other than their concentration camp garb—a rather hideous striped pajama effect—while others, to their chagrin, were obliged to wear German S.S. uniforms.

  The internees feel particularly bitter when they see how well the German population is still dressed. The German population today is still the best-dressed population in all of Europe.

  In many camps, the 2,000 calories included 1,250 calories of a black, wet and extremely unappetizing bread. Harrison received the distinct impression and considerable substantiating information that large numbers of the German population—again principally in the rural areas—have a more varied and palatable diet than is the case with the displaced persons. The Camp Commandants put in their requisitions with the German burgomeister and many seemed to accept whatever he turned over as being the best that was available.

  At many places, however, the military government officers manifest the utmost reluctance or indisposition, if not timidity, about inconveniencing the German population. They even say that their job is to get communities working properly and soundly again, that they must “live with the Germans while the D.P.s (displaced persons) are a more temporary problem.” Thus (and according to Harrison he can cite many an example) if a group of Jews are ordered to vacate their temporary quarters, needed for military purposes, and there are two possible sites, one an apartment block (modest) with conveniences and the other a series of shabby buildings with outside toilet and washing facilities the burgomeister readily succeeds in persuading the Town Major to allot the latter to the displaced persons and to save the former for returning German civilians.

  For reasons that are obvious and need not be labored, most Jews want to leave Germany and Austria as soon as possible. That is their first and great expressed wish and while this report necessarily deals with other needs present in the situation, many of the people themselves fear other suggestions or plans for their benefit because of the possibility that attention might thereby be diverted from the all-important matter of evacuation from Germany. Their desire to leave Germany is an urgent one. The life which they have led for the past ten years, a life of fear and wandering and physical torture, has made them impatient of delay. They want to be evacuated to Palestine now, just as other national groups are being repatriated to their homes. They do not look kindly on the idea of waiting around in idleness and in discomfort in a German camp for many months until a leisurely solution is found for them.

  I hope you will adopt the suggestion that a more extensive plan of field visitation by appropriate Army Group Headquarters be instituted, so that the humane policies which have been enunciated are not permitted to be ignored in the field. Most of the conditions now existing in displaced persons camps would quickly be remedied if through inspection tours they came to your attention or to the attention of your supervisory officers.

  I know you will agree with me that we have a particular responsibility toward these victims of persecution and tyranny who are in our zone. We must make clear to the German people that we thoroughly abhor the Nazi policies of hatred and persecution. We have no better opportunity to demonstrate this than by the manner in which we ourselves actually treat the survivors remaining in Germany.

  I hope you will report to me as soon as possible the steps you have been able to take to clean up the conditions mentioned in the report.

  I am communicating directly with the British Government in an effort to have the doors of Palestine opened to such of these displaced persons as wish to go there.

  Very sincerely yours,

  HARRY S. TRUMAN

  31

  2nd September, 1945

  Camp 7525/7 Prokopyevsk

  Dear Wife! Whenever this man writes to you it is like returning home. I’m being thrifty with my visits home, the pencil has been getting rapidly shorter since I’ve been renting it out. I was given paper by a Russian officer, some of which I sold on. More prisoners have arrived in the past month. They told us about Germany. About the towns and cities. There’s also a young man from Lübeck, his name is Friedrich Kleinert. I told him about our honeymoon. He asked me why anybody would want to have a honeymoon in Lübeck. Good question! I told him about the picture. Did I ever mention it to you? When I said Lübeck you agreed at once! Did I tell you that we had a picture of the Holstentor on the wall at home? When your farmer was a young boy and you just a girl living nearby, he would stand in front of this picture, staring at the fat towers with their pointy hats. Now you know. How wonderful our honeymoon was! It’s so long ago now that your farmer sometimes has to pinch himself when he thinks about it. Fritz said that Lübeck was bombed too. The very first city! In 1942. That was when we decided to leave Bukovina. When you put it like
that, one thing after the other, you get the feeling that everything is connected. But the connection is probably only in my head. Your farmer’s getting philosophical! Life throws up surprises.

  32

  10th October, 1945

  Berlin, Rykestrasse 57, second floor

  “The Russians aren’t treating us as Jews. They say we’re Poles, Hungarians, Romanians, Germans, Austrians etc. Do you understand? We need to leave the Russian sector or they’ll send the Abramowiczes, the old man and me back to Poland.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Your Peretz told me.”

  “My Peretz?”

  “Isn’t that what he is? At least he’s more your Peretz than you are his Anna.”

  “Stop being so snide.”

  “I’m not being snide, I’m just telling the truth.”

  “So what’s your plan then?”

  “Our plan? Oh that’s right, you’re German, aren’t you? You don’t have any problem with going back to the Nazis, do you?”

  “Ruth! What is the matter with you? I’m pregnant; I’ve got to bear that in mind too.”

  “Of course!”

  33

  What kind of family are we? Lisa wrote in her diary. Auntie Maria’s been living with us for a year now, she wrote. She barely speaks to me, she gets up late and comes home late at night. She’s got a boyfriend, she wrote. He goes around like a gangster out of an American film, suit, spats, hat, hands in his trouser pockets. You never see his face. I watch him from the window when he’s standing on the other side of the street, waiting for her, while Auntie Maria is still in the bathroom, hectically putting on so much make-up that everyone can see it. Was Mummy like that too? Lisa wrote. I asked Grandma, she wrote. She said, No, Mummy was completely different. I still find it strange that Mummy’s real name is Margarita and not Maria, she wrote, pausing to reread the lines she had written.

  Auntie Maria, she continued writing, sometimes makes fun in a most peculiar way. For example, she says, “My sister, what was her name again? Oh yes, Margarita,” and then she laughs exaggeratedly, while Grandma gives her an evil look. Or she calls me “my darling niece” with an ironic expression on her face. Why does Auntie Maria do that? Grandma told me that the two of them used to argue a lot and Mummy never forgave Auntie Maria for disappearing from the transit camp in Gunzenhausen with one of the S.S. men who had been brought over from Bukovina. One day Auntie Maria simply left, while Grandma and Grandpa and Uncle Karl and Mummy had to stay there for months having checks to see if they were German enough. Grandma said that the officers went around with books full of drawings of noses and eyes and heads. They had strange instruments for measuring the features of ethnic Germans, and then the officers would decide if someone really was German or not. As if you could tell like that! Grandma shook her head too, But back then, she said, we didn’t have any choice. She raised her left arm and showed me a tattoo on the inner side. It’s an A with a B beside it. From one of the doctors in the camp in Gunzenhausen. Grandma said, When it was clear that we were Germans and not members of some inferior race they tattooed us with our individual blood groups, just like when they brand cattle. And Auntie Maria, Lisa wrote, had simply gone to Berlin, she’d spared herself all this, and from there she wrote them a postcard with the Brandenburg Gate on it. Nothing more. They were like night and day, your mother and aunt, Grandma said, Lisa wrote. That may be true. But somehow I don’t believe Grandma. I can’t put my finger on it, but she makes such a funny face when she talks about it, that sometimes I feel she’s lying to me because she doesn’t want me to find out something far worse. In fact she’s been behaving strangely ever since we’ve been in Friedland. Perhaps it’s got something to do with Granddad. She still hasn’t read his letter. But perhaps she’s lying and she has read it, and it makes her so sad that she doesn’t want to talk about it, and that’s why she just says she hasn’t read it yet. Poor Grandma, Lisa wrote.

  34

  Dearest child,

  Anna thought

  This

  is a message to you.

  I hope you can hear me or,

  if you can’t hear me then you can

  feel what I want to say to you.

  Because you can’t yet see

  I’ll describe to you the place

  where the two of us are now:

  I’m lying on a camp bed

  on the second floor of house number 57,

  Rykestrasse,

  Soviet sector,

  Berlin.

  The room is full of people,

  it’s evening, and outside

  it’s been chilly for a week now.

  Winter is gradually approaching,

  and autumn, my dearest child,

  is now no more than a foreshadow of winter,

  before it appears itself.

  The people around me

  have become familiar over the last three months,

  I know them all by name,

  I know their voices and moods,

  I know their odors,

  all blending together

  in this damp room,

  as if in an orgy.

  And so it smells musty in here

  and moldy and of too many people.

  Closest to me are Ruth,

  poor Mrs. Abramowicz, who still says nothing,

  her two children,

  Marja and Ariel,

  the old man, who’s started speaking again,

  perhaps because he realized that

  there are worse things,

  more absurd things in life

  since Dana died,

  or perhaps because he realized that

  unhappiness does not vanish from the world

  if we bear a grudge against our god.

  I won’t list the other people,

  but I’m sure you know their voices.

  Now

  they’re getting ready for night,

  one after another

  they visit the only bathroom in the house.

  There’s no hot water.

  The toilet paper is old newspapers,

  sometimes I read what’s written there,

  and get a shock, because they’re from a time

  which is now gone.

  The two of us have already been to the bathroom,

  luckily people always let me go ahead now,

  ever since my belly has grown so large

  with you.

  So now you know precisely where you are

  and what it’s like here.

  Who knows

  where you come from?

  If your father,

  if he is your father,

  was right,

  then you’ve lived before,

  and perhaps you’re even Sturmbannführer Treitz.

  who was shot by a Pole

  while on the hunt for Jews.

  It would serve him right

  to be reborn from the womb of a Jew,

  to have to love her,

  and to have to be loved by her.

  But the world is large,

  perhaps you come from somewhere quite different

  and everything you remember seems,

  given the reality of our situation,

  like a fairy tale or a dream.

  Who knows?

  You have become so big inside me

  and you’re moving so much

  that I can’t sleep

  and in the daytime, when you’re sleeping,

  I feel sluggish and immobile.

  Ruth, that lovely creature,

  has given us her half of the bed,

  she said,

  All the beds here are being shared by two people,

  why should we share this one between three?

  I’m sure you heard her.

  Where on earth does she get

  this perspective on things?

  I often wonder.

  I hope my close relationship with her

  has rubbe
d off on you, my child.

  Your mother is not a happy person,

  I regret to have to say.

  And there’s more I have to tell you.

  I have to tell you that

  your father,

  whichever one he may be,

  is probably dead

  and that’s exactly what he deserved.

  I have to tell you that

  when I look inside myself

  I stare into a dark crater,

  which seems bottomless,

  and that’s why I can’t promise

  to be a good mother.

  I’m so sorry about this.

  But if you have already lived before

  then you sought me out

  then you didn’t want it

  any other way.

  There’s something else I have to tell you:

  Your father isn’t your father,

  but a stranger.

  I have to tell you

  that we will lie to you,

  You will think you know everything about yourself,

  but nobody, not even I

  can tell you the truth.

  Take heart, my child.

  we’re all strangers, even you,

  you’re more of a stranger to me than

  all the people in this room.

  And me, too, I’m

  more of a stranger to you than you will know,

  for as long as you are a child and perhaps even

  for as long as you are on this earth.

  It makes me sad, truly it does, my child,

  sad because love cannot conquer the unfamiliarity.

  Maybe unfamiliarity is even necessary

  so that love can exist.

  Perhaps

  it’s necessary to be sad about it,

  so we know that this is how it is.