If it is a solitary profession, it is also a kind of loving involvement with history. To insert yourself lovingly into another culture means a very special kind of love affair. The director Robert Bolt has said, "The comparison between a love affair and the making of a film is not so exaggerated as it sounds. There is the same day and night preoccupation, the same switchback of elation and gloom, the same absurd intensity. A film-maker gives to his film the sort of anxious attention which is only properly bestowed upon a woman." It is the same being a foreign correspondent. Sitting alone sometimes in a cafe, I would be overcome by the mystery, by the joy, by the sense of watching or of being watched. I got a sensuous thrill out of the travel, the excitement, the observing and exploring. I have always felt sorry for people who couldn't love other peoples and other countries; I adored each new place. And the mysteries became ever more mysterious.
***
One day at lunch in Rio, one of the United Press correspondents mentioned that Walter Rauff, the second-most-wanted Nazi, was living in Chile on the remote southern island of Tierra del Fuego. There had been an extradition fight over him, but the time period had run out, so he was able to remain in Chile. Yet while people knew where he was, no one had succeeded in interviewing him. Many had made the long trip down to the bottom of the world and had sought him out in the remote fishing village where he lived, but all had been coldly turned away. When I returned to my hotel that afternoon, I put a notation in my book under Chile (I have always kept a book listing countries and ideas and names and phone numbers of people there) and vowed the next time to try to see Herr Walter Rauff, mass murderer.
Several months later, when I again found myself in Chile, I flew down to Punta Arenas, the pleasant modern city on the wild and historic Straits of Magellan. The next day I arranged to fly across the Straits to the barren, isolated island. At the oil camp there the workers were nice--they even fed me lunch at the company dining room--but I was impatient to move on. Already it was early after noon and I had another eighty miles to reach Porvenir, the remote fishing village where Rauff lived in utter seclusion. This last portion of the trip was taken in a jeep. Once in that barren cluster of houses that is Porvenir, I asked a policeman for the house. He climbed in the back of the truck. "We had a warning that somebody might attack him some time ago," he said, "and we try to watch his house."
Porvenir -- the word means "future" in Spanish. It is a place where the cold gray waters from Antarctica slap at the black rocky beaches and the wind wails day after day. Black-necked swans fly overhead, white salt beds dapple the land, and the camellike guanacos race in packs of thousands across the unrelieved loneliness of Tierra del Fuego, the last place on earth.
When the door to the Pirata crabmeat factory opened to my insistent knock, there stood Rauff, a short man with chiseled Prussian features, now in his sixties and dressed in a neat brown tweed jacket with a tan neck scarf.
"Yes, come in," said Rauff. "It's nice to have company. But, no, I cannot give any interview. I am not news anymore, and I don't want any publicity."
I sat down and tried to convince him. I lapsed into German; I spoke Spanish with him. He was glad to have company, he said in both, but that was it. Even then I sensed that he was torn between wanting to talk and not wanting to talk. He was living a very simple, very quiet life there in Porvenir. The fishermen of the village could not understand how their kindly neighbor could be accused of killing 100,000 people.
He chatted informally as he moved about his cozy little room, with its shortwave radio and its Germanic touches, but of one thing he was certain -- I had to leave. That very night. I knew of no realistic way to stay, so I said nothing.
It was 5:00 p.m. Rauff stood by his radio, trying to call the main "airline" office in Punta Arenas. Then it was 5:05, and 5:10. He paced. "One thing I cannot stand," he said, "is when people are not punctual. I am always punctual."
Now it was time for the "evening plane," really a bush plane, back to Punta Arenas. But before going to the "airport" he took me for a ride in his truck with his big dog, Bobby, barking nervously in the back. We drove out the five miles to the Straits of Magellan, the historic passage that divides the island from the mainland, and this evening the Straits were wild, with stormy whitecaps.
Along the way Rauff showed me the fishermen's camps, wooden shacks huddled along the beaches. "And I, who loved big cities, have to live here," he murmured.
"Why do you stay now?" I asked.
"There are many people who would like to get me," he answered matter-of-factly. "Here -- they see everyone who comes and goes."
Being with Walter Rauff was a strange experience. I knew he was wanted by West Germany as the second-most-wanted Nazi war criminal. Yet he could obviously be a charming and a cultured man. I felt safe with him because the evidence against him shows that he was what the Germans call a Schreibtisch murderer -- a man who kills by signing papers at a "writing desk." He was as remote from his actions as the place he had now put himself.
How does a journalist relate or not relate to such a man? How should one? There are no rules; you make them up as you go along. My own feeling was to be outwardly nonjudgmental, in much the same way as good law officers try to be with criminals. Obviously, that would have been impossible were he still in power.
We were standing in the little shack, with its radio equipment, in the primitive airport. The man on the radio kept asking the distant bush plane, "Cuando van a venir, chicos?" And then I heard, in Spanish, the reply, "No vamos a poder aterrizar esta noche a causa del tiempo, pero --We won't be able to land this night because of the weather, but almost certainly we'll come tomorrow early."
I looked up and looked at Rauff. He looked stricken. I was staying.
Now it was 7:00 p.m. and he was sitting in his little living room drinking coffee, which he served with the impeccable neatness that attended every one of his efforts. The hot water for the powdered coffee was in a neat pitcher. His napkin was in a special holder. Everything was perfectly in order in the warm, wood-paneled living room with its simple furniture. Outside, the bay was darkening, and it was getting cold, very cold. "I like the house cold at night," Rauff was saying. "I have an automatic switch that turns the heat on at seven thirty in the morning when I get up."
Then, in a conversation that kept changing from moment to moment, I decided to wade in -- I asked him of what he was actually accused. His face tightened.
"They say I killed ninety-six thousand Jews," he said unemotionally. "They know I never killed one man, and we never killed one Jew there." He paused. "That was a gentleman's war."
Again the conversation changed. "I usually make package soup in the evening," he went on, "but that is not good enough for a guest. So let us go downtown and have dinner at the hotel. I will show you the 'nightlife' of Porvenir."
Since it was still partially light, we drove out in his truck to "Useless Bay," a new moon of lonely sand. By now the sunset was exploding over the darkening water, and a luminous yellow light glowed behind the clouds. By the time we got to the Hotel Tierra del Fuego, a little low place in simple but comfortable style, it was after 10:00 p.m. A small band of men, all very Yugoslav-looking (not surprising, since they were Yugoslavs) were sitting in the bar, talking politics. We had a drink, a mixture of Chilean Pisco and vermouth, before retiring into the dining room, a little room warmed by a glowing stove.
And now Walter Rauff, the silent recluse of The End of the World, began to talk slowly, hesitantly, about his past. This has happened to me before. Something about a woman interviewer puts men at ease. They sit there and sooner or later everything pours out. Men forget that they are with a journalist and respond as they do to women who have always and throughout all time been the listeners and the comforters. At times I have felt guilty about this "advantage." But after clearly telling men that I am a journalist, I do not feel it is my duty to maintain eternal vigilance and keep warning them.
"There is no brief way to explain it all,"
he said as we drank a white Chilean wine. "Nobody can explain simply what happened in Germany. You have to understand what Germany went through in the twenties and thirties. It was a proud country, humiliated. No people can stand that. There were terrible things done, later on -- I don't say there weren't terrible things. I'm not one who says he didn't know..." (He seemed, I thought here, almost strangely proud of not taking the "easy" way out on "knowing.") "I knew. But I was a soldier -- right or wrong, my country. A soldier obeys. That's what he is."
I pressed him, because I still did not, then, know all the details of his case. "Of what exactly are you accused?"
"They say that I was in charge of technical things," he said, his voice sinking lower. "What did I know of technical things? I was the organizer. Organization -- that was my strength."
Later I was to learn that he had started as a respectable career naval officer. He was already a commander when Hitler came to power and then joined the S.S. when Hitler began eliminating the Jews and other "undesirables." Rauff was in charge of the office that dispatched the trucks to the concentration camps; he personally approved of the "efficient" new method by which 100,000 people were gassed in the trucks en route. Organization: that was his talent.
Later, after he had fled to Chile, he was in jail briefly during an extradition trial that failed. "In the jail, I was so calm, so peaceful," he was saying, "as I have never been before. Once, one of the jailers came to me and asked, 'Now, tell us how it really was.' "As the corpulent hotelkeeper's wife served us lamb from Tierra del Fuego, I asked him, "If you could go back, would you do the same thing over again?"
"Yes," he said slowly, "I would have to say I would do the same thing again. There was nothing else to do."
But now he was beginning to look drawn and depressed. Outside a ferocious cold had set in and we said good night.
When I met him for breakfast, he looked a different man. His face was agonized, his eyes bloodshot. "I didn't sleep," he explained. "I don't know why." He tried to smile. "Old things ..."
He drove me to the little runway. "I know you will write something," he said, "but please don't say anything too bad about me."
And so I returned and left Walter Rauff alone at the end of the world. I still remember him, standing by the bleak gray shore, saying, "This is Porvenir, where there is no future."
***
The Chilean experiment in democratic change died. Eduardo Frei was unquestionably the most popular man ever to be president of Chile, but he could not succeed himself. And so, by a series of electoral quirks, Salvador Allende was elected president in 1970 -- the first Marxist ever to be elected president of any country in the history of the world.
Now the legendary free air of Chile hung with new fears. Now the two sides no longer sat and drank and laughed and loved together, for one side no longer respected the rules of the game. Whereas before I had always been on the friendliest of terms with Allende, now he refused to see most American journalists. The minute he became president, he was a different man; now he was in public the true Marxist he had always been inside himself. Worse, it was the same with Augusto Olivares.
I remember how my heart fell when over and over again I called Augusta's office at the national TV, which he now headed. I was unwilling to believe what in my heart I knew--under their new regime we were now the enemies. The tolerant, loving, rational, arguing, decent old Chile was dead.
Yet the defenders and apologists for Allende and his regime will say smugly even today that Allende was only another democratic president; that he had no intention of changing the system; that he was unfairly overthrown by American involvement and imperialism. Why did some of us refuse to believe this?
For one thing there was the question of who was supporting and abetting a far leftist activist group called the MIR (Movimiento Izquierda Revolucionario). This was a group of fanatic leftist guerrillas and activists in the South, particularly around the coal-mining city of Concepcion, which was always a poor, leftist city. In sharp and total contradiction to everything that President Allende, dapper as always and now living in not one but two of the great mansions of the old rich in Santiago, was saying about obeying Chilean law, the MIR in the South was ruthlessly taking over small farms, terrorizing people, and driving out the small middle class and small farmer class that was the backbone of Chile. Apologists for Allende do not know or perhaps do not care that the big fundos were actually taken over by the government under Frei. Meanwhile Allende was angrily denying over and over in Santiago that he was a dangerous Marxist. He claimed to be simply a revolutionary reformer. Of the MIR, he said to all critics, "I can't control the MIR."
I decided to go to Concepción and look around; I had a feeling the answer to what Allende really was -- and to what Allende really intended to do -- might well be found there. An old friend, a professor in the university of leftist persuasion, gave me a letter to the leaders of the Socialist party in Concepcion and soon I was knocking on the door of one of those scabrous, shabby old buildings in the southern city. I asked to see Rafael Merino, head of the party, and to my surprise they did not even look at my letter. Within minutes I was ushered into the presence of Merino and five other leading party members. I found myself sitting in a prim circle, almost like a ladies' sewing bee.
I decided to wade right in. "Are the Socialists leading the tomas [the land takeovers]?" I asked forthrightly. There was a moment of silence, then all broke into laughter. "It would appear that they are," said Merino, smiling broadly. A husky, well-spoken man who was a professor of philosophy at the University of Concepción, Merino explained that "the position of the Left and the Socialist Party is to push land expropriations even faster."
After that astonishing acknowledgment that they -- Allende's own party -- were indeed behind the provocations, I traveled all over the province. And it became even clearer that Allende's Socialists were indeed behind everything. I talked my way into the jail in Ñuble in the province harboring thirty-eight thousand farms and stretching from Santiago to the southern lake country, and there I talked to a young leader of the MIR. An engaging young man with a ready smile and intense eyes, "Ugarte" carried the Socialist line one step further. "We have to exterminate the patrones, " he said, referring to the bosses of the big estates. "Soon the fight is not going to be only for land. Now we are preparing for war. Civil war. The type in Spain or Indonesia." Then he brought one fist down on a knee. "God, how I hate," he said, his voice nearly breaking. "It's a terrible hate, but I hate the patrones."
So it really was true. The Socialists were behind the MIR, behind the takeovers of the mini-estates. They were not only fighting for greater social justice within the system but for total revolution in which whole classes would be exterminated.
Already at this time the little farmers of the province had fled their farms and were staying in hotels, hiding out. Some would hesitantly meet me in a small park, looking over their shoulders at every word they said. When I drove out to the tomas or the little farms of ten and twelve acres that had been taken over in total contravention of all laws and Allende's statements, there were lines of hostile-looking men standing in front of the farms. They stared at me from behind hooded eyes, pointing always to the one man who talked for all: the Socialist organizer. This was a "spontaneous" revolution?
The sense of inner paralysis that so many Chileans felt in those days was perhaps expressed best by the youthful, open editor of the big Concepcion newspaper, El Sur, Ivan Cienfuegos. "Why does no one act?" he said to me. "Because we're not accustomed to such things [the violence] here. We can't believe they're happening."
I came back to Santiago with, for the first time, a real understanding of what was going on. And I could see, too, everywhere I went in the South, from Chilian to Ñuble to Concepcion itself, that the army was waiting.... They were not going to interfere so long as Chile still hung on the brink of being a democracy.
But it was clear to me -- it would have been clear to anyone -- that the army
and the forces of traditional democracy were not going to wait forever and let the Marxist forces establish a leftist dictatorship. As awful and as reprehensible as was the rightist dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, which was to come, anyone who could not see that Allende's policies were leading directly to that certainly knew nothing of political dynamics.
Ironically, those who did know this were the Communist Party leaders. The Communist Party, which was the traditional Moscow- line party and far more sober than Allende's Castroite Socialist Party, wanted a long period of transition rule. They had a theory of history and they applied it, but they also saw that Chile, with its impressive history of democratic traditions, would not bear the kind of shock it was getting from Allende's MIR tactics.
In the winter of 1972, for instance, I stopped by the gray, formal Chilean Senate building to see Senator Volodie Teitelboim, who was "the" ideologue and thinker of the Communist Party, and I was astonished at what he told me. Teitelboim, who was a Communist but a realistic one, told me that Chile was such a traditional parliamentary democracy -- and so deeply so -- that it would have to continue as such for many years before becoming "socialist." It would need to continue to get aid from the United States. But Allende and the MIR were pushing things so much too fast that tragedy was approaching. If they continued things like the land takeovers in the South, which were enraging so many people, there would be a military coup that would destroy everything they were trying to do.
When would that coup be? Teitelboim, a little gnomelike man with heavy glasses, looked at me for a moment. "About eighteen months from now," he answered.
Later I looked back at my notes and found my breath catching. That was exactly when Allende was overthrown and committed suicide. And Teitelboim was one of the few to escape the new rightist tyranny -- he was in Paris, showing again that realistic analysis knowledge is not only power but, often, survival!
Buying the Night Flight Page 14