The Night Ocean

by Paul La Farge

  Autumn came, and the bay darkened with clouds. Snow mounded on the curbs of Waubeek Street. The summer of 1943 found me in the same chair, my stomach bigger, as the Canadian First Division fought its way through the mountain passes of Sicily. That winter, the First Division was stranded on the Italian littoral; in the spring, I cheered when the Allies breached the Hitler Line and Rome lay before them. “Go, Canadians!” Walter looked up from the Globe and Mail. “Those are your friends dying over there. Are you sure you should be cheering?” “It’s different units,” I said. “And we won, so yes, thank you, I’ll cheer.” I felt contempt for my father’s weakness. “If everyone was like you,” I said, “we’d have Hitler parading down Sherbourne Street.” Walter said nothing. “Actually, pacifism is just about the same thing as treason,” I said. “Is that really what you believe, Leo?” Walter asked. “You bet,” I said. “If I was in charge, I’d treat the pacifists like Hitler treats the Jews.” I knew that what I was saying was hateful, but I had to speak. Finally, Charlotte ordered me upstairs, where I listened to the war on a smaller radio.

  In June 1944, I was drafted. I thought the letter must be a mistake, but it wasn’t. So Charlotte saw me off again, and wept again, and I went back, as if in a dream, to Camp Borden, which had grown immeasurably since I was last there. I took a course on mine detection and removal which, in its brevity, gave me an idea of what fate Canada had in mind for its draftees. My unit, the 273rd Engineers, was sent to England, where we sat out the winter in a camp on the South Downs; then, in April 1945, with the war almost over, I was posted as a munitions specialist to the RAF’s 84 Group. After four and a half years of waiting, I crossed from Dover to Antwerp on a breezy blue morning and saw that the harbor was full of sunken German warships. That was my first intimation of what the war really was: a tremendous, chaotic destruction. Compared to it, my anger was nothing. The city itself had been wrecked by German rockets, V-1s and V-2s, which had smashed the buildings like giant fists, leaving behind caved-in heaps of beams and pools of black water. I saw old women with infinitely bitter faces hauling buckets of water, and men in suits lifting the body of a horse onto the bed of a truck. To my relief, we drove straight out of the city, and that night we camped in a field. There was a red light on the horizon; our C.O. said it was the city of Essen, burning. We convoyed east for days, through Holland into Germany, on the heels of the Second Canadian Army. The towns we passed through had been shot to bits; the air smelled of burning trash and dead flesh. The Germans ran from us like a race of crabs, ash-colored crabs, their eyes dark with hatred. Sometimes we’d come upon a scaffold where, in its insanity, the SS had hung deserters: most of them not regular soldiers, but old men and children, who had been called up to reduce the number of living Germans at war’s end to an absolute minimum. So these were the fascists, I thought. I wanted to tell Wollheim that we’d been fighting the wrong people, but I supposed he already knew. And perhaps we hadn’t been fighting the wrong people after all.

  Eighty-four Group was bound for Celle, at the southern edge of the Lüneburg Heath. We got there three days after the war ended. The spring had taken firm hold of the land by then; the fields were green, with a speckling of small white flowers. The town, too, was very pretty. At the center of it was a white-and-pink Baroque castle, where, in happier days, the philosopher Leibniz had shot billiards with the Duke of Lüneburg. The castle was surrounded on three sides by a park, with a lake fed by meandering streams. On the fourth side was the Altstadt, the old town, with cobbled streets and half-timbered houses with peaked roofs. It was like a town sprung from a cuckoo clock. Eighty-four Group was stationed at the Scheuen airfield; our job was to inventory the various assets that the Luftwaffe had left behind in the region. I drove our platoon commander, Lieutenant Yale, to airfields and offices and POW camps, where he interviewed irrelevant personnel in his bad German. You didn’t have to speak any German to know that our activity was pointless. The Luftwaffe’s planes had all been shot down or blown up; the hangars were empty; any piece of equipment that might have been useful had been stolen or sabotaged. When I wasn’t on duty, I hiked on the heath, which reminded me of the land around Muskoka, a rolling plain of heather and eerily regular stands of pine. Hiking was more fun than wandering around Celle, enduring the citizens’ quiet, orderly hatred. And when I heard that there was a concentration camp in the forest, and that some people from 84 Group were going there to bring supplies to the liberated inmates, I volunteered right away.

  On an overcast May Sunday, Lieutenant Yale and I drove around Celle, banging on the doors of frightened civilians and demanding their overcoats “for inspection,” a ruse that the Germans obeyed with strange alacrity. In no time our Jeep was full of fine winter coats. We joined the relief convoy and drove into the heath. Swaths of pine forest had been burned by the British to flush out German snipers, but even here, remarkably, a green fog of life clung to the ground; wildflowers with red bell-shaped blossoms grew at the feet of black limbless trees. But the air smelled foul, like a latrine trench, and as the convoy crunched up the road, the smell got worse. We seemed to be approaching a zoo. By the time we came to the camp’s gate, a single bar hung across the path; the odor was nauseating. The words to describe it, I realized, with uneasy surprise, came from Lovecraft: a mephitic blast, or a nameless stench: words that have no particular power to terrify, until you find yourself in the presence of the thing to which they refer. Until you discover that there is a thing to which they refer. The head of our convoy, a Canadian officer named Aplin, ordered the soldier on duty to lift the gate, and we went into the camp.

  I soon learned that what I saw was far from the worst of what Belsen had been. By the time we arrived, the dead had been cleared from the streets, and buried in mass graves the size of football pitches. The camp had running water again, and heroic Australian sappers were digging up the clogged sewer lines. Many of the sickest inmates had been moved to the hospital at the Panzer Training School in Hohne, three or four kilometers north of the camp. But what I saw was terrible enough. Belsen was inhabited by emaciated creatures with yellow skin, wearing bathrobes and pajamas or long coats, their shaved skulls covered by kerchiefs and hats. Their eyes were set deep in their heads, and their teeth, when they smiled, seemed unusually large, because their gums had retracted. They walked in twos and threes, up and down the street, as though they existed in a completely different sort of time than us. Even as they approached our convoy, their eyes darted left and right, to see who might take from them the things they hadn’t received yet. It was a scene from a horror story, and I was in it, and what I felt was not thrilling in the least. It was, above all, sadness and repugnance, and not a little anger at the insane people who had made this place. I wished I hadn’t come; I wanted what I saw never to have been. Still, what could I do? Belsen existed. I was there.

  “Coats!” I cried out, gamely. The crowd came toward us and stood in solemn silence, looking at what we’d brought. An old man with a black fedora asked me for a cigarette, but Aplin had warned us not to give them out. If you gave an inmate a cigarette, he said, the others would fight him for it, and they’d all get hurt. I said that I didn’t smoke. The old man shrugged skeptically and turned away. The rest followed; they didn’t want winter coats in May. They mobbed a Jeep whose wiser crew had brought toothpaste and stockings. In a minute everything was gone, including, I discovered, our spare tire and gas can. Someone asked if we wanted to visit the hospital, and Lieutenant Yale said no, not today. “Spinks, I think we’ll go home now, and return when we have something these fellows need.” So I drove us back past the mounded graves and barbed wire, into Lüneburg Heath, which I thought would be a welcome change from the camp, but now that I knew what it hid, I felt only nausea and sorrow. As soon as we got back to Celle, I went to our hotel and bathed, then I got drunk. I tried to fit what I had seen into my consciousness, then I tried to squeeze it out, but I couldn’t do either. It was there, singular and awful, like a hole
in the world. But as terrible as that was, it wasn’t as terrible as the thought I had later, when I was trying, uselessly, to fall asleep. The man who asked for cigarettes had spoken Hungarian, and I had answered him in the same language.

  8.

  Here, in horror’s heart, I had found my people. Only, what people they turned out to be! Shamblers, moochers, living corpses with terrified eyes. Angry women and stealthy children. Vacant people set like stones at the feet of trees. A broken race in borrowed clothes, feigning politeness while the British were looking, and breaking out in fights when their backs were turned. I felt my kinship to them in waves of contradictory emotion: horror and pity and terrible rage. I thought about going down to the Rathausplatz in Celle on market day and opening fire on the Germans with a tommy gun, but what would that accomplish? The only thing I could do was go back to Belsen and help as best I could.

  With Lieutenant Yale’s blessing, I returned on my own the next Sunday, with a cargo of pots, pans, knives, and spoons commandeered from the locality. These were a success; the inmates took everything, and asked if I could bring them rolling pins, ladles, teapots, coffee, tobacco, rain boots. I did what I could. Helping was a way to conquer the horror of what had happened. And I had another purpose, too. There were many Hungarian Jews in the camp; they had survived in such numbers because they’d been the last to arrive. I wondered if one of them might know my cousin. In halting Hungarian, I asked around, and discovered that everyone had heard of Mihaly Rozen. They had seen him alive! For a cigarette or a chocolate bar, they would tell me where! But when I gave them what they asked for, it turned out that they were thinking of Mitzi Rozen, or Michel Bloch, or some interesting object that had appeared far behind my left shoulder, which they hurried off to investigate.

  The only positive result of all my looking was that I became friends with a Hungarian schoolteacher named Luiza. When we met, she might have been forty-five; but as the months passed, I would have the strange privilege of watching her age in reverse until she was twenty-six. In addition to her native language, she knew Czech, German, French, English, Yiddish, and a little Russian. She had the decency to tell me that Mihaly Rozen was probably dead. “So many from Budapest died,” she said. “It was better for the Jews in the countryside. Not that the peasants loved them more. Just that they were harder to round up. Because, more dispersed. And, of course, the Budapest Jews all went to Auschwitz.” I had heard the name of that place, but not much else. Luiza had been there. She told me everything. Nowadays we know what Auschwitz was, sometimes I think we know to the point of forgetting; but for me, hearing, for the first time, about the gas chambers and the selection lines, the children taken from their parents and burned up, it was as if I’d passed from one horror into another, still more horrible. I believed Luiza, how could I fail to believe her, but I felt dizzy, as if I were falling into some kind of terrible chasm. “It makes you wonder, doesn’t it,” she said. It certainly did. “Wonder what?” I asked, anyway. “What is underneath,” Luiza said. She scratched the back of my hand with an unevenly bitten fingernail. “Whether you could ever know.” She threw her cigarette on the ground and a moment later a kid who looked all of nine picked it up and ambled off with the dignity of a priest. “Would you like another?” I asked. “No, thank you,” Luiza said. “I must be careful of my complexion.”

  I drove back to Celle and wept for the family I would never meet, and also for the one I had lost when I was a child. By then I had remembered them as much as I ever will: my tired, gentle mother; my father in his study, which smelled of the Turkish cigarettes he smoked to cure his asthma; and my brother, who sailed and played with older boys and told me I didn’t have enough courage to be an Indian. I even remembered Mihaly Rozen and his gentle blond wife, Sara, and a chorus of other cousins who had come to stay with us in the summers, bringing with them trunks and maids and strange dogs. It was infinitely worse than if I had never got Mihaly’s letter. I felt as if everything had been taken away from me, and every hope had been extinguished. I thought about shooting myself, but it seemed ridiculous. How could I do that when the inmates at the camp, who had endured infinitely more terrible things than I had, were so determined to go on living?

  A few weeks later, I ran into Luiza again. I offered her a cigarette; she shook her head coyly. So, chocolate? Not that, either. “What I want,” she said, “is books.” “Books?” “Yes. Look at us. We are the people of the book, here, and yet we have nothing to read.” This was in early June. The concentration camp’s wooden huts had been razed, and the inmates had all been transferred to the Panzer Training School, an enormous campus of identical white-stuccoed barracks, which looked, to my Canadian eyes, like sinister ski lodges, their ranks punctuated by neat parade grounds. Luiza and I stood by the Roundhouse, a grandiose neoclassical pustule where the Germans had had their officers’ mess and cinema. Now it housed the British post office and the clothes distribution center, which everyone called Harrod’s. “What are we supposed to do, in the night?” Luiza asked. She looked at me with disinterested curiosity. “With nothing to read?” she clarified. I blushed. “Of course. Stupid of me not to have thought of that.” “Oh, you have so many things to think about,” Luiza said. “You have all of us, and yourself, too. Whereas we survivors think only of ourselves.” She held out a thin hand and I shook it gently.

  I went round the Altstadt, banging on the Germans’ cuckoo-clock doors, demanding Bücher. I got Goethe and Schiller in black letter; when I brought the books to Luiza the following week, she looked aghast. “No!” she said. “Take them away!” “It’s what they had,” I said apologetically, to Luiza’s back. In the days that followed, I canvassed the Brits and Canadians, and got a hoard of adventure novels; then I drove to Bremen and hit up the Americans. By this point, everyone knew what Belsen was. British cameramen had filmed the bulldozers pushing bodies into the pits; the newsreel played all over the world. The Americans were all too happy to fill canvas sacks with comic books and paperbacks. Among them, I noticed with pleasure, was an Armed Services edition of Lovecraft’s stories: Lovecraft’s fame had grown to the point where he was a ration, a war supply, like chocolate or cigarettes. I delivered my haul to Luiza in the middle of June. It was a beautiful day, and the parade ground beside the Roundhouse was full of people sunning themselves. “Leo!” Luiza said. She’d never before called me by my first name. “These are all in English, which is a problem. But some have pictures. In short, it could be worse.” She recruited two American artillerymen from a vaccination table, and together we carried the books into the Roundhouse, and set them up on shelves in a former Nazi janitor’s closet. Luiza had written a sign on a cardboard square: LIBRARY, in Yiddish, Hebrew, German, English, French, Polish, Hungarian, Czech, Russian, Latin, and Greek. “Anything else?” I asked, gallantly. “Yes,” Luiza said. “Books in languages we can read. Also, leather wingback reading chairs.” “Wingback?” I asked. “Yes,” Luiza said. “I think they would look nice in here.” In here being the circular hallway that ringed the Roundhouse’s interior rooms. Luiza looked very happy. She had put on some weight, and the color was returning to her skin. She had on bright red lipstick: some genius had delivered a case of lipstick to the camp, and all the women were wearing it. “I’ll see what I can do,” I said. “You will get them!” Luiza said. “It’s an order.”

  All the leather wingback chairs in Celle had been commandeered by our officers, but it didn’t matter. The library was abolished before it had begun. It happened so quickly, Luiza told me, in tears. First, a mob of children came to claim the comic books, and dispersed with them to the farthest corners of the camp, where the English speakers translated the dialogue for the rest. But, of course, they were seen doing this, and right away a representative of the Jewish Provisional Committee confronted Luiza at the door to her closet and told her that it would not do. These children had not survived the greatest atrocity in history to become comic-book readers! They deserved Jewish books, by Je
wish authors. “So he got a Kommando of disgusting barbarians, and they took all my books and locked them in one of the equipment sheds.” “Is that all?” I said. “I have a friend, his name is Mr. Crowbar. He can help us out . . .” “You don’t understand!” Luiza said. “They are cracking down. Everything must be done the way the committee has decreed it. It’s like the Nazis all over again! I don’t know why they didn’t just burn the books and make us all watch.” “Probably because they aren’t Nazis,” I said, as gently as I could. Luiza was still trembling with anger. I had imagined that I was angry, but I was nothing in that department, not compared with her. She had seen every kind of horror, and her rage was without measure. “I can still bring you books,” I said. “The Provisional Committee will never know. I’ll smuggle them to you inside of oranges.” Which was a joke on several levels: oranges had not been seen in Northern Europe since the war began. “I don’t want your small books,” Luiza said. She led me to the closet, which was empty now. “Break the shelves,” she said. “What?” I said. “Break the shelves,” Luiza said. “I don’t want this closet to be used for anything, ever again.” I didn’t bother pointing out that shelves were easily built. While Luiza stood guard outside, I broke up the shelving with an entrenching tool. Splinters hit my face and cut my hands, but when I was finished, the closet was impressively wrecked, a memorial to Luiza’s broken hope. “Thank you,” she said. “My poor library.” Indeed, I felt bad for it, too. It was what I thought of, years later, when it came time for me to describe Yoh-Vombis.