The View from the Ground

by Martha Gellhorn

  Furthermore, as the committee neglects to note, we have only recently been at cold war with Russia: in the years between 1933 and 1939, a German anti-Nazi could conceivably have been grateful to the Russians for keeping him outspoken company in his hatred of Hitler. Since the committee's evidence seems principally to concern the period between 1929 and 1939, it is only proper to remind them of history.

  But this is beside the point: if Eisler broke a law, if Eisler is a servant of the Comintern masquerading as a sincere composer of music, these facts can be proved by established courts of law and handled by the fixed penalties of law. What is intolerable is the free and easy process of defamation, replacing the careful and weighty process of justice.

  There was an extraordinary feature of this case, which seems to have passed unnoticed. The State Department had a dossier on Eisler, saying that Eisler was “communistic” but not a member of the party. Which leads one to brood, in sorrow of spirit, on the making of dossiers, and to ask oneself whether intuitive and arbitrary deduction is adequate evidence for governmental bodies. The Un-Americans, after three days of sordid and pointless baying over Eisler, decided to turn his case over to the Justice Department, and ultimately to a court of law, which is where it always belonged and the only place it belonged. If Eisler in fact did break the law, it must be proved beyond a reasonable doubt, and if proved he will stand the penalty, and that is exactly how it should be. But as it is now, the Un-Americans have terminated another of their travesties of justice; nothing is proved though anything is stated; and Eisler departs, free as air, and at liberty to be boycotted in his profession and starve at will. This is not the great terror which we watched during the long hateful years; this is not the secret arrest, the questioning with torture, the returned box of ashes. This is just a little terror, calculated to frighten little people. It works. Without recourse to law, a man can be well and truly destroyed.

  One asks oneself, finally, what these people wanted with Hanns Eisler. They proved nothing; they learned nothing. One can recognize the Un-Americans to be evil, but surely not half-witted; and they cannot expect anyone to believe that Eisler, writing background music in Hollywood for a living, is at the head of some large furtive movement of music-lovers, vowed to plunge us all into communism. There is a limit to possible public gullibility. Of course, in pawing over Eisler, they had the joyful chance of trying to besmirch what is absolutely and finally unassailable: the character of Eleanor Roosevelt. And there was also the pleasure of being able subtly to scold and condescend to very important public figures. This must be a deep satisfaction, but it is amazing that the public figures do not rise, with dignity and good sense, to condemn these dingy tactics.

  Still, none of this is enough, and one must wonder whether there is a plan in this shabbiness, and whether Eisler, who is not himself important to them, has importance as a test of strength. For perhaps these men in the House Caucus Room are determined to spread silence: to frighten those voices which will shout no, and ask questions, defend the few, attack cruelty and proclaim the rights and dignity of man.

  A man with a family will think many times before speaking his mind fearlessly and critically when there lies ahead the threat of an Un-Americans’ investigation, a publicized branding, and his job gone. It is small consolation to know that you cannot be put in jail for your opinions if your opinions, freely expressed, end by starving your dependents. And if you can ruin a musician's livelihood, before a court has determined whether he is indeed a law-breaker or not, pretty soon you can ruin a painter and a teacher and a writer and a lawyer and an actor and a scientist; and presently you have made a silent place.

  If these things should come to pass, America is going to look very strange to Americans and they will not be at home here, for the air will slowly become unbreathable to all forms of life except sheep.

  The Children Pay

  SATURDAY EVENING POST, August 1949, Rome

  You really wouldn't know, everyone says, there'd been a war here. It's too good to be true, they say; these Italians are the luckiest people on earth. And life is so pleasant and easy and, furthermore, cheap. You sit at a sidewalk café on the Via Veneto and have a drink before lunch and watch the people passing, and all the women look pretty and all the men look elegant and nobody hurries and everyone seems to be smiling, and around you there is Rome, ochre-colored and soft in the sun.

  Wherever you turn, you find beauty—the climbing stone splendor of the Spanish Steps, banked with flower stalls; the pillared courtyard of St. Peter's; the great trees and ancient statues in the Pincio gardens. As for the shops, well, this is authentic luxury. You can buy anything from seductive pastries to diamonds, not forgetting leather goods and silks and antiques and whatever else you covet.

  If you think Rome is wonderful, then wait until you see Venice. You loaf away the afternoon in St. Mark's Square, eating the world's best ice cream, looking at that marvel of light, the domed church and the high rectangular frame of palaces, watching children feed the pigeons and lovers saunter past in a state of beatitude, while two comic orchestras play off key. After which, you take a gondola to dinner or the opera. Tomorrow you can hire a speedboat and go to the Lido to swim. Why should one ever leave this blissful spot?

  But you'd be bewitched by Siena, too, and Ravello and Florence and any place else you name, and you ought to drive because the countryside is a dream. Once in a while, of course, you see ruins—bomb damage, most likely—but there is so much else unspoiled, unique, that you hardly notice these mementos of war. Besides, the Italians don't moan over what's smashed. You can't argue; it's a plain fact. Italy is prewar, perfect, the nearest thing to heaven.

  The word has gone out, and tourists flock to Italy by the hundreds of thousands. Swedes arrive in sumptuous blue buses. Austrians, wearing leather shorts and green-felt hats, ride around on the motor launches which are Venice's street cars. Even some well-dressed Germans nibble chocolate bars on the first-class train to Naples. The French, always chic, contemplate somewhat enviously gay Rome, this new rival to Paris. The English eat with joy and patiently figure up, afterward, how many lire in a pound sterling and how much of their rationed money is left for the trip. And there are Swiss, and Indian ladies in saris and, everywhere, Americans. The Italians do not snarl at foreigners. The Italians seem delighted to share the wonders of their country.

  Naturally, not everyone can be happy; you do see some beggars on the streets. But, as everyone says, there always have been poor people in Italy—it's pathetic but it's not news. So you give them 100 lire—about fifteen cents—and they smile and thank you. The kids who beg look like little imps, very picturesque in their rags, and they seem to be begging for fun as if it were a jolly new game.

  If you happen to drive through the slums, by accident, they are so quaint and lively, with washing hanging across narrow streets, and a red mattress alongside pink geraniums on a window ledge, and everyone shouting and talking and running around, that you can't feel too upset. Besides, the Marshall Plan is pouring money into the country, and Italy's industrial production is 98 per cent of the 1938 peak, which is marvelous, isn't it? And they actually sell thousands of sewing machines to the United States where the sewing machine was born, and every country in Europe owes them money, and God knows there must be enough food, judging by the amount you see in the markets and the grocery stores and in all the restaurants. It's impossible to believe that five years ago Italy was a shambles, rotted with war. But whatever the war was like, it's over and done with now. Everyone says, merrily, that only two countries won the war, the United States and Italy, and it's more fun in Italy.

  All of this seems like a fairy story or a travel advertisement. The astonishing thing is that it is largely true. Probably there is a reasonable explanation for the recovery of Italy, but it looks and feels like a miracle. Those who know Italy and Italians would agree that the miracle is built into the people. For here is a race which has been overrun, devastated and conquered since the be
ginning of history—and nothing can defeat their love of life. The result is that they go on living and working like a nation of beavers. And apparently an Italian has to be an optimist, and have faith in the future, or die. If you love life enough, it would seem you can force life to be good. They have survived the war and risen from the ruins with incredible speed.

  But the war cannot be forgotten. It was a terrible war, inching over the land from Sicily to the Alps. Two armies fought here slowly. The retreating army, in bitterness and failure, had plenty of time to destroy the country and the people, as it moved north. The victorious army had plenty of artillery and aviation to destroy the country and the people as it advanced against the enemy. Someone must pay for this. The dead have paid their share and are quits.

  Someone does pay.

  In terms of life, the price falls most heavily where it is least deserved and least noticed—on children. Neither the enchanted foreigners nor the fairly privileged Italians visit the shuttered buildings that are orphanages, the prisonlike reform schools, the hospitals and rest homes crowded with tubercular and undernourished children. Why should anyone trouble to inspect a dank school where thin, white-faced children are too hungry to concentrate on their books? No one wants to remember the torment of war. And certainly no adults want to watch children paying the price of adult cruelty and folly. But the children are there, scattered and hidden behind the pleasant appearance of everyday life. They go on paying for the war with their lives—they, at least, will never forget what the true cost is.

  The port of Naples was a military target. Behind it, the crowding stone tenements of the poor got smashed as well. Two litle boys, barefooted, ragged, bony, about nine years old, were walking in front of this giant rubble heap which is their neighborhood. They were waiting for a ship that was due at two o'clock; then they would sneak past the gate into the dock area and beg food from the sailors. It was a pretty good system; they could figure on one meal a day. They had last eaten twenty-four hours before.

  As the ship was late, they decided to show us where they lived and led us down a dust path into the ruins. Here the bombs had carved out a barren square which became a playground, full of children—there never were so many children as live in the slum streets of Naples. A man had built a swing of old crates and was charging a penny for a ride; he did not like to take money, but he was an unemployed dockworker and had three kids of his own. Our two little guides spoke to various chums, who were sorting old nails and tin cans and other objects they had salvaged for sale, and then took us into a street like a canyon. At this point the second child vanished into a black doorway. He evidently feared we were the police.

  Luigi, the smaller, blond one, lived here in one windowless room with his mother and sister and two brothers. His father went to the war, he explained, and did not come home; his mother was out all day trying to find work. He seemed to think the room was very nice, and indeed he had part of a bed to sleep in and, although damp, the room was warmer than the streets. The second brother, a boy of thirteen, sat on the edge of the lumpy unsavory bed and stared from a strange, closed-in face. Luigi announced, in a matter-of-fact way, that his brother had much fear ever since the bombings—he had become a little stupid in the head, and his sister coughed all the time. Another brother begged uptown with a group of friends; he was the one who brought in money.

  Now Luigi had to return to the docks to see about the ship, so we pushed our way through an enormous crowd which had gathered, children and women and the jobless men. Perhaps we had come to offer work? Or food? Or could we do something about this baby—a gray package—or this one, another gray package covered with sores? On the streets by the docks we met a pal of Luigi's—this was a very small, dark boy; it is hard to tell the ages of such undersized children—who was collecting cigarette butts. He remarked bitterly that he could do nothing in this wind; rain or wind made the business bad. But on a good day if you worked hard you could sometimes pick up twenty cents’ worth of butts.

  The cigarette merchant informed Luigi that mutual friends were sitting behind that fence over there, playing cards. These five busy little gamblers, aged seven to twelve, had made some money in the morning, pooled it, bought bread and cheese, so now they were fed for the day and could take it easy, playing an improvised card game on a heap of cement that was the crushed wall of an apartment building. Luigi did not know where they lived. Three of them had no parents, so he guessed they lived someplace different every night. Then he said “So long,” and slipped through the iron gate into the docks to continue his daily search for food.

  No one knows how many children in Italy exist like this, and it is a mystery how they manage. They do not go to school because they have no shoes and they need their time to find food, and besides there aren't enough schools. They do not come under the care of any agency because war disrupts social services quite as thoroughly as it does dock installations and rail terminals. In Italy a child is considered an orphan if he has lost one parent, and this is a sound definition—one parent cannot maintain a home. So these children roam in the adult world's jungle, cheated of everything that would make a decent childhood.

  But they are not the unluckiest children. The unluckiest are the ones who get thrust into orphanage prisons like the Hotel of the Boor, in Naples, where everything has been silenced by terror and misery, except the children's eyes. The unluckiest are the girls, not criminal, only homeless, lost, who are locked into a certain convent reform school in Rome, where they are made to feel ugly and despised and forever outcast. The children of the streets hold on to their freedom as long as they can, but what catches up with them is sickness, principally tuberculosis, that great legacy of war.

  Through no fault of the Italian authorities, statistics on children are unreliable. They are guesses based on some known facts, and these figures are apt to be underestimated rather than overestimated. A private report of the Ministry of the Interior estimates that 300,000 children are predisposed to tuberculosis, and of these, 6.5 per cent are helped. If a child happens to be in this 6.5 per cent, he is better off than a healthy orphan, for the care in the TB preventoria, as they are called, is gentler than in most orphanages, and the child will receive a little extra food—perhaps more powdered milk—and have a clean bed. He will be allowed to stay in the sun for at least an hour a day and, if very young, some hours longer. He might even have a toy. In Naples there is one such TB rest home for 300 children that seemed cheerfully human because the walls were freshly painted, trees grew in the courtyard, the little girls had hair ribbons, which they loved, and a unit of the United States Air Force, having bombed the building by mistake, now sends the children dolls.

  A delicious little girl, with curling brown hair and a bright-red hair ribbon, showed us her doll and thanked us for it. As we were Americans, she assumed we would know the other Americans who gave it to her. She had color in her cheeks and smiled, and one thought, At last, a happy child. She probably was, too, because she knew no other life. When she was two years old, her mother had been killed during a bombing raid. Someone found the sick baby later, and she was put in here to pass her childhood with other children even less fortunate than she because they were even sicker.

  On the seacoast, just above Ostia, Rome's summer resort, is a village called Fiumicino. Behind the dunes, in a large shabby villa, is an orphanage for eighty children. You will find such small institutions everywhere. But this one has a garden, and the children can play on the beach, so it is a fine place. The children are babies, aged two to five, and this day they were sitting on the sand in a large circle, singing their heads off. They were comfortably dirty and all wore absurd little white-and-blue-striped cotton caps because nuns usually feel that sun is perilous stuff.

  The Superior, a young nun with an intelligent face, started to call out names. Suddenly a little bowlegged mulatto toddled toward us, followed by a little mulatto girl with kinky brown hair. A pale golden-blond child joined them, and another little girl with f
reckles and flaming red hair. They were four of the prettiest children imaginable.

  “Mixed races,” the nun said, and gestured toward the whole circle. “The soldiers left them behind.” These four had American Negro, German and Scotch fathers—but all the nations that fought in Italy were here represented in their children. The babies went back to their places and began to sing again, very loudly, in Italian.

  It is not known how many thousands of these children there are, illegitimate and abandoned, destined to spend their lives moving from institution to institution until they are any age between sixteen and twenty-one. They do not stay in one place and so grow up at least with borrowed roots, the same adults to look after them, the same house to live in. They move from a foundling home when they are two years old, and again when they are six, and again when they are twelve; and when they come of age they will receive identity papers stating that their parents are unknown. Thus they are guaranteed never to feel safe anywhere.