Herman Wouk - War and Remembrance

by War

  The Talmud boys sit in a circle around one large tome, some reading aloud from the upside-down text.

  Young men and women armed with rifles patrol the camp.

  Ephraim tells Berel that radio-equipped sentinels are posted far down the trails and passes. The camp is not likely to be surprised.

  The armed guards can take care of infiltrators or small bands, but for protection from serious threats they must signal Nikonov. Their best young people are gone. They wanted vengeance for the killings at Zhitomir; some have joined Kovpak's famous partisan regiment, others the one led by the legendary Jew, Uncle Moisha. Dr. Levine approved their going.

  In the week that Berel stays he hears a flood of stories, most of them horrible, a few heroic, some funny, drawn from the Jewish forest grapevine. He too has his adventures to relate. In this way, as he is reminiscing at supper one evening about his days with the early Jewish partisans outside Minsk, he learns that his own son is alive! There is no mistake about it. A skinny, pimply young fellow with an eyepatch, who served with Kovpak until a German grenade half-blinded him, marched with a Mendel Jastrow, through the Ukraine for months. So it comes out that not only is Mendel alive, but a partisan-quiet Mendel, the super-religious yeshiva boy-and that the daughter-in-law and her child, from what this young fellow last heard, are in hiding on a peasant's farm outside Volozhin.

  This is the first word Berel has had of his family in two years of wanderings and imprisonment. Through all the abuse, pain, and hunger that have ground him down, he has never totally lost hope that things would yet Turn around. He takes the news quietly, but it seems a signal that the darkest part of the dark night may be starting to pass.

  He feels stronger, and he is ready to forge on to Prague.

  In the big room of the main lodge, the night before he leaves, Ephraim puts on a lantern-slide show for selected adults: Berel's developed films, copied to larger slides, and flashed on a sheet gray with age and washings, through a crude projector using the arc light of two battery carbons.

  The sputtering and flickering of this improvised light lends a bloodcurdling animation to the slides. The naked women appear to shiver, marching into the gas chamber with their children; the prisoners wrenching gold from the corpses' teeth under SS guard seem to heave and strain; over the long open pit, where huge rows of human bodies burn, and Sonderkommandos with meat hooks are dragging up more bodies, the smoke wavers and billows. Some pictures are too blurred to show much, but the rest tell the story of the Oswiecim camp in crushing truth.

  The bad light makes the photographed documents hard to read. A long ledger page shows several hundred deaths of "heart attacks" in the same day; there are inventories of jewels, gold, furs, currency, watches, candlesticks, cameras fountain pens, itemized and priced in neat German; six pages of a report of a medical experiment on twenty identical twins, with measurements of their response to extremes of heat, cold, and electric shock, length of time for expiring after phenol injection, and elaborate comparative anatomy statistics after autopsy. Berel Jastrow has never seen the documents nor witnessed the scenes pictured. Horrified and I SO sorrowful, he is yet reassured to know that the materia is utterly and unanswerably damning.

  Silently, those who have watched the slides trudge out of the main house, leaving only the council. Dr. Levine stares at the fire for a long time. "Berel, they know me in the villages' I'll take you over the border myself. The Jewish partisans in Slovakia are well organized, and they'll get you to Prague." The train from Pardubice to Prague is crowded, the aisles of the second-class carriages jammed with standees. Czech policemen patiently work their way down the compartments examining papers. In this docile Protectorate, betrayed a; Munich, gobbled up before the war by the Germans, crushed by the reprisals for the Heydrich assassination, nothing ever turns up in the train inspections. Still, the Gestapo headquarters in Prague continues to require them.

  An old man reading a German paper has to be nudged for his papers by a policeman entering the compartment. Absentmindedly he pulls out a worn wallet containing his cards and permits, and hands it over while continuing to read. Reinhold Henkle, German construction worker from Pardubice, mother's maiden name Hungarian, which goes with the broad smooth-shaven Slavic face; the policeman glances at the threadbare suit and toilworn hands of the passenger, returns the papers, and takes the next batch. So Berel Jastrow surfaces.

  The train bowls along the valley of the Elbe by the glittery river, through fruit-laden vineyards and orchards full of harvesters, and grain fields spiky with stubble. The other people in the compartment are a fat old lady with an irritated look, three young women giggling together, and a uniformed young man with crutches. This confrontation with the policeman, for which Berel rehearsed for a week, has come and gone like a quick bad joke. He has been through grotesque times, but this passage from the wild world of mass graves and mountain partisans to what he once took for everyday reality-a seat on a moving train, girls in pretty dresses diffusing cheap scent and laughing, his own tie, creased hat, white shirt that cuts his neck -what a jolt!

  Coming back from the dead would have to be something like this; normal life seems a mockery, a busy little make-believe game that shuts out a terrible truth beyond.

  Prague astounds him. He knows it well from business trips.

  The lovely old city looks as though the war has never happened, as though the past four years recorded in his mind have been a long bad dream. The swastika flags flapping noisily in a high wind were all too visible in Prague in peacetime, when the Nazis were agitating for the return of the Sudetenland. Just as always the people crowd the streets in the afternoon sunshine, for it is just about quitting time.

  Well-dressed, looking stolidly content with things as they are, they fill the sidewalk cards. If anything, Prague is more serene now than in the turbulent days when Hitler was breathing fire against Bene. In the sidewalk crowds Berel sees not one Jewish face. That is new. That is the one clear sign in Prague that the war is no dream.

  His memorized instructions give him an alternate address if the bookshop should be gone; but there it is, in a crooked alley of the Mala Strana, the Little Town.

  N. MASTNY

  BOOKS

  NEW AND SECOND-RAND

  The opening door jangles a bell. The place is packed with old books on shelves, in piles on the floor, and the smell is very musty.

  A white-haired woman in a gray smock sits at a desk heaped with books, marking catalogue cards. She looks up benignly, with a smile that is more like a twitch, and says something in Czech.

  "Sprechen Sie Deutsch?"

  "Ja."

  "Do you have, in your second-hand section, any books on philosophy?"

  "Yes, quite a number."

  "Do you have Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason.?"

  "I'm not sure." She blinks at him. "Forgive me, but you do not'look like a man whom such a book would interest."

  "It is for my son Eric. He is writing his doctoral thesis."

  After a long appraising stare, she gets up. "Let me ask my husband."

  She goes out through a curtain in the back. Soon a short, stooped, bald man in a torn sweater, wearing a green eyeshade, emerges sipping from a cup. "Excuse me, I just made my tea and it is still hot."

  Unlike the other dialogue, this is not a signal. Berel makes no reply. The man potters about among the shelves, noisily drinking. He takes down a worn volume, blowing off dust, and hands it to Berel, open to the flyleaf, on which a name and address are inked. "People should never write in books."

  The volume is about travels in Persia, and the author's name is meaningless. "It is such a desecration."

  "Thank you, but that is not what I had in mind."

  The man shrugs, murmurs a blank-faced apology, and vanishes behind the curtain with the book.

  The address is on the other side of town. Berel takes a trolleybus there, and walks several blocks through a shabby section of four-story houses. On the ground-floor entrance of
the house he seeks, there is a dentist's sign. A buzzer admits him. Two doleful elderly men sit waiting on a bench in the foyer. A housewifely woman in a dirty uniform comes out of the dentist's office, from which groans and the noise of a drill can be heard.

  "I'm sorry, the doctor can see no more patients today."

  "It's an emergency"madam, a very bad abscess."

  "You'll have to wait your Turn, then."

  He waits almost an hour. The doctor, his white coat spattered with blood, is washing his hands at a sink when Berel comes into the office.

  "Sit down, I'll be right with you," he says over his shoulder.

  "I come from Mastny, the bookseller."

  The doctor straightens and turns: busby sandy hair, a heavy square face, a hard big jaw. He scans Berel with narrowed eyes, and says words in Czech. Berel gives the memorized reply.

  "Who are you?" asks the dentist.

  "I come from Oswiecim."

  ."Oswiecim? With films?"

  "Yes."

  "My God. We've long since given you fellows up for dead." The doctor is tremendously excited. He laughs. He seizes Berel by the shoulders. "We expected two of you."

  "The other man is dead. Here are the films."

  With a sense of solemn exaltation, Berel hands the aluminum cylinders to the dentist.

  That night, in the kitchen on the second floor of the house, he sits with the dentist and his wife at a supper of boiled potatoes, prunes, bread, and tea. His voice is giving out, for he has been talking so much, recounting his long journey and his adventures along the way. He is dwelling on his week in Levine's camp, and the great moment when he learned that his son was alive.

  The wife, bringing glasses and a bottle of slivovitz to the table, casually says to her husband, "It's an odd name, at that. Didn't someone at the last committee meeting tell about a Jastrow they've got in Theresienstadt now? One of the Prominente?"

  "That's an American." The dentist makes a gesture of dismissal.

  "Some rich Jewish writer who got himself caught in France, the damn fool." He says to Berel, "What route did you take to get over the border? Did you go through Turka?"

  Berel does not reply.

  The two men look at each other.

  "What's the matter?" asks the dentist.

  "Aaron Jastrow? In Theresienstadt?"

  "I think his name is Aaron," says the dentist. "Why?"

  PART SIX

  The Paradise Ghetto UNLIKE Auschwitz THERE is really nothing secret about Theresienstadt. The German government has even been at some pains to publicize, with news stories and photographs, the"Paradise Ghetto" in the Czech fortress town of Terezin near Prague, where Berel now hears his cousin is immured.

  This anomalous Nazi-sponsored haven for Jews, also called Theresienbad ("Terezin Spa"), is almost a byword in Europe.

  Jews of influence or meansdesperately try to get sent there.

  The Gestapo collects enormous fees for selling them commodious Terezin apartments with guaranteed lifetime medical care, hotel service, and food allotments. Jewish leaders of some large cities are shipped there, once disease, hunger, and transportation "to the east" have erased their communities.

  Half-Jews, deserving old people, distinguished artists and scholars, decorated Jewish war veterans, dwell in this town with their families. Privileged Jews of the Netherlands and Denmark also end up there.

  News pictures in European journals show these fortunate Jews, some recognizable by name or face, all wearing yellow stars, sitting at their ease in small cards, attending lectures and concerts, happily at work in factories or shops, strolling in a flowery park, rehearsing an opera or a play, watching a local soccer game, wrapped in their prayer shawls and worshipping in a well-appointed synagogue, and even dancing in crowded little nightclubs. Outside Nazi Europe information about the place is distorted and sparse, but its existence is known through favorable Red Cross reports. European Jews who have not yet gone "east'." would joyously trade places with Aaron Jastrow, and throw into the bargain all they possessed.

  Such a comfortable resort for Jews in the midst of a Europe swamped in anti-Semitic propaganda and wartime hardships has naturally caused resentment. Dr. Goebbels has given voice to this in a speech:... While the Jews in Terezin are sitting in the cafe, drinking coffee, eating cake, and dancing, our soldiers have to bear all the miseries and deprivations, to defend their homeland.

  Hints are not lacking in neutral and Allied countries, to be sure, that Theresienstadt is just a Potemkin village, a cynical show staged by the Nazis; so German Red Cross representatives have been invited to come and see for themselves, and have publicly confirmed the existence of this curious sanctuary. The Germans claim that Jewish camps in "the eat" are all like Theresienstadt, just not quite so luxurious. For this the Red Cross and the world has to take their word.

  There are few American Jews in Theresienstadt, or indeed anywhere in Nazi Europe. Most of them fled before the war.

  As for the scattering that remain, some are surviving by dint of influence, reputation, wealth, or luck, like Berenson and Gertrude Stein; some have gone into hiding and are making it through the war that way; some have already been gassed in Auschwitz, their American citizenship a useless mockery.

  Natalie, her uncle, and her baby have landed in the Paradise Ghetto.

  National Socialist Germany seems to have been something new in human affairs. Its roots were old, and the soil was old, but it was a mutant. In the ancient world, Sparta and Plato's imaginary Republic were but the dimmest foreshadowings.

  Despite Hitler's copious borrowings from Lenin and Mussolini, no modern political comparisons hold. No philosopher from Aristotle to Marx and Nietzsche ever foresaw such a thing, and none gave an account of human nature that could accommodate it. The Third Reich erupted into history as a surprise. It lasted a mere dozen years. It is gone.

  Historians, social scientists, political analysts, still stammer and grope in the mountainous ruins of unprecedented facts about human nature and society that it left behind.

  Ordinary people prefer to forget it: a nasty twelve-year episode in Europe's decline, best swept under the rug.

  Scholars force it into one or another academic pigeonhole: populism plus terror, capitalist counterrevolution, recrudescence of Bonapartism, dictatorship of the right, triumph of a demagogue; bookish labels without end, developed into long heavy tomes. None really accounts for the Third Reich. The still-spreading, still-baffling, sinister red stain on all mankind of National Socialist Germany-more than the population explosion, nuclear bombs, and the exhaustion of the environment-is the radical though shunned question in present human affairs.

  Theresienstadt sheds light on it, because unlike Auschwitz, the Paradise Ghetto is not unfathomable- It was a National Socialist deed; but by an effort of the imagination, because it had a trace of recognizable sense, we can grasp it. It was just a hoax. The resources of a great government went into it, and so it worked.

  Natalie Henry's best hope for survival with her child lay, strangely enough, in this enormous fake painstakingly staged by the Germans.

  The intention to kill every Jew in Europe-and every Jew in the world, as German domination expanded-was, for Hitler and his trusted few, probably never in doubt. It crystallized in deeds and documents early in the war. The paper trail remains exiguous, and Hitler apparently never signed anything; but that the order came down from him to execute his threats in Mein Kampf appears self-evident.

  However, old-fashioned notions in the world outside Germany presented difficulties: mercy, justice, the right of all human beings to life-and safety, horror of killing women and children, and so forth.

  But for the National Socialists, killing was the nature of war; German women and children were dying under bombs; the definition of enemy was a matter of government decision. That the Jews were Germany's greatest enemy was an article at the core of National Socialist policy.

  This was why, even as Germany in 1944 began to crumple,
crucial war resources continued to go to murdering Jews. To the critical military mind this made no sense. To the leaders whom the German nation passionately followed to the last it made total sense. In the last will and testament that Adolf Hitler wrote, before blowing his brains out in his Berlin bunker, he boasted of his "humane" massacre of the Jewshe used that word-and exhorted the defeated German people to go on killing them.