Herman Wouk - War and Remembrance
Page 119
The idiot thoroughness of this Beautification is awesome.
There is nothing Rahm and his advisers haven't thought of, assuming that he can hold his visitors to the red line. Very little is finished yet, but the scenario is all laid down. The bustling disorder in Theresienstadt these days is that of a stage halfway ready for a dress rehearsal. Two or three thousand able-bodied Jews are toiling from dawn to dusk for the Technical Department-and, here and there, all night under floodlights-to build this fantastic narrow path of illusion.
The itinerary of the visitors has been fixed for months.
Rahm carries around a thick document bound in black and red striped cloth, which we of the council call (among ourselves) the "Beautification Bible." All our department heads have contributed to it, but the final minuteness of detail could only be German. It includes the selections the municipal orchestra will play in the town square, though the Technical Department is only now laying the foundation for the pavilion. Our musicians are busy copying out the parts two Rossini overtures, some military marches, several Strauss waltzes, and potpourris from Donizetti and Bizet.
Copying paper is now available in profusion. Excellent new instruments have flooded in. Theresienstadt, like Prospero's magic island, is becoming a place where melody fills the air.
Looking into the opera house in the Sports Hall, the visitors will observe a full orchestra and large chorus rehearsing Verdis Requiem: more than a hundred fifty talented Jews in neat clean clothing, yellow stars and all, producing music worthy of performance in Paris or Vienna.
Downstairs in a smaller theatre they will happen upon a costumed run-through of the delightful original children's opera, Brundibar, the hit of the ghetto. Walking in the flower-lined streets, they will hear a string quartet in one private house doing Beethoven, a superb contralto singing Schubert lieder in another, a great clarinetist practicing Weber in a third. In the cafes they will come on costumed musicians and singers performing, as patrons sip coffee and eat cream pastries. The visitors will refresh themselves at one cafe, where customers will pay, depart, and arrive in a thoroughly drilled natural fashion.
The visitors will see shops well-stocked with all manner of fine goods, including luxury foods, and shoppers casually coming and going, buying what they please, paying in the Theresienstadt paper currency engraved with a picture of Moses. This worthless currency is the sourest joke of the ghetto, of course, and Rahm's Bible contains a stern warning that as soon as the visitors depart these "customers" must return all the "purchases." Any shortage will be punished.
For a missing food item, the offender will go to the Little Fortress.
.
The plan families through every phase of ghetto life. A mock superclean hospital, a mock children's playground, a mock printing plant for men, a mock clothing factory for women, a mock sports field, are all in the works. The bank is being redecorated. A mock boys' school is already finished, a new building complete to the last detail of blackboards, chalk, and textbooks, which has never been and will never be used, except for musicians' rehearsals. A "main mess hall," a commodious hut, is being erected for the serving of exactly one meal, the visitors' lunch, where Jews all around them will also heartily dine. The SS have yet to figure out a way to avoid feeding some Jews just this once. It is the only lapse in Rahm's Bible. The cafe customers, of course, are to indulge in coffee and cakes only while the visitors are in sight, otherwise they will go through motions over brown slop, and plates of cakes they may not touch.
It is after one o'clock. Why do I go on with this bitter drivelling?
Well, even the gallows jest of the Beautification is some relief from thoughts of Berel's disclosures, and my worry over Natalie's tardiness.
She must get up at six. Before she goes to work at the mica factory, she has to rehearse for the visit, at the children's playground and the kindergarten.
She has just received that assignment, with several other attractive women. They will have their work cut out for them, training the kids to speak their little pieces and simulate happiness. At lunch, she tells me, the kids are supposed to cry out, "What, sardines again?" A whole twenty-minute charade like that has been written out.
Here the Beautification is doing some real good, for the SS have increased the rations of the children. They want the visitors to see roly-poly tots at play; so they are stuffing them as the witch did Hansel and Gretel.
I cannot believe that so blatant a comedy can hoodwink anybody.
Yet say it does succeed: what are the Germans hoping to gain by it?
The Jews are disappearing, millions are gone, and can this vast horror be long concealed? I cannot understand it. There is no sense to it.
No, it is the backward child'on a monumental and terrible scale; the backward child caught at the empty jam jar, his face, hands, clothes smeared red, smiling and denying that he ate the jam.
For that matter, what sense is there to the Oswiecim gas cellars?
I have thought and thought about that for weeks, with dizzied brain.
Calling the Germans sadists, butchers, beasts, savages explains nothing, for they are men and women like us. I have an idea, and I will scribble it down, with much more certainty than I feel. The root of the matter cannot be Hitler. I start with that premise. Such a thing must have been brewing for centuries, to have encountered so little resistance among the Germans when it happened.
Napoleon forced liberty and equality on the Germans.
From the outset they gagged on it. With cannon and tramping boots, he invaded a patchwork of absolutist states hardly out of feudalism. He ground the faces of the Germans in the brotherhood of man. Freeing the Jews was part of this new liberal humanism. It was not natural to the Germans, but they conformed.
Alas, we Jews believed in the change, but the Germans in their hearts never did. It was the conqueror's creed. It swept Europe, but not Germany. Their Romantic philosophers inveighed against the un-German Enlightenment, their antisemitic political parties sprouted, while Germany grew and grew to an industrial giant, never convinced of the "Western" ideas.
Their defeat under the Kaiser, and the great inflation and crash, generated in them a terrible frustrated anger. The communists threatened chaos and overthrow. Weimar was falling apart. When Hitler rose from this witches' brew, like an oracular spook in Macbeth, and pointed at the Jews in the department stores and the opera promenades; when he thundered that not only were they the visible beneficiaries of Germany's wrongs, but the actual cause of them; when that frenzied historical formula rolled forth, as mendaciously simple as the Marxist slogans, but more candidly bloodthirsty; then the German rage was released in an explosion of national energy and joy, and the plausible maniac who had released it had his murder weapon in hand. Bottomless lack of compunction in the Germans peculiarly fitted the weapon to the man. Awareness of this baffling trait had to be kicked into me. I am still puzzling over it.
Does my work on Luther shed light on it? Only Luther, before Hitler, ever so wholly spoke with the national voice to release plugged-up national rage; in his case, against a corrupt Latin-droning popery. The resemblances in the forceful, coarse, sarcastic rhetoric of the two men gave me anxious pause even when I was Luther's admiring biographer.
Luther's Protestantism is a grand theology, a sonorous earnest hardheaded Christianity, well worthy of the Christ whom Luther claimed to be rescuing from the Whore of Babylon. But even this homegrown product sat hard on the German stomach, did it not?
The German has never been quite at home in Christian Europe, has never quite made up his mind whether he is Vandal or Roman, the destroyer from the north or the comme il faut Western man. He oscillates, vacillates, plays the one or the other role, as historic circumstances change.
To the Vandal in him, Christian compunction and British and French liberalism are nonsense; the reason and logic of the Enlightenment are a veneer over real human nature; destruction and dominance are the thing; slaughter is an ancient joy.
Oh, scribble, scribble, scribble! I look back over these hastily pencilled pages and my heart sinks. No wonder I have neglected the diary; my small mind cannot cope with what I now know. How can one move on this theme without a general theory of nationalism? Without tracing socialism to its sources, and demonstrating how the two movements converge in Hitler? Without giving the menace of the Russian Revolution its due weight?
Have I made any contact whatever with the German in all this glib scrawling? Am I, the stinking Jew Jastrow, putting on phylacteries in Theresienstadt, and he, striking out all over Europe with clanking armies and roaring ai. leets, really following the same human impulse, to preserve a threatened identity? Is that why he wants to kill me, because the Jew and Judaism are the everlasting challenge, reproach, and hobble to primitive Germanism? Or is all this an empty conceit, the vaporings of the tired and overwrought brain of a lifelong liberal, trying to find one shred of sense in Oswiecim and in the Beautification, trying to bridge the gulf between myself and Karl Rahm, because the truth is that though he slay me we are brothers, in Darwinian taxonomy if not under God?
Here is Natalie!
NEXF MORNING.
It is even graver than I thought. She is in very deep. She came back weary, but in a glow. These Zionist meetings have been debating ways and means to defeat the Beautification, to signal the truth about Theresienstadt to the Red Cross visitors, without alerting the SS. She thinks they have hit on something. At each of the stops, a Jew in charge will be primed to say one and the same sentence, in response to any Red Cross comment: " Oh yes, it is all very, very new. And there is much more to see."
They worked this out, I gather, with great wrangling and revisions. They voted on words. These exact repetitions, they believe, will strike the visitors as a signal. The Jews will speak the sentence casually, with meaningful looks, if possible beyond SS earshot. The hope, or rather the fantasy, is that the visitors will catch on that they acre seeing brand-new faked installations, and will push beyond the planned route, because of the "much more to see."
I listened patiently. Then I told her that she was slipping into the endemic ghetto dreaminess, and endangering her life and Louis's.
The Germans are trained wary prison guards.
The visitors will be soft polite welfare executives. The Beautification is a major German effort, and the most obvious thing to guard against is just such Jewish schemes to tip off the visitors. So I argued, but she retorted that one way or another the Jews must fight back. Since we have no weapons but our brains, we must use them.
Then I took the drastic step of disclosing Berel's revelations about Oswiecim. My intent was to shock her into greater awareness of her danger of being transported. She was, of course, badly shocked; not quite flabbergasted, since such stories do float around. But she took it the wrong way. All the more reason, she said, to waken the suspicions of the Red Cross; anyway, Berel's story must be exaggerated, because Udam had received postcards from his wife in Oswiecim, and her friends were getting cards now from relatives in the February transport.
I repeated what Berel told me: that the Oswiecim SS keeps up a "Theresienstadt family camp," in case the Red Cross ever manages to negotiate a visit to that terrible place; that on arrival in Oswiecim everyone must write postcards dated months ahead; and that the Theresienstadt camp is periodically cleared of the sick, the weak, the elderly, and the children, all gassed in a body, to make room for further Theresienstadt transports. Udam was undoubtedly getting mail from a cremated woman.
Next she asserted that her group has heard, via their grapevine to Prague, that according to German military intelligence, the Americans will definitely land in France on May 15. This may well touch off uprisings all over Europe, and lead to the rapid collapse of the Nazi empire. In any case, the SS officers will begin worrying about their own necks, and so further transports are unlikely.
Against such wishful thinking hardened into delusion there is no arguing. I urged her, if she meant to go on with this business, at least to send word to Berel to get Louis out. She wouldn't hear of it; denied that she was putting Louis in any greater danger than he already faced; turned decidedly snappish, and went off to bed.
That was only a few hours ago. She was in a better mood when she awoke, and apologized before she left for her display of short temper.
She said nothing more about Louis.
Nor did I.
Far from objecting to her newfound Zionism, I am glad of it. It seems to be for her the assertion of threatened identity that I have found in my old religion. One needs some such spiritual stiffening to survive in the ghetto, if one is not a conniver or a black marketeer.
But suppose her circle is penetrated by an informer? With scurrilous puppetry already on record in her SS dossier, that will be the end of her.
I myself was never a Zionist. I remain enormously skeptical of the notion of returning the Jews to that desolate patch of the Middle East inhabited by unfriendly Arabs. True, the Zionists did foresee this European catastrophe, when it was a cloud no bigger than a man's hand. But does it follow that their visionary solution was a possible or correct one? Hardly.
Only a handful of d-earners ever went to Palestine before Hitler.
Even they were driven there by pogroms, rather than drawn by the desiccated Holy Land.
I am no longer sure about this, I confess, or about any of my former notions. Certainly Jewish nationalism is a powerful means of identity, but I regard nationalism as the curse of modern times. I simply cannot believe that we poor Jews are ever meant to have an army and a navy, a parliament and ministers, boundaries, harbors, airports, universities, on Mediterranean sands. What a sweet and hollow dream!
Let Natalie dream it, if it helps her get through Theresienstadt.
She says that if a Jewish state the size of Liechtenstein had existed, all these horrors wouldn't be happening; and that such a state must arise to prevent their happening again.
Messianic rhetoric; my fear is only that this new febrile enthusiasm, overcoming her usual tough good sense, may lead her into rashness that will destroy her and Louis.
THROUGH THE CLOSED bedroom door it sounded like crying, but Rhoda cried so seldom that Victor Henry shrugged and passed on to the guest room where he now slept. It was very late. He had sat up for hours in the library after dinner, working on landing craft documents for his meeting with Colonel Peters; something he was not looking forward to, but a priorities conflict was forcing it. He undressed, showered, drank off his nightcap of bourbon and water, and before turning in stopped to listen at Rhoda's door. The sounds had become unmistakable: keening moans, broken by sobs.
"Rhoda?"
No answer. The sounds ceased as though switched off.
"Rho! Come on, what is it?"
Muffled sad voice: "Oh, I'm all right. Go to sleep."
"Let me in."
"The door's not locked, Pug."
The room was dark. When he turned on the light Rhoda sat up in an oyster-white satiny nightdress, blinking and dabbing a tissue at swollen red eyes. "Was I making a racket? I tried to keep it low."
"What's up?"
"Oh, Pug, I'm done for. Everything's in ruins. You're well rid of me."
"I think you can use a drink."
"I must look GRUESOME. Don't I?" She put her hands to her tumbled hair.
"Want to come down to the library and talk?"
"You're an angel. Scotch and soda. Be right there." She thrust shapely white legs and thighs out of bed. Pug went to the library and mixed drinks at the movable bar. She soon
appeared in a peignoir over her nightgown, brushing her hair in familiar charming gestures he had not seen since moving to the guest room. She was lightly made-up and she had done something to her eyes, for they were bright and clear.
"I washed my face and FLUNG myself into bed hours and hours ago, then I couldn't sleep."
"But why? Because I have to see Colonel Peters? It's just a business meetin , Rhoda. I told you that." He handed her the drink.
"Maybe I shouldn't have mentioned it, but I won't make any trouble for you."
"Pug, I'm in such distress!" She took a deep gulp of her drink.
"Somebody's been writing Hack anonymous letters.
He's received, oh, five or six. He tore up the first ones, but he showed me two. With abject apologies, but he showed them.
They've gotten under his skin."