Herman Wouk - War and Remembrance

by War

  Meantime, the whole mad Beautification extravaganza is on again; rehearsals, refurbishing, and construction of even more fake Theresienstadt delights: a public "beach" on the river, an open-air theatre, and Heaven knows what else. The film is a God-given reprieve.

  Preparing for it will take a month; shooting, another month. The Germans are as fully bent on it as they were on the Beautification. If somebody in the collapsing Berlin regime doesn't think of countermanding the film, the cameras may be inanely grinding away when Russian or American tanks come crashing through the Bohusovice Gate.

  For the Anglo-Americans have at last begun to break out of their Normandy bridgehead. The German papers tell of heavy fighting around Saint-Lo, a new place-name. On the eastern front, old place-names of my youth fill the German communiques, as the Soviets have driven deep into eastern Poland. Pinsk, Baranovitch, Temopol"Lvow-great Jewish cities, homes of famous yeshivas and eminent Hassidic dynasties-have been recaptured by the Red Army.

  From Lvov, as the crow flies, Theresienstadt is some four hundred miles.

  In the past three weeks, the Russians have advanced two hundred miles. In three weeks.

  It is a race. Because of the film, we have a chance. Thank God-this once-for the Nazi passion for crude fraud!

  August 6.

  I have been drafted to work on the film script, hence the gap in this record. I suggested a simple visual running theme-the flow of water, in and out of the ghettothinking that some clever viewers might catch the symbolism of the "sluice." The director grasped it without words; I saw it in his eyes. The blockhead Rahm approves. He is taking childish pleasure in the film project; especially in selecting the bathing girls for the beach scene.

  And still no word about Louis. Nothing. He disappeared into the hospital a month ago yesterday. Natalie puts in her day's work at the mica factory, then plods to the children's pavilion for film rehearsals. She does not eat, she never mentions Louis, and she looks gaunt and haunted. A few days ago in desperation she went to the hospital and demanded to talk to the doctor who wrote Louis's death certificate. She was very roughly turned away.

  AUGUST 18.

  Filming began. I have been rewriting the half-witted script night and day with four collaborators, under the interminable meddling of the dullard Rahm. No time to breathe but thank God still for the film.

  Eisenhower's armies have swarmed out over France and surrounded the German armies at a place called Falaise. The BBC talks of a "western Stalingrad." The Allies have now landed in southern France, too, and the Germans there are retreating in panic. "The south of France is going up in flames," says the Free French radio, and the Russians have reached the Vistula. They are in Praga, across the river from Warsaw, in great force. The Poles are rising Eigainst the Germans. In Warsaw there is bloody street fighting. One's hopes brighten and brighten.

  AUGUST 30.

  Louis is all right! Paris is liberated!

  This is the brightest day in all my years.

  During a filming session in the library today, a Czech cameraman I honestly don't know which one, it happened so - fast, in the glare of the klieg lights -shoved into my pocket an off-focus photograph of Berel and the boy. They stand by 'a haystack in strong sunlight.

  Louis looks plump and well. As I write these words, Natalie sits opposite me, still weeping with joy over the picture.

  The good news from the battlefields is becoming a cataract.

  The American armies moved so fast across France that they captured Paris undamaged. The Germans simply pulled out and fled. Rumania has suddenly changed sides, and declared war on Germany. This caught the Nazi regime by surprise, it seems. Between the invading Red Army and the Rumanian turncoat forces, so says the Moscow radio, the Germans are snared in a colossal Balkan entrapment. They are being shattered on all fronts, no doubt of that. The Allied air bombing, complains the Volkischer Beobachter, is the most horrible and remorseless in history.

  How pleasant! The Goebbels editorials take on a strident tone of Gdtterddmmerung. This war can end at any moment.

  SEPTEMBER 10.

  How far off can the end be now? Bulgaria has declared war on Germany. Eisenhower's armies are driving for the Rhine, scarcely opposed by the fleeing Wehrmacht. The uprising in Warsaw goes on.

  Somehow the Russians have not managed to cross. the Vistula to help the Poles. Of course those lightning advances strained their supply lines. No doubt that is the reason for the lull.

  Now Pahm, after much meddling and dawdling, has abruptly ordered the film finished. No explanation. I can think of only one. When the Soviets captured Lublin, they overran a vast concentration camp for Jews there called Maidanek. They found gas chambers, crematoriums, mass graves, thousands and thousands of living skeletons, and countless corpses lying about, all exactly as Berel described Oswiecim. The Russians brought in thirty Western correspondents to see the horror for themselves. The details are being told and retold on Radio Moscow.

  The worst reports and rumors turn out to have been plain fact.

  So the gruesome German game is up. "The Fuhrer Grants the Jews a.Town," an idyllic documentary of the Paradise Ghetto almost two hours long, will probably never be shown.

  After the Lublin exposure the film is a self-evident, clumsy, hopeless fabrication. Our reprieve expires in five days. Then what?

  Nobody knows yet.

  It is very strange. All these crashing war developments are for us distant thunder. We read words on paper, or we hear whispers of what was said on some foreign radio. Theresienstadt itself remains a stagnant little prison town where every sticky summer day is the same; a noisome ghetto jammed with undernourished, sick, scared people; faintly animated by the filming nonsense, but otherwise quiet as a morgue.

  ...

  From Sudb oofocaui$t

  The September Miracle

  During August our doom appeared to some giddy Western journalists "a question of days." The jaws of the east-west vise had closed to the Vistula and the Meuse. On the southern fronts the Anglo-Americans were driving up the Rhone valley almost unchecked and ascending the Italian boot far north of Rome; and the Russians, wheeling in a great mass through our wideopen southern flank in the treacherous Balkans, had arrived at the Danube. On nearly every active front largo numbers of our forces were either retreating or encircled.

  Later Hitler himself called August 15 "the worst day of my life."

  That was the day the Allies landed in the south of France and in the north General von Kluge disappeared into the Falaise pocket.

  Pathologically suspicious after July 20, the Fuhrer feared that Kluge might have vanished to negotiate; the situation actually looked that bad at Headquarters. But the gallant Kluge soon managed to restore communications with us. Shortly afterward he killed himself; whether in despair over Hitler's stupid commands which were destroying his army, or because he was really involved in the bomb plot, I do not know. In August, I confess, the thought of suicide more than once crossed my own mind.

  But September passed and no enemy soldier had yet set foot on German soil! After Rundstedt's forces brilliantly repulsed Montgomery's foolhardy narrow thrust with airborne troops at Arnhem, trying to flank the Westwall through Holland, Eisenhower's rush toward the Rhine faded away. Gas tanks were empty, generals at loggerheads, strength dispersed from the Low Countries to the Alps. The Russians were halted along the Vistula, coping with our counterattacks, while across the river the Wappen SS levelled Warsaw with fire and explosives to wipe out the uprising. The southern drives against us were all halted. Under the worst pounding and against the worst odds of modern history, Germany stood bloodied and defiant, holding its ring of foes at bay.

  If the lone British stand in 1940 merits praise, why not this heroic rebound of the Wehrmacht in September 1944?

  The analytical elements of the "September miracle" are clear.

  West and east, our enemies outran their supplies in their spectacular and speedy advances; while German discipline harden
ed and total mobilization took place, under the threat to our sacred soil.

  Nor can one overlook the letdown in the invaders' fighting morale, especially in the west: the euphoric feeling of "well, we've won the war, we'll be home by Christmas," induced by long advances, the fall of Paris, and the attempt on Hitler's life. Also, Hitler's one-sided insistence on hardening up the French ports was at last paying some dividends. Eisenhower had two million men ashore, but through the distant bottlenecks of Cherbourg and an artificial harbor he could not supply an all-out assault on the Westwall. He needed Antwerp, and we still dominated the Scheidt estuary.

  In postwar military writings there is much armchair scoffing at Eisenhower. These authors dwell on map distances and troop counts, overlooking the sweaty, gritty, complex logistics that decide modern war. Eisenhower was the typical American military man, a plodder in the field but something of a genius in organization and supply. His caution and troad-front strategy were not unsound, if scarcely Napoleonic. We were still a very dangerous foe, and he deserves credit for resisting specious gambles in September.

  Advocates of both Montgomery and Patton argue that given enough gasoline, each of their heroes could have thrust on to Berlin and quickly ended the war. General Blumentritt told British interrogators that Montgomery could certainly have done it. I shall demonstrate in my operational analysis the decisive adverse factors. Briefly, the flanks of such a narrow thrust on extended supply lines would have invited a disastrous repulse, a much greater Arnhem. I knew Blumentritt well, and I doubt that those wer ,# his professional views.

  He was telling his conquerors what they wanted to hear. Given the port facilities and communications available to Eisenhower, the thing could not be done.

  The consumption rate of his troops was quite shocking: seven hundred tons per division per day! A German division did its fighting on less than two hundred tons a day.

  Eisenhower could not afford a massive risk and setback; not with hundreds of American correspondents breathing down his neck, and a presidential election two months away. The enemy coalition was unstable enough. All through the summer campaign the Anglo-Americans pulled and tugged at bad crosspurposes. And the Russian failure to aid the Warsaw uprising and what was worse, their refusal to allow the Anglo-Americans even to send airborne assistance-already planted the poison of the Polish question, which -would in time destroy the strange alliance of capitalists and Bolsheviks.

  Unfortunately we lacked the punch to exploit these strains among our foes. Hitler's mulish "stand or die" policy on the battlefield had bled us too much. In the three colossal summer defeats-Bagration, the Balkans, and western France-and a score of smaller entrapments, one million five hundred thousand German front-line troops had been killed, captured, cut off, or routed in disorder without arms. Had these battle-hardened forces fought all- elastic defense instead, harrying our foes' advance while withdrawing in good order to the Fatherland, we might well have salvaged something from the war.

  As it was, the "September miracle" could not avert Finis Germaniae, it could only postpone the doom. Yet even as he went down, Hitler retained the hypnotic power to draw suicidal reserves of nervous energy and fighting heart from GermanyAlready at the end of August he had issued his startling directive for the Ardennes counterattack.

  With heavy hearts we were making plans and issuing preliminary orders at Headquarters.

  However badly the man was failing, his feral willpower was not to be opposed.

  TRANSLATOR'S NOTE: This Ardennes operation became the "Battle of the Bulge." It is interesting that Roon commends Eisenhower's cautious broad-front strategy, which many authorities condemn. The true Judgment would lie in unravelling very complicated logistical statistics of Overlord. Fortune favors the bold, but not when they are out of gas and bullets. The strange Red Army inaction while Warsaw was destroyed by the Germans in plain sight across the river remains controversial. Some say that from Stalin's viewpoint the wrong Poles were leading the uprising. The liussians maintain that they had reached the limit of their supplies, and that the Poles did not bother to coordinate their uprising with Red Army plans. - V. H.

  ...

  From A Jew's Journey OCTOBER 4.

  The fourth transport since the filming ended is now loading. I have just come from the.hamburg barracks, where I said my last good-bye to Yuri, Joshua, and Jan. That is the end of my Theresienstadt Talmud class.

  We stayed up all night in the library, studying by candlelight until dawn broke. The boys had packed their few belongings, and they wanted to learn to the last. A strange and abstruse topic we had reached, too the met-mitzva, the unidentified body found in the fields, whose burial is a strict duty to all. The Talmud drives to a dramatic extreme to make the point. A high priest, enjoined by special laws of ritual purity against contact with a corpse, is forbidden to bury even his own father or mother. So is a man under Nazirite vows.

  Yet a high priest who has taken a Nazirite vow-thus being doubly restricted-is commanded to bury a met-mitzva with his own hands! Such is the Jewish regard for human dignity, even in death. The voice of the Talmud speaks across two thousand years to teach my boys, as its last word to them, the gulf between ourselves and the Germans.

  Joshua, the brightest of the three remaining lads, asked abruptly as I closed the old volume, "Rebbe, are we all going to be gassed?"

  That yanked me back to the present! The rumors are rife in the ghetto now, though few people are tough-minded enough to face up to them. Thank God I was able to answer, "No.

  You're going to join your father, Joshua -and you, Yuri and Jan, your older brothers-at a construction project near Dresden. That's what we in the council have been informed, and that's what I believe."

  Their faces shone as though I had set them free from prison. They were high-spirited still at the barracks, with the transport numbers around their necks, and I could see that they were cheering up other people.

  Was I deceiving them, as well as myself. The Zossen construction project outside Berlin-temporary government huts-is a fact. The workers from Theresienstadt and their families are being very well treated there. This labor project in the Dresden area, Rahm has firmly assured the council, is the same sort of thing. Zucker heads the draft; an able man an old Prague Zionist and council member, very supple at handling the Germans.

  The pessimists in the council, who tend to be Zionists and long-term ghetto inmates, don't believe Rahm at all. The draft of five thousand able-bodied men, they say, denudes us of the hands needeo for an uprising, should the SS decide to liquidate the ghetto. There have been uprisings in other ghettos; we hear the reports. When Eppstein was arrested after the filming stopped, and the order came down for this huge labor draft, the false security of the Beautification and the movie foolishness dissolved, and the council was plunged in dismay. We had had no transport order in almost five months. I heard mutinous mutterings around the table that astonished me, and there were Zionist meetings about an uprising to which I was not invited. But the draft went off on schedule in three transports, with no disturbance.

  This fourth transport is extremely worrisome. True, they are the relatives of the construction workers who have gone.

  But last week the SS permitted relatives to volunteer to go along, and about a thousand'did. These are being railroaded out willy-nilly.

  The one shred of reassurance is that the four shipments do make up one group, the big labor draft and its families. Rahm explains that it is the policy to keep families together. This may be a soothing lie; conceivably it could still be true.

  The endless talk in the council about our probable fate comes down to two opposed views: (1) Despite the lull in the war, the Germans have lost, and they know it; and we can expect a gradual softening of our SS bosses as they start thinking of self-preservation. (2) The lust of the Germans to murder all the Jews of Europe will only be aggravated by looming defeat; they will rush to complete this "triumph" if they can gain no other.

  I hesitate
between the two probabilities. One is sensible, the other insane. The Germans have both faces.

  Natalie is a total pessimist. She is recovering much of her old toughness, now that Louis is gone and safe; eating the worst slops voraciously, and gaining weight and strength every day. She means to survive, she says, and find Louis; and if transported, she intends to be strong enough to survive as a laborer.

  OCTOBER 5.

  A fifth transport was ordered two hours after the fourth left; a random selection of eleven hundred people. No explanation this time, nothing to do with the Dresden construction project. Many families will have to be broken up. Large numbers of the sick, and women with small children, will go. Natalie probably would have gone, if Louis were still here. The Germans simply lied-again.