The Books That Mattered

by Frye Gaillard

  At three o’clock . . . someone rang the front doorbell. I was lying lazily reading a book on the veranda in the sunshine, so I didn’t hear it. A bit later, Margot appeared at the kitchen door looking very excited. “The S.S. have sent a call-up notice for Daddy,” she whispered . . . When we were alone together in our bedroom, Margot told me that the call-up was not for Daddy, but for her. I was more frightened than ever and began to cry. Margot is sixteen; would they really take girls of that age away alone? But thank goodness, she won’t go. Mummy said so herself; that must be what Daddy meant when he talked about us going into hiding.

  Into hiding—where would we go, in a town or the country, in a house or a cottage, when, how, where . . . ?

  Those were the questions I was not allowed to ask . . .

  I was about Anne’s age when I first read her diary, and like a few million others who also read it, I felt like Kitty—like her lone confidante and best friend. Such was the intimacy of her writing. Re-reading it now, I’m struck once again by the subtlety and wisdom of her words, and more than that, by the sheer and dogged continuity of effort—an unbroken account spanning two years and touching the range of human emotion, resisting a final submission to despair.

  She writes of the irritability of confinement as two Jewish families and a member of a third are forced to share cramped quarters above an office, unable to move about except at night for fear of detection by the workers below. As the months go by Anne busies herself with her passion for writing and her studies of history, genealogy, mythology, most often setting an example for the others with her youthful optimism and cheer. All of this comes through in her diary, where she wrote these words at age fifteen:

  It’s really a wonder that I haven’t dropped all my ideals, because they seem so absurd and impossible to carry out. Yet I keep them, because in spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart. I simply can’t build up my hopes on a foundation consisting of confusion, misery, and death. I see the world gradually being turned into a wilderness, I hear the ever approaching thunder, which will destroy us too. I can feel the sufferings of millions and yet, if I look up into the heavens, I think that it will come right, that this cruelty will end, and that peace and tranquility will return again.

  Two weeks later, on August, 4, 1944, the dreaded knock on the door finally came, and the Franks were arrested and taken away to Auschwitz. Otto Frank managed to survive, and though he knew that his wife did not, he had the highest hopes for his daughters. He learned at the liberation of Auschwitz that they had been sent to Bergen-Belsen, a work camp where there were no gassings. There was, however, an epidemic of typhus that claimed both girls just a few weeks before they would have been freed. Anne Frank was fifteen, Margot eighteen.

  On the day that the news arrived of their deaths, Miep Gies entered the office of her boss, and handed him a sheaf of papers with an orange-checkered diary on the top. She had found them after the Gestapo raid of August 4, and had put them away unread, waiting for the day that Anne would return. Now she gave them to Mr. Frank. “Here is your daughter’s legacy to you,” she said.

  Frank read the diaries with a mounting sense of amazement: the honesty, the vitality of the voice, even the awkward revelations of tension in the family—all of these were rendered with a grace that touched the father’s heart. He began to share the writings with friends, some of whom urged him to have them published, and in 1947 he agreed. A Dutch edition, entitled Het Achterhuis, or The Secret Annexe, appeared in Amsterdam that year, and in 1952, after sales of more than nine hundred thousand, Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl was published in the United States. Now, of course, sales are in the millions.

  Eleanor Roosevelt, the former First Lady, spoke for many of those readers when she wrote: “Anne Frank’s account of the remarkable changes wrought upon eight people hiding out from the Nazis for two years during the occupation of Holland, living in constant fear and isolation, imprisoned not only by the terrible outward circumstances of war but inwardly by themselves, made me intimately and shockingly aware of war’s greatest evil—the degradation of the human spirit. At the same time, Anne’s diary makes poignantly clear the ultimate shining nobility of that spirit.”

  II

  Mrs. Roosevelt’s assessment, emphasizing nobility of spirit, was in keeping, I think, with the American understanding of the times—a fundamental optimism rooted in the truth. Yes, many terrible things had happened; the Nazi aggressors and their Japanese allies had been unspeakable in their cruelty, but in the end they had been defeated. American might and righteousness prevailed, and that victory produced, understandably, a literature of celebration—celebration, not only of triumph, but also of bravery and shared sacrifice. We had, after all, lived the other side of the story, the side of decency and liberation.

  Perhaps the ultimate expression of that point of view was Tom Brokaw’s The Greatest Generation, his intelligent and finely crafted tribute, published in 1998, to a generation of Americans who had saved the world from the greatest evil in history. Brokaw makes his case with passion, and in the most basic sense I am one of many who agree.

  But I have to confess that I’m also drawn to what I would call a literature of dissent—to those American writers who have declared, essentially, “Well, yes, but wait a minute.” Joseph Heller, of course, mocks the whole undertaking of war in his absurdist satire, Catch-22, and more directly E. B. Sledge writes in his memoir, With the Old Breed, of the spirit-killing savagery of combat. But there is more. Kurt Vonnegut also saw major fighting during World War II, and in a letter to his family he described his experience on the Belgian front: “The other American Divisions on our flanks managed to pull out: We were obliged to stay and fight. Bayonets aren’t much good against tanks.”

  Vonnegut was taken prisoner and shipped in a crowded boxcar to Dresden, where he was brutalized by his German captors. But in his letter home, he also wrote of another vivid memory, one he could never put out of his mind:

  On or about February 14th the Americans came over, followed by the R.A.F. Their combined labors killed 250,000 people in twenty-four hours and destroyed all of Dresden—possibly the world’s most beautiful city. But not us. After that we were put to work carrying corpses from Air-Raid shelters; women, children, old men; dead from concussion, fire or suffocation. Civilians cursed us and threw rocks as we carried bodies to huge funeral pyres in the city.

  Twenty-three years later, that memory became a centerpiece for Vonnegut’s novel, Slaughterhouse-Five, which unfolds with a kind of wry detachment, as if the subject were something very different. “So it goes” becomes Vonnegut’s refrain throughout the book, his punctuation for every revelation of tragedy: “She was dead now, had been killed while entertaining troops in the Crimea. So it goes.” Or: “His mother was incinerated in the Dresden fire storm. So it goes.”

  Despite the armor of irony that became his shell, this was not an easy book for Vonnegut to write. “I would hate to tell you,” he admits, “what this lousy little book cost me in money and anxiety and time.” It was as if the horror of the story were too great, too stark and inexplicable for any person who had actually lived through it, to permit much literary rumination. So Vonnegut wraps the realities of war in a more lighthearted story of science fiction. The central character is Billy Pilgrim, a reluctant soldier and hapless optometrist after the war, who becomes unstuck in time and travels freely from one event in his life to the next. Eventually, he is kidnapped by aliens and taken away to the planet, Tralfamadore, where he is held in captivity with a beautiful actress, Montana Wildhack. The two of them mate, with decreasing self-consciousness, for the fascinated Tralfamadorians, whom Vonnegut describes this way:

  . . . They were two feet high, and green, and shaped like plumber’s friends. Their suction cups were on the ground, and their shafts, which were extremely flexible, usually pointed to the sky. At the top of each shaft was a little hand with a
green eye in its palm. The creatures were friendly, and they could see in four dimensions. They pitied Earthlings for being able to see only three.

  Thus does Vonnegut manage to achieve the necessary measure of irony and detachment to tell the story he really wants to tell—how, as a prisoner of war, he rode out the bombing of Dresden in the meat locker of an abandoned slaughterhouse, emerging when it was finally over, to a scene of unbelievable devastation.

  A guard would go to the head of the stairs every so often to see what it was like outside, then he would come down and whisper to the other guards. There was a fire-storm out there. Dresden was one big flame. The one flame ate everything organic, everything that would burn.

  It wasn’t safe to come out of the shelter until noon the next day. When the Americans and their guards did come out, the sky was black with smoke. The sun was an angry little pinhead. Dresden was like the moon now, nothing but minerals. The stones were hot. Everybody else in the neighborhood was dead.

  So it goes . . .

  As readers we are left to make of this what we will—not just the novel, but the truth it reveals. Was it rational, was it just, for Allied bombers to attack this city, one that was largely undefended, and inflict such massive civilian casualties? Estimates of the death toll vary, and Vonnegut’s are almost certainly high. But at the time of the attack, February 13–15, 1945, Dresden was a city full of refugees, many of them recent arrivals, fleeing the advance of the Russian Army. Nobody knows how many people were in Dresden at the time, and the bodies in the end were impossible to count. The firestorm left them melted and charred, but the lowest estimate of the dead was twenty-five thousand.

  Nor was Dresden the only target of saturation bombing, where civilian casualties were part of the design. In Hamburg the death toll was at least fifty thousand, and then came Hiroshima and Nagasaki where the policy achieved new levels of efficiency and scale. In Hiroshima, the survivors remember August 6, 1945, as a quiet morning with a lone airplane flying overhead, and then a blinding flash of light. “It is an atomic bomb,” President Truman told the American people. “It is a harnessing of the basic power of the universe. The force from which the sun draws its power has been loosed against those who brought war to the Far East.”

  For many Americans, the first full account of the devastation came on August 31, 1946, in a New Yorker article written by John Hersey. The article—thirty-one thousand words—filled the magazine’s entire issue, and within a few hours every copy had been sold. Earlier, in September of 1945, another reporter named George Weller had filed a detailed report from Nagasaki, just after the second atomic bomb was dropped, but it was censored by the U.S. military. Hersey’s was not, and it is regarded by many as perhaps the finest piece of journalism of the twentieth century.

  Published later as a book, entitled simply, Hiroshima, the article offered this description of the scene at Hiroshima’s Red Cross Hospital:

  Wounded people supported maimed people; disfigured families leaned together. Many people were vomiting . . . In a city of two hundred and forty-five thousand, nearly a hundred thousand people had been killed or doomed at one blow; a hundred thousand more were hurt. At least ten thousand of the wounded made their way to the best hospital in town, which was altogether unequal to such a trampling, since it had only six hundred beds, and they had all been occupied.

  And this from another part of the city, based on an interview with a priest:

  The hurt ones were quiet; no one wept, much less screamed in pain; no one complained; none of the many who died did so noisily; not even the children cried; very few people even spoke. And when Father Kleinsorge gave water to some whose faces had been almost blotted out by flash burns, they took their share and then raised themselves a little and bowed to him, in thanks.

  U.S. officials, military and civilian, defended the bombings on the grounds of military necessity. Without them, so the argument goes, many more people—certainly many more Americans—might have died in the final, bloody conquest of Japan. But regardless of the strategic realities, when reading both Vonnegut and John Hersey, I found it hard to disagree with the Saturday Review. Reviewing Hiroshima, the magazine declared:

  “Everyone able to read should read it.”

  III

  How, in the end, do we understand our own morality as a nation? Is it enough to say that in World War II the Germans and the Japanese were worse? One of the writers who has reflected most eloquently on those kinds of questions is, once again, Jacobo Timerman, the great Jewish author from Argentina. In 1983, he too wrote a lengthy article for the New Yorker, one that also became a book, and stirred, like Hersey’s, a deluge of commentary at the time.

  Following his imprisonment in Argentina, Timerman had been deported to Israel, the mythic sanctuary of his Zionist dreams. He found so much that was beautiful there, so much history, so much to love. His son had been living on a kibbutz, or farming collective, coaxing crops from what had once been a desert. It was a tradition deeply rooted in Israeli history, when Jews at the turn of the twentieth century began to repatriate Palestine—a journey of escape from the persecutions of Europe.

  Timerman, of course, recognized the necessity of such a journey, and he regarded the modern state of Israel, whatever its flaws, as a beacon of hope to Jews everywhere—and perhaps to other peoples as well, for there was an idealism about its founding, a commitment not only to self-defense, to the prevention of atrocities like those under Hitler, but also to justice. Israelis fought wars when they were attacked, but only then, for they were a people who wanted only peace. They understood the horrors of war too well.

  And yet when Timerman arrived in Israel, he could feel a shift in the political climate, and perhaps in the moral climate as well—all of which played out in an invasion of Lebanon. In 1982, Israeli General Ariel Sharon orchestrated a massive bombardment, and from Timerman’s perspective it was fundamentally different from anything his adopted country had ever done. In his impassioned book, The Longest War, which grew out of his article for the New Yorker, he offered this assessment of the war:

  Many things were occurring for the first time. For the first time Israel had attacked a neighboring country without being attacked; for the first time it had mounted a screen of provocation to justify a war. For the first time Israel brought destruction to entire cities: Tyre, Sidon, Damur, Beirut.

  And also this:

  Every Jew carries within him some old or recent scar from an inflicted humiliation. Heroism is a daily need, and in those first days it came in bundles. But afterward one had to decide whether those burning ruins of Lebanese cities had anything to do with heroism, or whether they were pictures of another war to demonstrate what Jews would be incapable of doing.

  A man walks among those ruins, carrying in his arms a child of ten. A group of men, women, and children with their arms raised are under guard, and the expression on their faces, what their eyes say, is easily understood by almost any Jew. Yet we are forbidden to equate today’s victims with yesterday’s, for if this were permitted, the almost unavoidable conclusion would be that yesterday’s crimes are today’s.

  As I read Jacobo Timerman’s words, I thought of another book on Israeli history, a book called The Prophets, written by Rabbi Abraham Heschel. Heschel was a remarkable man. In 1965, he marched from Selma to Montgomery with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and with his air of solemnity and long, flowing beard, he reminded some of his fellow marchers of God. In his book on the ancient Hebrew prophets—men like Micah, Isaiah, Jeremiah—Heschel offered this summary of their calling: “The prophet is a lonely man. His standards are too high, his stature too great, and his concern too intense for other men to share.”

  In particular, the prophets expected better things of the Jews, God’s chosen people, and deep in his heart Jacobo Timerman shared that perspective. He did it, in fact, without any trace or glimmer of apology. He did not equate the scale of devastation c
aused by Israel with the massive atrocities committed by Hitler. But even the faintest hint of similarity was more than he could bear, and he believed the similarities were there: a newfound power, perhaps a burgeoning greed, all of it shielded and artfully disguised by memories of suffering in the past.

  There were many in Israel who regarded Timerman as an ingrate, criticizing the country that had granted him asylum. Others saw him as remarkably brave, while Timerman, I think, merely saw himself as a writer, trying somehow to issue a warning against the startling human capacity not to learn. At the least, he helped to trigger a debate, which in one form or another, is still going on in Israel today.

  IV

  But what of this country?

  Ever since Sherman’s March to the Sea—and certainly in World War II and Vietnam—civilian suffering has been a cornerstone of military strategy, part of America’s way of making war. Many of us are unhappy with those, particularly our writers, who are so ill-mannered as to point this out, for it puts a chink in our armor of innocence. This is certainly true in the twenty-first century, when, after the hideous attacks of 9-11, our national state of fright was so intense that we attacked a country that had not attacked us—again with massive civilian casualties—and resorted to torture as an instrument of policy. In 2009, when a new administration came into power, there was a brief discussion of holding those accountable who had thus betrayed our national ideals. But the new administration proved to be timid, and when a leader in the opposition party promised “World War III” (presumably speaking only in metaphor) if any such serious attempt were made, all discussion of accountability ceased.

  Many Americans would prefer to leave it that way, rather than explore our national contradictions, reflected in the people we have chosen to lead us. But there are always writers who won’t let it rest. In addition to the columnists at magazines like the Nation, I found myself reading, during the debate over torture, a writer of great eloquence who had recently died. Marshall Frady had been a Willie Morris protégé at Harper’s, and in that capacity, had written about the collective character of the country. In 1979, during an unaccustomed interlude of peace, he wrote of “the American Innocence itself—that plain, cheerful, rigorous, ferociously wholesome earnestness which, to some, as one Egyptian editor put it during the days of Vietnam, ‘has made you nice Americans the most dangerous people on the face of the earth.’”