When Memory Comes

by Saul Friedlander

  Within my limited ability, I contributed. In Shimon’s name I kept in touch with various departments of the ministry, drafted the letters to some outside agencies, particularly the International Atomic Agency in Vienna, and, when it came to humdrum issues, took care of things on my own; I summarized French correspondence and at times even made some suggestions. To this day, I do not regret having belonged, albeit briefly, to a project that, ultimately, may be the only guarantee of Israel’s survival. I never forgot the article about the fate of the Crusader Kingdom that I had read at Harvard in the summer of 1957.

  The world I became part of under the name of Shaul Eldar (the hebraization of names was compulsory for government employees) had been given its decisive dimension in a series of audacious secret agreements between Israel and France, initiated by Shimon Peres in 1956. According to these agreements, France would assist Israel in the building of a nuclear reactor and related installations and, in due time, would provide Israel with the necessary uranium fuel. On the French side, notwithstanding the secrecy of the project, quite a number of officials took part in various stages of the negotiations. However, throughout, the main driving force remained the defense minister, then prime minister, Maurice Bourgès-Maunoury. The political alliance and personal friendship between Peres and “Bourgès” overcame all initial obstacles. Soon Dimona was teeming with French engineers and technicians of all kinds.

  “In Israel,” Michael Bar-Zohar writes in his Peres biography, “Peres started building a huge organization of manpower, scientific personnel, construction companies, budgets, and, primarily, weaving a watertight cover of concealment that would hide the daily activity of thousands of people. The success of the project depended on preserving absolute secrecy; any leak might set off heavy international pressure that could kill the project.”* Leaks occurred, nonetheless.

  5

  During my work with Peres, three major crises shook the defense establishment. All three were centered upon Dimona.

  The first crisis was close to home. I had become quite friendly with Israel Bar, an old-timer at the ministry who, as far as I remember, filled the role of free-floating adviser but one who participated — as I did — in all meetings of the senior staff and with whom one could discuss any of the most confidential issues. Easygoing and amusing, Bar told me how close he was to Ben-Gurion (true) and to Shimon Peres (also true) but how thoroughly he despised the chief of staff, Moshe Dayan. Dayan, it so happens, distrusted Bar.

  One of the stories Bar told to illustrate how he felt about Dayan was that of the turtle and the scorpion (a story that has a long pedigree). A scorpion and a turtle arrive at a riverbank and want to cross. Since the scorpion can’t swim, it begs the turtle to take it across the river on its back. “You’ll sting me while I’m swimming,” objects the turtle. “Why should I do that? We would both drown,” the scorpion replies. The turtle sees the logic of the argument, takes the scorpion on its back, and starts swimming. Midstream, the scorpion stings the turtle. “Why did you do that?” cries the dying turtle. “We are both sinking!” “It’s my nature,” answers the scorpion, a.k.a. Moshe Dayan.

  Bar told me — and everybody else — that he was born in Vienna, studied at the university there, fought in 1934 in the Schutzbund (a socialist militia) against the authoritarian government of Engelbert Dollfuss, moved to Spain when the Civil War started there, became a Communist, and joined the International Brigades. In 1938, he opted for Zionism and immigrated to Palestine. Soon his military experience brought him close to Itzhak Sadeh, the leader of the Palmach (the elite unit of the Jewish underground army, the Haganah), and eventually to Ben-Gurion, Peres, et al. Bar knew practically everything about Israeli military doctrine, strategic planning, defense installations, and procurement. He knew about Dimona.

  Bar had been a Soviet mole before the creation of the state and an active spy thereafter. The Israeli Security Service arrested him sometime in 1961, as he returned from one of his frequent trips to Germany. The head of the Mossad, Isser Harel, shared Dayan’s suspicion of Bar but for a long time Ben-Gurion dismissed any such allegations.

  Peres told us of Bar’s arrest and, among other things, of a diary he had been keeping during his recent trip to East Berlin. Each day was marked by several names of women. As Bar was a notorious ladies’ man, he argued at first that these were merely some of his conquests. It soon became obvious, however, that they were code names for various contacts in the East. Bar died in prison in 1966 and, to this day, his true identity remains in doubt.

  What the Soviets probably got to know about Dimona from Israel Bar, the Americans learned from U-2 overflights and other sources. Golda Meir had to face difficult questions from the U.S. ambassador about installations linked to the reactor she had just heard of. As a result, President Kennedy pressured Ben-Gurion to open Dimona for inspection. I still remember the first visit of American inspectors to the site in the spring of 1961, to ascertain its peaceful aims; the tension was palpable. The visit proceeded without incident, but each following inspection probably became a source of some jitters (by then, I was long gone).

  The potentially most serious crisis of all developed at about the same time as the U-2 affair. After deciding to accept the National Liberation Front’s demand for the independence of Algeria, French president Charles de Gaulle, who had returned to power in May 1958, sought to reestablish his country’s traditional influence in the Arab world. This meant, among other things, considerably loosening many of France’s secret ties with Israel, and particularly, putting an end to its assistance in the construction of Israeli nuclear installations. Ben-Gurion, accompanied by Peres, traveled to Paris to persuade de Gaulle to reconsider. A compromise was reached: although official French help stopped, some private French firms were allowed to continue working at the site.

  I saw Peres almost daily throughout this period of overlapping and highly stressful events. Much criticism has been directed at him throughout his career — some of it quite justified, as we shall see — but to one thing I can attest: Peres remained unflappable during the crises just mentioned, although pressure on him at the time was immense. He steadily continued to work on his major projects — and kept talking about the latest book he had read.

  I remember only vaguely today what made me decide to leave my position at the ministry in the summer of 1961 and opt for a different course altogether. I recall mulling for months about the possibility of resuming graduate studies. I even had a rather clear idea of what I was specifically not interested in: Middle Eastern topics. I was attracted to the history of Europe between the wars and during the Second World War, without yet clearly linking it to my personal story. I wanted to make my own decisions and face my own choice of challenges in an area in which I felt confident that I could achieve something on my own. In other words, I sensed that it was the world of books and of scholarly work that came closest to what could be seen as a calling.

  * * *

  * Michael Bar-Zohar, Shimon Peres: The Biography, New York, 2007, p. 218. The biography was first published in Israel in 2005.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Geneva

  The Graduate Institute of International Studies stood on the shore of Lake Geneva. From the Villa Barton, its main building, painted an unusual rose color that made it look more like a candy box than a site of learning, a few steps led to the “promenade,” along the bank of the lake. To your right you could see the scenic Geneva fountain rising tens of feet into the air, behind it the Mont Blanc bridge that linked both parts of the city, the old town above it, and — as Proust wonderfully wrote about the church of Combray — the Saint Pierre Cathedral “résumant la ville” (summing up the town). To your left the lake extended along shores you knew (but could not make out), toward Lausanne, Vevey, and Montreux. And, on many days of the year, looking straight ahead, you could see, over the opposite French shore and the lower mountain ranges, snow-covered Mont Blanc dominating the landscape.

  And, if you drove along the
French side for an hour or so, you would reach Saint-Gingolph, the small border town where my parents were arrested in September 1942. It took me seventeen years after arriving in Geneva to make the trip to Saint-Gingolph.

  1

  Sometime in September 1961, I left Hagith and one-year-old Eli in Tel Aviv, drove to Haifa in my brand-new Peugeot, and boarded a ferry to Genoa on my way to Geneva or, more precisely, to the institute.

  During my early months of work with Peres I had been “lent back” to Goldmann for a few weeks to organize the first international conference on Soviet Jewry scheduled to take place in Paris in the fall of 1960 under the auspices of the World Jewish Congress. It meant traveling all over Western Europe to convince prominent personalities to attend. I still remember how, during a short stay in Amsterdam to invite a Dutch bishop, Msgr Ramselaar (who attended), I read with amazement in the morning paper that Adolf Eichmann had been abducted from Argentina and was safely held in Israel to stand trial. I felt proud.

  In the course of this mission I had also paid a visit to Jacques Freymond, the director of the Geneva Graduate Institute of International Studies (who, I believe, also attended). A year later, after leaving my work with Peres, I applied to the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and spoke with both historian Jacob Talmon, the widely known author of The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy and a recognized stellar lecturer, and with political scientist Benjamin Akzin, the undisputed ruler of his department (both of whom I knew from my Goldmann days). I asked for a teaching assistantship in either domain, as I didn’t have the means to take care of a wife and son without some income. Both, generous with advice, turned me down. I remembered Freymond. He promised a modest fellowship in exchange for some tutoring. I gratefully accepted.

  I just mentioned Eichmann’s capture. Still working with Peres, I couldn’t get to the trial in Jerusalem, but, notwithstanding all my “defenses,” I followed the radio reports as much as possible. Many years later, while I taught at Tel Aviv University, in the late 1970s or early 1980s, I read the protocols of the interrogation preceding the trial, an interrogation conducted with great skill by police officer Avner Less, who was of German background and interrogated Eichmann in German. What struck me — and hadn’t been mentioned as far as I know — was a strange aspect of Eichmann’s way of referring to superior authority. Here he was, in an Israeli prison in 1960, fifteen years after the collapse of the Reich, but when he mentioned Himmler, each time he added the full title: Reichsführer SS und Chef der deutschen Polizei Heinrich Himmler; of course, the same happened with Hitler (Führer und Reichskanzler). In short, as apparently candid as Eichmann was in his answers, inwardly he still stood at attention. Whether this ongoing subservience to his past masters influenced his answers cannot be proven, but it is not impossible.

  Hagith and Eli joined me a few weeks after my arrival. Very soon the institute’s fellowship did not suffice to support a family of three. I appealed to a wide variety of funding sources and finally got a positive reply from the Rockefeller Foundation. However, as the foundation was also financing the institute as such, they asked me to find another academic sponsor to supervise the transfer and use of the money. The Hebrew University seemed to me the obvious choice and, once again, I naively turned to Talmon and Akzin. Their answer was immediate: since I had not enrolled at the Hebrew University, they could not help me with the Rockefeller fellowship. After I explained my predicament, I received the fellowship nonetheless and soon thereafter a teaching assistantship.

  Six years later, forgetting that he had refused to give me even a lowly assistantship, Talmon asked me to replace him as visiting professor of history at the Hebrew University while he spent a year in Princeton. Sometimes, life has its sweet little ironies.

  After reading through the summer of 1961, I concluded — and rightly so — that the topic I had thought of for my dissertation had hardly been dealt with and manifestly not on the basis of archival work. The title I chose was self-explanatory: “The American Factor in German Foreign and Military Policy between September 1939 and December 1941” (that is, between the beginning of the war in Europe and Hitler’s declaration of war against the United States). I wrote to Freymond about my suggestion and he accepted right away.

  I had squandered too many years, I thought, and had to make up for lost time. Consequently, I adopted an unusual working routine: I wrote a first draft with whatever material I had on hand, along the general lines that I could establish on the basis of my reading; then came a second draft and a third and so on (ultimately there could be ten such drafts or more), each integrating more material, each eventually adapting to new archival material, until I sensed that the text was ready. It allowed me to keep a constant overview of the entire manuscript and organize its chapters accordingly. It meant working simultaneously on content and on form.

  To this day I work in the same way, even on this memoir. As I write, new perspectives open that I had not perceived before and much that seemed forgotten suddenly reappears, imposing new reshufflings, new drafts, and so on. At the time of my dissertation, I also adopted a very strict discipline: six pages every day, except during archival research. If I didn’t complete my daily chore, I had to add the missing pages on the following days. (I have become more lenient since …) The really strange aspect of this obsessive approach to work was, and remains, writing a draft in longhand and, as I was (and am) unable to type myself, having somebody type the manuscript, then reworking the newly typed draft in longhand, having it typed again, and continuing this process to the very end. It was a very expensive method at a time when I hardly could afford it. Such was the price of obsession: I couldn’t do without a cleanly typed draft for each round.

  There was another price exacted by my obsession. Barreling, as I did, toward the completion of the dissertation didn’t leave time for any unrelated subjects. The immediate consequence was a huge and cumulative gap in my education. After finishing high school in 1950, I had gone on reading eclectically but studied neither history nor political science in any organized way. I managed — and managed well — at Sciences Po because I briefly concentrated on my exams and nothing else. When I finally returned to my studies, in 1961, eleven years after high school, I had swallowed bits and pieces from here and there: evening courses in law and economy, the Sciences Po fare in a very “concentrated” mode, then nothing from 1955 to 1961 (the last year at the embassy, Sweden, Goldmann, and Peres). Now that I was back in a doctoral program, I avoided courses or readings that could deflect me from my dissertation. The dissertation would be solid, but any other area I dealt with was just a cobbling together of bits and pieces, or, as the German poet Christian Morgenstern put it, “a picket fence of interstitial excellence.”

  During our first two or three months in Geneva, we lived in a studio belonging to Hôtel Mon Repos, just opposite the institute. We then moved to our first rented apartment on rue Gauthier, a small street not far from the lake, and remained there until well after the completion of my dissertation. We liked that small but cozy abode, in walking distance from Eli’s jardin d’enfants. Eli must have been about three when Hagith was summoned by the directrice. There had been a crisis. The children had been given some drawings of animals that they had to color and put in an envelope. Eli had nicely colored the figures but instead of putting them in the envelope, he had dropped them on the floor. “Madame,” said the lady director to Hagith, “if your son continues to behave in that way, he has no future in Switzerland.” “No future in Switzerland” remains a frequent family expression to this day.

  As I went on working in my monomaniacal way, the doctoral exams in law and in economics could have been a problem. Yet I somehow survived both the quizzing on “repressed inflation” and the one on “compulsory arbitration.” The history of international relations went well; I spoke of my dissertation topic and Freymond waved me through.

  I liked Jacques Freymond. A native of the Canton de Vaud, he had been a professor of history at the University of La
usanne before being chosen as director of the institute in the late fifties. “What, a foreigner?” must have been the reaction of quite a number of Genevans upon his appointment. In fact, he had something of the crafty Vaudois peasant in him, together with a very amicable personality. Here (in California) you would say that Freymond was “a people person.” When he wanted to talk to you, even about the most banal issue, he would hold you by the arm, call you mon cher, and create an instantaneous feeling of trust and complicity.

  The institute could be considered as liberal-conservative in terms of the political leanings of its director and its senior teachers. I guess that this overall tendency, supported by the identical philosophy of an affiliated institution, the Institute of European Studies, under the aegis of Denis de Rougemont, made it a natural venue for at least one gathering of the Congress for Cultural Freedom’s governing board. I didn’t know at the time how thoroughly anti-Communist the Congress was; not that I minded or felt otherwise. Freymond invited me to attend the discussions.

  Thus I met Robert Oppenheimer; Melvin Lasky (the editor of the organization’s periodical, Encounter); G.L.S. Shackle, one of Churchill’s economic advisers during the war and later professor of economics in Liverpool; Oskar Morgenstern, who, with John von Neumann, invented game theory; and a few other luminaries whose names I have forgotten (I think Karl Popper also attended). The organizer of the meeting, and its supervisor, if one could call him this, was Michael Josselson. Part of the funds came from the Ford Foundation. Many years later it became known that the Congress and Encounter were “guided” by the CIA — and that Josselson may have been its main operative in Europe for these and related matters.

  I never tried to find out whether a parallel intellectual enterprise, Futuribles, run from Paris by the political philosopher Bertrand de Jouvenel and also funded by the Ford Foundation, belonged to the same CIA anti-Communist intellectual campaign. It probably did. Be that as it may, in 1964 (after I had finished my dissertation), a much larger conference organized by Futuribles took place in Paris. I spoke on “Forecasting in International Relations.” Despite my excruciating fear, I delivered the lecture reasonably well and Jouvenel had it duly published. It was my first semischolarly article.