by W. E. Gutman
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The history of dictatorship is convoluted and so is that of communism. Its birth in central and southeast Europe was hailed with massive popular support. This phenomenon is narrowly linked to both the hopes and aspirations awakened following the overthrow of the Nazis, and to the unerring skill of communist leaders to rhapsodize their creed, foment unreasoned zeal and arouse latent hatreds, especially among the young, the restive and the maladjusted.
The elements of terror were in place in Romania well before the advent of communist regimes. Violence had long been an integral component of its social and psychological reality and Romanians were ill-prepared to defend against yet another wave of barbarism. The instruments of violence, this time, were the so-called communists. Unwavering disciples of Bolshevism, a doctrine further “enriched and fortified” in Stalin’s Soviet Union, its leaders’ first order of business was to obliterate both their ideological adversaries and their competitors. They did so by swiftly banning all other political parties. The second implement in their panoply of repression was the piecemeal destruction of civil society. It is in the prisons and concentration camps built earlier by the Fascists that this process took its most innovative form. Romania is rightfully credited with reinventing the science of repression in Eastern Europe. Indeed, it was the first nation to introduce on the continent the persuasive “reeducation” methods and “brainwashing” techniques long in vogue throughout Asia. Encouraging inmates to betray and abuse each other was the culmination of a collection of monstrous physical and psychological ordeals the Romanians would hone to an art. It was in the prison of Pitesti, a stygian house of detention outside Bucharest, that these outrages would find their most fiendish expression. What took place at Pitesti between 1949 and 1952 deserves a special spot in the ghoulish repertoire of horrors. In his book, Pitesti: Detention Laboratory, Romanian journalist Virgil Ierunca focuses on the methodical use of torture of inmates upon other inmates and puts on display one of the most appalling examples of dehumanization our era has ever known.
“Some inmates had to swallow a bowl full of excrement. When they vomited they were force-fed their regurgitations. Others were ‘baptized’ every morning head first in a basin filled with urine and fecal matter while the other inmates mockingly recited the baptismal prayer. To avoid drowning, the victim’s head was lifted briefly out of the basin then re-immersed in the loathsome concoction. One of the ‘anointed’ who had been repeatedly tortured in that manner acquired a tragic automatism that lasted two months: Every morning, to the delight of his re-educators, he would reflexively dunk his head in the basin…”
“Reconditioning” was achieved at the end of four stages. First the prisoner had to prove his loyalty by confessing that he had deliberately withheld vital information during the inquest, including an exact accounting of his relationship with family members, associates and acquaintances. He then had to denounce anyone who might have acted kindly or offered him assistance during his incarceration. The third phase called on the prisoner to repudiate everything he held sacred -- parents, wife, husband, children, God. The fourth and final phase was essential if the candidate for “rehabilitation” ever hoped to “graduate;” he had to “re-educate” another inmate, usually a trusted friend, by torturing him repeatedly. Exhausted, stripped of their dignity, hardened by suffering and lacking the capacity to commiserate, many of the surviving Pitesti alumni -- thousands perished in captivity -- took their own lives or ended in mental institutions. Others gleefully joined the ranks of Romania’s swelling hordes of inquisitors.
*
In 1948, shielded by my French citizenship, and under diplomatic protection from the French Embassy in Bucharest which interceded on our behalf, my mother and I were among the dwindling few who exited Romania legally, by plane. Freedom came at the price of one last indignity.
“Your watch. Your coat too,” barked a uniformed Amazon before letting us aboard. We complied. I will never forget the smugness of her smile as we stripped in the name of the “Popular Republic.” My mother had to surrender her rings, a necklace and a bracelet. I was forced to part with a pair of gold cufflinks and a small but valuable stamp collection that I’d inherited from my grandfather. We climbed a foul-smelling and noisy DC-3 that shook, rattled and rolled during the two-hour flight to Oradea, in northwestern Romania. There, we changed planes and flew to Prague in a similarly malodorous and clattering tin can. Two days later we boarded a sleek, white Air France four-engine Lockheed Constellation alive with cheerful blue-clad hostesses who filled my pockets with candy. We arrived in Paris later that afternoon with the shirts on our backs.
I was eleven.
APRIL IN PARIS
In the final months of the German occupation, as young people serenely unconcerned by the rising chaos around them basked in the sun on the banks of the Seine, Paris succumbed, once more, to fratricide. For many Frenchmen the ultimate act of defiance against the Germans had been to die: on the battlefield; in detention; in daring urban raids or -- betrayed and trapped -- at their own hands. Busy tracking Jews, communists and Freemasons, remnants of the militias ignored, with characteristic imbecility, the rapid Allied advance. They went about their ghoulish task convinced that Hitler's One Thousand-Year Reich was at hand.
An ebbing war, a looming insurrection and daring forays by the Résistance did not dampen the resolve of theater owners to keep the stages lit and the curtains up. Nor did frequent blackouts and sporadic street violence stop crowds from flocking to the latest film, play, or girlie show. As fighting intensified in the marshes of Normandy, Edith Piaf and other entertainers filled the Paris music halls. Falsely accused (by Life Magazine, among others) of consorting with the German high command while in captivity during the first World War, Maurice Chevalier, who had negotiated the release of several French fellow inmates, was rehabilitated and returned to his adoring fans.
Journalists, novelists, poets and pamphleteers wrote feverishly, some vying for eminence or political clout, others desperately in need of cash. With the end in sight, many celebrities hastily deserted Paris. Crippled by fear or old age, unwilling to risk flight, others sought refuge in the very bowels of the capital. Meanwhile, clandestine anti-German publications and official pro-collaborationist papers raised the volume of dissent and sharpened the rhetoric. Doctrinal and procedural disagreements polarized the leadership on both sides. Infighting caused rifts that further diluted their reach. The Résistance was largely indifferent to these conflicts. Emboldened, it hunted down collaborators, shooting some on sight, arresting and imprisoning others. Over 10,000 collaborators were executed, 800 following summary trial. The rest were liquidated extemporaneously throughout France.
Nor were men of letters and media icons spared. Scores of writers and journalists were rounded up and charged with treason. Eighteen were sentenced to death. Five were executed by firing squad. Four were slaughtered in cold blood as they ventured into the streets. Targeted for assassination, trapped in their lairs or consumed with shame and remorse, several committed suicide. The rest died in exile or at home, disgraced, destitute, trivialized.
Sixty some years have since passed. The theorists and commentators of that epoch are long gone but their writings echo with unsettling obstinacy, inciting Frenchmen to hazard, again, through the quicksand of history, to challenge its inferences and conclusions. All have left a rich harvest of ideas and persuasions, some noted for their decadence, others reviled for the evil they inspired, a few enshrined for their wisdom and refinement. Masterworks of agonized introspection, they are the testament of weaklings and heroes, martyrs and villains cowed, debauched or ennobled by the monstrosity of war. Their manifestos have kept the embers of dissension smoldering beneath a heap of ashes. Unlike the sanguine Americans, who catalogue their past and move on -- perhaps out of shame or utter lack of remorse -- the skeptical and disputatious French cling to outmoded rationalizations. Beating a dead horse is one way of keeping ugly memories and uglier passions alive.
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France never readily accepted responsibility for the crimes committed in its name, not just by collaborators like Henri Chamberlin Lafont or traitors like Marshall Philippe Pétain, who died in prison, or Prime Minister Pierre Laval, who was executed, but by thousands of anonymous civil servants who stayed at their posts, some too scared to look, others pretending not to see what was happening around them. Many did terrible things that were later whitewashed by a nation all too eager to forget. Nihilist anti-Semitism fed the furnaces, but so did indifference and cowardice.
Obfuscation and official sophistry continued to shroud the precise role France played in the deportation of Jews and the plunder of their properties long after the end of World War II. Seeking to draw a distinction between the puppet Vichy regime and the “loyalist” French state, post-war France doggedly shielded the forest from the trees. It took more than half a century of selective amnesia for the French to come to grudging terms with their past.
Among the many miscreants long protected in the name of “national reconciliation,” was Maurice Papon. To please his German mentors, Papon, a high-ranking police official, rounded up hundreds of foreign-born Jews and sent them to Drancy. Tried on charges of complicity in Nazi crimes against humanity by ordering the deportation of 1,560 Jews, including 223 minors, he later served as Budget Minister in Paris until his past came to light in 1981. He was directly involved in quelling a demonstration called by the Algerian National Liberation Front on October 17, 1961, in the seventh year of a bloody war to overthrow French colonialist rule. Violence erupted on the streets of Paris. Demonstrators were fired upon. At least 200 Algerians were slain. Others “disappeared” after being arrested. For weeks, bodies were fished out of the Seine and Paris canals.
“We went to the upper floors of buildings and fired at anything that moved,” said a policeman who participated in the carnage.
First indicted in 1983 then again a year later, Papon was released on “technical grounds” in 1987. In 1997, a second investigation paved the way for a trial. Papon steadfastly denied any wrongdoing and invoked “extenuating circumstances” in defense of the crimes committed under his watch. In April 1998, then 87, Papon was sentenced to 10 years in prison. He served fewer than three and died at his family home in 2007.
René Bousquet, national police chief under the occupation, directed the deportation of 194 Jewish children. Although his criminal past was a matter of public record, he held a number of high government posts long after the war. He was killed in 1993 before he could be brought to trial.
Paul Touvier, militia chief in Lyon, was protected by the Catholic Church for 17 years. Finally convicted of ordering a number of summary executions, he died in prison in 1996.
There were others.
Dutch writer Abel Herzberg, who survived the Bergen-Belsen extermination camp, said that six million Jews were not killed but rather that one Jew was killed, and then another, and another, and that the process was repeated six million times. France, to its shame, added to this mathematics of death.
Self-hatred is the beginning of a long love affair.
*
We landed at Le Bourget Airfield, my mother and I, in a dense, slanting rain that washed away all color and turned the surrounding countryside to a streaky blur. I remember alighting from the plane in a steaming, all-encompassing grayness. I did not immediately make out the dim figure standing on the apron by the arched hangar doorway. But the figure recognized us and ran in our direction, arms outstretched, tears streaming down his face.
“Papa, papa.”
The rain turned to mist then stopped. The sun tore through as we sped away from the airport in a bus belching black, acrid smoke. By the time we entered Paris the city had shed its gray mantle. Like a butterfly emerging from the chrysalis, it had unfurled its magnificent wings in fitting self-glorification.
*
My father had fled Romania six months earlier. Traveling mostly on foot, at night, his journey had been slow and fraught with perils. He’d crossed into Hungary, then Czechoslovakia and Austria, reaching France through Italy and hitching his way north to Paris in lorries, hay carts and private cars. The overland trek had taken nearly three months. Penniless and jobless, he’d borrowed money to pay the first few months’ rent on a small furnished apartment near the Denfert-Rochereau Métro station, in an attractive middle-class district boasting terraced cafés, shops, outdoor food stalls and neatly landscaped public parks. This latest leg in a seemingly endless quest for stability and peace would keep us in Paris for only a year. From the Land of Canaan to Babylon and the sands of Egypt, from Worms to Burgos and back, from the Occident to the portals of the Levant, the Guzmán-Gutman tribe, it suddenly dawned on me, was destined to roam. Any attempt to secure a tranquil existence would inevitably be scuttled by adversity or the irrepressible urge to move on. For a long time, wanderlust ablaze inside me, I took comfort in the notion that I could pick up and go if I really wanted to. It’s not that I had a specific destination in mind. It was the illusive belief that I could escape the status quo that kept me in its grip. It was the possible loss of such freedom that often sent me on the wildest goose chase.
*
Three years had passed since the end of hostilities, a mere ten since Paris reveled in the gentle radiance of hedonism and insouciance. Shell-shocked and enfeebled, France was slowly stirring from a post-war gloom that would continue to suffuse its soul long after the flesh wounds had healed. Traumatized, dazed, the French would surrender to a world of make-believe that hearkened to a time long gone, enjoying in childish evasion what they could not yet accept as stark reality.
“Nous faisons semblant” -- we pretend -- some would confess with touching candor. They pretended that the war had never taken place; that native thrift, not penury, now shepherded the economy; that indolence, not impotence, impeded national reconstruction; that rationing and power outages and wildcat strikes and the successive rise and fall of inept, erratic and visionless governments could be wished away by ignoring their very existence and the harm they’d caused.
The rekindling of France’s élan vital -- much of it contingent on biftek and pommes frites, bread, wine and tobacco -- entailed privations and sacrifices that the testy French endured with alternating doses of fatalism and irascibility. In short supply in the best of times, civism and solidarity had now been reduced to final fits of vindictiveness and retribution against anyone perceived to have abetted or benefited from the German occupation. My father’s petitions to be granted French citizenship were denied. Affidavits, stirring letters of recommendation and pleas from former Resistance colleagues attesting to his bravery, selflessness and loyalty fell on deaf ears.
A document signed on October 10, 1939 by the commander of the French Foreign Legion Recruitment Center in Paris, declared my father “fit for service.”
On February 29, 1944, as the Gestapo net tightened around us, the French Ministry of the Interior issued us a “Safe-Conduct to Romania valid on buses and railroads.” The document was signed by Adjudant Lins, chief of police in Vic-Fezensac where my father had last served in the Maquis.
Dated 9 November 1946, a sworn statement signed by Lieutenant G. Luino, former commander of the Armagnac Battalion of the 158th Infantry Regiment, and countersigned by the mayor of La Chapelle de la Tour, read:
“I declare, on my honor, that Dr. A. Gutman, a Résistant known as Dr. Guillemain, has always demonstrated in word and deed feelings and ideals of typical French character. Forced to flee Paris to escape the Gestapo in 1943, he joined our ranks for which he performed invaluable services. Having left France for Romania in 1944, he is remembered with fondness and admiration. Nothing in his demeanor, selfless devotion and extraordinary bravery could possibly cast doubt on his loyalty.”
On September 5, 1947, as he readied to leave Romania, my father was issued an Allied Forces Permit authorizing him to enter the “Zone of the Allied Forces in Austria en route to Italy.” The permit is signed by
Lawrence G. Leisersohn, Captain A. C. Adjudant, United States Military Representation.
On January 15, 1948, shortly after his arrival in Paris, my father received the following testimonial from the president of the French community in Bucharest:
“… Dr. A Gutman, now residing on the rue des Rosiers in Paris, has treated generously and at no charge members of the French colony, especially during bombardments by the Allied air forces from May to August 1944. In September of 1944, and under especially difficult circumstances, he escorted our sick and wounded back to the capital [Bucharest].”
And on April 26, 1948, the mayor of Cazaubon, a small town near Vic-Fezensac issued what would be the last of a series of tributes and accolades the post-war French government would ignominiously ignore. It reads: