Nobody Said Amen (2 page)

“You keep calling them kids,” Max said. “They’re not kids.”

“They look like my son, Richard. And they look like my daughter, Laurie. They’re kids to me.”

“That’s fine, Teddy’. Just don’t write it that way. Keep some distance. You’re working for
Newsweek
, not bucking for father of the year.”

Ted hung up the phone slowly, lingering on the time he’d conjured up of him and Max together—’43? ’44?—in England, and before that, at the midshipman school at Notre Dame. The sailor had told the new arrivals, “Follow me topside to the sixth deck,” and Ted had hoisted his duffle bag and followed the other new midshipmen to their quarters. At the end of the long corridor the sailor began to read the list of their new billets.

“McElroy, Frederick—billet 6A

McElwain, Jack—billet 6A

McKendrick, Alan—billet 6B

Mendelsohn, Theodore—billet 6B

Miller, Max—billet 6C

McCarthy. Brian—billet 6C.”

Before opening his door Ted looked at the short, wiry midshipman-behind him in the hall. He looked like a young Jimmy Cagney. “Are you Alan McKendrick, my new bunkmate?”

“I’m Max Miller. And you’re not Brian McCarthy, I’ll bet.”

“You’re right.” He held out his hand, laughing. “Ted Mendelsohn.”

So Miller, a reporter-on-leave “for the duration” from
Newsweek
, and Mendelsohn, the school newspaper editor at Chapel Hill, nurtured a special friendship. In the four months at midshipman school, they discovered a mutual appreciation for good writing, Chicago stride piano, South Bend girls on Saturday leaves, Robert Benchley, and good jazz. On the long bus ride back to South Bend from Chicago, where they had heard the Benny Goodman band on a Saturday leave, Ted lamented, “It took a Jew to hire Lionel Hampton and Teddy Wilson for a big band. But Goodman will never get a booking in my hometown of Atlanta.”

Max disagreed. “Nonsense. I’m Catholic, and I would have hired those guys. They’re the best in the business.”

“You’re a mixed breed, Miller. Doesn’t count. Only your old man was Jewish.”

Max grimaced. “He was also a prick who ran out on my mother and me. That’s why I got raised in the church.” He tapped Ted’s knee and looked quizzical. “Were you serious about Atlanta? Goodman’s the hottest swing band in the country. They could play anywhere.”

“Not with Teddy Wilson on piano and Lionel Hampton on vibes. There’d be a riot. If you were born and raised there, you’d know it. And it’s not just Atlanta, Max. It’s the South. My family’s been there since Sherman burned the place. Believe me, I know.” He’d felt edgy and sad. “Being in that audience today, blacks, whites, it didn’t matter. We were just folks who wanted to hear great music.”

“How did your people get to Atlanta? Why Atlanta?”

“My great grandfather, Elijah Mendelsohnn, was a farmer, piss-poor, in Austria. He had a cousin who’d immigrated to Georgia and opened a pawnshop in Atlanta during Reconstruction. The cousin made money pawning rifles from the Union soldiers who were going home, and he told Elijah to come. And he came, with Grandma Sarah and two Guernsey breeding stock. He dropped the second “n” in Mendelsohnn to be more like a Yankee, and bought a small piece of land outside Atlanta. He started a tiny dairy that grew into Eli Dairy, a name that fit better on a milk wagon than Elijah. So for a hundred years there’s been an Eli Dairy.” He looked at Max. “The family expects me to run it after the war.”

“What are the odds of your doing it?”

Ted shook his head. “Same odds as you have for making Admiral.”

When they received their commissions as ensigns, USNR, Mendelsohn and Miller were assigned to train naval amphibious crews for the coming invasion of Europe. In the long, anxious days and nights preparing for D-Day in the English Channel they shared a longing for sleep, a desire to get the damn war behind them, and unsettling fears about what was waiting for them in Fortress Europe.

On D-Day they hit the invasion beaches together but saw each other only one more time before Ted was assigned to the Normandy beachhead and Miller got orders to return to his ship and proceed to New York to prepare for the invasion of Japan. From that point on, the friendship was nurtured by V-mails and letters.

One letter from Max caught up with Ted when he returned to England after the beachhead had been secured.

Teddy,

If you get to London again, look up Alex Hanson, an old buddy who’s working for Yank Magazine. I’m seeing his sister, Maggie, while my ship is in dry-dock at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Terrific girl, Maggie. You’d like her. You ever coming home? It’ll be lonesome in the Pacific without you, pal.

Max

After VJ-Day, Max was discharged and was eagerly embraced again by
Newsweek
magazine. When Ted’s discharge papers came through, he found himself adrift in London, hungry to see beyond the beachheads and liberated ports of Fortress Europe that had been his truncated world since D-Day. He wanted to explore Rome, visit Vienna, cross the Alps, and, after the ennui of his goddam beachhead, enjoy Paree! And he wanted to write about this new world, not the one of marketing milk in Atlanta. When he met with Alex Hanson at
Yank
magazine, his stars started to come into alignment.

Yank
was beginning its final months of publication, and was trying desperately to find the reporters needed to tell the liberation story. Hanson enthusiastically introduced him to the managing editor, and Mendelsohn was taken aboard. For six months he wrote a column for
Yank
that he called “Kilroy Was Here,” vivid recollections from the sailors and soldiers who had liberated the beaches and braved the killing thickets and hedgerows of France. When Hanson sent the reportage to his new brother-in-law, Max, in New York, Ted received his first American assignment as a reporter.

Teddy,

When you’re done with Fleet Street,
Newsweek
can use you to tell our readers what our kids are leaving behind. Your word pictures are as graphic as Bill Mauldin’s drawings in
Stars and Stripes
. We’ll pay you a hundred bucks a column, once a month. Tell us what you find in what’s left of Hitler’s Europe. Your press card will be in the next mail.

Max

With the first paycheck from New York, Ted bought an English bike and began the personal exploration of Europe he had promised himself. Within 36 hours the tour was nearly aborted when he swerved into a canal trying to avoid a hurtling Red Ball truck convoy outside of Saint-Lô. He was scrambling out of the slimy water, hauling his wrecked bike, when the driver of the last truck in the 30-truck convoy saw him and wheeled the loaded truck off the rutted highway. The black GI leapt from the cab. “You okay?” He extended his hand and helped the bleeding and shaken Mendelsohn to his feet. “Good reflexes, man! I’ve seen worse slides into second base. You sure you’re all right?”

Ted wiped the muck from his face and stared at the wrecked bicycle. “I made second safe, but my bike was out by a mile.” With disgust he tossed the bike back down in the weeds and sank, exhausted, to the roadbed. “Thanks for the hand, Mac. You got a load to deliver. I don’t want to keep you.”

The driver squatted beside him, exploring the cut on Ted’s forehead, trying to stop the bleeding with a handkerchief soaked from his canteen. “Doesn’t seem deep. I don’t think it’s much to worry about. I got a truckload of medic supplies, but you’re not going to need them.” He sighted down the empty and silent highway, seeing only the clouds of dust from his convoy that still lingered like ghosts in the dusk. “Gotta catch up with the trucks in Chartres and then I got a detail to deliver to a place called Dachau. You know Dachau?”

“Dachau? Never heard of it. But if you’re really going into Germany can I hitch a ride with you? I’ve been stuck in Normandy since D-Day and I’d like to see Hitler’s playground and the Supermen. The Krauts have just been mostly the invisible bastards who’ve kept me from going back to Atlanta.”

“Atlanta! You must be kidding. You’re going back to see my mammy in old Dixie? You really from Atlanta? I can’t believe that! I’m from the south side. Went to Carver High.” He grinned. “Don’t guess you went there, too. Wrong color, man. Name is Sam. Sam July.”

Ted took his extended hand. “Ted Mendelsohn.”

“Climb aboard. I can always use a back-up driver.” July threw the truck in motion. “We ought not be out here alone. The krauts love to surprise us.” He stared out the grimy windshield. “Watch the sky on your right.” When the convoy came into view he lit a cigarette and passed Ted the deck. “What did you do in Atlanta?”

“I worked for Eli Dairy.”

July slapped his hands against the wheel. “Best damn milk in all of Atlanta!” He turned and looked at Mendelsohn with a new interest. “Mendelsohn,” he said, “Eli Dairy Mendelsohn?”

Ted tried to smile. “Eli Dairy Mendelsohn.”

“My Grandpa Phineas on my mama’s side had a route with Eli, horse-drawn,” said July. “Horse’s name was Moses.” He laughed. “Used to let me feed Moses once in a while. He and Moses delivered for Eli for twenty-seven years.” He smiled, watching Ted out of the corner of his eye. “Hey, now you can deliver for me!”

“I’m not as dependable as Moses,” said Mendelsohn. “But I do land in the bulrushes.”

They were laughing as they rolled into Chartres.

From
Yank
magazine:

KILROY WAS HERE

There is no way, no way I know, for an American born in the twentieth century to really understand what I am seeing. This is the concentration camp of Dachau, a German invention. It was erected as the very first camp for political prisoners by Adolph Hitler in 1933. Just beyond these bullet-riddled and now deserted guard towers is an unrecognizable nightmare world, created by the same nation that blessed us with Bach, with Beethoven, with Mozart. There is no way.

What I enter now is a killing ground, an extermination camp with a still-warm crematorium, rail tracks still shivering from the last transport of the men, women, and children who have been delivered here to be murdered. In front of me is a rotting pile of 2300 human corpses, and the riddled bodies of wild carrion dogs who had been feeding on the flesh, shot by outraged GI’s when they broke into the camp, and the ashes of 400 innocents whose bodies were set on fire by the terrified Nazi guards as our troops stormed the gates. I wondered if some of them were Mendelsohns who never reached America. There is no way.

There was no way for General Eisenhower either. The unspeakable horror assaulted him when we liberated Dachau. In his fury he ordered our troops to go outside the camp and round up every German male in the village and march them slowly, one by one, through the entire slaughterhouse. The Nazi commandant was laid on the top of the rotting corpses, and the villagers were forced to spit upon him. Even for this five-star General, born in Abilene, Kansas, just before this century began, a man from a family rooted in Germany, there was no way. Dachau was such an obscenity that his very humanity felt assailed. No way to understand how his family’s spiritual home could be so profoundly defiled.

There was no way. There is no way.

The guards who survived recalled that during the forced showers, when the tens of thousands of children, women, and men were suffocated by gas, the loudspeakers in the camp would play Bach. And Beethoven. When the next trains arrived, they would play Mozart.

Mendelsohn was nearly overwhelmed by the human disaster he encountered everywhere, the cruel consequences of the Master Race mythology, the unspeakable barbarism it had unleashed. Dazed and shattered remnants of the Jews, Gypsies, and liberals who miraculously had escaped the fires of Dachau, Treblinka, Auschwitz, and Buchenwald filled every by-way and turgid refugee camp in the heart of Europe. It was a desolate and desperate journey into the dark heart of racism, and he wanted to capture that reality in his “Kilroy Was Here” columns that now had begun to appear in
Newsweek
. The heartbreaking powerlessness of the skeletal survivors seeded a fierce resolution. Mendelsohn knew he would resist the horror of racism whenever and wherever he found it.

On his last week on the continent, Max Miller had sent him a cable.

Teddy,

Soon as you can shake the clan after your visit home, there’s a chair for you at
Newsweek
. Folks here are eager to meet Kilroy because your stuff has been so alive and on-target. We got a lot to do, pal. Come.

Max

When he returned to Atlanta at the end of the year, Ted Mendelsohn was nearly a stranger to his family. Although they ravenously reclaimed him, he found the norms of Atlanta life stultifying and surprisingly difficult. He had changed, and Atlanta was changing. The city was racing into a buoyant postwar prosperity, reaching out to new suburbs and greenery. But beneath the euphoria, he could detect the old truisms of caste and race that he remembered from his childhood.

It was soon apparent that the subject of racism in any form was a source of irritation to his parents.

“Let the
schwartze
get the laundry, Teddy darling. You ought to rest.”

He reacted abruptly and loudly, startling his mother. “Christ, Mom, stop that! Clementine is not a
schwartze
. She’s an American who happens to be Negro!”

His mother’s eyes widened; she was clearly wounded by the sharpness in his rebuke. “All right, darling. I understand. I won’t use that word. I won’t say
schwartze
again.” She cocked her head, seeking to find the boy who had gone off to war, then smiled. “I should have my mouth washed out with soap.”

Ted looked tenderly at his mother. “When is the last time you told me that, mom? Probably when I called Paddy McElroy a lousy harp when he called me a kike after Boy Scout camp!”

She kissed him then and walked briskly to the door. “Get washed up, Teddy. We’re going to the club for dinner.”