Secret History of Vladimir Nabokov (30 page)

More than sixty thousand Jews had been forcibly relocated eastward from France via Drancy by the middle of 1944.
⁸⁹
Three locomotives a week loaded with a thousand deportees rolled away from the camp—there were rumors the trains were headed to an extermination center, but there was no way to be sure.

In preparation for their departure, the prisoners’ heads were shaved, and they, along with their possessions, were thoroughly searched. They were given a last meal and a final postcard to write to their loved ones. They were not told where they were going. The children, too, would eventually meet the same fate, packed onto trains rolling over the countryside to an unknown destination, sometimes weeks after their parents had traveled the same rail line to the same endpoint.
⁹⁰

These stateless Jews were not just German or Polish refugees; they included Russian Jews, adults and children, who would no longer need the Nansen passports that had saved them from nothing. Weeks before George and Joseph Hessen made their circuitous trip south through Spain, Ilya Fondaminsky was taken from Drancy and put on a train. Less than two weeks later, Sonia Slonim’s ex-husband Max Berlstein would also be sent east, part of Transport Number 37 from Drancy that September.
⁹¹
Both men found themselves where so many of the Jews deported from Paris had ended up. Carried in on the human tidal wave arriving in Auschwitz that fall, they were likely herded into the gas chambers of Birkenau shortly after their arrival, living out the fate that Véra and Dmitri Nabokov had eluded.

If the French collaborators, still thinking in terms of forced labor camps, did not grasp or did not want to grasp what they were abetting, though it was happening before their eyes, they were not alone. It was a global failure of imagination, not least in the United States. After it was understood that mass exterminations were underway, a historic eyewitness report was made to Roosevelt by Catholic Polish resistant Jan Karski in September 1943. In order to be able to testify
persuasively, Karski had braved entry into the Warsaw ghetto and sneaked
into
the extermination camp at Belzec, Poland—and then survived torture after a brief time in captivity. On behalf of the Polish government in exile, Karski went to England and the U.S. to tell the tale of what he had seen, only to find his story disbelieved by Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter. Karski was shocked by Frankfurter’s response, and decades later described the clarification Frankfurter had made to the Polish ambassador to the United States, who was in the room at the time: “I did not say that he was lying, I said that I could not believe him. There is a difference.”
⁹²

Karski’s testimony, which he had risked his life to get, made little impact at the highest levels of government. In his absence, Karski was denounced on Nazi radio and, as a result, was dissuaded from returning to the Polish underground. He stayed in America.

Other Catholics joined the fight in occupied Europe. Zinaida Shakhovskoy, who had helped Nabokov with readings in Belgium, aided the French resistance. Véra’s sister Lena had begun working with the Jesuits in Berlin, despite having an infant son.
⁹³
She was taken in and twice interrogated by the Gestapo.

Nabokov’s literary rival Ivan Bunin, who had already seen rough treatment at the hands of the Gestapo before the war, was living in southern France amid the steep mountains outside the perfume capital of Grasse. During the Occupation, Bunin hid several Jews from the Germans, including pianist Alexander Bakhrakh, who stayed underground with him for nearly the entire war.
⁹⁴

In Prague, the twentyfive-year companion of Nabokov’s mother, Evgenia Hofeld, found another path to action. Family lore would recall how Hofeld indiscriminately helped Jews in Prague and became known as a Gentile who would sign as an official witness on the identity papers that would certify that the bearer was
not
Jewish.
⁹⁵

But on the eastern front, it was a tight squeeze between Hitler and Stalin, with many compelled to choose between fascist and Communist forces. If Nabokov thought Hitler presented the graver danger
of the two for the time being, not everyone in his family agreed. Boris Petkevič, the husband of Nabokov’s sister Olga, had become deeply involved with anti-Bolshevik forces, in a group apparently supported by the Nazis.
⁹⁶

During the war, Nabokov knew little of his friends and families’ lives, but he had his own, smaller struggles back home. His contract with Wellesley was not renewed, in part, he feared, for his straightforwardly anti-Soviet attitude, which had become less fetching now that America was at war and Russia her ally. He had been given a small income from the Museum of Comparative Zoology to continue his work on their butterfly collection, but it was not nearly enough for three Nabokovs to live on, even in small quarters in Cambridge. In desperation, he did a lecture tour with the Institute of International Education, an organization best known for promoting American democracy abroad but whose mission also apparently extended to exposing Americans to foreign intellectuals favoring democratic ideals at home.
⁹⁷

Though he still struggled to find a dependable job, Nabokov’s literary star had begun to glimmer ever so slightly. New Directions, which had published
Sebastian Knight
, had given him a contract to translate Russian poetry and do a short book on Russian author Nikolai Gogol, which he completed mid-war. With Edmund Wilson’s recommendation, he applied for a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1943, becoming the first applicant over the age of forty ever chosen. He even received a new contract to teach Russian at Wellesley the following year.
⁹⁸

With prodding from Véra, he cut back on time spent with butterflies to focus on the novel he had begun when the U.S. entered the war. In fits and starts, he continued to build a dystopian parody of a Soviet-German police state, in which a freethinking philosopher (not unlike his earlier character Cincinnatus) is pulled into the prison system of a totalitarian society that is being forced into unthinking conformity. Nowhere close to finished with it, he pulled the first four chapters together and submitted them to a publisher.
⁹⁹

The Allies’ prospects seemed to be improving as well; they soon turned the tide on the Eastern front in Europe. By the time Nabokov and Edmund Wilson met up with Sonia Slonim in New York in preparation for the locally urgent matter of ten-year-old Dmitri’s appendectomy, D-Day was just around the corner.

Following in Véra and Carl Junghans’s footsteps, Sonia had joined the war effort by taking her turn at France Forever. She had also, she told several friends, gone unannounced to the office of the French Military attache in Washington to volunteer her services to the French cause, only to be turned away.
¹⁰⁰

After Normandy, the Allies poured forward, chasing the retreating Germans, and it became clear that the war would soon be over. As U.S. forces liberated Paris and moved across France, the Soviets worked their way back across Poland, Hungary, and Austria from the east, arriving in Prague on May 9. That very day, Soviet forces would go looking for Olga Nabokov’s husband, Boris Petkevič, who had chosen the losing side in the war. They would find him long gone to England. But Olga was taken in for questioning.
¹⁰¹
Unlike so many who were interrogated and then sent to the far reaches of the Gulag, she was released after three days.

Over the summer, the Soviets overran the location of the killing center at Belzec that Jan Karski had seen, along with the nearby extermination sites at Sobibor and Treblinka. That July, religious committees confirmed the existence of death camps at Birkenau and Auschwitz, and had seen evidence of more than a million and a half executions.
¹⁰²

Writer Arthur Koestler, who years before had plumbed the psyche of true believers in Stalin’s purges with
Darkness at Noon
, lamented the disbelief he encountered across three years of speaking to the troops: “They don’t believe in concentration camps, they don’t believe in the starved children of Greece, in the shot hostages of France, in the mass graves of Poland; they have never heard of Lidice, Treblinka, or Belzec.”
¹⁰³
It soon became apparent that, if anything, the testimony of witnesses like fan Karski had understated the horrors of what had happened.

Karski’s own book,
Story of a Secret State
, had come out at the end of 1944 to tremendous attention in the U.S. He had kept faith with his assignment to testify about what he had seen, but he understood by now that such testimony was not enough to alter history. In his book, a Jewish elder in the Warsaw ghetto says that of course Hitler will be defeated, and Karski’s country will rise from its ashes. But the Polish Jews, the elder explains, will by then have ceased to exist. “It is no use telling you all this,” he says. “No one in the outside world can possibly understand. You don’t understand. Even I don’t understand, for my people are dying and I am alive.”
¹⁰⁴

The dead of the Warsaw ghetto haunted Nabokov that spring. His belief that all Germans should be exterminated—voiced in passing to Wilson years before—had not faded. Writing in 1944 to the chair of the New York Browning Society, Nabokov declined her invitation to speak and responded to material she had enclosed calling for understanding and pity for the suffering of German civilians.

Far from being in need of succor, Nabokov suggested, Germans had already derived quite enough comforts from the bloody belongings stolen from the Jews of Warsaw. Lest she misunderstand, he clarified that at times, castration and improved breeding techniques were insufficient to solve a chronic issue. In his powerlessness, he fantasized turning the final solution on the Germans themselves. Germany, he suggested to Mrs. Hope—and it is not clear whether he meant the country, the culture, or its people—deserved to be chloroformed.
¹⁰⁵

Anti-Semitism within his own émigré community remained equally repellent to him. Not long after his own arrival in America, Nabokov had advised George Hessen on how to get by in the new country: “The only thingyou must do is deal with genuine Americans and don’t get involved with the local Russian emigration.”
¹⁰⁶

Nabokov would pour it all into his writing. In his first short story for
The New Yorker
, originally titled “Double Talk,” a Russian émigré
explains how he is perpetually mistaken for a bigot with the same name. Decades before, the double had failed to return a copy of
The Protocols of the Wise Men of Zion
to the library, with the narrator receiving the blame. The double’s scurrilous activities complicate the narrator’s border crossings, while the narrator’s provocative writing causes his double to be arrested twice by the Germans.

In wartime Boston, the narrator mistakenly accepts an invitation that was intended for his double, who—it does not surprise readers by this point—belongs to a circle that pities Germany, decrying “the vivid Semitic imagination that controls the American press” and atrocities “invented by the Jews.”
¹⁰⁷
Seated amid people voicing ideas repellent to him, the narrator is reluctant to speak up in the salon because of his tendency to become inarticulate and stammer under stress. But in the end, he finds his voice and makes a dramatic exit, unfortunately with someone else’s coat.

“Double Talk” was written in the wake of the liberation of Auschwitz, which fell into Soviet hands in January 1945. That spring, American troops swept through German territory, taking over hundreds of camps and subcamps along the way, including Buchenwald, which soldiers reached that April. Within days, newspaper stories told of American troops forcing civilians from nearby Weimar to come and see for themselves the crematorium, the dead bodies, the remnants of medical experiments injecting typhus into children, the torture chamber, the gallows, the dead bodies, and the near-dead survivors.
¹⁰⁸

At Auschwitz, Soviet soldiers found that fleeing Germans had destroyed many of the camp warehouses. Nevertheless, more than one million suits and dresses were recovered—clothing that had indeed been intended, as Nabokov had indicated in his letter to Mrs. Hope, to be sent back to German cities as relief supplies.

Deportees from Drancy, however, had been allowed to depart with very little in the way of possessions on their way east. And so when Soviet forces finally got to Poland in January 1945, it is possible that no jacket, no ring, not a recognizable trace of Ilya Fondaminsky or Max Berlstein remained on the grounds of Auschwitz.

Before it was shut down, this largest of the extermination camps had delivered nearly a million Jews and hundreds of thousands of Poles, Gypsies, and Soviet prisoners of war to their deaths. It was not just the graphic revelations of the large camps, but also the sheer numbers that proved overwhelming. Details of genocide began to pour out of Europe. News of the dead—the beloved, the loathed, and the forgotten—radiated like ghost webs to cross and recross the paths of the living. A former student of Nabokov, Mikhail Gorlin, who had himself become a poet, had died at Auschwitz in a mining subcamp. His wife, another poet, whose writing Nabokov had mocked in a Berlin review, had died too. (“Raissa Blokh,” he would later say. “I was horrid to her.”) A Jew stopped by the Swiss at the border when she tried to enter, Blokh had been turned over to officials and sent to Drancy.
¹⁰⁹