War and Remembrance (105 page)

When she emptied the wastebaskets next day, she couldn’t resist turning the pages of
Time
to the picture of Pamela Tudsbury. It was still there, of course. She felt like a fool. Not all that attractive a woman, at that; aging fast, and badly. Engaged to Lord Burne-Wilke, besides. Let it lie, she thought. Let it lie.

{from Aaron Jastrow’s manuscript)

CHRISTMAS DAY, 1942.

LOURDES.

I awoke this morning thinking of Oswiecim.

The Americans in all four hotels were permitted, just this once, to go to church together, to the midnight Mass at the basilica. As usual we were accompanied by our reasonably pleasant Surete shadows, and by the surly German soldiers who since last week have been following us on our walks, shopping trips, and visits to the doctor, dentist, or barber. The soldiers were clearly irked at drawing such disagreeable duty on Christmas Eve (it is very cold up here in the Pyrenees, and of course neither the basilica nor the hotel lobbies are heated) when they might have been greeting the birth of their Savior with drunken wassail, or perhaps with animal raptures on the bodies of the few poor French whores who service the conquerors here. Well, Natalie would not go to the Mass, but I did.

It is a very long time since I attended a Mass. In this pilgrimage town you get the real thing, with a crowd of real worshippers; and because of the shrine, those who come include the paralyzed, the crippled, the blind, the deformed, the dying, a terrible parade; a parade of God’s cruel jokes or inept mistakes, if you seriously maintain that He heeds the sparrow’s fall. Cold as it was in the basilica, the air was warm as May compared to the chill in my heart as the Mass proceeded; chants, bells, elevations, genuflections, and all. It would have been only courteous to kneel at the proper time, as all did, since I had voluntarily come; but for all the disapproving glances, I, the stiff-necked Jew, would not kneel. Nor would I go afterward to a Christmas party for our group at the Hotel des Ambassadeurs, where, I was told, the black-market wine would flow free, and there would be black-market turkey and sausage. I returned to the Gallia, accompanied to the door of my room by a grumpy German with a hideous breath. I went to sleep, and I awoke thinking of Oswiecim.

It was in the yeshiva at Oswiecim that I first broke with my own religion. I remember it all as though it were yesterday. I can still feel my
cheek stinging from the slap of the
mashgiakh,
the study hall supervisor, as I trudge in the snow on the town square in the purple evening, having been ordered out of the
bet midrash
for impudent heresy. I have not thought about all this for years, yet even now it rises in my mind as an intolerable outrage. Perhaps in a yeshiva in a larger city — say Cracow or Warsaw — the
mashgiakh
would have had the sense to smile at my effrontery, and pass it off. Then the whole course of my life might have been different. That slap was the twig that turned the torrent.

It was so utterly unfair! After all, I was a good boy; a “silken boy,” as they would say in Yiddish. I excelled in expounding the abstruse legal distinctions that are the meat and the glory of the Talmud, the subtle ethical nuances that the foolish call “hair-splitting.” These arguments have an austere, almost geometrical elegance for which one acquires not only a taste, but a thirst. I did have that thirst. I was a star Talmud student. I was brighter and quicker than the
mashgiakh.
Possibly he was glad of the chance, narrow thick-skulled black-capped bearded fool that he was, to take me down a peg; so he slapped my face, ordered me out of the study hall, and set my foot on the path to the Cross.

I remember the passage: page one hundred eleven, Tractate
Passover Offerings.
I remember the subject: demons, and how to avoid them, foil them, and conjure them away. I remember why I was slapped. I asked, “But Reb Laizar, are there really such things as demons?” I remember the bearded fool bawling at me, as I lay on the floor stunned, with a flaming cheek, “Get up! Get out!
Shaygetz!”
(nonbeliever, abomination!) And so I stumbled out into dreary snowy Oswiecim.

I was fifteen. To me, Oswiecim was still a big town. I had visited the grand metropolis of Cracow only once. Our village of Medzice, some ten kilometers up the Vistula, was all wooden houses and crooked muddy pathways. Even the Medzice church — which we children steered clear of as though it were a leprosarium — was built of wood. Oswiecim had straight paved streets, a large railroad station, brick and stone houses, shops with lighted glass windows, and several churches of stone.

I did not know the town well. We lived a strictly regimented life in the yeshiva, seldom venturing beyond the mews on which it faced, bounded by our little dormitory and the teachers’ houses. But my rebellious anger that day carried me out of the mews into the town. I walked all over Oswiecim, seething at my ill-treatment, giving way at last to the suppressed doubts that had been plaguing me for years.

For I was no fool. I knew German and Polish, I read newspapers and novels, and precisely because I was a bright Talmudist I could look beyond the
bet midrash
to the world outside; a world glittering with strange dangers and evil temptations, but nevertheless a broader world than one saw in the
everlasting straight and narrow march down black columns of Talmud, hemmed in by wise but wearying commentators, who absorbed all one’s young wit and energy in exhaustive microanalysis of a main text fourteen centuries old. Between my eleventh year and the moment of the slap, I had been ever more painfully wrenched between the natural yeshiva boy’s ambition to become a world-famous
ilui
(prodigy), and a wicked whisper in my soul that I was
WASTING MY TIME.

Thinking of all this as I trudged ankle-deep in snow, freed by the
mashgiakh’s
anger to wander like a homeless dog, I halted in front of Oswiecim’s largest church. Strange that I should have forgotten its name! The one nearest the yeshiva was called
Calvaria;
that I recall. This was another, and much more imposing, edifice on a main square.

My anger had not cooled. Rather, as the rebelliousness of four years came bursting through the bounds of lifelong drilling and a very tender religious conscience, I did something that a few hours earlier would have been as unthinkable as cutting my wrists. I slipped into the church. Wrapped against the cold, I did not look very different from a Christian child, I suppose. In any case some sort of service was going on, and everybody was looking to the front. Nobody paid attention to me.

So long as I live, I shall not forget the shock of seeing a great bloody naked Christ hanging from a cross on the front wall, where in a synagogue the Holy Ark would stand; nor the strange sweetish Gentile smell of incense; nor the big painted saints on the side walls. I was stunned to think that for the “outside” world (as I then regarded it), this was religion, this was the way to God! Half-horrified, half-fascinated, I stayed a long time. Never since have I felt so alien and alone, so dizzily on the brink of a shattering irreversible change in my soul.

Never, that is, until last night.

Whether it was the cumulative effect of living for weeks in the appalling commercialism of Lourdes, which still garishly pervades the town, even offseason, even in wartime; or whether it was the pathetic gathering of the maimed in the basilica; or whether, as once my rebelliousness surfaced, so everything that has been happening to me and Natalie broke through a suppressing instinct in my spirit — however all that may be, the fact is that at midnight Mass last night, familiar as Christ on his cross now is to me, and much as I have written about Christianity, and much indeed as I have loved the religious art of Europe, I felt last night as alienated and alone as I did at fifteen in the Oswiecim church.

I woke this morning thinking of it. I am writing this note as I drink my morning coffee. It is not bad coffee. In France, in the depths of war, under the conqueror’s heel, money can still buy everything. The illegal prices are not even very high in Lourdes. It is off-season.

I have neglected this diary ever since our arrival in Lourdes; hoping — to be honest — that I would resume it on a steamship bound for home. That hope is dimming. Our situation is probably worse than my niece and I admit to each other. I hope her good cheer is more real than mine. She knows less. The consul general wisely avoids upsetting her with the ins and outs of our problem, but he is fairly straight with me.

What has gone wrong is a matter far beyond anybody’s control. It was of course the most ghastly misfortune that we failed by a few days to leave Vichy France legally. All was in order, the precious papers were in hand, but with the first news of the American landings all train schedules were suspended and the borders were closed. Jim Gaither acted with coolness and dispatch to protect us, by providing us with official journalists’ documents predated to 1939, accrediting us to
Life
magazine, which has in fact published a couple of my essays on wartime Europe.

But he went further than that. In the consulate files which they were burning, they turned up some letters from
Life,
requesting courtesies for various writers and photographers. In Marseilles there is a most accomplished ring of document fakers for refugees, run by a remarkable Catholic priest. The consul general, despite everything else he had to do in the sudden crisis, obtained through his underground contacts forged letters on the
Life
letterhead, establishing both Natalie and myself as regularly employed correspondents; papers authentic-looking to the extent of being rubbed, folded, and faded as though they were several years old.

James Gaither did not anticipate that these concocted papers would have to shield us for any very long time, but he thought they would stand up until we got out. However, as time passes, the risk increases. At first he expected that our release would be a matter of days or weeks. After all, we are not at war with Vichy France. There is but a rupture of relations, and so Americans are not “enemies” and should not be “interned” at all. But the group here in Lourdes, about a hundred and sixty of us, most definitely is interned. We have been under strict French police surveillance from the start, unable to move about except under the eyes of a uniformed inspector. And a few days ago, Gestapo men took station around all four hotels where we Americans are sequestered. Ever since, we have been under German guard, as well as in official French police custody. The French act vaguely humiliated and embarrassed by all this, and in small ways try to make us more comfortable. But the Germans are there always, stolidly marching with us wherever we move, staring at us in the lobbies, and ordering us about severely if one of us happens to trespass on a Boche regulation.

Only gradually have I learned what the long delay is all about. For a while Gaither himself did not know. The American charge d’affaires, who was brought here from Vichy with our entire embassy staff, lives in another hotel, and telephone communication is forbidden. The charge, an able man
named Tuck — a great admirer of my writings, though that is neither here nor there — is apparently allowed one telephone talk a day, of short duration, with the Swiss representative in Vichy. So we are virtually cut off, especially here at the Gallia, and are very much in the dark.

The snag turns oat to be simple enough. The Vichy personnel in the United States who should have been swapped for us refused almost to a man to go back to France; understandably, since the Hun now occupies all of it. This has created great confusion, into which the Germans have stepped to seize an advantage. Thus far they still talk through their Vichy puppets, but it is plainly they who are bargaining over us.

We might have gotten away in the first week or two, if the French had simply sent us off the thirty miles to the Spanish border. That would have been a decent return for the food and medical supplies America has lavished on this government for years. But the Vichy men are a loathsome form of life — crawling, sycophantic, pretentious, lying, self-righteous, anti-Semitic, reactionary, feebly militaristic, and altogether base and unworthy of French culture — the very slimy dregs of the anti-Dreyfusards of old. In short, we didn’t get out. Here we are, counters in German haggling for assorted Nazi agents being held abroad; and that they will drive a close and savage bargain goes without saying.

I woke thinking of Oswiecim for yet another reason.

During our long stay in the Mendelson apartment in Marseilles, a stream of refugees kept passing through, usually staying not more than one or two nights. In consequence, we heard a lot of the grisly talk that circulates in the European Jewish grapevine about the atrocities in the east, the mass shootings, the gassing in sealed vans, the camps where everybody who arrives is either murdered outright or starved and worked to death. I have never known how much credit to give to these reports and still don’t, but one thing is sure: a place name that keeps recurring, and that is never uttered except in hushed terms of the most profound horror and dread, is Oswiecim; usually in its ugly Germanization that I remember well,
Auschwitz.