War and Remembrance (106 page)

If these rumors amount to more than mass paranoid fears brought on by suffering, then Oswiecim is the focal point of the whole horror; my Oswiecim, the place where I studied as a boy, where my father bought me a bicycle, where the whole family sometimes came to spend a Sabbath and hear a great traveling cantor or
maggid,
a revivalist Yiddish preacher; and where I first saw the inside of a church and a life-size Christ on the cross.

The ultimate menace that faces us, in that case, is transportation to the mysterious and frightful camp at Oswiecim. There would be a neat closing of the circle for me! But our random existence on this petty planet does not
move in such artistic patterns — that thought really consoles me — and we are a continent away from Oswiecim, and only thirty miles from Spain and safety. I still have faith that we will end by going home. It is vital to keep up one’s hopes in a time of danger; to remain alert, and ready to face down bureaucrats and brutes when one must. That takes spirit.

Natalie and the baby, who had a chance to escape, are trapped because at a crucial moment she lacked spirit. I wrote a decidedly intemperate journal entry on Byron’s thunderbolt visit and its miserable outcome. My anger at Natalie was fueled by my guilt at having mired her and her baby in this ever-worsening predicament. She will never let me express it; invariably she cuts me off by saying that she is grown up, acted of her own free will, and bears me no grudge.

Now we have been shadowed and ordered about by Germans for a week; and while I still think she should have taken the chance and gone with Byron, I can sympathize more with her reluctance. It would be a fearful thing to fall into the hands of these hard uncouth men without legal papers. All policemen, in relation to those they guard, must seem more or less wooden, hostile, and cruel; for to carry out their orders they must suppress fellow feelings. There has been nothing attractive about the Italian and French police I’ve dealt with during the past two years, nor — for that matter — about certain American consuls.

But these Germans are different. Orders do not seem merely to guide their actions; orders, as it were, fill their souls, leaving no room for a human flicker in their faces or eyes. They are herdsmen, and we are cattle; or they are soldier ants, and we are aphids. The orders cut all ties between them and us. All. It is eerie. Truly, their cold empty expressions make my skin crawl. I understand that one or two of the higher-ups are “decent sorts” (Gaither’s words), but I have not met them. I too once knew “decent sorts” who were German. Here one sees only the other face of the Teuton.

Natalie might well have chanced it with Byron; I know no more resolute or resourceful young man, and he had special diplomatic papers. It was a question of a fast dash through the flames. If she had been the old Natalie, she would have done it, but she balked because of the baby. James Gaither still maintains (if with less assurance as the days pass) that he advised her correctly, and that all will yet be well. I think he’s beginning to wonder. We talked the whole matter out again last night, Gaither and I, as we slogged through the snow to the midnight Mass. He insists that the Germans, wanting to recover as many of their agents as possible in this swap, are not at any point going to examine anybody’s papers too closely. Natalie, Louis, and I are three warm bodies, exchangeable for perhaps fifteen Huns. They will be satisfied with that, and will look no further.

He does think it is important that I remain inconspicuous. So far we are
dealing with very low-grade Frenchmen and Germans, none of whom is likely to have read any books in years, let alone one of my books. He says that my credentials as a journalist are holding, and that none of the police officers has yet singled me out as a “celebrity” or person of consequence, nor as a Jew. For this reason he quashed a suggestion that I give a lecture to our hotel group. The United Press man is arranging a lecture series here at the Gallia, to pass the time. The topic he suggested to me was Jesus, naturally. This was a few days ago, and but for Jim Gaither’s veto, I might have consented.

But since my experience at the midnight Mass, I would under no circumstances—even back in the States, and offered a large fee — lecture about Jesus. Something has been happening to me that I have yet to fathom. In recent weeks I have found it harder and harder to work even on Martin Luther. Last night that something began to surface. I have still to focus on it and determine what it is. One of these days I shall trace in this journal the path from my first glimpse of Christ crucified in Oswiecim, to my brief conversion to Christianity in Boston, eight years later. Just now Natalie has come in from her bedroom with Louis, all bundled up for her morning walk. In the open doorway our surly German shadow glowers.

O
N
New Year’s Eve Pug surprised Rhoda by suggesting that they go to the Army-Navy Club. She knew he detested the rigmarole of paper hats, noisemakers, and alcoholic kissing; but tonight, he said, he wanted distraction. Rhoda loved the New Year’s Eve nonsense, so she happily got herself up; and in the merry crowd of senior military men with their wives moving through the lobby, she felt that few women looked as pretty or glittery as she did in the silver lame dress from the old Bundles for Britain days. She had an uneasy moment when, as she and Pug entered the dining room, Colonel Harrison Peters stood up and waved to them to join him. Her conduct with Peters had been snowily blameless, but might he not mention Palmer Kirby, or show too much warmth?

Arm in arm, feeling her hesitate, Pug gave her a questioning look. She decided she didn’t give a damn. Let it come out at last! “Well, bless me! There’s Colonel Peters. Let’s join him, by all means,” she said cheerily. “He’s a fine man, I’ve met him at church. But where on earth did he get that
CHORUS GIRL?
Can I trust you at the same table with her?”

Peters towered a head and a half over Pug Henry, shaking hands with him. His blonde bosomy young companion, in a white Grecian-drapery sort of dress that showed much rosy skin, was a secretary at the British Purchasing Council. Rhoda mentioned that they knew Pamela Tudsbury. “Oh, really? The next Lady Burne-Wilke?” the girl trilled, and her accent stirred an ache in Victor Henry. “Dear Pam! You could have knocked us all over with a feather at the Council. Pamela used to be our office mutineer. Always muttering against the old slave driver! Now his lordship will pay for all that overtime, won’t he just?”

The hour before midnight melted away in dull war talk over dull club food and very flat champagne. An Army Air Corps colonel with purple bulldog jowls, sitting at this table by chance with his highly rouged wispy wife, railed at the neglect of the “CBI” theatre from which he had just returned, by which he meant China, Burma, and India. Half the human race lived there, said the colonel; even Lenin had once called it the richest war prize in the world. If it fell to the Japs, the white man had better find himself another planet to live on, because Earth would soon be too hot for him. Nobody in Washington seemed to grasp that.

An Army brigadier general, with conspicuously more ribbons than either Peters or the CBI colonel, held forth on the assassination of Admiral
Darian; whom, he said, he had come to know very well in Algiers. “It’s a great pity about Popeye. That’s what we on Ike’s staff all called Darian, Popeye. The fellow looked like an insulted frog. Of course he was a plain pro-Nazi, but he was a realist, and once we nabbed him, he delivered the goods, saved a whole lot of American lives. This de Gaulle fellow, now, thinks he’s Joan of Arc. We’ll get nothing from him but rhetoric and grief. Try telling that to all these pinko typewriter.strategists.”

Rhoda might have spared herself any concern about Colonel Peters. He was scarcely looking her way, sizing up instead the squat husband with the forbidding tired face. Pug was saying nothing at all. Peters at last asked how he thought the war was going.

“Where?” asked Pug.

“All over. How does the Navy see it?”

“Depends, Colonel, on where you sit in the Navy.”

“From where you sit, then.”

Puzzled by the idle probing of this big good-looking Army man, Pug answered, “I see plenty of hell behind and plenty ahead.”

“Concur,” said Peters, as the lights in the noisy dining room blinked and darkened, “and that’s a better year-end summary than I’ve read in all the newspapers. Well, five minutes to midnight, ladies and gentlemen. Allow me, Mrs. Henry.” She was sitting beside him, and in an oddly gentle and pleasing way, to which she felt Pug couldn’t possibly take exception, he placed on her head a paper shepherdess’s bonnet, then tilted a gilt cardboard helmet on his own handsome gray hair. Not everybody at the table put on paper hats, but to Rhoda’s astonishment her husband did. Not since the children’s early birthday parties had she seen that happen. On Victor Henry’s head a pink hat with gold frills, far from looking playful or funny, brought out a terrible sadness in his face.

“Oh, Pug! No.”

“Happy New Year, Rhoda.”

Champagne glasses in hand, the guests stood up to kiss all around and sing
“Auld Lang Syne”
in candlelight. Pug gave his wife an absent kiss, and yielded her to a polite buss from Colonel Peters. His mind was drifting back over 1942. He was thinking of Warren leaning in the doorway of the cabin on the
Northampton,
with one hand on the overhead, saying, “Ht,
Dad. If you’re too busy for me, say so”;
and of the officers and men lying entombed in the sunken hull of the
Northampton,
in the black waters off Guadalcanal. And he was thinking, in the depths of bitter sorrow, that he would ask Hopkins to try to get Natalie and her baby out of Lourdes, after all. She at least was alive.

Harry Hopkins’s bedroom in the White House was at one end of a long dark gloomy hall, a few doors down from the Oval Office. In a gray suit that
hung on him like a scarecrow’s rags, he stood looking out toward the sunlit Washington Monument. “Hello there, Pug. Happy New Year.”

He kept skinny hands clasped behind his back as he turned. This stooped, shabby, emaciated, yellow-faced civilian made a sharp contrast to the beefy Rear Admiral Carton, red of cheek and straight as a pole, standing near him in tailored blue and gold with a golden froth of shoulder cords. In newspaper accounts Hopkins sometimes seemed a Dumas figure, a sort of shadowy gliding Mazarin in the presidential back rooms; but face to face he looked to Pug more like a debauched playboy, by the glint in his eye and his fatigued grin still hoping for fun. At a glance Pug took in the dark Lincoln painting and the plaque saying the Emancipation Proclamation had been signed here; also the homey touches of a rumpled red dressing gown flung over the unmade four-poster bed, a frilly negligee beside it, pink mules on the floor, and bottles of medicines lined up on the bedside table.

“Thank you for seeing me, sir.”

“Always a pleasure. Sit you down.” Carton left, and Hopkins faced Pug on a wine-colored couch seedily worn at the arms. “So! Cincpac wants you, too. Popular fella, aren’t you?” Caught by surprise, Pug made no comment. “I suppose that would be your choice?”

“I naturally prefer combat operations.”

“What about the Soviet Union?”

“I’m not interested, sir.”

Hopkins crossed bone-thin legs and rubbed a hand over his long curving jaw. “Do you remember a General Yevlenko?”

“Yes. Big burly gent. I met him on my trip to the Moscow front.”

“Just so. He’s now Russia’s top dog on Lend-Lease. Admiral Standley thinks you could help a lot in that area. Yevlenko has mentioned you to Standley. Also Alistair Tudsbury’s daughter, who I gather went along on that trip.”

“Yes, she did.”

“Well, you both made quite an impression on him. You know, Pug, your report about the Moscow front last December was a big help. I was a lonely voice around here, maintaining that the Russians would hold. The Army’s intelligence estimate was all wrong. Your paper impressed the President. He thinks you have horse sense, which is always in short supply around these parts.”

“I thought I’d queered myself by my gratuitous letter about the Minsk Jews.”

“Not at all.” Hopkins casually waved away Pug’s words. “Between you and me, Pug, the whole Jewish situation is a fearsome headache. The President has to keep dodging delegations of rabbis. The State Department tries to deflect them, but some do get through. It’s all terribly pitiful, but what
can he tell them? They just go over and over the same depressing ground. Invading France and breaking up that insane Nazi system is the only way to keep faith with the Russians, save the Jews, and end this damned war. And the key to
that
is landing craft, my friend.” Hopkins leaned back on the couch with a shrewd look at Pug.

Trying to stave off that tricky topic, Pug asked, “Sir, why don’t we take in a lot more refugees?”

“Modify the immigration laws, you mean,” Hopkins replied briskly. “That’s a tough one.” He picked a blue book off a side table, and handed it to Pug. The title was
America’s Ju-Deal.
“Ever see this?”

“No, sir.” Pug made a disgusted face and dropped it. “Nazi propaganda?”

“Possibly. The FBI says it’s been widely circulated for years. It came in the mail, and should have gone into the wastebasket, but it reached my desk, and Louise saw it. It sickened her. My wife and I get a flood of hate mail, Pug. Half of it in various filthy ways calls us Jews, which would be funny if it weren’t tragic. It’s hit a peak since the Baruch dinner.”