War and Remembrance (127 page)

After the disaster of the Conference, what can still be done?

At best, very little can be done. The Germans are bent on their savage deed. They have most of Europe’s Jews in their grip. Only Allied victory can prevent their carrying out their purpose. But
if we will but do with vigor what little we can do, we will be absolved of complicity in the Nazi crime.
As
things stand now, the Bermuda Conference has made the United States government a passive bystander at murder.

Some sixteen months from now, there will be a presidential election. The massacre of the European Jews may by then be almost an accomplished fact. The American people will have had another year and a half to overcome their lag in awareness of this incredible horror. Evidence will have mounted to a flood. Conceivably Europe will have been invaded, and some murder camps captured. The American public is a humane one. Though today it does not want to “admit all those Jews,” by the end of 1944 it will be looking for somebody to blame for letting the thing happen. The blame will fall squarely on those in power now.

The author of this memorandum knows the President to be a true humanitarian, who would like to help the Jews. But in this vast global war, the problem is a low-priority one. Since so little can be done, and since the subject is so ghastly, Mr. Roosevelt can hardly be blamed for attending to other things.

The agitation to open Palestine or to change the immigration laws seems hopeless. Extravagant mass ransom schemes, and proposals to bomb nonmilitary targets like concentration camps, run afoul of major war-making policies. Still, some things can be done, and must be done.

The single most urgent and useful thing that President Roosevelt can do at once is
to take the entire refugee problem out of the State Department,
and above all away from Mr. Breckinridge Long.

He is now in charge of this problem, and be is a disaster. This unfortunate man, forced out on a limb of negativism, is resolved to do as little as possible; to prevent anybody else from doing any more; and to move heaven and earth to prove that he is right and has always been right, and that nobody could be a better friend of the Jews. At heart he still seems to think that talk of the Nazi massacre is mostly a clever trick to get around the immigration laws.

State personnel have had this viewpoint drummed into them. Too many share his rigid restrictionist convictions. The Department’s morale, and its capacity to perform in humanitarian matters, are low. An executive agency must be created, empowered to explore any possibility to save Jewish lives, and to act with speed. Commonsense adjustment of visa rules in itself can at once rescue a larger number of Jews
eligible to enter the United States under existing quotas.
They will be no financial burden. Relief funds in almost any magnitude will be procurable from the Jewish community.

Latin America’s restrictionism is based on our own. Once the new agency projects to Latin American countries the changed attitude of the United States, some of those countries will follow suit.

The new agency should at once move as many refugees as possible from the four neutral European havens — Switzerland, Sweden, Spain, and Portugal — to relieve the strain on them, and change their present attitude of “the lifeboat is full” to one of welcome to those hunted Jews who can still reach their borders.

The new agency should work on congressional leaders for the temporary admission of perhaps twenty thousand refugees. If ten other countries around the world will follow such a lead, this will be a loud and clear signal to the slaughterers themselves, and to the satellite governments which have not yet handed over their Jewish citizens to the Germans, that the Allies mean business.

For as the tide of war shifts, the murders are bound to slow, and at last stop. Sooner or later, the murderers and their accomplices will take fright. That turning point can come when ninety-nine percent of the Jews are gone, or when sixty or seventy percent are gone. No better figure can probably be hoped for; but even that much would be a historic achievement.

Leslie Slote

William Tuttle received no acknowledgment of his letter to the President, and never found out whether it had reached him. As a matter of history, the public reaction gradually swelled to a roar during 1943, as the facts of the Bermuda Conference came out. On January 22, 1944, an Executive Order from the White House took the refugee problem out of the State Department’s hands. It created the War Refugee Board, an executive agency empowered to deal with “Nazi plans to exterminate all the Jews.” A new policy of forceful American rescue action began. By then the hurricane had long been blowing its worst.

T
HE
Swiss diplomat who walked into the hospital alongside Jastrow’s wheelchair brought a letter from the German ambassador to the director, Comte Aldebert de Chambrun. “You know, of course,” said the Swiss casually, “Monsieur’s masterpiece,
Le Jésu dun Juif.”

Comte de Chambrun was a retired general, a financier, an old-line aristocrat, and an in-law of Premier Laval, all of which made him fairly imperturbable, even in these disordered times. He nodded as he glanced over the letter, which called for the finest possible treatment for the “distinguished author.” Since the abrupt departure of most of the staff after Pearl Harbor, the comte had taken on the directorship of the American Hospital. The few Americans left in Paris came there for treatment, but Jastrow was the first from the Baden-Baden group. The comte did not keep up with current American literature and wasn’t sure he had ever heard of Jastrow.
A Jew’s Jesus!
Strange letter, in the circumstances.

“You will note,” went on the Swiss, as though reading his mind, “that the occupying authority considers racial origin irrelevant.”

“Just so,” replied the comte. “Prejudice cannot pass the doorway of a hospital.”

The Swiss received this sentiment with a face twitch, and left. Within the hour the German embassy telephoned to inquire about Jastrow’s condition and accommodations. That settled it. When Jastrow began to mend, after difficult two-stage surgery and a few bad days, the director placed him in a sunny room and had him nursed around the clock.

Comte de Chambrun discussed this odd German solicitude for Jastrow with his wife, a very positive American woman with a quick answer for everything. The comtesse was a
grande dame:
a Longworth, related by marriage to the Roosevelts, sister of the former Speaker of the House. She was whiling away the war by managing the American Library, and pursuing her Shakespearean studies. Their son was married to the daughter of Pierre Laval. The comtesse had long since taken on French citizenship, but in talk and manner she remained pungently American, with a patina of rabid French old-nobility snobbishness; a walking anomaly of seventy, begging for the pen of a Proust.

There was nothing in the least odd about the thing, the comtesse briskly
told her husband. She had read A
Jew’s Jesus,
and didn’t think much of it, but the man did have a name. He would soon be going home. What he had to say about his treatment would be widely quoted in American newspapers and magazines. Here was a chance for the Boches to counter the unfavorable propaganda about their Jewish policy; she was surprised only at the good sense they were showing, for she regarded the Germans as a coarse and thickheaded lot.

General de Chambrun also told her about Jastrow’s niece. Chatting with her in visiting hours, he had been struck by her haggard sad beauty, perfect French, and quick intelligence. The young lady might work at the library, he suggested, since Jastrow’s convalescence would take time. The comtesse perked up at that. The library was far behind in sorting and cataloguing piles of books left behind in 1940 by hastily departing Americans. The Boches might veto the idea; then again, the American niece of a famous author, wife of a submarine officer, might be quite all right, even if she was Jewish. The comtesse consulted the German official who supervised libraries and museums, and he readily gave her permission to employ Mrs. Henry.

Thereupon she lost no time. Natalie was visiting Aaron at the hospital when the comtesse barged into the room and introduced herself. She liked the look of Natalie at once; quite chic for a refugee, pleasantly American, with a dark beauty that might easily be of Italian or even French origin. The old Jew in the bed looked more dead than alive; gray-bearded, big-nosed, with large melancholy brown eyes feverishly bright in a waxy sunken face.

“Your uncle seems to be very sick indeed,” said the comtesse in the director’s office, where she invited Natalie for a cup of “verbena tea” which tasted like, and perhaps was, boiled grass.

“He almost died of internal hemorrhaging,” said Natalie.

“My husband says he can’t return to Baden-Baden for a while. When he’s well enough he’ll be moved to our convalescent home. Now then, Mrs. Henry, the general tells me that you’re Radcliffe, with a Sorbonne graduate degree.
Pas mal.
How would you like to do something useful?”

She walked with Natalie to her boardinghouse; declared the place unfit for an American to be caught dead in; cooed, or rather croaked, over Louis; and undertook to move them to decent lodgings. Marching Natalie to an old mansion near the hospital, converted to flats occupied by hospital staff, she then and there arranged room and board for her and the baby. By nightfall she had moved them to the new place, executed the necessary papers at the prefecture, and checked them in with the German administrator of the Neuilly suburb. When she left, she promised to return in the morning and take Natalie to the library by Métro. She would arrange, she said, for someone to look after Louis.

Natalie was quite overborne by this crabbed old fairy godmother materializing
out of nowhere. Her transportation into Germany had put her into a state of mild persisting shock. In the Baden-Baden hotel with its unfriendly German staff, incessant German talk, German menus and signs, Gestapo men in the lobby and the corridors, and glum American internees, her nervous system had half-shut down, narrowing her awareness to herself and Louis, to their day-to-day needs, and to possible dangers. The opportunity to go to Paris had seemed like a pardon from jail, once the Swiss representative had assured her that several special-case Americans dwelled freely in German-occupied Paris, and that she would be under Swiss protective surveillance there, just as in Baden-Baden. But before the comtesse burst upon her, she had seen little of Paris. She had cowered in her room, playing with Louis or reading old novels. Mornings and evenings she had scurried to the hospital to visit her uncle and scurried back again, fearing police challenge and having no confidence in her papers.

A new time began with her employment at the library. She had work, the best of anodynes. She was moving about. The first scary check of her papers in the Métro went off without trouble. After all, Paris was almost as familiar to her as New York, and not much changed. The crushing crowds in the Métro, including many young German soldiers, were a disagreeable novelty, but there was no other way to get around Paris now except for bicycles, decrepit old horse carriages, and queer bicycle-taxis like rickshaws. The library task was simple, and the comtesse was enchanted with her speed and ready grasp.

Natalie had mixed feelings about the strange old woman. Her literary talk was bright, her run of anecdotes about famous people tartly amusing; and she was an impressive Shakespeare scholar. Her political and social opinions, however, were hard to take. France had lost the war, she averred, for three reasons; Herbert Hoover’s moratorium on German war reparations, the weakening of France by the socialist Front Populaire, and the treachery of the British in running away at Dunkirk. France had been misled by the English and her own stupid politicians into attacking Germany (Natalie wondered whether to believe her ears at that remark). Still, if the French army had only listened to her husband and massed its tank forces in armored divisions, instead of scattering them piecemeal among the infantry, an armored counterstroke in Belgium could have cut off the panzer columns in their dash to the sea, and won the war then and there.

She never troubled to coordinate or justify her opinions and judgments; she just let them off like firecrackers. Pierre Laval was the misunderstood savior of France. Charles de Gaulle was a posturing charlatan, and his statement, “France has lost a battle, not a war,” was irresponsible rubbish. The Resistance was a riffraff of communists and bohemians, preying on their fellow Frenchmen and bringing reprisals on them without hurting the Germans.
As to the occupation, despite its austerities, there was something to be said for it. The theatre was much more wholesome now, offering classics and clean comedies, not the sexy farces and depraved boulevardier dramas of other days; and the concerts were more enjoyable without all the horrid modern dissonance which nobody really understood.