War and Remembrance (150 page)

The Jews who run the Transport Section are a sad harried lot. They are their brothers’ keepers, saviors, and executioners. It is a ghetto joke that in the end Theresienstadt will shrink to the commander and the Transport Section. Everybody smiles on them; but they know they are cursed and despised. They have life-and-death power they never wanted. They are Sonderkommando clerks, disposing of Jews’ living bodies with pens and rubber stamps.

Are they to blame? Many desperate Jews stand ready to seize their places. Some of these transport bureaucrats belong to the communist or Zionist undergrounds, spending their nights in vain plots for uprisings. Some never think of anything but their own skins. A few brave ones try to correct
the worst hardships. Some wretched ones show favoritism, take bribes, satisfy grudges.

In this spectrum of human nature blasted by German cruelty, what man can say where he would have fit? What man who was not there can judge the
JudenrÄte,
the Central Secretariats, and the Transport Sections?
“God pardons the coerced,”
says an ancient Jewish proverb, distilled from bitter millennia.

A parody of German thoroughness, the Central Secretariat reaches everywhere with its gray summons cards. In half a dozen different catalogue systems, Jews are indexed and cross-indexed by other Jews. Wherever a body can lie down for the night, that space is catalogued, with the name of the body occupying it. Each day a roll call of the town is taken. The dead and the transported are neatly crossed off the cards. Newcomers upon arrival are indexed as they are robbed. One can get out of the card catalogues only by dying or “going east.”

The real power in Theresienstadt under the SS is not Eppstein, or the Board of Three, or the Council of Elders; it is the Central Secretariat. Yet the Secretariat is nobody you can talk to. It is friends, neighbors, relatives, or just other Jews. It is a Bureau, bureaucratically carrying out the orders of the Germans. The Complaint Section of the Secretariat, a row of sour Jewish faces behind desks, is an impotent mockery; but it provides a lot of jobs. The Secretariat is monstrously overstaffed because it has been a refuge. Yet this time the gray cards strike even inside the Secretariat. The monster is starting to eat its own bowels.

The strangest thing is that a few people actually apply to go in each transport. In a previous shipment their spouses, parents, or children have gone. They are lonesome. Theresienstadt is not such a bed of roses that they should want to stay on at all costs. So they will brave the unknown, hoping to find their loved ones in the east. Some have received letters and postcards, so they know that those they seek are at least still alive. Even from the mica factory, the most reliable refuge in Theresienstadt, several women have volunteered and gone east. That is one request about which the Germans are invariably gracious.

When Natalie meets Udam outside the children’s home after work he stuns her by showing her his gray card. He has already been to the Secretariat. He knows Eppstein’s two deputies. The head of the transport section is an old Zionist pal from Prague. The bank manager has intervened. Nothing helps. Perhaps the SS got irked by his performances. Anyway, it is all finished. Tonight they give their last show. At six in the morning he must collect his daughter and go to the depot.

Her first reaction is cold fright. She too has been performing; has a gray
card come to her apartment during the day? Seeing the look on her face, Udam tells her he has inquired, and there is no summons for her. She and Jastrow have the highest exempt classification. If nobody else is here when “the cousins arrive from the east and the west,” they will be. He has some new topical jokes for Frost-Cuckoo Land, and they may as well rehearse, and make this last show a good one.

She lays a hand on his arm as he starts inside, and suggests that they call it off. Jastrow’s audience will be small and in no mood to laugh. Maybe nobody will come. Aaron’s lecture subject, “Heroes of the
Iliad,”
is heavily academic, and hardly inspiring or cheering. Aaron requested the puppet show because he has never seen it, but Natalie suspects that professorial vanity dies hard, and that he really wants to draw an audience. It is his first lecture since he became an Elder, and he must know that he is unpopular.

Udam won’t hear of cancelling. Why waste good jokes? They go in to the children. Louis greets her with the usual wild joy, in the great moment of his day. During their meal, Udam talks optimistically about “the east.” How much worse can it be, after all, than Theresienstadt? His wife’s postcards, coming about once a month, have been short but reassuring. He shows Natalie the last card, dated only two weeks ago.

Birkenau, Camp II-B

My dearest

Everything is all right. I hope Martha is well. I miss you both. Much snow here.

Love,

Hilda

“Birkenau?” Natalie asks. “Where is that?”

“Poland, outside Oswiecim. It’s just a village. The Jews work in big German factories around there, and get plenty of food.”

Udam’s tone does not match his words. Natalie passed through Oswiecim with Byron years ago, on the way to the wedding of Berel’s son in Medzice. She barely remembers it as a flat dull railroad town. There is remarkably little talk in the ghetto about “the east,” the camps there, and what happens there; like death, like cancer, like the executions in the Little Fortress, these are shunned topics. Nevertheless, the word
“Oswiecim”
vibrates with horror. Natalie does not press Udam. She does not want to hear any more.

They rehearse in the basement, while Louis romps with the playmate he will not see after tonight. Udam’s new jokes are pallid, except for the touch about the Persian slave girl. The Frost-Cuckoo minister has brought her for the king’s pleasure. She comes in, a veiled waggling female puppet. Natalie puts on a husky sexy voice for the billing and cooing she does with
the amorous king. He asks her name. She is coy and reluctant. He teases it out of her. “Well, I’m named after my home town.” “And that is?” She giggles. “Tee-hee. Tehran.” The king shrieks, the icicles fall off his nose — a standard trick Natalie has worked up — and he chases her off the stage with a club. That will go well. Reports of the Tehran Conference have much cheered the ghetto.

Afterward Natalie hurries back to the new apartment, still fearing a gray card may be there. Who was safer than Udam? Who had more inside contacts? Who could have felt more protected? But she sees at once on Aaron’s face that there is no gray card; though he says nothing, merely looking up and nodding, at the quite decent desk where he is marking his lecture notes.

The luxury of these two rooms and a bath still makes Natalie uneasy. Ever since Jastrow reversed himself and accepted the post and privileges of an Elder, there has been a coldness between them. She saw Eichmann accept his refusal. He has-never explained why he changed his mind. Did his old selfish love of comfort overcome him? Being an SS tool does not seem to trouble him at all. The religiosity is the only change. He puts on phylacteries, spends a lot of time over the Talmud, and has withdrawn into a quiet frail placidity; perhaps, she thinks, to shut out her disapproval, or his own self-contempt.

Jastrow knows what she thinks. He can do nothing about it. The explanation would be too terrifying. Natalie already lives on the brink of panic; she is young, and she has the baby. Since his illness he is reconciled to dying when he must. Let her go about her business, he had decided, not knowing the worst. If the SS chooses to pounce, her scurrilous performances have already condemned her. It is now a race against time. His aim is to last, until rescue comes from the east and the west.

She tells him about Udam, and without much hope asks him to intercede. He replies drily that he has very little influence; that it is a bad business to venture prestige and position on a request likely to be refused. They hardly talk again until they set out together for the barracks where Aaron is to lecture in the loft.

A large silent audience has gathered, after all. Usually there is lively chatter before the evening’s diversion. Not tonight. They have turned out in surprising numbers, but the mood is funereal. Behind the crude lectern, off to a side, stands the curtained puppet theatre. As Natalie takes the vacant seat beside Udam, he gives her a little smile that cuts her heart.

Aaron places his notes on the lectern and looks about, stroking his beard. Softly, in a dry classroom manner, speaking slow formal German, he begins.

“It is interesting that Shakespeare seems to find the whole story of the
Iliad
contemptible. He retells it in his play,
Troilus and Cressida,
and he
puts his opinion in the mouth of Thersites, the cynical coward —
’The matter is only a cuckold and a whore.’”

This quotation Aaron Jastrow cites in English, then with a prudish little smile translates it into German.

“Now Falstaff, that other and more celebrated Shakespearean coward, thinks like Emerson that war in general is nothing but a periodic madness.
’Who hath honor? He that died o’ Wednesday.’
We suspect that Shakespeare agreed with his immortal fat man.
Troilus,
his play of the Trojan war, is not in his best tragic vein, for madness is not tragic. Madness is either funny or ghastly, and so is much war literature: either
The Good Soldier Schweik,
or
All Quiet on the Western Front.

“But the
Iliad
is epic tragedy. It is the same war story as
Troilus,
but with one crucial difference. Shakespeare has taken out the gods, whereas it is the gods who make the
Iliad
grand and terrible.

“For Homer’s Hector and Achilles are caught in a squabble of the Greek deities. The gods take sides. They come down into the dust of the battlefield to intervene. They turn aside weapons hurled straight to kill. They appear in disguises to make trouble or to pull their favorites out of jams. An honorable contest of arms becomes a mockery, a game of wits among supernatural, invisible magicians. The fighting men are mere helpless pieces of the game.”

Natalie glances over her shoulder at the listeners. No audiences like these! Famished for diversion, for light, for a shred of consolation, they hang on a literary talk in Theresienstadt, as elsewhere people do on a great concert artist’s recital, or on a gripping film.

In the same level pedantic way, Jastrow reviews the background of the
Iliad:
Paris’s awarding of the golden apple for beauty to Aphrodite; the hostilities on Olympus that ensue; the kidnapping by Paris of Helen, the world’s prettiest woman, Aphrodite’s promised reward; and the inevitable war, since she is a married Greek queen and he a Trojan prince. Splendid men on both sides, who care nothing for the cuckold, the whore, or the kidnapper, become embroiled. For them, once it is war, honor is at stake.

“But in this squalid quarrel, what gives the heroes of the
Iliad
their grandeur? Is it not their indomitable will to fight, despite the shifting and capricious meddling of the gods? To venture their lives for honor, in an unfair and unfathomable situation where bad and stupid men triumph, good and skilled men fall, and strange accidents divert and decide battles? In a purposeless, unfair, absurd battle, to fight on, fight to the death, fight like men? It is the oldest of human problems, the problem of senseless evil, dramatized on the field of battle. That is the tragedy Homer perceived and Shakespeare passed over.”

Jastrow pauses, turns a page, and looks straight at the audience, his emaciated face dead pale, his eyes large in the sunken sockets. If the audience has been silent before, it is now as quiet as so many corpses.

“The universe of the
Iliad,
in short, is a childish and despicable trap. The glory of Hector is that in such a trap he behaves so nobly that an Almighty God, if He did exist, would weep with pride and pity. Pride, that He has created out of a handful of dirt a being so grand. Pity, that in His botched universe a Hector must unjustly die, and his poor corpse be dragged in the dust. But Homer knows no Almighty God. There is Zeus, the father of the gods, but who can say what he is up to? Perhaps he is off mounting some bemused mortal girl in the disguise of her husband, or a bull, or a swan. Small wonder that Greek mythology is extinct.”

The disgusted gesture with which Jastrow turns his page surprises an uncertain laugh from the rapt audience. Thrusting his notes into his pocket, Jastrow leaves the lectern, comes forward, and stares at his listeners. His usually placid face is working. He bursts out in another voice, startling Natalie by shifting to Yiddish, in which he has never lectured before.

“All right. Now let us talk about this in our mother-language. And let us talk about an epic of our own. Satan says to God, you remember, ‘Naturally, Job is upright. Seven sons, three daughters, the wealthiest man in the land of Uz. Why not be upright? Look how it pays. A sensible universe! A fine arrangement! Job is not upright, he is just a smart Jew. The sinners are damned fools. But just take away his rewards, and see how upright he will remain!”

“’All right, take them away,’ God says. And in one day marauders carry off Job’s wealth, and a hurricane kills all his ten children. What does Job do? He goes into mourning. ‘Naked I came from the womb, naked I will return,’ he says, ‘God has given, God has taken away. Blessed be God’s name.’

“So God challenges Satan. ‘See? He remained upright. A good man.’

“ ‘Skin for skin,’ Satan answers. ‘All a man really cares about is his life. Reduce him to a skeleton — a sick, plundered, bereaved skeleton, nothing left to this proud Jew but his own rotting skin and bones —’”