War and Remembrance (168 page)

“So? What are you saying? That I’d be prudent to keep Duncan on the string? Something like that?”

“I’m saying you needn’t make up your mind. I love you, and God knows I want you, but just remember what you said in Tehran.”

“What did I say in Tehran?”

“That these very rare meetings of ours generate an illusion of romance, a wartime thing of no substance, and so on —”

“I’ll gamble the rest of my life that it’s a lie. I’ll have to tell Duncan straight off, darling. There’s no other possibility now. He won’t be surprised. Hurt, yes, damn it, and I dread that, but — oh, Christ, I hear them.” The voices of the other men sounded faintly in the house. “They weren’t at it long, were they? And we’ve arranged nothing, nothing! Pug, I’m dizzy with happiness. Call me at the Air Ministry at eight o’clock, my dear sweet love, and now for God’s sake kiss me once more.”

They kissed. “Is it possible?” Pug murmured the words, looking searchingly into her face. “Is it possible that I’m going to be happy?”

He rode back to London with Leigh-Mallory. All the while the car raced down the moonlit highway to the city, and twisted through blacked-out streets to Pug’s quarters, the air marshal said not a word. The meeting with Eisenhower clearly had not gone well. But the lack of talk was a blessing for Pug, who could dwell on the amazed supreme joy suffusing him.

When the car stopped, Leigh-Mallory spoke hoarsely and abruptly. “What you said about the Russian sense of honor interested me, Admiral. D’you think we British have a sense of honor, too?”

The emotion in his voice, his strained expression, forced Pug to collect himself fast.

“Marshal, whatever we Americans have, we learned from you.”

Leigh-Mallory shook his hand, looked him in the eye, and said, “Glad we met.”

The night before D-day. Ten o’clock.

In a lone Halifax bomber flying low over the Channel, the Jedburgh team “Maurice” was on its way. The Jeds were a small cog in the giant invasion machine. Liaison with the French Resistance was their mission; to arm and supply the maquisards and link them to the Allied attack plan. These three-man teams parachuted into France from D-day onward, had colorful adventures, did some good, had some losses. Without them the war would doubtless have been won, but the thorough Overlord plan had provided for this small detail, too.

And so it was that Leslie Slote — a Rhodes Scholar, a resigned Foreign Service officer, a man who had despised his own timidity all his life — found himself crouching in the noisy Halifax with a baby-faced aircraftsman from Yorkshire, his radio operator, and a French dentist, his contact with the Resistance; calculating, as the plane roared over moonlit water toward Brittany, his chances for living very long. A Rhodes Scholar had had to excel in sports, and he had always kept up his physical fitness. His mind was nimble. He had mastered the guerrilla crafts in a fashion: jumping, knife and rope work, silent movement, silent killing, and the rest. But to the last, to this moment when he found himself going in, it had all seemed strenuous make-believe, a simulation of Hollywood combat. Now here was the real thing. His uppermost feeling was relief, whatever the dread that was muttering underneath; the waiting at least was over. The hundred twenty-five thousand embarking troops probably felt much the same way. There were few hurrahs on D-day. Honor consisted in keeping one’s head in the convulsive maelstrom of machinery, explosives, and fire, and doing one’s assigned job unless shot or blown up.

Leslie Slote did his assigned job. The moment came, and he jumped. The opening shock of the chute was violent; and seconds later, so it seemed, the ground hit him another hard shock. Dropped too damned low by the damned RAF again; made it, anyway!

Powerful arms embraced him, even as he was unhooking the parachute. Whiskers scratched him. There was a gabble of idiomatic French, a smell of wine and garlic on heavy breaths. The dentist appeared out of the night, and the young Yorkshireman, in a mill of happy armed Frenchmen with wild faces.

I’ve done it,
thought Leslie Slote.
I want to live, and by God I’m going to.
The surge of self-confidence was like nothing he had known before. The dentist was in command. Slote carried out his first joyous order, which was to drink down a stone mug of wine. Then they set about gathering up the dropped supply containers in the peaceful fragrant meadow under a glittery moon.

{from Aaron Jastrows manuscript)

JUNE
22, 1944.

I am utterly spent from the day’s “dress rehearsal.” Tomorrow the Red Cross comes. Cleanup and painting squads are still at work under floodlights, though already the town looks far better than Baden-Baden did. The spanking new paint everywhere, the clipped lawns, the lush flower beds, the fine sports fields and children’s playgrounds, together with the artistic performances and the well-dressed Jews playacting vacationers at a happy peacetime spa, all add up to a musical comedy in the open air, utterly unreal. Not knowing what humaneness is, the Germans have worked up an elephantine parody of humaneness. It shouldn’t deceive anybody who is not determined to be deceived.

Rabbi Baeck, the wise and gentle old Berlin scholar, a sort of spiritual father of the ghetto, hopes for much from this visit. The Red Cross people will not be taken in, he is sure; they will ask searching questions and probe behind the façade; and their report will force genuine changes in Theresienstadt, and perhaps in all the German camps. He reflects the prevailing optimism. We are an unstable lot in Theresienstadt. The prison mentality, the overcrowding, the haunting fear of the Germans, the subhuman nutrition and medical care, and the nerve-wracking jumbling together of Jews from many countries with little more than the yellow star in common, all make for unrealistic gusts of mood. What with the Allied landings in France and this imminent visit from the “outside,” the mood is for the moment manic.

But I try to keep a grip on reality. The Allied invasion of Normandy has in fact bogged down. The Russians have in fact failed to attack in the east. What treachery is beyond Stalin? Has the monster decided to let a death struggle waste both sides in France, after which he can roll over all Europe at his leisure? I greatly fear so.

Today, June 22, three years ago, the Germans sprang at the Soviet Union. Today, if ever, the Russians, with their love of dramatic anniversary gestures, should have launched their Tolstoyan counterblow. No sign of it. The BBC evening bulletin was glum and vague. (BBC is always covertly monitored here and the word quickly spreads, although the penalty for listening
is death.) Radio Berlin was cock-a-hoop again, crowing that Eisenhower’s armies are trapped in the bocage and marsh country of Normandy; that Rommel will soon drive them into the sea; and that Hitler’s new “wonder weapons” will then deliver a frightful knockout to the Anglo-Americans. As for the Russians, the Germans say that they paid “with oceans of blood” for their drive in the Crimea and the Ukraine, and have now come to the end of their strength, hence their long halt. Is there any truth to that? Even the German home front cannot tolerate total nonsense in war bulletins. Unless the Russians do attack very soon, and in great force, we will yet again know the foul taste of hope soured to despair.

Oh, what a revolting farce this long day was! Some small-fry German officials from Prague stood in for the visitors. Only Rahm was in uniform. It was absolutely dreamlike to watch Haindl and the other SS thugs in ill-fitting suits, ties, and felt hats bowing and scraping to us Elders, helping us in and out of our chauffeured cars, stepping aside smilingly for Jewish women in the cafés, in the streets, or in corridors. The whole thing went off like clockwork. Concealed messenger boys, as the party progressed, ran ahead and triggered off a singing chorus, a café performance, a string quartet in a private house, a ballet workout, a children’s dance, a soccer game. Wherever we passed we saw happy, well-dressed, good looking holiday strollers smoking cigars and cigarettes. “Clockwork” is just the word. The Jews played their little happy parts with the stiffness of living dolls; and the “visitors” once past, their motions stopped, and they froze into poor seared Theresienstadt prisoners waiting for the next signal.

Three battered Red Cross parcels from Byron are piled on the floor beside me. Trucks trundled through the ghetto tonight heaped high with the packages, withheld by the Germans for months. Thus the visitors will see a ghetto swamped with Red Cross provisions. The Germans have thought of everything. From the Prague storehouses of Jewish loot they have brought a great load of finery for those inmates who will be on show. Right now I am wearing a superb suit of English serge and two gold rings. A beauty parlor has been set up for the women. Cosmetics have been distributed. Pretty Jewesses with neat yellow stars on their elegant clothes strolled today like queens on the arms of well-dressed escorts in the flower-bordered squares. Almost, I could believe I was back in peacetime Vienna or Berlin. Poor females! Despite themselves, they glowed in the brief delight of being bathed, perfumed, coiffed, decked out, and gemmed. They were as pathetic in their way as the wagonloads of dead bodies that used to pass by day and night, before all the sick were transported.

At the children’s pavilion Natalie wears a beautiful blue silk dress, and Louis, in a dark velvet suit with a lace collar, is a joy to watch at his games. The SS have fattened up the tots like Strasbourg geese. They are rotund,
red-cheeked, and full of vim, none more so than Louis. If anything can fool the visitors it will be this lovely pavilion, completed only a few days ago, charming and quaint as a dollhouse, and its enchanting little children playing on the swings and roundabout or splashing in the pool.

Natalie has just come in with the news that the Russians have attacked, after all! Two separate radio reports were picked up at midnight; an exultant BBC bulletin, and a long Czech-language broadcast from Moscow. The Soviets called the attack “our drive to crush the Hitlerite bandits in cooperation with our Allies in France.” When she told me this, I murmured the Hebrew blessing on good news. Then I asked her if she would go ahead with the plans for Louis. Who knows, I said — suddenly manic myself — but what Germany may now quickly collapse? Is the risk still worth it?

“He goes,” she said. “Nothing will change that.”

I drop my pen with poor Udam’s song running in my brain:
“Oy they’re coming, they’re coming after all! Coming from the east, coming from the west
…”

God speed them!

From
Borio Solocaust

by Armin von Roon

Bagration

On the night of June 22, 1944, the third anniversary of Barbarossa, the Russians struck at us with full fury in the east. Partisan uprisings all over White Russia derailed our troop trains and blew up bridges. Reconnaissance probes stabbed at Army Groups Center and North from the Baltic Sea to the Pripet Marshes. Next day rolling artillery barrages from perhaps a hundred thousand big guns, massed in some places wheel to wheel, turned the four-hundred-fifty-mile front into an inferno. Then rifle divisions, tank divisions, and motorized divisions advanced in hordes, under a sky dark with Soviet aircraft. No Luftwaffe fighters rose to oppose them. The Russians were attacking us with a million two hundred thousand men, five thousand tanks, and six thousand airplanes. Here with a vengeance was the other jaw of Roosevelt’s vise, grinding westward to meet the eastward thrust of Overlord.

BAGRATION! Revenge of Barbarossa!

Like us, the Soviets invoked the name of a great war leader, their hero of the Battle of Borodino, for their June 22 assault. Like us, they aimed at the speedy capture of all of White Russia, and the envelopment of the
armies stationed on that vast wooded plain. Indeed, Bagration as it unfolded on our OKW maps was a spine-chilling mirror image of Barbarossa, reflecting back in our amazed faces the military lessons we had taught the Soviets only too well.