War and Remembrance (171 page)

And still no word about Louis. Nothing. He disappeared into the hospital a month ago yesterday. Natalie puts in her day’s work at the mica factory, then plods to the children’s pavilion for film rehearsals. She does not eat, she never mentions Louis, and she looks gaunt and haunted. A few days ago in desperation she went to the hospital and demanded to talk to the doctor who wrote Louis’s death certificate. She was very roughly turned away.

AUGUST
18.

Filming began. I have been rewriting the half-witted script night and day with four collaborators, under the interminable meddling of the dullard Rahm. No time to breathe, but thank God still for the film. Eisenhower’s
armies have swarmed out over France and surrounded the German armies at a place called Falaise. The BBC talks of a “western Stalingrad.” The Allies have now landed in southern France, too, and the Germans there are retreating in panic. “The south of France is going up in flames,” says the Free French radio, and the Russians have reached the Vistula. They are in Praga, across the river from Warsaw, in great force. The Poles are rising against the Germans. In Warsaw there is bloody street fighting. One’s hopes brighten and brighten.

AUGUST
30.

Louis is all right! Paris is liberated!

This is the brightest day in all my years.

During a filming session in the library today, a Czech cameraman — I honestly don’t know which one, it happened so fast, in the glare of the klieg lights — shoved into my pocket an off-focus photograph of Berel and the boy. They stand by a haystack in strong sunlight. Louis looks plump and well. As I write these words, Natalie sits opposite me, still weeping with joy over the picture.

The good news from the battlefields is becoming a cataract. The American armies moved so fast across France that they captured Paris undamaged. The Germans simply pulled out and fled. Rumania has suddenly changed sides, and declared war on Germany. This caught the Nazi regime by surprise, it seems. Between the invading Red Army and the Rumanian turncoat forces, so says the Moscow radio, the Germans are snared in a colossal Balkan entrapment. They are being shattered on all fronts, no doubt of that. The Allied air bombing, complains the
Völkischer Beobachter,
is the most horrible and remorseless in history. How pleasant! The Goebbels editorials take on a strident tone of
GötterdÄmmerung.
This war can end at any moment.

SEPTEMBER
10.

How far off can the end be now? Bulgaria has declared war on Germany. Eisenhower’s armies are driving for the Rhine, scarcely opposed by the fleeing Wehrmacht. The uprising in Warsaw goes on. Somehow the Russians have not managed to cross the Vistula to help the Poles. Of course those lightning advances strained their supply lines. No doubt that is the reason for the lull.

Now Rahm, after much meddling and dawdling, has abruptly ordered the film finished. No explanation. I can think of only one. When the Soviets captured Lublin, they overran a vast concentration camp for Jews there called Maidanek. They found gas chambers, crematoriums, mass graves, thousands and thousands of living skeletons, and countless corpses lying
about, all exactly as Berel described Oswiecim. The Russians brought in thirty Western correspondents to see the horror for themselves. The details are being told and retold on Radio Moscow. The worst reports and rumors turn out to have been plain fact.

So the gruesome German game is up. “The Führer Grants the Jews a Town,” an idyllic documentary of the Paradise Ghetto almost two hours long, will probably never be shown. After the Lublin exposure the film is a self-evident, clumsy, hopeless fabrication. Our reprieve expires in five days. Then what? Nobody knows yet.

It is very strange. All these crashing war developments are for us distant thunder. We read words on paper, or we hear whispers of what was said on some foreign radio. Theresienstadt itself remains a stagnant little prison town where every sticky summer day is the same; a noisome ghetto jammed with undernourished, sick, scared people; faintly animated by the filming nonsense, but otherwise quiet as a morgue.

From
World Solcanst

The September Miracle

During August our doom appeared to some giddy Western journalists “a question of days.” The jaws of the east-west vise had closed to the Vistula and the Meuse. On the southern fronts the Anglo-Americans were driving up the Rhone valley almost unchecked, and ascending the Italian boot far north of Rome; and the Russians, wheeling in a great mass through our wide-open southern flank in the treacherous Balkans, had arrived at the Danube. On nearly every active front large numbers of our forces were either retreating or encircled.

Later Hitler himself called August 15 “the worst day of my life.” That was the day the Allies landed in the south of France, and in the north General von Kluge disappeared into the Falaise pocket. Pathologically suspicious after July 20, the Führer feared that Kluge might have vanished to negotiate; the situation actually looked that bad at Headquarters. But the gallant Kluge soon managed to restore communications with us. Shortly afterward he killed himself; whether in despair over Hitler’s stupid commands which were destroying his army, or because he was really involved in the bomb plot, I do not know. In August, I confess, the thought of suicide more than once crossed my own mind.

But September passed and no enemy soldier had yet set foot on German soil!

After Rundstedt’s forces brilliantly repulsed Montgomery’s foolhardy
narrow thrust with airborne troops at Arnhem, trying to flank the Westwall through Holland, Eisenhower’s rush toward the Rhine faded away. Gas tanks were empty, generals at loggerheads, strength dispersed from the Low Countries to the Alps. The Russians were halted along the Vistula, coping with our counterattacks, while across the river the Waffen SS levelled Warsaw with fire and explosives to wipe out the uprising. The southern drives against us were all halted. Under the worst pounding and against the worst odds of modern history, Germany stood bloodied and defiant, holding its ring of foes at bay.

If the lone British stand in 1940 merits praise, why not this heroic rebound of the Wehrmacht in September 1944?

The analytical elements of the “September miracle” are clear. West and east, our enemies outran their supplies in their spectacular and speedy advances; while German discipline hardened and total mobilization took place, under the threat to our sacred soil. Nor can one overlook the letdown in the invaders’ fighting morale, especially in the west: the euphoric feeling of “well, we’ve won the war, we’ll be home by Christmas,” induced by long advances, the fall of Paris, and the attempt on Hitler’s life. Also, Hitler’s one-sided insistence on hardening up the French ports was at last paying some dividends. Eisenhower had two million men ashore, but through the distant bottlenecks of Cherbourg and an artificial harbor he could not supply an all-out assault on the Westwall. He needed Antwerp, and we still dominated the Scheldt estuary.

In postwar military writings there is much armchair scoffing at Eisenhower. These authors dwell on map distances and troop counts, overlooking the sweaty, gritty, complex logistics that decide modern war. Eisenhower was the typical American military man, a plodder in the field but something of a genius in organization and supply. His caution and broad-front strategy were not unsound, if scarcely Napoleonic. We were still a very dangerous foe, and he deserves credit for resisting specious gambles in September.

Advocates of both Montgomery and Patton argue that given enough gasoline, each of their heroes could have thrust on to Berlin and quickly ended the war. General Blumentritt told British interrogators that Montgomery could certainly have done it. I shall demonstrate in my operational analysis the decisive adverse factors. Briefly, the flanks of such a narrow thrust on extended supply lines would have invited a disastrous repulse, a much greater Arnhem. I knew Blumentritt well, and I doubt that those were his professional views. He was telling his conquerors what they wanted to hear. Given the port facilities and communications available to Eisenhower, the thing could not be done. The consumption rate of his troops was quite shocking: seven hundred tons per division per day! A German division did its fighting on less than two hundred tons a day.

Eisenhower could not afford a massive risk and setback; not with hundreds of American correspondents breathing down his neck, and a presidential election two months away. The enemy coalition was unstable enough. All through the summer campaign the Anglo-Americans pulled and tugged at bad cross-purposes. And the Russian failure to aid the Warsaw uprising — and what was worse, their refusal to allow the Anglo-Americans even to send airborne assistance — already planted the poison of the Polish question, which would in time destroy the strange alliance of capitalists and Bolsheviks.

Unfortunately we lacked the punch to exploit these strains among our foes. Hitler’s mulish “stand or die” policy on the battlefield had bled us too much. In the three colossal summer defeats — Bagration, the Balkans, and western France — and a score of smaller entrapments, one million five hundred thousand German front-line troops had been killed, captured, cut off, or routed in disorder without arms. Had these battle-hardened forces fought an elastic defense instead, harrying our foes’ advance while withdrawing in good order to the Fatherland, we might well have salvaged something from the war.

As it was, the “September miracle” could not avert
Finis Germaniae,
it could only postpone the doom. Yet even as he went down, Hitler retained the hypnotic power to draw suicidal reserves of nervous energy and fighting heart from Germany. Already at the end of August he had issued his startling directive for the Ardennes counterattack. With heavy hearts we were making plans and issuing preliminary orders at Headquarters. However badly the man was failing, his feral willpower was not to be opposed.

TRANSLATOR
’
S NOTE
:
This Ardennes operation became the “Battle of the Bulge.” It is interesting that Roon commends Eisenhower’s cautious broad-front strategy, which many authorities condemn. The true judgment would lie in unravelling very complicated logistical statistics of Overlord. Fortune favors the bold, but not when they are out of gas and bullets. The strange Red Army inaction while Warsaw was destroyed by the Germans in plain sight across the river remains controversial. Some say that from Stalin’s viewpoint the wrong Poles were leading the uprising. The Russians maintain that they had reached the limit of their supplies, and that the Poles did not bother to coordinate their uprising with Red Army plans.
—
V.H.

From
A Jew’s Journey