War and Remembrance (172 page)

OCTOBER
4.

The fourth transport since the filming ended is now loading. I have just come from the Hamburg barracks, where I said my last good-bye to Yuri, Joshua, and Jan. That is the end of my Theresienstadt Talmud class.

We stayed up all night in the library, studying by candlelight until dawn broke. The boys had packed their few belongings, and they wanted to learn to the last. A strange and abstruse topic we had reached, too: the
metmitzva,
the unidentified body found in the fields, whose burial is a strict duty to all. The Talmud drives to a dramatic extreme to make the point. A high priest, enjoined by special laws of ritual purity against contact with a corpse, is forbidden to bury even his own father or mother. So is a man under Nazirite vows. Yet a high priest who has taken a Nazirite vow — thus being doubly restricted — is commanded to bury a
met-mitzva
with his own hands! Such is the Jewish regard for human dignity, even in death. The voice of the Talmud speaks across two thousand years to teach my boys, as its last word to them, the gulf between ourselves and the Germans.

Joshua, the brightest of the three remaining lads, asked abruptly as I closed the old volume, “Rebbe, are we all going to be gassed?”

That yanked me back to the present! The rumors are rife in the ghetto now, though few people are tough-minded enough to face up to them. Thank God I was able to answer, “No. You’re going to join your father, Joshua — and you, Yuri and Jan, your older brothers — at a construction project near Dresden. That’s what we in the council have been informed, and that’s what I believe.”

Their faces shone as though I had set them free from prison. They were high-spirited still at the barracks, with the transport numbers around their necks, and I could see that they were cheering up other people.

Was I deceiving them, as well as myself? The Zossen construction project outside Berlin — temporary government huts — is a fact. The workers from Theresienstadt and their families are being very well treated there. This labor project in the Dresden area, Rahm has firmly assured the council, is the same sort of thing. Zucker heads the draft; an able man, an old Prague Zionist and council member, very supple at handling the Germans.

The pessimists in the council, who tend to be Zionists and long-term ghetto inmates, don’t believe Rahm at all. The draft of five thousand able-bodied men, they say, denudes us of the hands needed for an uprising, should the SS decide to liquidate the ghetto. There have been uprisings in other ghettos; we hear the reports. When Eppstein was arrested after the filming stopped, and the order came down for this huge labor draft, the false security of the Beautification and the movie foolishness dissolved, and the council was plunged in dismay. We had had no transport order in almost five months. I heard mutinous mutterings around the table that astonished me, and there were Zionist meetings about an uprising to which I was not invited. But the draft went off on schedule in three transports, with no disturbance.

This fourth transport is extremely worrisome. True, they are the relatives
of the construction workers who have gone. But last week the SS permitted relatives to volunteer to go along, and about a thousand did. These are being railroaded out willy-nilly. The one shred of reassurance is that the four shipments do make up one group, the big labor draft and its families. Rahm explains that it is the policy to keep families together. This may be a soothing lie; conceivably it could still be true.

The endless talk in the council about our probable fate comes down to two opposed views: (1) Despite the lull in the war, the Germans have lost, and they know it; and we can expect a gradual softening of our SS bosses as they start thinking of self-preservation. (2) The lust of the Germans to murder all the Jews of Europe will only be aggravated by looming defeat; they will rush to complete this “triumph” if they can gain no other.

I hesitate between the two probabilities. One is sensible, the other insane. The Germans have both faces.

Natalie is a total pessimist. She is recovering much of her old toughness, now that Louis is gone and safe; eating the worst slops voraciously, arid gaining weight and strength every day. She means to survive, she says, and find Louis; and if transported, she intends to be strong enough to survive as a laborer.

OCTOBER
5.

A fifth transport was ordered
two hours
after the fourth left; a random selection of eleven hundred people. No explanation this time, nothing to do with the Dresden construction project. Many families will have to be broken up. Large numbers of the sick, and women with small children, will go. Natalie probably would have gone, if Louis were still here. The Germans simply lied again.

I will not yield to despair. Despite the strange lull on the battlefronts, Hitler’s Reich is falling. The civilized world can yet smash into this lunatic enclave of Nazi Europe in time to save our remnant. Like Natalie, I want to live. I want to tell this story.

If I do not, these scrawls will speak for me in a distant time.

T
HE
wind was high, the swells huge, as Battleship Division Seven stood in to Ulithi atoll with the
Iowa
in the van, and the
New Jersey
in column astern flying Halsey’s flag. When the battleships pitched, gray water broke clear over their massive forecastles, and the dipping long guns vanished in spray. The screening destroyers were bobbing in and out of sight on the wind-streaked black swells of the typhoon’s aftermath. Blue patches were just starting to show in the overcast after the storm.

Ye gods, Victor Henry was thinking — as the warm sticky wind, sweeping salt spray all the way up to the
Iowa’s
flag bridge, wetted his face — how I love this sight! Since the newsreels of his boyhood days showing dreadnoughts plowing the seas, battleships under way had always stirred him like martial music. Now these were
his
ships, more grand and strong than any he had ever served in. The accuracy of the radar-controlled main batteries, in the first gunnery exercises he had ordered, astounded him. The barrage thrown up by the bristling AA made a show like the victory blaze over Moscow. Halsey’s staff in its happy-go-lucky fashion had not yet put out the Leyte operation order, but Pug Henry was convinced that this landing in the Philippines meant a fleet battle. Avenging the
Northampton
with the guns of the
Iowa
and the
New Jersey
was a grimly pleasing prospect.

Signal flags ran snapping and fluttering up the halyards, ordered by Pug’s chief of staff:
Take formation to enter channel.
Responding flags showed on the
New Jersey
and the carriers and destroyers. The task group smoothly reshuffled its stations. Pug had one reservation about his new life; as he had told Pamela, there wasn’t enough to do. Paperwork could keep him as busy as he pleased, but in fact his staff — nearly all reserves, but good men — and his chief of staff had things under control. His function was close to ceremonial, and would continue so until BatDivSeven got into a fight.

He could not even explore the
Iowa
much. At sea he had an ingrained busybody instinct, and he yearned to nose around the engine spaces, the turrets, the magazines, the machine shops, even the crew’s quarters of this gargantuan vessel; but it would look like snooping on the work of the
Iowa’s
captain and exec. He had missed out on commanding one of these engineering
marvels, and his two stars had lifted him forever beyond the satisfying dirty work of seagoing, into airy spotless flag quarters.

As the
Iowa
steamed up Mugai channel, Pug had his eye out for submarines; he had not seen Byron or heard from him in months. Fleet carriers, new fast battleships, cruisers, destroyers, minesweepers, support vessels, were awesomely arrayed in this lagoon ten thousand miles from home; one could scarcely see the palms and coral beaches of the atoll for the warships. But no subs. Not unusual; Saipan was their forward base now. The dispatch that his flag lieutenant brought him as the anchor rattled down was therefore a disquieting surprise.

FROM
:
CO BARRACUDA

TO
:
COMBATDIV SEVEN

RESPECTFULLY REQUEST PERMISSION CALL ON YOU
.

It had come in on the harbor circuit. The submarine was berthed in the southern anchorage, the flag lieutenant said, blocked from view by nests of LSTs.

But why the commanding officer, Pug wondered? Byron was the exec. Was he ill? In trouble? Off the
Barracuda?
Pug uneasily scrawled a reply.

FROM
:
COMBATDIV SEVEN

TO
:
CO BARRACUDA

MY BARGE WILL FETCH YOU 1700 DINNER MY QUARTERS

For Halsey’s command conference, deferred by the typhoon sortie, long black barges fluttering white-starred blue flags came bouncing through the choppy waters to the
New Jersey.
Soon admirals in starched open-collared khakis ranged the long green table of Halsey’s quarters. Pug had never seen so many starred collar pins and flag officers’ faces in one room. There was still no operation order. Halsey’s chief of staff, standing with a pointer at a big Pacific chart, described the forthcoming strikes at Luzon, Okinawa, and Formosa, intended to squelch land-based air interference with MacArthur’s landing. Then Halsey, though looking very worn and aged, talked zestfully about the operation. The Nips could hardly stand by idly while MacArthur recaptured the Philippines. They might well hit back with everything they had. That would be the chance to make a killing, to annihilate the Imperial Fleet once for all; the chance Ray Spruance had passed up at Saipan.

His pouchy eyes glinting, Halsey read aloud from Nimitz’s directive. He was ordered to cover and support the forces under MacArthur “
in order to assist in the seizure and occupation of all objectives in the Central Philippines.”
That much he intoned in a level voice. Then giving the assembled admirals an amused yet menacing glare, he grated slow words:
“In case opportunity for destruction of major portion of the enemy fleet is offered or can be created, SUCH DESTRUCTION BECOMES THE PRIMARY TASK.”

That was the sentence, he said, that had been missing from Ray Spruance’s directive for Saipan. Getting it into his own orders for Leyte had been a job, but there it was. So everybody at the conference now knew what the Third Fleet was going to Leyte for; to destroy the Japanese navy, once the invasion forced it out of hiding.

At the eager exclamations of approval around the table, the old warrior grinned with tired happiness. The talk moved to routine details of the air strikes. The chief of staff mentioned that some newspapermen flown out by Cincpac to observe the Third Fleet in action would be berthed in the
Iowa
as guests of ComBatDiv Seven.

Amused glances all turned on Pug Henry, who blurted, “Oh, Christ, no! I’d rather have a bunch of women aboard.”

Halsey wagged gray thick eyebrows. “Ha! Who wouldn’t?”

Barks of laughter.

“Admiral, I mean old, bent, toothless women, with skin ailments.”

“Of course, Pug. We can’t be all that fussy out here.”

The conference broke up in ribald merriment.

When Pug returned to the
Iowa
his chief of staff told him that the newspapermen were already aboard, berthed in wardroom country. “Just keep them away from me,” Pug growled.

“The fact is,” said the chief of staff, a pleasant and able captain of the class of ‘24, with thick prematurely white hair, “they’ve already asked for a press conference with you.”

Pug used obscenity sparely, but he let fly at the chief of staff, who departed fast.

Mail lay on the desk in two baskets: official, stacked high as as usual, and a small personal pile. He always looked first for Pamela’s letters. There was one, promisingly thick. Pulling it out, he saw a small pink envelope, with the address on the back that still jarred him:

MRS
.
HARRISON PETERS

1417
FOXHALL ROAD

WASHINGTON
,
D.C
.

The letter was brisk. The longer Hack lived in the Foxhall Road house, Rhoda wrote, the better he liked it. In fact, he wanted to buy it. She knew Pug had never really been fond of the place. It was a messy thing, since the divorce settlement had given her rent-free occupancy, but left the house in his name until she felt like disposing of it. If Pug would just write to his lawyer and suggest a sale price, the “legal beagles” could get started. Rhoda reported that Janice was seeing a lot of a law school instructor, and that Vic was doing admirably in nursery school.

Madeline has been a great comfort, too. She actually writes every month or so, cheering me up. She seems to love New Mexico. I got one lovely letter from
Byron at last. I wondered and wondered how he would take it. Frankly I sort of
cringed.
He doesn’t understand, any more than I do, exactly, but he wished me and Hack happiness. He said that to him I would always be just Mom, no matter what. Couldn’t be sweeter. Sooner or later you’ll see him out there. When you explain, don’t be too hard on me. The whole thing’s been hard enough. However, I am perfectly happy.