War and Remembrance (178 page)

The date-time of the dispatch was 2210; ten minutes past ten at night, October 24, 1944.

(from Aaron Jastrow’s manuscript)

OCTOBER
24, 1944.

Natalie and I have received our deportation notices. We leave in the eleventh transport on October 28. Appeal is quite useless. Nobody gets excused from these October transports.

Theresienstadt is a desolate and terrible scene. Perhaps twelve thousand people are left. In less than a month since the filming ended, the trains have taken away almost twenty thousand, all under sixty-five. Above that age one is still safe, unless, as in my case, one has offended. The young, the strong, the able, the good-looking, are gone. The aged remnants of a jammed and bustling ghetto creep about the nearly empty streets, freezing, frightened, and starving. The town’s institutions and services have broken down. There is no hot food, not even the wretched slops of former days. No cooks are left. Garbage piles up, for there is nobody to remove it. In empty barracks abandoned clothes, books, carpets, and pictures are strewn around. There is nobody to clean up, and nobody is interested in looting. The hospitals are empty, for all the sick were transported. Everywhere there is the smell of decay, abandonment, and rot.

The gimcrackery of the Beautification — the quaint signposts, the shop fronts, the bandstand, the cafés, the children’s pavilion — is falling apart in the harsh weather, the colors fading, the paint peeling. Despite dire posted penalties, the old people pilfer the planks of these Potemkin constructions for firewood. There is no music. Hardly a child is left, except for those of mixed couples, war veterans, municipal officials, and
Prominente.
But this eleventh transport, a big one of more than two thousand souls, is cutting like a scythe into the ranks of privilege. There will be plenty of children in it.

My offense was refusal to cooperate. The new High Elder, who replaced the pathetic, mysteriously vanished Eppstein at the end of September, is a certain Dr. Murmelstein of Vienna, a former rabbi and university lecturer. I am sure that the SS put him up to designating me as his chief deputy. The motive must have been window dressing again, in case of a sudden end to the war. It would look good for them, these twisted minds must calculate, if an American Jew would be on hand as a high official to greet the
conquerors. Not that the war looks to be ending. East and west it appears to have bogged down for the winter, and the crimes of the Germans will go on for many more months unchecked, perhaps multiplying because this is their last chance to commit them.

Murmelstein worked on me for hours with a wearisome flood of flattery and argument. To cut it off, I said I would think about it. Natalie’s reaction that night was the same as mine. I pointed out to her that if I were transported for refusing, she would probably share my fate. “Do as you please,” she said, “but don’t accept it on my account.”

When I gave Murmelstein my answer next day, I had to endure the whole rigmarole again, ending in threats, grovelling, beseeching, and real tears. No doubt he feared the displeasure of his masters upon conveying my refusal. A sketch of this man and how he thinks is worth preserving in these last sheets. He is a type. There have surely been Murmelsteins all over Europe. His theme in brief is that the Germans as direct overseers are far more brutal and murderous than the Jewish officials who are willing to interpose themselves as buffers, carry out their orders, absorb their anger at delays, exemptions, and evasions, endure the hatred and contempt of the Jews, and work unceasingly at reducing hardships and saving lives.

I retorted that even if this had once been so in Theresienstadt, the officials now were doing nothing but organizing and sending off the transports, and that I would not be part of it. I refrained from pointing out that such officials are saving their skins, or at least postponing their fates, by designating fellow Jews for death. Epicurus said that everything in this world can be taken by two handles. I don’t condemn Murmelstein. There may be a color of truth in his argument that things would be worse if Jews like him did not administer the orders of the Germans, and try to soften the impact. Nevertheless, I will not do it. I knew when I refused that I risked torture, but I was not going to yield.

Among his blandishments was an appeal to me as between fellow scholars. Our fields overlap, for he taught ancient Jewish history at Vienna University. I have heard him lecture here in the ghetto, and don’t think much of his scholarship. He cited Flavius Josephus, a figure he clings to in his desperate self-justification; a man hated by the Jews as a collaborationist and a tool of the Romans, whose whole aim was to benefit his people. History’s verdict on Josephus is equivocal at best. The Murmelsteins will not come out that well.

After warning me with popping eyes and a skull-like expression of the SS anger that hung over me, he broke down and wept. He was not acting, or else he is very good at it, for the tears really gushed. His burdens were overpowering, he wailed. He respected me more than almost anybody in the ghetto. As an American, at this stage of the war, I had unusual power to intercede
with the Germans and do good. He was ready to go down on his knees to change my mind, save me from going to the Little Fortress, and get me to share his frightful responsibilities. He could no longer carry on alone.

I told him he would have to carry on without me, and that as to my own fate, I would risk anything my frail body could still endure. So I left him, shaking his head and drying his eyes. That was almost three weeks ago. I trembled with fear for days. I have not become any braver, but there are really things worse than pain, worse than dying; not to mention that, in the grip of the Germans, a Jew probably has no way in the long run of escaping pain or death, unless the outside world rescues him. He may as well do what is right.

I heard nothing further until the blow fell today. I feel sure that Murmelstein is not to blame. Of course he countersigned the orders, as he does for all the transportees. But I was simply on the SS list. Not being able to use me, or not interested in forcing me, as they were for the Red Cross visit, they are getting rid of me. Unless they can have me on their side, as a tool of theirs and therefore an accomplice of sorts, I am not one they want to have around when the Americans arrive. Or the Russians, either.

The notices came in the morning, just before Natalie went off to the mica factory. The thing has become commonplace, and we both half-expected it. I offered to go to Murmelstein and say I had reconsidered. I meant it. I pointed out that she has her son to live for, and that though we have had no word in months (all communication with the outside has long since broken down) she has every reason to hope that he is all right, and that when this long nightmare ends, if she can manage to survive, she will find him.

She said sombrely, her face drawn and somewhat scared — and I want to record this little exchange before I seal away these pages — “I don’t want you to protect me by sending Jews off in trains.”

“Natalie, that is how I talked to Murmelstein. But you and I know that the transports will go anyway.”

“Not by your hand, though.”

I was moved. I said,
“Ye-horeg v’al ya-harog.
“

She has learned some Hebrew from me and from the Zionists, but not much. She looked puzzled. I explained, “It’s from the Talmud. There are three things a Jew must die rather than do under compulsion, and that’s one of them.
Let yourself be killed, but do not kill.”

“I call that common decency.”

“According to Hillel the whole Torah is only common decency.”

“What are the other two things a Jew must die rather than do?”

“Worship of false gods, and forbidden sexual conduct.”

She looked thoughtful, then smiled at me like the Mona Lisa, and went off to the mica factory.

I, Aaron Jastrow the Jew, began this record of a journey aboard a vessel docked in Naples harbor, in December 1941. It was bound for Palestine. My niece and I left that vessel before it sailed and were interned in Siena. We escaped from Fascist Italy through the help of the underground, intending to return to America via Portugal. Mischances and misjudgments brought us to Theresienstadt.

Here I have seen German barbarism and duplicity with my own eyes, and have tried to record the truth in bald hurried language. I have not recorded one one-thousandth of the daily agony, brutality, and degradation I have witnessed. Yet Theresienstadt is a “model ghetto.” The accounts I have heard of what the Germans are doing in camps like Oswiecim exceed all human experience. Words break down as a means of describing them. So, in writing what I have heard, I have put down the plainest possible words that come to mind. The Thucydides who will tell this story so that the world can picture, believe, and remember may not be born for centuries. Or if he lives now, I am not he.

I am going to my death. I have heard that strong young people are spared to work in Oswiecim, so my niece may survive. I am in my sixty-eighth year, and will not lack much of the Biblical threescore-and-ten. Millions of Jews, I now believe, have already perished at German hands with half or less than half of their lives lived. A million or more of these must have been little children.

The world will be a long time fathoming this fact about human nature, this new fact, the thing the Germans have done. These scribbled sheets are a miserable fragment of testimony to the truth. Such records will be found all over Europe when the National Socialist curse passes.

I was a man of nimble Talmudic wit, insight quick rather than profound, with a literary gift graceful rather than powerful. I was at my best in my youth, a prodigy. My parents took me from Poland to America. I expended my gifts there in pleasing the Gentiles. I became an apostate. I dropped my Jewishness outside and inside, and strove only to be like other people, and to be accepted by them. In this I was successful. This period of my life stretched from my sixteenth year, when I arrived in New York, to my sixty-sixth year, when I arrived in Theresienstadt. Here under the Germans I resumed my Jewishness because they forced me to.

I have been in Theresienstadt about a year. I value this year more than all my fifty-one years of
hefkerut,
of being like others. Degraded, hungry, oppressed, beaten, frightened, I have found myself, my God, and my self-respect
here. I am terribly afraid of dying. I am bowed to the ground by the tragedy of my people. But I have experienced a strange bitter happiness in Theresienstadt that I missed as an American professor and as a fashionable author living in a Tuscan villa. I have been myself. I have taught bright-eyed, sharp-minded Jewish boys the Talmud. They are gone. I do not know whether one of them still lives. But the words of the Talmud lived on our lips and burned in our minds. I was born to carry that flame. The world has greatly changed, and the change was too much for me, until I came to Theresienstadt. Here I mastered the change, and returned to myself. Now I will return to Oswiecim, where I studied in the yeshiva and where I abandoned the Talmud, and there the Jew’s Journey will end. I am ready.

There is such a world still to write about Theresienstadt! And ah, if a good angel would but give me a year to tell my story from my early days! But these scattered notes, much more than anything else I have written, must serve as the mark over the emptiness that will be my grave.

Earth, cover not their blood!

Aaron Jastrow

October 24, 1944

Theresienstadt