War and Remembrance (26 page)

Suddenly the priest resumed walking. Slote had to run a few steps to get beside him. “You must understand Germany, Herr Slote.” The tone was calmer. “It is another world. We are a politically inexperienced people, we know only to follow orders from above. That is a product of our history, a protracted feudalism. We have been wavering for a century and a half between our dreamy socialist optimists, and our romantic materialistic pessimists. Between sweet visions of utopia, and brutal power theories. Basically, today, we are still caught between the liberal epicureanism of the western democracies, and the radical atheism of the eastern Bolsheviki.” The priest stretched his arms wide, as the abstract phrases rolled in a practiced way from his tongue. “And between them, a hideous gap, what a vacuum, what a void! Both these modernist humanisms propose to ignore God. We Germans know in our hearts that both these theses are equally oversimple and false. There we are right. There we are not deceived. We have been groping to put love and faith and, yes, Christ back into modern life. But we are naive, and we have been humbugged. An Antichrist has beguiled us, and with his brutish pseudoreligious nationalism he is leading us on the path to
hell. Our capacity for religious fervor and for unthinking energetic obedience is unfortunately bottomless. Hitler and National Socialism are a ghastly perversion of an honest German thirst for faith, for hope, for a sound modern metaphysics. We are drinking salt water to quench our thirst. If he is not stopped, the end will be an immeasurable cataclysm.”

Deeply stirred, as much by the ever-tightening grip of the priest’s heavy hand as by this passionate outburst, Slote said, “I believe all that, and it is well said.”

The bullet head nodded. The priest said with a simper, in a ridiculous change to a casual tone, “Do you like the cinema? I’m very partial to the films myself. It’s a frivolous misuse of time, I confess.”

“Yes, I go to films.”

“How nice. Perhaps we could go together, some day.”

Foreign Service officers were approached from time to time with offers of intelligence, and movie houses were a commonplace rendezvous. It had never before happened to Slote. Nonplussed, he sparred, “What is your name again? I’m very sorry, I should have caught it, but I didn’t.”

“I am Father Martin. Shall we count on taking in a film together, one of these days? Let me give you a call.”

After a considerable pause, Slote nodded.

What went into that small gesture? Often thereafter Leslie Slote wondered, because it shaped the rest of his days. The sense of representing America, and the feeling that America was at bottom — whatever the surface cross-currents and prejudices — compassionate; his own haunting belief that he had been a short-sighted ass in rejecting a splendid Jewish girl; an itch to conquer his own timidity, which was beginning to disgust him; an awareness that his revelation of the Minsk documents to the Associated Press, however it had harmed his career, remained a source of perverse pride; finally, as much as anything else, curiosity; these things impelled him into a new life.

Three weeks went by. This strange talk in the night faded from Slote’s mind. Then out of the blue Father Martin called. “Mr. Slote, do you like Bing Crosby? I find him so amusing. The latest Bing Crosby film is playing at the Bijou cinema, you know.”

The priest was waiting with tickets already bought. For the seven o’clock showing the house was less than full. Father Martin took an aisle seat and Slote slipped in beside him. For a half hour or so they watched Bing Crosby, dressed as a collegian, caper and swap jokes with pretty girls in very short skirts. Without a word the priest left his seat to move farther down front. Shortly a thin man in glasses came and sat down, juggling a hat, an umbrella, and a thick envelope. The hat dropped to the floor.
“Bitte,”
he
said, laying the envelope on Slote’s lap as he groped under the seat. On the other side of Slote, a pimply girl, watching Bing Crosby open-mouthed, observed none of this. The man retrieved the hat and settled down. Slote kept the envelope. When the picture ended he tucked it under his arm and left, his heart beating fast. In the twilight outside, nobody in the departing audience gave Slote a glance.

He strolled back to his flat, resisting the impulse to hurry, in fact to run. Behind locked doors and drawn shades, he pulled out of the envelope a sheaf of photostat pages, white on black; a copy of an official German document, stained on some pages with a brown slop that blurred the words. An acrid chemical smell rose from the dark sheets as he riffled them.

A rubber stamping on the top page stood out clearly, white on black —
Geheime Reichssache (National Secret).
The title of the documents was

CONFERENCE PROTOCOL

Meeting of Under Secretaries of State

Held in Gross-Wannsee, 20 January 1942

The first pages listed fifteen high government officials with orotund titles. Reinhard Heydrich, the deputy chief of the SS, had chaired their meeting in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee. Slote was just starting to sight-translate the text when his telephone rang.

“Hello. It’s Selma Ascher. Will you take me dinner?”

“Selma! God, yes!” She burst into rich laughter at his enthusiasm. “When? Where?”

Before dressing, he skimmed the document. The main topic was a transfer by railroad of large numbers of European Jews to the conquered eastern territories, for forced labor on highways. This was neither novel nor very shocking. Russian and French war prisoners were being used as slave labor. The Germans were pressing even Italians into their factories. They were harsh overlords, and harshest to the Jews, hence the road-building project. Slote wondered why the priest had been at such pains to get the material to him. He tucked the envelope under his mattress for a close reading later.

Selma picked him up in her gray Fiat two-seater. Half-hidden by a white fox collar, her face was solemn as she greeted him, her eyes bright and shy. She drove to a tiny restaurant in a side street.

“Since meeting you I’ve done two bad things for the first time in my life.” Selma clasped and unclasped her small hands on the checked tablecloth. “One of them is to ask a man to take me to dinner.”

“That’s not so bad, and I’m happy you did. What’s the other thing?”

“Far worse.” She suddenly, heartily laughed, touched her hand on his, and jerkily withdrew it.

“Selma, your hand’s cold.”

“No wonder. I’m awfully nervous.”

“But why?”

“Well — to get one thing out of the way, it wasn’t my idea to ask you to dinner last month. Papa took me by surprise. You seem not to mind a forward girl — from what you’ve said about your friend in Siena — but that’s the last thing I am. I did tell my parents I’d met you. They’d heard about you. Papa’s headed the Jewish Council here for years. It’s been an education for me,” Selma exclaimed, talking rapidly after her first halting sentences, “a real education in cynicism, to see our friendships here in Bern dwindle down with every German victory. Papa has supported the hospital, the opera, the repertory theatre, everything! We used to be a popular family. Now — well —”

“Selma, who was the priest I met at your house?”

“Father Martin? A good German. Oh, they exist. There are many, but unfortunately not enough to make a difference. Father Martin has helped Papa get many South American visas.”

“He offered me secret information on German mistreatment of the Jews.”

“He did?”

“Would his information be reliable?”

“I can’t really judge anything about a priest, even a friendly one. I’m sorry.’’ She made an agitated negative gesture with both hands, as though waving the topic away. “Things are in such a turmoil at home! I had to get out tonight. Papa’s moving his business to America. He’s just exhausted, and Mother doesn’t want him to die of grief and worry. It’s a very complicated deal, it involves trading off factories in Turkey and Brazil, and I don’t know what else, and — I’m talking my head off.”

“I’m glad you’re confiding in me. I never repeat anything.”

“Does Natalie talk so much?”

“Much more. She’s quite opinionated, and very argumentative.”

“I think we’re not really much alike.”

“I’m rapidly forgetting the resemblance.”

“Truly? Poor me. That’s the only reason you were interested in me.”

“Not once you spoke half a dozen words.”

Selma Ascher colored and turned away her head, then faced him, bridling. “The other reason, the real one, that my father is moving is that I’m going to marry an American, a lawyer in Baltimore, quite orthodox.”

“Are you — well, are you yourself actually religious? Or do you conform to your parents’ wishes?”

“I have a fine Hebrew education. I even know some Talmud, which girls aren’t supposed to learn. I’ve always been a serious student. It makes
my father happy. He and I are studying Isaiah together right now, and it’s really glorious. But as to God”— again she made the nervous negative gesture — “I grow more skeptical all the time. Where is He nowadays? How can He allow the things that are happening? I may yet become a lost soul.”

“Then what about marrying that devout young man?”

“Oh, I couldn’t possibly marry any other kind.” She chuckled at his puzzled frown. “You don’t understand that? Well, you don’t have to.”

It was now perfectly evident to Slote that there was nothing doing with this girl. They talked aimlessly until the food came. He began to look for her unattractive points, an old trick of his when trying to back off. All girls had flaws. Selma’s long drippy earrings were badly chosen. Her sense of style was deficient: prudishness and femininity were awkwardly at odds in the high-necked dress, which concealed her throat but made provocative mounds of her small breasts. Her eyebrows were heavy and unplucked. What had seemed at first remarkable freshness and innocence apparently was nothing but overprotected narrowness. He was dining with — of all things — a pious virgin! He began to feel taken in. What was the point of this dinner?

“Do you like to dance?” Selma was picking idly at her steamed fish.

“So-so,” said Slote with faint ungraciousness. “And you?”

“I dance abominably. I’ve done it so little. I would like to dance tonight.”

“By all means.” It was a way, if no very satisfying one, of taking the pious virgin in his arms.

“You’re angry at me.”

“Not in the least.”

“Can’t you guess the other bad thing that I’ve done for the first time in my life?”

“I’m afraid not.”

“All right. Then I’ll tell you. It was kissing a Gentile. I’ve not kissed many Jews, either.”

They went to a casino where two bands spelled each other. She kept stepping on his feet, turning the wrong way, holding herself a foot away from him, seeming at once confused, distraught, and delighted. Holding this slim clodhopping girl in his arms at whatever distance, and with whatever punishment to his toes, brought back wistful memories of high school proms. She kept watching a large wall clock, and precisely at a quarter past eleven, she said, “We must go now. That was very nice.”

She let him out of the Fiat at his flat without a handshake and roared off. He plodded upstairs, knowing that Selma Ascher’s image, and the remembered sensations of embracing her body and smelling her hair, would keep him awake for hours. Mixing himself a dark whiskey and water, he
dropped in an armchair. His eye fell on the bed. With a sigh he got up and went for the Wannsee Protocol, thinking that translating official German prose might make him sleepy. Settling down with a yellow pad, a pencil, and the black sheets, he began to read and write.

After an hour or so, he let the sheet he was reading fall to the floor. “Jesus… Christ!” he exclaimed, more wide awake than ever, staring with horror-stricken eyes at his own dead-white face in a mirror on the wall. “Jesus… CHRIST!”

* * *

by General Armin von Roon
(adapted from his
Land, Sea, and Air Operations of World War II)

English Translation by

VICTOR HENRY

(with a note on “The Wannsee Protocol”)

Time usually hangs heavy on the hands of a retired naval officer, but in recent years I have been well occupied translating General Armin von Roon’s
World Empire Lost
and its sequel,
World Holocaust.

These strategic summaries are extracted from Roon’s massive two-volume operational analysis of World War II, written in prison while serving a sentence for war crimes. Without the battle analyses that documented these summaries, Roon’s judgments may seem sweeping. But his whole work is for military specialists, and they can read German. Other people must get Roon’s views in this short form, first compiled by a German publisher as a two-part popular history of the war.

Though much colored by Roon’s nationalism, the strategic overview in these two volumes should interest readers who want a clear and readable account of the whole war as it looked “from the other side of the hill.” Roon’s penetrating analyses of the sea battles in the Pacific, a theatre so remote from his own field, show German military professionalism at its soundest. Where I have felt compelled to dissent from Roon’s views, my comments are plainly set off in italics.