Warburg in Rome (35 page)

Warburg liked the way the service called participants only loosely together, leaving him to wrestle with the text at his own pace, to brood. The recovered beauty of the synagogue contrasted with figments of those he’d met in the camps, whose funerals he’d attended, whose names he’d upheld while reciting the Mourner’s Kaddish. In Warburg’s mind, the roll call had never ceased: Simone Luzatto, Bettina Chiara, Isaac Samuel Reggio. Here in the synagogue his people hovered in the air above him, witnesses to all that he had failed to do in their behalf. Giuseppe Nathan. Fiorella Coco. And always, still missing but never far from his mind—Wallenberg. Reciting their names to himself was as close as he could come to prayer for the living and the dead.

The others in attendance included elderly and middle-aged Romans, a number of ill-clad refugees who were housed in the city, and a smattering of uniformed American GIs, present more out of homesickness than devotion. For tomorrow morning’s service, at which the Torah would be brought out, there would be twice this many in attendance, and the prayers would be recited more robustly. Warburg, though, preferred this quieter ritual. And tonight it was a harbinger of what was coming in an hour.

He himself had insisted on what was sure to be an awkward confrontation with the leaders of these people. No longer badgered by inquisitors or popes, now their nemesis was the British government. Hence the bombing of the embassy.

Some Jews had rejoiced: the British were the new tribunes of an eternal Jew-hatred, and retaliation was overdue. But other Jews still saw the British as valiant conquerors of the Nazis: to attack London was cowardly and treasonous.

Warburg surveyed such arguments within himself. If the violence of the embassy bombing had shocked him—and he had gone at once to see the wreckage for himself—his own violence in response to Mates that same night had been even more unsettling. What a dawn had broken then. As if by controlling a group he could control himself, Warburg had demanded a meeting of the leaders of the Delegation to Assist Hebrews, his main Roman counterparts in getting aid to the camps.

The meeting convened immediately after the service, in the Jewish library across the square. Warburg had been in the second-floor room dozens of times since that first meeting, when the issue was Fossoli. The glass-enclosed shelves held the same books. Sepia landscapes of a dream Jerusalem still decorated the brown walls. The cone-shaped light fixture hung over the same table, but now a dozen chairs were pulled up to it. In each chair sat a man—bespectacled or sharp-eyed; bearded or clean-shaven; between the ages of about twenty-five and sixty; jackets open, neckties; several wearing yarmulkes, making a Sabbath exception to conduct business. At Warburg’s entry, they had all stood.

Once they were seated, Warburg came right to the point. “I bring a message from Mr. Morgenthau in New York. I can tell you that the telexes nearly caught fire with his anger. Joint Distribution Committee funds are not to go to the killing of Englishmen. I must know how your groups are tied to the so-called Hebrew Rebellion Movement. If the Irgun war against the British has moved from Palestine to Europe, the cutoff of JDC funds will be complete.” Warburg’s statement was met with silence.

Finally Lorenzo Anselmo, the Delegation chairman, spoke. He was a white-haired man, formerly the prosperous manufacturer of porcelain ware who had lost his company in the Fascist requisition of Jewish property. The courtly Anselmo had spent the war years in Switzerland, but because of the force of his personality and the memory of his open defiance of Mussolini, he had resumed his role as a leader of Rome’s Jews. “You know, Mr. Warburg, that we are not the ones to whom you should be conveying this message. No one here is associated with the Haganah. And the Haganah would be foolish to associate with us. Is that not obvious?”

Another man spoke, Stanislaw Monash, the head of the new Central Committee of Liberated Jews. This coordinating body of DPs in various camps had, in fact, been formed at Warburg’s insistence, and with his help. Monash, a survivor of Warsaw, was a Dante scholar and fluent in Italian. “The British secret service watches all of us,” he said. “They are watching this meeting. To them, one Jew is like another.”

“To Morgenthau also,” a man whom Warburg did not know put in. He was glaring at Warburg. “The JDC will punish those still languishing in the camps because of the actions of Jewish resisters? That is collective punishment, a Nazi tactic.”

“The JDC will do no such thing,” Warburg said firmly. “You think
I
will abandon those in camps? Do you know me, Sir?” Warburg returned the man’s unfriendly stare.

“Yes, I know you,” he said, but with sudden sheepishness. “You said the support will be cut off—”

“Yes, from expressly Jewish groups. From
your
groups. Bricha, the Delegation, Merkaz, Aliyah Bet, even Comunità Ebraica di Roma. That is the message the Hebrew rebels need to hear, whoever they are. Jewish
groups
will be cut off, not Jews. The JDC is under pressure from Washington now, because Washington is under pressure from London.”

“Truman already bars Jews from America.”

“Yes,” Warburg said. “That is why he supports Jews in Israel. Israel solves his problem. That works for us so long as we do not defy him. The JDC cannot sponsor war, period. JDC support of refugees will continue through other channels. The International Relief Committee, the Red Cross, our own medical centers. JDC’s work will not flag. But nothing will go to
groups
associated with attacks on the British.”

“Every group with Zionist sympathies will be associated,” another said.

“We all have Zionist sympathies,” Warburg said. “But we are not killers.”

“No one died at the embassy. Whoever did that put up police barricades ahead of time, to keep innocent people away.”

Warburg himself had made that point to Mates that night, even before knowing about the barricades. But now he was making a different point. “We all want the British to open up immigration. Hell, Truman wants it. He’s leaning on Attlee right now. But American support, both financial and political—and support from American Jews themselves—depends on the widespread sympathy for the plight of refugees. If refugees become a pawn in the war, justifying terror and assassination, then the sympathy disappears. Disappears from the White House. Disappears from American synagogues. Disappears! Who here does not understand that?”

Warburg cast his eyes slowly around the table, inviting dissent, ready to snuff it out. He placed his hands together, leaning forward. “The Jewish war must not come to Rome. Palestine is another matter. The Jewish war must be kept separate from the Jewish refugees. I am delivering the message to you because I assume some at this table can carry the message further. Leave morality out of it. Violence against the English will only stiffen their refusal to open immigration.”

No one disputed Warburg’s declaration. After another interval of silence, they began to turn toward each other, speaking in twos and threes, in Italian and Yiddish, stepping on one another’s statements, preferring contention among themselves to confrontation with the American. Voices were raised, a release of the tension that had built in the room, a resumption of the arguments Rome’s Jews had been having with themselves since the bombing. Catching snatches of what was said, Warburg listened as if the “he” referred to were not himself.

“How dare he leave morality out of it!”

“Morality requires resistance!”

“The Jewish Agency has denounced the bombing. Ben-Gurion denounced it.”

“No one knows who did it. Who said it was Jews?”

“Jews are being scapegoated. An old story.”

“Lionni did it.”

“At the Bagnoli camp, the inmates cheered the news of the bombing.”

“Bagnoli is full of Ukrainians and Hungarians. What do you expect?”

“They cheered because they know what’s happening on Cyprus.”

“Attlee is not Churchill. He can be reasoned with. But no Englishman will—”

“Cyprus is the issue. New camps in Cyprus. There’s the violence!”

“And Jews are being attacked again in Poland.”

The stew of complaint was familiar to Warburg, and he ignored the roil, except for the young man who had dropped Lionni’s name into the cauldron.

The young man’s face was vaguely familiar. Thick black hair crowded his forehead. He was sitting next to Anselmo, and now Warburg noticed that the older man was gripping the younger by the forearm, a quiet gesture of pressure:
Say no more!

Then Warburg saw that the young man’s face—thin lips, wolf’s jaw, deep-set dark eyes beneath hairy brows bridged above the sharp nose—was a version of Anselmo’s. His son? Warburg had heard of Anselmo’s son. The young man was staring at his clenched hands. His father was staring at Warburg, worried, as if to ask,
Did you hear?

The argument was going full bore, and it was clear that several in the room were prepared to take the battle to the British. Enough of Jewish passivity! But why bombs against Englishmen and nothing but surrender to Nazis? Where was the great Irgun before? And so on.

Warburg stood and left the room. At the end of the corridor was an open window. He went there, lit a cigarette, tossed the match out into the night air, and waited. A few minutes later the men began to leave. As he expected, when Anselmo appeared at the threshold, his eyes found Warburg’s. Anselmo nodded when Warburg lifted his finger. Anselmo was not a man to avoid what he knew was inevitable. He walked down the corridor to Warburg, with his left hand stretched behind, firmly gripping his son’s arm, pulling him along.

Warburg had his cigarette pack ready, and each man took one. Then each took his light from Warburg’s match.

“This is my son Enzo,” Anselmo said, adding with a smile, “He takes his name from the
end
of Lorenzo.” He nudged the young man forward. “He is the end of me.” An old joke between them.

“I’m David,” Warburg said. They shook hands. Enzo’s grip was firm.

“My son was in the mountains,” Anselmo said, a euphemism for service with the Partisans.

“I’ve heard that,” Warburg said. “So you know about resistance.”

Enzo nodded.

“Are you with Jocko?”

“No. Lionni works alone. Almost alone. A small group from Palestine. You know him?”

“When he was with the Delegation, I knew him, yes. Seems long ago. He left Rome. Are you saying he’s back?”

Enzo did not reply. His father poked him. With eyes downcast, Enzo said, “They say he was in Palestine. Italian kibbutz. Training with the Irgun. He returned to Rome last month.”

“Where is he?”

Enzo did not reply. His father nudged him. Enzo raised his face, with a miserable look that Warburg immediately understood.

“Enzo,” Warburg said, “you are sworn to secrecy. Is that right?”

The young man nodded.

“I am not asking you to betray Lionni. But do this for me, would you? Get this to him.” Warburg produced a card, the contact card he handed out to the desperate and bereft, if judiciously—not wanting to promise what he could not deliver. “Pass the word that I need to see him.”

Where had Lionni disappeared to the year before? He answered with a rambling account. Kibbutz Lavi, in Galilee, near Tiberias, was a collective founded in the late twenties. Lionni had liked Galilee for its rolling hills and familiar weather, the wet, dank winter. Umbrian grape growers had been among the first to make
aliyah
at Lavi. Once the war broke out, the vines were neglected, as the young men of the kibbutz divided between those who joined the British Army and those who went underground with the Haganah. By 1943, Lavi, because of its still lively ties to Italy, had been a training center for Jews joining the Partisans there. At the onset of the Irgun’s open revolt against the Mandate authority in 1944, the kibbutz had become a training center for the underground. Jewish Partisans with whom Lionni conspired during his time as a fugitive from the Nazis had brought him there.

Warburg interrupted Lionni. “So it was Fossoli?” He let the question elaborate itself in silence.
So it was Fossoli that sent you away and brought you back, armed?
In the nearly thirty minutes he’d been speaking, Lionni had not mentioned the death camp. The two were seated at a corner table in the deep, isolated interior of a Trastevere café. Warburg had found a note under his door the night before, instructing him to come here. It was late afternoon. Lionni was haggard-looking, coughing, obviously ill. That had not stopped him from talking. He seemed eager to explain himself to Warburg.

“Of course. Conscription. I was conscripted at Fossoli.”

“But into an army too late to kill Germans.”

“Perhaps not.” Lionni coughed, a hollow rattling from deep in his chest. He wore a soiled shirt under a tattered serge coat, what was left of a suit. Under his clothes the skin hung on his bones. His fingers
were
bones. His flesh was gristle.

“But it’s the British you attack now.”

“We made our point. It remains to be seen if the point must be made again.”

Warburg shook his head. “From reports out of London, Attlee has just ordered a doubling of the Cyprus garrison, which presumably means a doubling of internment capacity. There are plans being laid for a camp in British-controlled Port Said. The Admiralty has ordered two fresh destroyer squadrons deployed to the Mediterranean, one to Piraeus and one to Malta. The JDC was preparing to buy ships for emigration, but to run a Royal Navy blockade? Never. So much for the point you made. Incredibly stupid, Jocko.”

“The embassy was the center of operations for Cyprus. A new Fossoli.”

“No. Don’t confuse the two.”

“You think we Jews should simply wait until the world decides to be nice to us? The British will never yield the Mandate without force being applied. Some Jews are uneasy about force. A habit of passivity. If Attlee is doubling the Cyprus garrison, that is good. It means he heard us. And he must not be able to unroll fresh wire there without the world knowing it. A bomb in Rome—and the eyes of the world go to Cyprus.”