Pamela
A Jew’s Journey
(from Aaron Jastrow’s manuscript)
APRIL 22, 1944.
I am waiting for Natalie to return from a clandestine Zionist meeting; waiting and worrying on a cool spring night, with pleasant scents drifting into the apartment from window boxes of geraniums, placed on our sills only yesterday by Beautification workers. I think she is stumbling into acute danger. Though it may cause a scene for which I haven’t the strength, I intend to have it out with her when she returns.
How long is it since I wrote a diary entry? I’m not sure. The last sheets are hidden away, long since. The Beautification has more or less overwhelmed me, both at the library and in the council. Also, Berel’s stunning appearance after my Iliad lecture was a very difficult thing to write about, so I put it off, put it off, and let the whole diary slide. Now I will try to fill it in. I’ve prepared tomorrow’s Talmud section, and this is the best way left to kill time. I won’t sleep till she shows up.
Berel gave me the start of my life that night, coming out of the gloom. What an eerie encounter! I had not seen him for close to fifty years. Alas, the transformations of time; the red-cheeked plump boy has become a hard-looking elderly man with bushy gray hair, a big outthrust jaw, heavy frowning eyebrows, and deep lines scored on a clean-shaven face. There’s a ghostly familiarity in the smile, and that is all. Shabbily dressed, with a yellow star for camouflage on his torn sheepskin jacket, be looked more Polish then Jewish, if there is anything to these notions of racial physiognomies; a formidable suspicious old Silesian peasant. He was nervous and wary in the extreme. While he walked with us he kept looking around and behind. He had a mission to perform in the ghetto, he said, and would leave before dawn; no explanation of when and how he had come, or how he would go.
He walked to our apartment with us, and there without ado he offered to get Louis out of Theresienstadt! Natalie paled at the very thought. But a new transport had just been ordered, she was in a shaken mood, and she was willing to listen. Berel’s idea was to place the child with a Czech farm family, as some Prague Jews managed to do with their tots before being hauled off to Theresienstadt. It has worked well; the parents hear news of the children from time to time, and even receive smuggled letters from the older ones. To get Louis out, he would be hospitalized on some fraudulent diagnosis, for which Berel says he has the necessary connections in the Health Department. A death certificate would be provided to satisfy the Central Secretariat index, and there might be a faked burial or cremation. The child would be removed from the hospital in secret and spirited to Prague. There Berel would receive him and take him to the farm, visit him regularly, and send news about him to Natalie. The war might go on another year or more; but whatever happened, Berel would watch over him.
Natalie’s face grew longer and grimmer as Berel talked. Why, she asked, was this necessary? Louis was adaptable and thriving. Seeing his mother every day was the best thing for him. Berel did not argue about any of that, but he urged that, all in all, the best thing was to let Louis go. Sickness, malnutrition, transport, and German cruelty were ever-present dangers here, worse than the temporary risk of getting him out. Natalie gave no ground. I am abstracting here a low-toned Yiddish conversation that took more than an hour, before Berel dropped it and said he had business with me. She went off to bed. We talked Polish, which she doesn’t understand.
Now my pencil halts. How to write down what he told me?
I will not try to recapitulate his journeyings and ordeals. Imagination numbs, belief fails. Berel has passed through all seven circles of the inferno that Germany has made of eastern Europe. The very worst rumors about the Jewish fate are not only true, but very pale and gentle intimations of the truth. With his own hands my cousin has disinterred from mass graves and burned thousands of murdered men, women, and children. Such graves dot all of eastern Europe near cities where Jews once lived. A million and a half buried corpses, is his conservative guess.
In certain camps, including the one outside our old yeshiva town of Oswiecim, huge poison gas cellars exist for killing thousands of people at a time. A crowd to fill a great opera house, crammed into an enormous basement and asphyxiated all at once! Arriving fresh off sealed trains from all over Europe, they are murdered then and there. Great crematoriums burn up the bodies. Tall chimneys dominate the camp landscape, vomiting flames, greasy smoke, and human scraps and ash twenty-four hours a day, when an “action” is on. Berel was not recounting rumors. He worked in a construction gang that built such a crematorium.
The Jews who are not killed at once are worked to death as slave labor in gigantic armaments factories, on rations calculated to murder them by rapid attrition.
We Theresienstadt Jews, he says, are oxen in the pen, waiting our turn. The Beautification is a lucky reprieve, but the day after the neutral Red Cross visit the transports will again roll. Our hope is an Allied victory. The war is certainly going against the Germans, but the end is a way off, and the destruction of the Jews is accelerating. His organization, which he did not identify (I would guess the communists), is planning an uprising in case of a mass transport order, or a killing action launched by the SS here in Theresienstadt. But that will be a desperate business in which Natalie and Louis are unlikely to survive. The Jewish people must look to the future, he said. Louis is the future. He is the one to save.
He did not want to tell Natalie about the murder camps because he could see that her spirits are good, and that is the secret of survival under the Germans. I must try to persuade her to let Louis go, without frightening her too much.
I asked him how widespread in Theresienstadt was knowledge of the murder camps. He said that high-placed people had been told of it; he had spoken to two himself. The usual reaction was incredulity, or anger at the tellers of such “scare stories,” and a quick change of subject.
I asked if the outside world yet had any inkling. Newspaper stories were just starting to appear abroad, he replied, and radio broadcasts. The microfilmed documents and pictures he brought from Oswiecim did reach Switzerland and these may be figuring in the accounts. But the people in England and America seem no more inclined as yet to believe the thing than are the Jews right here in Theresienstadt, who know the SS so well. In the Oswiecim camp itself, Berel said, where one saw the chimneys flame out at night, and smelled the burning hair, meat, and fat, many inmates shunned the topic of the gassings, or even denied that they were happening.
(My hand has been shaking as I write these things, that is why the words straggle on the page.)
To wind up quickly the visit of Berel, we had a sad interlude of family gossip. Except for himself and one son’s family, our Jastrow clan in Europe has been extirpated, root and branch. His eldest son fights with Jewish partisans behind the German lines in White Russia. The daughter-in-law and grandson are safe on a Latvian farm. Berel has lost everyone else, and so have I; a network of clever and lovable relatives I never saw after I went to America but pleasantly remembered. Through all his wanderings he has preserved a tattered picture of the grandchild, so scuffed and water-stained that one sees only a vague blurred infant face. “The future,” Berel said as he showed it to me. “Der osed.”
He explained how I could notify him if Natalie changed her mind about Louis. We embraced. I had last hugged Berel half a century ago in Medzice, when we left for America; nothing is stranger than what actually happens. As he released me, he shot me the kind of keen look, with head aslant, that in the old days preceded an acute question about the Talmud; and one shoulder humped up, a mannerism unchanged by years and sufferings. “Arele, I heard you wrote books about that man.” (Oso ho-ish, Jesus.)
“Yes.”
“Why did you dafka have to write about that man?”
Dafka is an untranslatable Talmud word. It means many things: necessarily, for that very reason, perversely, defiantly, in spite of everything. The Jews have a tendency to do things dafka. That is the essence of the stiff-nec
ked people. They had to worship the golden calf dafka, for instance, at the foot of Mount Sinai.
It was a moment of truth. I answered, “I wrote to make money, Berel, and a name for myself among the Gentiles.”
“See how it helped you,” he said.
I took from a drawer the phylacteries for which I recently gave a diamond, and showed them to him.
“So?” He sadly smiled. “In Theresienstadt?”
“In Theresienstadt, dafka, Berel.”
We embraced again, and he slipped out. In two months I have heard nothing more from him or about him. I assume he got safely away. In the First World War Berel escaped twice from prisoner-of-war camps. He is made of wiry stuff, and he is very ingenious.
Past midnight. No sign of her. It is unwise to be walking the streets at this hour, though I suppose her nurse’s aide card covers her.
Now let me hurriedly sketch the Beautification. This is a story which in years to come must be told. Future generations may find it harder to believe even than the Oswiecim gassing cellars. After all, however gruesome, those are but the natural end product of National Socialism. One has simply to grasp that Hitler meant it, and that the obedient Germans went and did it.
The Beautification is stranger. It is a painstaking pretense that the Germans are Europeans just like the others, conforming to the tenets of Western civilization; that the rumors and reports about the Jews are too silly for words, or else cruel Allied atrocity propaganda. The Germans are playacting here an elaborate denial of their central effort in this war, the eradication of a people and of two world religions. Yes, two. I believe with whole faith that Jews and Judaism will in the end live on; but Christianity cannot survive this deed by a Christian nation. Nietzsche’s Antichrist has come, in boots and swastika armband. In the flames and smoke of the Oswiecim chimneys, all the crucifixes of Europe are going up.
Our new commander, Rahm, is a coarse but thorough brute. His planning of this Beautification carries hypocrisy into new realms. Because I am the Elder in charge of culture, I am much involved. I have spent hours in his office over a table map of the town, where the route of the visitors is marked in red, with every stopping place numbered. A wall chart shows the progress of renovation and new construction at each numbered halt. My department is staging the musical and dramatic events along the route, but my deputies are doing the real work. My role on “the day” will be to show the visitors around a marvelously renovated library; I already have twenty people working on the catalogue, and beautiful books keep pouring in. We are amassing the finest Judaica collection left on European soil, all for one day’s fakery.
The visit is being planned like a Passion play; it will be a spectacle involving an entire town. The action, however, will be limited to the route traced in red on the map. A hundred yards on either side of that route, the old filth, illness, overcrowding, and starvation will prevail. A narrow simulacrum of an idyllic spa is being created with immense labor, and no expense spared, wherever the visitors’ eyes may look. Do the Germans really expect to get away with this grotesque fake? It seems so. Previous inspections by German Red Cross officials proved no problem, of course. The visitors came and went and spread glowing reports about the Paradise Ghetto. But this time the visitors will be neutral outsiders. How can the Germans be sure of controlling them? A determined Swede or Swiss Red Cross man has only to say, “Let us go down that street,” or “Let us have a look in yonder barracks,” and the bubble will pop. Beyond the iridescent film of fakery will lie horror to make a neutral’s hair stand on end; though we of course are used to it, and thought it is nothing compared to an Oswiecim.
Does Rahm have some wily plan to deflect such embarrassing requests? Does he count on suave bullying to keep the visitors in line? Or, as I strongly suspect, is this whole Beautification just a master instance, a paradigm, of the idiot thoroughness which has characterized what the Germans have done since Hitler took power?
In their ability to get things done, their energy, their attention to detail, their sheer scientific and industrial prowess, they equal and perhaps surpass the Americans. Moreover, they are capable of the greatest charm, intelligence, and taste. It is their peculiarity as a people that with no reservations, with whole hearts, with singular élan, they can throw themselves into the executing of plans and orders crazy or monstrous beyond previous human conceptions. Why this should be, the world may be a thousand years puzzling out; meantime it is happening. It has loosed a holocaust of war which must almost certainly end in the destruction of Germany. At the heart of that vast hecatomb is what they are doing to my people. And at the heart of the heart is this Beautification, the German face turned innocently to the outside world, with the plaintive statement, “See how unjust you are, to accuse us of doing bad things?”
The idiot thoroughness of this Beautification is awesome. There is nothing Rahm and his advisers haven’t thought of, assuming that he can hold his visitors to the red line. Very little is finished yet, but the scenario is all laid down. The bustling disorder in Theresienstadt these days is that of a stage halfway ready for a dress rehearsal. Two or three thousand ablebodied Jews are toiling from dawn to dusk for the Technical Department — and, here and there, all night under floodlights — to build this fantastic narrow path of illusion.
The itinerary of the visitors has been fixed for months. Rahm carries around a thick document bound in black and red striped cloth, which we of the council call (among ourselves) the “Beautification Bible.” All our department heads have contributed to it, but the final minuteness of detail could only be German. It includes the selections the municipal orchestra will play in the town square, though the Technical Department is only now laying the foundation for the pavilion. Our musicians are busy copying out the parts — two Rossini overtures, some military marches, several Strauss waltzes, and potpourris from Donizetti and Bizet. Copying paper is now available in profusion. Excellent new instruments have flooded in. Theresienstadt, like Prospero’s magic island, is becoming a place where melody fills the air.
Looking into the opera house in the Sports Hall, the visitors will observe a full orchestra and large chorus rehearsing Verdi’s Requiem: more than a hundred fifty talented Jews in neat clean clothing, yellow stars and all, producing music worthy of performance in Paris or Vienna. Downstairs in a smaller theatre, they will happen upon a costumed run-through of the delightful original children’s opera, Brundibar, the hit of the ghetto. Walking in the flower-lined streets, they will hear a string quartet in one private house doing Beethoven, a superb contralto singing Schubert lieder in another, a great clarinetist practicing Weber in a third. In the cafés they will come on costumed musicians and singers performing, as patrons sip coffee and eat cream pastries. The visitors will refresh themselves at one café, where customers will pay, depart, and arrive in a thoroughly drilled natural fashion.
The visitors will see shops well-stocked with all manner of fine goods, including luxury foods, and shoppers casually coming and going, buying what they please, paying in the Theresienstadt paper currency engraved with a picture of Moses. This worthless currency is the sourest joke of the ghetto, of course, and Rahm’s Bible contains a stern warning that as soon as the visitors depart these “customers” must return all the “purchases.” Any shortage will be punished. For a missing food item, the offender will go to the Little Fortress.
The plan ramifies through every phase of ghetto life. A mock superclean hospital, a mock children’s playground, a mock printing plant for men, a mock clothing factory for women, a mock sports field, are all in the works. The bank is being redecorated. A mock boys’ school is already finished, a new building complete to the last detail of blackboards, chalk, and textbooks, which has never been and will never be used, except for musicians’ rehearsals. A “main mess hall,” a commodious hut, is being erected for the serving of exactly one meal, the visitors’ lunch, where Jews all around them will also heartily dine. The SS have yet to figure out a way to avoid feeding so
me Jews just this once. It is the only lapse in Rahm’s Bible. The café customers, of course, are to indulge in coffee and cakes only while the visitors are in sight, otherwise they will go through motions over brown slop, and plates of cakes they may not touch.
It is after one o’clock. Why do I go on with this bitter drivelling? Well, even the gallows jest of the Beautification is some relief from thoughts of Berel’s disclosures, and my worry over Natalie’s tardiness. She must get up at six. Before she goes to work at the mica factory, she has to rehearse for the visit, at the children’s playground and the kindergarten. She has just received that assignment, with several other attractive women. They will have their work cut out for them, training the kids to speak their little pieces and simulate happiness. At lunch, she tells me, the kids are supposed to cry out, “What, sardines again?” A whole twenty-minute charade like that has been written out. Here the Beautification is doing some real good, for the SS have increased the rations of the children. They want the visitors to see roly-poly tots at play; so they are stuffing them as the witch did Hansel and Gretel.
I cannot believe that so blatant a comedy can hoodwink anybody. Yet say it does succeed: what are the Germans hoping to gain by it? The Jews are disappearing, millions are gone, and can this vast horror be long concealed? I cannot understand it. There is no sense to it. No, it is the backward child, on a monumental and terrible scale; the backward child caught at the empty jam jar, his face, hands, clothes smeared red, smiling and denying that he ate the jam.
For that matter, what sense is there to the Oswiecim gas cellars? I have thought and thought about that for weeks, with dizzied brain. Calling the Germans sadists, butchers, beasts, savages explains nothing, for they are men and women like us. I have an idea, and I will scribble it down, with much more certainty than I feel. The root of the matter cannot be Hitler. I start with that premise. Such a thing must have been brewing for centuries, to have encountered so little resistance among the Germans when it happened.