AUGUST 30.
Louis is all right! Paris is liberated!
This is the brightest day in all my years.
During a filming session in the library today, a Czech cameraman — I honestly don’t know which one, it happened so fast, in the glare of the klieg lights — shoved into my pocket an off-focus photograph of Berel and the boy. They stand by a haystack in strong sunlight. Louis looks plump and well. As I write these words, Natalie sits opposite me, still weeping with joy over the picture.
The good news from the battlefields is becoming a cataract. The American armies moved so fast across France that they captured Paris undamaged. The Germans simply pulled out and fled. Rumania has suddenly changed sides, and declared war on Germany. This caught the Nazi regime by surprise, it seems. Between the invading Red Army and the Rumanian turncoat forces, so says the Moscow radio, the Germans are snared in a colossal Balkan entrapment. They are being shattered on all fronts, no doubt of that. The Allied air bombing, complains the Völkischer Beobachter, is the most horrible and remorseless in history. How pleasant! The Goebbels editorials take on a strident tone of GötterdÄmmerung. This war can end at any moment.
SEPTEMBER 10.
How far off can the end be now? Bulgaria has declared war on Germany. Eisenhower’s armies are driving for the Rhine, scarcely opposed by the fleeing Wehrmacht. The uprising in Warsaw goes on. Somehow the Russians have not managed to cross the Vistula to help the Poles. Of course those lightning advances strained their supply lines. No doubt that is the reason for the lull.
Now Rahm, after much meddling and dawdling, has abruptly ordered the film finished. No explanation. I can think of only one. When the Soviets captured Lublin, they overran a vast concentration camp for Jews there called Maidanek. They found gas chambers, crematoriums, mass graves, thousands and thousands of living skeletons, and countless corpses lying about, all exactly as Berel described Oswiecim. The Russians brought in thirty Western correspondents to see the horror for themselves. The details are being told and retold on Radio Moscow. The worst reports and rumors turn out to have been plain fact.
So the gruesome German game is up. “The Führer Grants the Jews a Town,” an idyllic documentary of the Paradise Ghetto almost two hours long, will probably never be shown. After the Lublin exposure the film is a self-evident, clumsy, hopeless fabrication. Our reprieve expires in five days. Then what? Nobody knows yet.
It is very strange. All these crashing war developments are for us distant thunder. We read words on paper, or we hear whispers of what was said on some foreign radio. Theresienstadt itself remains a stagnant little prison town where every sticky summer day is the same; a noisome ghetto jammed with undernourished, sick, scared people; faintly animated by the filming nonsense, but otherwise quiet as a morgue.
From World Solcanst
The September Miracle
During August our doom appeared to some giddy Western journalists “a question of days.” The jaws of the east-west vise had closed to the Vistula and the Meuse. On the southern fronts the Anglo-Americans were driving up the Rhone valley almost unchecked, and ascending the Italian boot far north of Rome; and the Russians, wheeling in a great mass through our wide-open southern flank in the treacherous Balkans, had arrived at the Danube. On nearly every active front large numbers of our forces were either retreating or encircled.
Later Hitler himself called August 15 “the worst day of my life.” That was the day the Allies landed in the south of France, and in the north General von Kluge disappeared into the Falaise pocket. Pathologically suspicious after July 20, the Führer feared that Kluge might have vanished to negotiate; the situation actually looked that bad at Headquarters. But the gallant Kluge soon managed to restore communications with us. Shortly afterward he killed himself; whether in despair over Hitler’s stupid commands which were destroying his army, or because he was really involved in the bomb plot, I do not know. In August, I confess, the thought of suicide more than once crossed my own mind.
But September passed and no enemy soldier had yet set foot on German soil!
After Rundstedt’s forces brilliantly repulsed Montgomery’s foolhardy narrow thrust with airborne troops at Arnhem, trying to flank the Westwall through Holland, Eisenhower’s rush toward the Rhine faded away. Gas tanks were empty, generals at loggerheads, strength dispersed from the Low Countries to the Alps. The Russians were halted along the Vistula, coping with our counterattacks, while across the river the Waffen SS levelled Warsaw with fire and explosives to wipe out the uprising. The southern drives against us were all halted. Under the worst pounding and against the worst odds of modern history, Germany stood bloodied and defiant, holding its ring of foes at bay.
If the lone British stand in 1940 merits praise, why not this heroic rebound of the Wehrmacht in September 1944?
The analytical elements of the “September miracle” are clear. West and east, our enemies outran their supplies in their spectacular and speedy advances; while German discipline hardened and total mobilization took place, under the threat to our sacred soil. Nor can one overlook the letdown in the invaders’ fighting morale, especially in the west: the euphoric feeling of “well, we’ve won the war, we’ll be home by Christmas,” induced by long advances, the fall of Paris, and the attempt on Hitler’s life. Also, Hitler’s one-sided insistence on hardening up the French ports was at last paying some dividends. Eisenhower had two million men ashore, but through the distant bottlenecks of Cherbourg and an artificial harbor he could not supply an all-out assault on the Westwall. He needed Antwerp, and we still dominated the Scheldt estuary.
In postwar military writings there is much armchair scoffing at Eisenhower. These authors dwell on map distances and troop counts, overlooking the sweaty, gritty, complex logistics that decide modern war. Eisenhower was the typical American military man, a plodder in the field but something of a genius in organization and supply. His caution and broad-front strategy were not unsound, if scarcely Napoleonic. We were still a very dangerous foe, and he deserves credit for resisting specious gambles in September.
Advocates of both Montgomery and Patton argue that given enough gasoline, each of their heroes could have thrust on to Berlin and quickly ended the war. General Blumentritt told British interrogators that Montgomery could certainly have done it. I shall demonstrate in my operational analysis the decisive adverse factors. Briefly, the flanks of such a narrow thrust on extended supply lines would have invited a disastrous repulse, a much greater Arnhem. I knew Blumentritt well, and I doubt that those were his professional views. He was telling his conquerors what they wanted to hear. Given the port facilities and communications available to Eisenhower, the thing could not be done. The consumption rate of his troops was quite shocking: seven hundred tons per division per day! A German division did its fighting on less than two hundred tons a day.
Eisenhower could not afford a massive risk and setback; not with hundreds of American correspondents breathing down his neck, and a presidential election two months away. The enemy coalition was unstable enough. All through the summer campaign the Anglo-Americans pulled and tugged at bad cross-purposes. And the Russian failure to aid the Warsaw uprising — and what was worse, their refusal to allow the Anglo-Americans even to send airborne assistance — already planted the poison of the Polish question, which would in time destroy the strange alliance of capitalists and Bolsheviks.
Unfortunately we lacked the punch to exploit these strains among our foes. Hitler’s mulish “stand or die” policy on the battlefield had bled us too much. In the three colossal summer defeats — Bagration, the Balkans, and western France — and a score of smaller entrapments, one million five hundred thousand German front-line troops had been killed, captured, cut off, or routed in disorder without arms. Had these battle-hardened forces fought an elastic defense instead, harrying our foes’ advance while withdrawing in good order to the Fatherland, we might well have salvaged something from the war.
As it was, the ??
?September miracle” could not avert Finis Germaniae, it could only postpone the doom. Yet even as he went down, Hitler retained the hypnotic power to draw suicidal reserves of nervous energy and fighting heart from Germany. Already at the end of August he had issued his startling directive for the Ardennes counterattack. With heavy hearts we were making plans and issuing preliminary orders at Headquarters. However badly the man was failing, his feral willpower was not to be opposed.
TRANSLATOR’S NOTE: This Ardennes operation became the “Battle of the Bulge.” It is interesting that Roon commends Eisenhower’s cautious broad-front strategy, which many authorities condemn. The true judgment would lie in unravelling very complicated logistical statistics of Overlord. Fortune favors the bold, but not when they are out of gas and bullets. The strange Red Army inaction while Warsaw was destroyed by the Germans in plain sight across the river remains controversial. Some say that from Stalin’s viewpoint the wrong Poles were leading the uprising. The Russians maintain that they had reached the limit of their supplies, and that the Poles did not bother to coordinate their uprising with Red Army plans. — V.H.
From A Jew’s Journey
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.
85
THE 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