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
90
WHEN it is midnight in Leyte, the sun rides high over Washington. About halfway between them lies Pearl Harbor. From there, Chester Nimitz was transmitting to Ernest King in his Washington headquarters all the Leyte events as they broke. In Tokyo, of course, the naval HQ was follo
wing the battle step by step.
So far had the art of communication advanced, so powerful were the transmitters, so swift the coding, so deliberate the movements of fleets traversing long distances at twenty or twenty-five miles an hour, that the far-off high commands could watch this entire battle like Homeric gods hovering overhead, or like Napoleon on a hill at Austerlitz. The Battle of Leyte Gulf was not only the biggest sea fight of all time, it was unique in having all these distant spectators; unique, too, in the flood of on-the-spot facts pouring out of transmitters and cryptographic machines.
It is interesting, therefore, that nobody on the scene, or anywhere else in the world, really knew what the hell was going on. There never was a denser fog of war. All the sophisticated communication only spread and thickened it.
Halsey totally confused everybody. In a very terse dispatch he notified Kinkaid down in the gulf of his decision to leave San Bernardino Strait unguarded, making Nimitz and King information addressees:
CENTRAL FORCE HEAVILY DAMAGED ACCORDING TO STRIKE REPORTS X AM PROCEEDING NORTH WITH THREE GROUPS TO ATTACK CARRIER FORCE AT DAWN X
That was all. Kinkaid assumed this meant that Halsey was taking his three carrier groups north, leaving Task Force Thirty-four, the Battle Line, to guard the strait. That is what Nimitz assumed. That is what King assumed. That is what Mitscher assumed. To all of them the dispatch could mean nothing else, for leaving the strait open to the enemy was unthinkable. But to Halsey and his staff it was crystal clear that since he had not ordered the battle plan executed, there was no Battle Line. Therefore San Bernardino was unguarded. Therefore Kinkaid was duly warned. Therefore he would have to look out for himself and for the beachhead.
In Pearl Harbor Raymond Spruance, standing at Nimitz’s side by the chart table when the dispatch came in, softly remarked, “If I were there, I would keep my forces right here,” placing his hand off San Bernardino Strait. But he too was referring to the carriers; it did not even cross his mind that Halsey was pulling out the battleships.
Halsey confused the Japanese by waiting until after dark to sally northward. Kurita therefore thought his Main Striking Force was steaming head-on into the Third Fleet. Ozawa in the decoy carriers was doubly confused; he had received word of Kurita’s turn west, but not of his reversal toward San Bernardino Strait, so he did not know whether Sho was off or on, and whether or not he had succeeded in luring Halsey. First he fled north, then getting the “Divine assistance” message, turned back south to resume his role of worm on a hook, then again went north. As for the Japanese commanders in Manila and Tokyo, they no longer had the dimmest idea of what to think.
However, the admirals Halsey was taking north with him did have ideas.
Pug Henry was haunting flag plot, hoping for new orders from Halsey. For long dragging hours, there was only dead silence in the transmitters, while the unguarded strait fell farther and farther astern. What was going on? Could Halsey possibly have failed to get the word that the Central Force was heading for Leyte again?
Suddenly the TBS began grating out tense harsh questions and answers between Admiral Bogan, the commander of Pug’s task group, and the captain of the Independence, the carrier of the night search planes. Pug recognized the admiral’s voice through the gargling wireless distortion. Were those position reports on the Sibuyan Sea force accurate? Had the captain closely questioned the pilots? Absolutely, the captain replied. Those Japs were coming on fast, no doubt of it. In fact, a snooper pilot out on search now had just reported the navigation lights in San Bernardino Strait brilliantly lit.
Pug heard the admiral exclaim in a most irregular and refreshing way, “Jesus Christ!” Within minutes Bogan was on the TBS again, calling “Blackjack personally,” the inter-ship call sign for Admiral Halsey. This took some temerity, but it was fruitless. Not “Blackjack” but an unidentifiable voice responded. Bogan repeated the news of the illuminated strait, underlining its import with his urgent excited tones. The voice said in audible boredom, “Yes, yes, we have that information.”
Again, long silence. Pug was working up his nerve to speak his own view over the TBS — for the little it was worth — that the San Bernardino situation was getting desperate, when Willis Lee beat him to it, calling Halsey to say he was sure the Central Force would be coming through San Bernardino Strait in the darkness. Pug heard the same bored voice say, “Roger,” and no more. That decided Pug against inviting a similar squelching.
Long after the battle it turned out that both Bogan and Lee intended to urge Halsey to send the Battle Line back to the strait. The bland cold anonymous voice silenced both of them. It turned out, too, that talking to Halsey wouldn’t have helped. The old man had made up his mind to get the Jap carriers. He had shut off all further debate in his staff, and gone to sleep. It also turned out that Marc Mitscher’s chief of staff, a belligerent sort nicknamed “Thirty-one Knot” Burke, had awakened Mitscher at midnight, imploring him to tell Halsey to send back the Battle Line. Mitscher’s answer is immortal: “If he wants my advice, he’ll ask for it.” With that he rolled over in his bunk.
So the mighty fleet went pottering north at varying moderate speeds — no faster, for Halsey did not want to run past the elusive Japs in the dark. Halsey’s admirals, in varying states of disagreement, apprehension, and consternation, held their tongues. October twenty-fourth melted at midnight into October twenty-fifth, the day of reckoning at Leyte Gulf; also, as it happened, the ninetieth anniversary of the Charge of the Light Brigade.
On October twenty-fifth, three different battles broke out, touched off by the three-pronged Sho approach. The Sibuyan Sea battle of the twenty-fourth is merged with these three, when Leyte Gulf is called “a combat of four engagements.”
Broad wastes of peaceful sea separated the three massive fights on the twenty-fifth. They had no tactical connection. No commander on either side coordinated them, or had any grasp of the whole picture. They started and ended at different times. Any one of the engagements might have gone down in history as the great Battle of Leyte Gulf, had the other two not occurred. In military records they have coalesced into one vast impenetrably tangled sea fight. Each of the three battles would need a long book to tell its violent smoky tale in full. A brief bare sorting out of the famous October twenty-fifth triple melee, which was spaced over six hundred sea miles, is this:
In the southern battle of Surigao Strait, the action took place in early morning darkness and lasted to the dawn, a smashing American victory.
In the northern battle off Luzon, Mitscher’s air strikes went on all day against Ozawa’s empty carriers and his supporting force; the carriers were sunk, but most of the supporting force escaped.
In the central battle off Samar, Seventh Fleet jeep carriers were surprised at sunrise by Kurita as he sped toward Leyte Gulf. In this chance encounter, the odds were totally reversed, in favor of the Japanese. The awesome Main Striking Force stumbled on a cheap victory to be had for the taking, in routine gunnery, on the way to the beachhead: six slow tubby little flattops and a few destroyers and DEs, not one armed with more than a five-inch gun.
Here took place the crucial battle for Leyte Gulf.
The most spectacular battle, however, was fought in the south, in the dark: a crossing of the T, the first on earth’s waters since Jutland, no doubt the last the world will witness.
The Japanese diversionary force, ignoring Kurita’s order to slow down, entered Surigao Strait — the southern entrance to Leyte Gulf — shortly after midnight. Every gunship of Kinkaid’s Seventh Fleet lay in wait, in textbook Battle Line formation: in all, forty-two warships against eight, six battleships against two.
Advancing blindly and doughtily in column, the Japanese first ran a gauntlet of thirty-nine PT boats, which they drove off with searchlights and secondary battery fire. Next they butted into destroyer attacks; one column after another, steaming past neatly as in a fleet exercise, discharging volleys of torpedoes, which ran through four miles of black water and blew
up one battleship, holed the other, which was the flagship, sank one destroyer and crippled two more. A pitiful little tail for the T limped up the strait to be crossed: one battleship, one cruiser, and one destroyer, all damaged. The Battle Line blasted them into oblivion. Pursuit of retreating cripples lasted well into daylight. Only one destroyer escaped to tell the grisly story of Surigao Strait back in Japan.
A second Japanese group of cruisers and destroyers, sailing down from Japan to join the southern attack, failed to arrive in time for this massacre. Coming on the scene before dawn, seeing the flaming hulks drifting on the sea, hearing the anguished radio exchanges among the doomed ships, the admiral turned and departed, after sustaining one PT boat torpedo hit on a cruiser. A cowardly or a prudent act? Judgments will vary on such discreetness in war.
By all accounts the Battle of Surigao Strait was ferocious fun for the Americans. They took many chances, absorbed some hits, and executed classic slaughter. Men wrote afterward of the beauty and the color of this last Battle Line fight: the long long wait for the enemy on the calm sea in the warm night under a setting moon, the tightening of nerves, the once-in-a-lifetime exaltation of destroyer run-ins against heavy ships in searchlight beams, under star shells, under the red blazing flying arches of tracers; the breathless wait for torpedoes to find their marks in the night; the ships blowing up and burning on the sea, the blue-white searchlights blindingly sweeping the black waters, the great guns erupting in salvo after salvo. The Japanese lost all their ships but one, and thousands of lives. The Americans lost thirty-nine lives and no ships.