The World of Yesterday (50 page)

That struggle by the strongest will and most penetrating mind
of our time against its downfall grew more and more cruel. Only when he himself clearly recognised—he, to whom clarity had always been the prime virtue of thought—that he would not be able to write or think any more did he act as a Roman hero would, and allow the doctor to put an end to his pain. It was a fine conclusion to a fine life, a memorable death even among the many deaths of that murderous time. And when we, his friends, lowered his coffin into English earth, we knew that we had given that earth the best of our own native land.

I often mentioned the horrors of Hitler’s world and the war in those conversations with Freud. As a humane man, he was deeply distressed by that terrible outbreak of bestiality, but as a thinker he was not at all surprised. He had always been considered a pessimist, he said, because he denied the supremacy of culture over our instinctive drives, and current events confirmed in the most dreadful way—not that he was proud of it—his opinion that it is impossible to root the elemental, barbaric destructive drive out of the human psyche. Perhaps, he said, some means of at least suppressing such instincts in the communal life of nations might be found in centuries yet to come, but they would remain ineradicable forces in daily life and fundamental human nature, and maybe they were necessary to maintain a vital tension. In those last days of his life he was even more concerned with the problem of Jewish identity and the present tragedy. The scientist in him had nothing to suggest here, and his lucid mind knew no answer to the problem. He had recently published his study of Moses, presenting Moses himself as a non-Jew, an Egyptian, and by placing him in that category, a theory that would be hard to substantiate, he had offended devout Jews as much as the nationalists. He was sorry now, he said, that he had published the book in the middle of the most terrible hour in Jewish history—“Now that everything is being taken away from the Jews I come
along and take away their great man as well.” I had to agree with him that every Jew had now become seven times more sensitive, for even in the middle of international tragedy they were the real victims, the victims everywhere because they had already been stricken before this blow fell, and wherever they went they knew that all evils would affect them first and to a greater degree, and that Hitler, a man more rabid with hatred than any other in history, was intent on humiliating them and would hunt them to the ends of the earth until they were underground. More and more refugees kept arriving week after week, month after month, and every week in more poverty and distress than the refugees who had arrived the week before. The first to leave Germany and Austria in haste had been able to save their clothes, their baggage, their household goods, and many of them even brought some money out. But the longer they had believed in Germany, the harder it was for them to tear themselves away from the country they loved and the worse it had been for them. First the Jews had been forbidden to work in their professions, to go to the theatre, the cinema, museums, and academics had been banned from visiting the libraries. They had stayed on out of either apathy or a sense of loyalty, timidity or pride. They would rather, they thought, be humiliated at home than lower themselves to the status of beggars abroad. Then they had been deprived of their domestic servants; radios and telephones had been removed from their homes, then those homes themselves had been confiscated, and they had been forced to wear the Star of David, so that everyone would avoid them in the street like lepers and they would be recognised as outcasts, to be avoided and abused. All their rights were cancelled, they suffered all kinds of mental and physical violence, inflicted on them with playful relish, and every Jew found that the old Russian proverb—“No one is safe from the beggar’s bag or from prison”—had suddenly come horribly true for them. Those who were left were thrown into concentration camps, where German discipline broke the spirit of even the
proudest, robbed them of everything and expelled them from the country with only the clothes they wore and ten marks in their pockets. On reaching the border they had to beg at consulates for shelter in their lands, usually in vain, because what country wanted to take in destitute beggars who had lost everything? I will never forget the sight I saw one day in a London travel agency. It was full of refugees, nearly all of them Jewish, and they all wanted to go somewhere, anywhere. It didn’t matter what country, they would have gone to the ice of the North Pole or the blazing sands of the Sahara just to get away, move on, because their permits to stay where they were had run out and they
had
to move on with their wives and children, under strange stars, in a world where foreign languages were spoken, among people whom they didn’t know and who didn’t want to know them. I came upon a man there who had once been a very rich Viennese industrialist and also one of our most intelligent art collectors. I didn’t recognise him at first, he looked so old, grey and tired as he clung faintly to a table with both hands. I asked where he wanted to go. “I don’t know,” he said. “Who bothers about what we want these days? You go wherever they’ll still let you. Someone told me it might be possible to get a visa for Haiti or San Domingo here.” It wrung my heart—an old, exhausted man with children and grandchildren, trembling with the hope of moving to a country he could hardly even have located on the map, just so that he could go on begging his way there, a stranger without any real aim left in life! Near us, someone else was asking with desperate eagerness how you got to Shanghai. He had heard that the Chinese would still let refugees in. They were all crowded together there, former university professors, bankers, businessmen, property-owners, musicians, all of them prepared to go anywhere, over land and sea, with the pitiful ruins of their lives, to do anything and put up with anything just to get away from Europe. They were like a company of ghosts. But what shook me most was the thought that these fifty
tormented people represented only a tiny advance guard of the vast, scattered army of five, eight, perhaps as many as ten million Jews already setting out in their wake, millions of people who had been robbed and then crushed in the war, waiting for donations from charities, for permission from the authorities, for money to travel, a gigantic crowd, cruelly expelled and fleeing in panic from the forest fire started by Hitler, thronging the railway stations on all European borders, an entire disenfranchised nation forbidden to be a nation, but a nation all the same, wanting nothing so much, after two thousand years, as not to be made to go on wandering, to find quiet, peaceful ground on which they could venture to rest their feet.

But the most tragic part of this Jewish tragedy of the twentieth century was that those who were its victims could not see what the point of it was, and knew they were not to blame. When their ancestors had been cast out in medieval times, at least they had known what they were suffering for—their faith and their law. As a talisman for their souls, they still had what today’s Jews lost long ago, an inviolable faith in their God. They lived—and suffered—in the proud delusion that, as Chosen People of the creator of the world and mankind, they were marked out for a great destiny and a special mission, and the promise of the word of the Bible was their commandment and law. When they were burnt at the stake, they held the holy scripture to their breasts, and the inner fire it gave them made the murderous flames seem less fierce. When they were hunted down all over the world they still had one last refuge in the Lord their God, and no earthly power, no emperor, king or Inquisition could drive them out of it. As long as their religion held them together they were still a community, and so a force to be reckoned with; when they were exiled and persecuted they thought they were atoning for their fault in deliberately cutting themselves off from all other nations on earth by their religion and their customs. However, the Jews of the twentieth century were not
a community any more, nor had they been for a long time. They had no faith in common with each other, they felt their Jewish identity was a burden rather than a source of pride, and they were not aware of having any mission. They lived at several removes from the commandments of the books that had once been sacred to them, and they did not want to speak the old language they used to share. They were increasingly impatient to integrate with the lives of the peoples around them and become part of their communities, dispersing into society in general, if only to have some relief from persecution and rest instead of moving on. As a result they no longer understood each other, having become part of those other nations—they were more French, German, British and Russian than they were Jews. Only now, when they were all lumped together, swept up in the streets like dirt, bankers from their grand homes in Berlin, synagogue servers from the Orthodox communities, Parisian professors of philosophy, Romanian cabbies, layers-out of the dead and Nobel prize-winners, operatic divas, women hired as mourners at funerals, writers and distillers, men of property and men of none, the great and the small, observant Jews and followers of the Enlightenment, moneylenders and wise men, Zionists and those who had assimilated, Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews, the just and the unjust, and behind them the frantic crowd of all those who thought they had escaped the curse long ago, converts to Christianity and half-Jews. Only now were Jews forced, for the first time in centuries, to be a single community again. It was a long time since they had felt like that, a community of outcasts driven out again and again since the exile from Egypt. But why was this their recurrent fate and theirs alone? What was the reason for this pointless persecution, what was its aim? They were driven out of the lands where they had lived, but never given any land of their own. They were told: “Don’t live here with us”, but no one told them where they
were
to live. They were blamed for transgressions but offered no means of atonement.
And so they looked at one another with burning eyes as they fled. Why me? Why you? Why you and I together when I don’t know you, I don’t understand your language, I don’t grasp your way of thinking, when we have nothing in common? Why all of us? No one could answer that question. Even Freud, with the most lucid intellect of the time, to whom I talked a great deal at the time, could see no sense in this nonsense and no way out of it. But perhaps it is the ultimate point of the existence of the Jews that, through their mysterious persistence in living on, they raise Job’s eternal question to God again and again, to keep that question from being quite forgotten.

Nothing is quite such an eerie sensation as when something you thought long dead and buried suddenly approaches you again in its old form and figure. It was the summer of 1939, Munich with its brief delusion that we might have “peace for our time” was long gone, Hitler had already broken his sworn oath and attacked mutilated Czechoslovakia, Memel
8
was occupied, the German press was whipping up feeling and vociferously calling for the annexation of Danzig and the Polish corridor. The awakening of Britain from its blind trust had been a bitter one. Even simple, uneducated people whose horror of war was purely instinctive were beginning to express great displeasure. All the English would speak to you of their own accord, although they are usually so reserved—the porter in our block of flats, the lift boy, our parlour maid as she did the housework. None of them had any clear idea of what had happened, but they all remembered one thing, obvious and undeniable—Chamberlain, as Prime Minister of Britain, had flown to Germany twice to safeguard peace, and no amount of concessions had been enough for Hitler. Harsher voices were suddenly being raised in Parliament, demanding: “Stop aggression!” You could sense preparations being made for—or rather, I should say against—the war that
was on its way. Once again the pale barrage balloons went up, still looking as innocent as grey toy elephants—to hover over London, once again air-raid shelters were dug, and the gas masks already distributed were carefully checked. The situation now was just as tense as it had been a year ago, perhaps even more so, because this time the government had a determined and embittered population behind it, a nation that was not naive and innocent any more.

During those months I had been out of London, and had gone out into the country, to Bath. I had never in my life felt more painfully aware of mankind’s helplessness in the face of world events. There was I, an alert, thinking human being, remote from anything political, dedicated to my work, quietly and persistently toiling away to give form and meaning to my years of life in my books. And there, somewhere out of sight, were a dozen other people entirely unknown to me, on whom I had never set eyes, a few men in Wilhelmstrasse in Berlin, at the Quai d’Orsay in Paris, in the Palazzo Venezia in Rome, in Downing Street in London, and those ten or twenty people, few of whom had ever shown any evidence of particular intelligence or skill, were talking and writing and telephoning and coming to agreements that the rest of us knew nothing about. They made decisions in which we took no part—we never did come to know the details of them—and in the end they determined the course of my own life and the lives of every one else in Europe. My fate was in their hands, not my own. They destroyed us or spared us, powerless as we were, left us our liberty or forced us into servitude; they decided, for millions, whether it would be war or peace. And there I sat, like everyone else, in my own room, defenceless as a fly, powerless as a snail, while matters of life and death were at stake along with my own private person and my future, the ideas developing in my brain, my plans already made or yet to be made, my waking and sleeping, my will, my possessions, my entire being. There I sat staring
into space like a condemned man in his cell, walled in, chained up in this senseless, powerless waiting and waiting, while my fellow prisoners to right and left asked questions, consulted each other, chattered, as if any of us knew or could know what was going to happen to us and why. The telephone rang; it was a friend calling to ask what I thought. The newspaper came, and confused me even more. There was talking on the radio, one voice contradicting another. I went out into the street, and the first person I met asked me whether I thought there was going to be war or not, although I had no more idea than he did. And I myself asked other people questions, and talked and chattered as well, although I knew perfectly well that all the knowledge and experience I had gathered over the years, all the foresight I had acquired, was nothing by comparison with the decision of those dozen or so strangers. I knew that for the second time within twenty-five years I faced my fate powerless, and there was nothing I could do of my own free will. Pointless ideas came into my aching head. In the end I couldn’t bear being in the big city any more, because the posters up on every street corner with the shrill words on them leapt at me like fierce dogs, and because I found I was trying to guess the opinions of every one of the thousands of people passing by simply from looking at them. But we were all thinking the same—we were thinking purely in terms of Yes or No, Black or Red, in this crucial game on which my whole life was staked, the last years still before me, the books I had not yet written, everything that I had felt until now was my task in life and gave meaning to life itself.