War and Remembrance (149 page)

I
don’t
know that Rhoda’s done anything wrong. I
did
meet her with a Colonel Harrison Peters, and not once but several times. Their relationship may be innocent. In fact I would venture from her demeanor that it is. However, I don’t think it’s trivial. You had better get back to Washington by hook or by crook, and have it out with her.

Meantime, my love, I
cannot
sit on the sidelines holding my breath for news. I am in very deep with Duncan. We’ll probably be married before you and I see each other or even communicate again. I confess this tenuous but iron tie between us is beyond me. It’s like a fairy-tale thread that giants cannot break. But there’s nothing we can do about it, except to be glad that we’ve known such painful and exquisite magic.

Write me when you settle something, anyway. With all my heart I urge you to give Rhoda the benefit of every doubt. She’s a remarkable woman, she gave you stunning sons, and she’s had a terrible time. I’ll always love you, always want to hear from you, always wish you well. We’ve lived five days now this year, haven’t we? So many people never live a day from the cradle to the grave.

I love you.

Pamela

Pug was downing the breakfast, thinking that Spam was a grossly maligned delicacy — especially with powdered eggs, another underrated treat — when the doctor looked into the ward and said that he had a visitor. Pug walked out as fast as he could on shaky legs, the hospital bathrobe flapping. On a cheap settee in the deserted outer room, Harry Hopkins sat. He raised a tired hand. “Hi. We’re flying off to Cairo in half an hour. The President asked me to see how you are.”

“That’s incredibly thoughtful of him. I’m better.”

“Pug, your Lend-Lease memo was a dandy. He wants you to know that. He didn’t use it, but I did. Molotov started to gripe to me about Lend-Lease at a foreign ministers’ meeting. I socked him with your facts, and not only did I shut him up, but he apologized and said the bottlenecks would be eliminated fast. When I told the President he laughed like anything. Said it made his day. Now, you haven’t talked to Pat Hurley, have you?”

“No, sir. I’ve been pretty much out of things.”

“Well, that idea for a new agreement on troop withdrawals has worked out. The Iranians asked for a statement of intent from the three occupying powers, and that was all the President needed. He got an okay from Stalin,
and Hurley rushed hither and yon getting the thing drafted and signed. It’s called The Declaration of Iran.’ The Shah signed at midnight.”

“Mr. Hopkins, what about the landing craft situation?”

“That’s shot up in importance and urgency at this conference.” Hopkins gave him an acute questioning glance. “It’ll be top priority next year. Why?”

“That’s what I’d like to do next.”

“That, rather than command a battleship?” The long lean sickly face expressed lively skepticism. “You, Pug? You’re up for a command, I know that.”

“Well, for narrow personal reasons, Mr. Hopkins, yes. I’d like to spend some time with my wife.”

Hopkins stuck out a bony hand. “Come back by fastest transportation.”

The first situation ever brought before the United Nations, in April 1946, was a complaint by Iran that the Soviet Union, unlike America and Great Britain, had failed to withdraw its troops in accordance with the Tehran agreement, and was trying to set up a puppet communist republic in the north. President Harry Truman forcibly backed up Iran. The Russians, with considerable snarling, finally got out. The puppet republic collapsed. Iran recovered its territory. During that crisis, Victor Henry wondered whether a few words at a Persian dinner table might have been his chief contribution to the war. He could never know.

S
OME
twenty seedy men wearing yellow stars sit around a long table in the Magdeburg barracks, Aaron Jastrow among them, awaiting their first meeting with the new commander of Theresienstadt. After several days of driving around in gray February gloom and slush, making a thorough inspection of the ghetto, the new man has summoned the Council of Elders. The Board of Three heading the table — Eppstein and his two deputies — are not saying much, but their faces are long.

The newcomer, SS Sturmbannführer Karl Rahm, is not unknown here. For years he ran the Registry for Jewish Property, in the Central Office for Jewish Affairs of nearby Prague. The registry is the official German government office for despoiling Jews. Most European capitals have such agencies, patterned after Eichmann’s pioneer bureau in Vienna, and men like Rahm manage them. By reputation he is a run-of-the-mill Nazi, an Austrian, with a dangerous way of exploding on small provocation; but his manners are reputed a bit less coarse and cold than Burger’s.

These Elders, the sham government of Theresienstadt, are worried about the change of commanders. Burger was a devil they were used to. The ghetto was functioning under him on a wretched but stabilized basis. There have been no transports for many weeks. What will the unknown devil bring? That is the question written on the faces around the table.

Major Rahm enters the room with the camp inspector, Haindl. The Elders rise.

Only the black dress uniform with silver flashes and buttons, Jastrow thinks, gives this very common-looking fellow Rahm any presence. One saw such types by the thousands in the old days, jowly thirtyish blonds with bulging stomachs and haunches, strolling on the boulevards of Munich or Vienna. But Scharführer Haindl looks as evil as he is: a real plug-ugly. This Austrian inspector with the cigarette obsession is a feared and loathed man. He will jump through barracks windows to catch Jews smoking; spy on field gangs with binoculars; pop into hospitals, cabarets, even latrines. For possessing a single cigarette he will beat a victim half to death, or send him or her off to the Little Fortress to be tortured. Nevertheless people smoke voraciously in Theresienstadt; cigarettes rate just below gold and jewelry as currency; but a very sharp watch is kept for Haindl. Today he has a mild look, and his gray-green uniform is less sloppy than usual.

Major Rahm tells the Elders to sit down. From the head of the table he addresses them, feet apart, black swagger stick clutched behind him. His opening words are an amazement. He means to make Theresienstadt the Paradise Ghetto in fact as well as in name. The Elders know the town. They know their departments. It is up to them to give him ideas. Present conditions are disgraceful. Theresienstadt is run-down. He is not going to tolerate it. He is initiating a great beautification
(eine grosse Verschönerungsaktion).

Jastrow is struck by this Eichmann phrase. Rahm’s entire speech echoes what Eichmann said two months ago. Under Burger too there was talk about “beautification,” but the idea was so preposterous, and Burger himself seemed so uninterested, that the Elders took it as just one more mendacious German façade of words; and the Board of Three gave only desultory orders for cleaning up the streets and painting some huts and barracks.

Rahm is talking a different language. “The Great Beautification” is going to be his prime concern. He has issued important orders. The old Sokol hall will be rebuilt at once as a community center, with studios, lecture halls, and an opera house and theatre with fully equipped stages. All Theresienstadt’s other auditoriums and meeting halls will be smartened up. The cabarets will be enlarged and newly decorated. More orchestras will be created. Operas, ballets, concerts, and plays will be scheduled, also various amusements and art exhibits. Materials for costumes, settings, paintings, and so forth will be provided. The hospitals are going to be spic-and-span. A children’s playground will be built. A beautiful park will be laid out for the old folks’ leisure.

As Jastrow listens to this astonishing harangue, wondering whether it can be serious, the catch in the whole business becomes clear. Rahm is not mentioning any of the things that really make Theresienstadt a hell instead of a paradise: the starvation diet, the hideous overcrowding, the lack of warm clothes, of heat, of latrines, of care centers for mental cases and for the old and crippled, all generating the terrible death rate. Of these things, not a word. He is proposing to paint a corpse.

Jastrow has long suspected that Eichmann made him a figurehead Elder, and possibly even sent him to Theresienstadt, in anticipation of a visit from the Vatican or the neutral Red Cross. Something like that must be in the wind now. Even so, Rahm’s approach seems simpleminded. No matter how laboriously he renovates the buildings and grounds, how can he conceal the overwhelming squalor, the crowding, the sickly faces, the malnutrition, the death rate? A little more food, some attention to health, would quickly and easily create a sunburst of happiness in the ghetto that would fool anybody. But the concept of treating the Jews themselves any better, even to create a brief useful illusion, seems beyond the Germans.

Rahm finishes up and asks for suggestions. Around the table eyes shift
in gray faces. Nobody speaks. The so-called Elders — in actuality department heads of varying ages — are a mixed lot: some decent, some corrupt, some narrowly self-seeking, some humane. But all hug their posts. Private living quarters, exemption from transport, the chance to give and receive favors, outweigh the tension and guilt of being SS tools. None will risk opening his mouth first, and the silence grows nasty. Outside, a gray sky; inside a gray silence, and the ever-prevailing Theresienstadt smell of dirty bodies. Faintly from afar one can hear “The Beautiful Blue Danube”; the town orchestra is starting the morning concert, off behind the fence in the main square.

Jastrow’s department does not deal in the vital things Rahm has ignored. He will do nothing that might hurt Natalie and her child, but for himself, since the encounter with Eichmann, he is strangely unafraid. The American in him still finds this European nightmare in which he is caught disgusting and ludicrous; and the miasma of fear all around him, pathetic. For the barking fat-faced mediocrity in the stagy black uniform he feels chiefly contempt, modified by caution.

He raises his hand. Rahm nods. He stands up and salutes.
“Herr Kommandant,
I am the stinking Jew, Jastrow — ”

Rahm interrupts, pointing a thick finger at him. “Now then! That kind of shit will cease at once.” He turns to Haindl, who is smoking a cigar in an armchair. “New regulations! No more idiotic saluting and removing of caps. No more ‘stinking Jew’ talk. Theresienstadt is not a concentration camp. It is a comfortable and happy residential town.”

Haindl’s malevolent face twists in surprise.
“Jawohl, Herr Kommandant.”

Surprise, too, on all the Elders’ countenances. Hitherto, failure to pull off one’s head-covering and to salute in a German’s presence has been a major ghetto offense, punishable by instant clubbing. Sounding off as a “stinking Jew” has been mandatory. The reflexes will take much unlearning.

“I beg leave to mention,” Jastrow goes on, “that in my department the music section badly needs paper.”

“Paper?” Rahm’s face wrinkles up. “What kind of paper?”

“Any kind,
mein Kommandant.”
Jastrow is speaking the truth. Scraps of wallpaper, even of linen, are being used to note down music. It is a small harmless item, worth a try. “The musicians will rule it themselves. Though of course, ruled musical score paper would be best.”

“Ruled musical score paper.” Rahm repeats this as though it were a foreign language. “How much?”

Jastrow’s deputy, a cadaverous orchestra leader from Vienna, whispers from the seat beside him.

“Mein Kommandant,”
says Jastrow, “for the kind of great cultural expansion you are planning, five hundred sheets to start with.”

“See to it!” Rahm says to Haindl. “And I thank you, sir. Gentlemen, that is the kind of idea I want. What else?”

One by one the other Elders now timidly rise with innocuous requests, which Rahm receives warmly. The atmosphere improves. On cue, the day brightens outside and the sun shines into the room. Jastrow rises again. May the music section also request more musical instruments, of better quality? Rahm laughs. By all means! The Central Registry in Prague has two big warehouses stuffed with musical instruments: violins, cellos, flutes, clarinets, guitars, pianos, the lot! No problem at all; just put in a list.

Not one Elder mentions food, medicine, or living space. Jastrow feels capable of bringing up these things, but what good could come of it? He would quench the sunny moment, bring trouble on himself, and accomplish nothing. Not his department.

When Rahm and Haindl leave, Eppstein rises. On his face the fixed obsequious smile fades. There is one more thing, he announces. The new commander has found the overcrowding of the town most unhealthy and unsightly, so five thousand Jews must at once be transported.

In an ordinary town of fifty thousand, struck by a tornado that wiped out five thousand inhabitants, the people might feel somewhat as the Jews do at a transport.

There is no getting used to this intermittent scourge. Each time the fabric of the ghetto is torn apart. Optimism and faith dim. The sense of doom rises again. Though nobody is sure what “the east” really means, it is a name of terror. The unlucky ones move around in shock, making their farewells, giving away what meager belongings they cannot pack into one suitcase. The Central Secretariat is besieged by frantic petitioners pulling every string and trying every loophole to get exemptions. But an iron proscenium of number frames the tragedy:
five thousand.
Five thousand Jews must get on the train. If one is exempted, another must take his place. If fifty are excused, fifty who thought themselves safe must be struck as by lightning with gray summons cards.