War and Remembrance (193 page)

His patrol sector was in the southeast, so he had to wait while the rest of the wolf pack crawled north into station. The thick Jap traffic ran peaceably past his periscope, showing lights at night, moving unescorted by day, like shipping in New York harbor — small passenger vessels, coastal cargo carriers and tankers, assorted small craft, even pleasure sailboats. He saw no warships. When the slaughter began at a scheduled hour, Byron was holding a clumsy little freighter in his sights. He turned the periscope over to Philby, who neatly and exuberantly torpedoed the victim.

All in all, over the two weeks of the pack’s assault, the
Barracuda
sank three ships. On the last two, in 1943, Aster would have scorned to expend torpedoes. All the torpedoes worked quite well now. The traffic dwindled after the first sinkings alarmed the Japs. Targets became scarce, and Byron crept here and there off the west coast of Honshu, admiring the pretty landscape.

At the rendezvous in La Pérouse Strait, eight of the nine submarines showed up. The wolf pack left in a welcome fog. Once clear of aircraft search range, they ran for Pearl Harbor on the surface, exchanging cheerful notes on their scores, and worried inquiries about the missing
Bonefish.
The
Barracuda
resumed copying Fox, but nothing came in for Byron. Entering port on July fourth, the flotilla encountered no jubilation, no ceremony. Byron went straight to the telephone office and put in a call to his mother, not knowing where his father was. It went through quickly, but there was no answer.

ComSubPac’s operations officer jumped up to throw his arms around Byron when he came into the office. “Hey, Byron! Christ, what a sweep!”

“Bill, I request relief.”

“Relief!
Are you out of your mind? Why?”

The operations officer sat down and heard the story out, chewing his lips and looking hard at Byron. His comment was tentative and cool. “That’s rough. But look here, your wife may be home by now. Maybe she’s got your boy, too. Why don’t you find out first? Don’t go off half-cocked like this. You’re on your way to a great record.”

“I’ve made my record. I request relief, Bill.”

“Sit down. Stop pounding my desk. That isn’t necessary.” Byron was in fact slamming his fist on the glass top.

“Sorry.” Byron dropped in a chair.

The operations officer offered him a cigarette. Taking a confidential tone he began to reveal surprising secrets. Russia was coming into the war. Sub-Pac had the word. MacArthur was going to land in Japan; first on Kyushu, then Honshu. The Sea of Japan was going to be zoned off between U.S. forces and the Russians. So it would be a whole new ball game. The only fat pickings left were in the Sea of Japan, and ComSubPac wanted to pour on the Hell’s Bells forays, and really clean up. while he could. “The submarines have won this war, Byron, you know that. But no job’s done until it’s over. You’re doing superbly. Lady Aster would have been proud of you. Don’t walk away from a fight.”

“Okay,” Byron said. “Thanks.”

He was not angry at the operations officer. The man’s purpose in life was fat pickings. He went to the office of the admiral, the enthusiast for FM sonar, and got right in. Byron calmly described to the admiral his talk with the operations officer.

“Admiral, here it is,” Byron said. “You may want to court-martial me for desertion, or you may not. I’m going to see my wife, and find my son if he’s alive. Please give me orders to enable me to do this. I’ve tried to serve. If I find my family, and the war’s still on, I’ll fly back here and take an FM submarine into Tokyo Bay. I’ll take one into Vladivostok, if you want me to.”

The admiral, with an annoyed squint and a jutting jaw, said, “You have one hell of a nerve.” He began looking through papers on his desk. “Whatever your personal hardship, I don’t appreciate being told off like that.”

“Sorry, Admiral.”

“I have a letter here from CNO, as it happens — now where the devil is it? Here we are. CNO wants a team of experienced skippers to inspect captured U-boats over in Germany. Preliminary reports are that those boats look better than ours. Embarrassingly so. The only way to get the real dope is to go out with the skippers and operate them. Do you know any German?”

“Sir, I speak it well.”

“Interested?”

“God, I’ll be so grateful, Admiral!”

“Well, you have the operational background. You’ll have to qualify your relief on the FM sonar first. Give him a week of runs in the dummy field off Molokai.”

“Aye aye, sir. Thank you and God bless you, Admiral.”

“Say, Byron, how did your FM sonar perform?”

“Magnificently, sir.”

“Greatest thing since canned beer,” said the admiral.

T
HE
usual pile of mail after a patrol lay on Byron’s bunk, including a heavy manila envelope from his father. Byron pounced on it. A handwritten letter was clipped to the bulky sheaf of papers inside.

14 June 1945

Dear Byron:

I know you re out on operations, so I’ve opened your mail from Europe. Here it is, as of now. In case this envelope goes astray, I’ve made facsimiles. Natalie’s story fills Pamela and me with horror. Horror is too weak a word. We still can’t grasp that an American girl went through these things, but it seems she just got caught in the mill.

Here in the U.S.A. the true facts are only now starting to sink in. General Eisenhower brought the press into Buchenwald, Dachau, Bergen-Belsen, and all those places. The papers have been full of the pictures and the accounts. Natalie’s survival shows her stamina, and perhaps the effect of our prayers, too. But prayer didn’t help the millions who got massacred. The decisive thing was that this man Rabinovitz’s outfit was working in Thuringia. That I call miraculous intervention. I believe that’s why she’s alive. His letter gives the details.

For a long time Pamela’s been asking me, “What’s this filthy war all about? Why did your son have to die? What have we achieved?” Now it’s clear. The political system that could perpetrate such foul deeds had to be wiped off the planet. It was damned powerful, too. The combined strength of the Russians, the British, and ourselves barely contained the thing. It could have overrun the earth. Because the Japs made league with it, we had to crush Japan too. Warren died in a right and great cause. I know that now, and I will never think otherwise.

Your little boy was well many months after he was taken out of Theresienstadt, since Natalie saw that snapshot of him on the farm outside Prague. Don’t give up hope. The search may take a long time. If you want to telephone me, I’m at the White House, office of the Naval Aide. That’s my new job. Evenings, Republic 4698 is our apartment number. Pam joins me in sending love,

Dad

Below this, on a single sheet of paper with an Army Medical Corps heading, Byron read these few typed words:

20 May 1945

Dear Byron:

I am a little better. Berel came to Theresienstadt and got Louis last July. Then later I received a picture of him on a farm outside Prague. He looked well. Avram says they will find him. I love you.

(Dictated to Nurse Emily Denny, First Lieutenant USANC)

The shaky signature was in green ink.

Avram Rabinovitz’s long typed letter on flimsy onionskin paper was signed with the same pen.

17th May 1945

Dear Byron:

I speak better than I write English, and I am also very busy. So I will make this short and give you what happened. The important thing is that she is over the typhus. Now she has to build up, she is in very poor condition. The interviewer from the War Refugee Board was a stupid woman so Natalie sounds stupid in the affidavit. Her mind is now clear and she talks nicely, but she cries a lot, and she does not like to talk about what happened. She ran a fever for three days after the interview. That is not being allowed any more. She has asked me to write to you. As you will see, her handwriting is unsteady and she is weak. Also she does not want to remember and write things down.

To make it short, I am based in Paris with a rescue organization, I won’t go into too many details. We are cleaning up the Nazi wreckage, putting the Jews who are wandering homeless and starving into camps, in order to get their health back and go to Palestine. It is terrible work. When Germany was falling apart the SS didn’t know what to do with the Jews they had not yet killed. It all happened too fast to kill them all and cover up the camps, although they tried. They marched them around or moved them sealed in trains, no orders, no destination, no food or water, and when the Americans or the Russians came the Germans just ran and left the Jews where they were, I don’t know how many thousands of them like that, all over Europe. Our people found Natalie in a train that came from Ravensbriick which was a women’s concentration camp, and was stalled in a forest outside Weimar, just standing there. Probably it was heading for Buchenwald. Natalie was under the train, lying on the railroad bed. She crawled out because women were dying all around her in the car. I was with a different unit, we talked on the telephone at night and they told me they had found a woman under a train who said she was an American. A lot of Jews claim they are Americans to get better treatment. These fellows couldn’t talk English, so I drove over from Erfurt, never expecting to find your wife, God knows, but even stranger things have happened to me in this work. She was not very recognizable, skin and bones, and she was delirious,
but I knew her and besides she kept talking about Louis and Byron. So I went to the American Army HQ and told them we had an American woman. This was in the middle of the night, and they sent a field ambulance for her right away. The treatment the army gave her is marvelous since she is an American.

They are trying to move her to Paris and I think they will succeed. There is a fine American hospital there in which Natalie worked for a while. The administrator remembers her and although it’s crowded he is willing to take her in. However, the red tape is tremendous, for instance the army officials are still trying to get her a new passport, but all that will be all right. Now about your son there is really no news. You will read in the affidavit how they got separated and Natalie did the right thing. That was very brave. However, it is not easy in Prague, because the Russians are occupying it, and they are not cooperative. Still, our people have been checking around Prague with no results yet. Just before the Russians arrived there was a lot of disorder in Prague, an uprising, Germans killing communists and so forth, and when the Germans retreated they looted a lot of the farms around there and set fire to them, so there is no telling what happened. Chances are your boy is certainly alive, but finding him is “looking for a needle in a haystack.” The homeless Jewish children are a problem in themselves, hundreds of thousands of them are roaming Europe, and some of them have become savages, wolves, their parents were killed and they learned to live by stealing. What the Germans did will never be repaired enough. Big card indexes are being assembled in Paris and Geneva by Red Cross, UNRRA, the Joint, and other organizations, but so far it is only a drop in the bucket. I have given the information on your son to our people who visit the files but they are swamped. It will take time. So that is the story, and I am sorry it is not a pleasanter one, but Natalie is alive at least, and she is beginning to look better. She has no appetite or she would recuperate faster. Letters from you would be a big help, and you had better send them to me, I’ll see that she gets them. Be as cheerful as possible when you write, tell her you believe your son is alive and we will find him.

Yours truly,

Avram Rabinovitz

The affidavit was a smudged faint single-spaced carbon copy, so poorly written that Byron could hardly follow some of it. It sounded nothing like Natalie. The interviewer obviously had taken notes, then typed them up in a hurry. The story began in peacetime in Siena, describing her entrapment by the Pearl Harbor attack and everything that had followed. Up to their meeting in Marseilles Byron knew most of it. The long Theresienstadt narrative, especially the scene in the SS cellar, made him cringe (though she or the interviewer had omitted the sexual details). The heading of the affidavit said there had been three interview sessions, but from Theresienstadt onward the narrative became sparse. The last words about Aaron Jastrow were oddly flat.