Читать книгу A Paler Shade of Red: Memoirs of a Radical - W. E. Gutman - Страница 25

ROMANIA, ROMANIA

In June 1944, as the battle of Normandy raged on, the formidable Russian armies launched a lightning two-pronged offensive. On the Baltic, demoralized, short on supplies, large German battle groups were surrounded and captured. For the first time, entire German garrisons were surrendering en masse.

On the southern front, the Soviets entered and seized Iasi, the capital of Moldavia where my mother and grandmother were born. Long persecuted as “Christ-killers,” hated for their affluence and scholarship, the Jews of Iasi were now accused of “communist leanings” and abetting the Russian invasion. Goaded by such suspicions, the pro-Axis government of Marshall Ion Antonescu had moved against the city’s Jewish community and prominent Jews, among them journalists, were arrested and imprisoned in Tîrgu Jiu.

Soviet bombers first strafed Iasi on June 24. The attack caused relatively little damage. The second bombardment, two days later, killed over 100 people. That same day, Police Chief Kirilovich summoned Jewish leaders to his office. He accused them of covertly communicating with Soviet pilots and threatened to kill 100 Jews for every German or Romanian casualty. In the evening, looking for evidence of complicity -- flags, flashlights, radio transmitters and “communist literature” -- 800 military and civil guards fanned out in a massive raid on Jewish homes. Many were severely beaten and robbed. Over 300 people were arrested. On June 27, Romanian soldiers evacuated more than 300 Jews from the Bessarabian town of Sculeni, forcing them across the Prut River to the Moldavian side. There, they were first forced to dig trenches then robbed, massacred and hastily buried.

In a monograph published in 1988 by the International Journal of Romanian Studies, history Professor Henry Eaton, of the University of North Texas at Denton, recalls:

“Iasi, that day, was a terrifying contrast of emptiness and violence -- silent houses and deserted streets suddenly alive with gangs of thugs, shots and screams. Towards evening, there were hurried visits to the synagogues. Five Jews were arrested and sent to the rail yard of the 13^th Infantry Regiment to mark unexploded bombs and their locations. They were chosen for the dangerous work because Jews were alleged to have directed the Russian bombs onto the military compound. The five were then murdered and their bodies were dumped on the city’s outskirts.”

The following morning, Prof. Eaton recounts, thirty Romanian soldiers began looting Jewish residences on the pretext that they were looking for radio transmitters. That night, a plane dropped a white flare over Iasi, setting off sirens, triggering a barrage of small arms and automatic fire, and signaling the wholesale arrest, plunder and murder of Jews. German and Romanian military patrols, sometimes accompanied by civilian “trainees,” broke into Jewish homes, dragged residents out into the street, beating and killing those who resisted, robbing them, and hauling them off in convoys, hands over their heads, to various police precincts. About 2,000 were rounded up by daybreak. Groups of civilians, including members of the Iron Guard, joined in the lynching, roaming Jewish neighborhoods and beating people, sometimes with nail-studded clubs or lead-weighted truncheons.

“The new day brought more intense violence. Convoys of Jews, viciously abused, arrived at the Central Station and were forced, single file, through the gates into the courtyard, between rows of German soldiers swinging crowbars and clubs. Some of the prisoners were killed on the spot.”

That afternoon, another alarm sounded and automatic weapons, including machine guns placed around the police station’s courtyard, were aimed at the prisoners and fired.

“… The firing went on intermittently until about six. Perhaps 4,000 or more were killed and many of the survivors were wounded. A few managed to climb the stone wall and escape. Those who were not killed and others, rounded up during and after the massacre, were cruelly herded to the railway station and crammed into suffocating boxcars whose doors and vents had been sealed shut. Nearly 1,200 died in the cars of one train that meandered for six days south to Cálárasi. In the weeks that followed the Iasi pogrom, Romanian soldiers killed thousands of innocent people in Bessarabia. In October they slaughtered tens of thousands of Jews in Odessa.”

*

Egged on by Romanian government bulletins promising Romanian expatriates safe-conduct back home, inferring -- foolishly -- from news from the front that the war was coming to an end, and feeling increasingly unsafe as the German occupation widened across France, my parents decided to leave France. We spent three days and nights switching from crowded Pullman coaches to dilapidated wagon trains and passing through countless military checkpoints. Three days and nights spent averting the probing gaze of railroad police, internal security officers, and border-crossing constabulary. Three days and nights to reach Bucharest, convinced that peace was at hand and just in time to grasp the awful truth, that it would take yet another year, more air raids, bloodshed and madness before war gasped its last.

“We took an incalculable risk,” my father would later reflect. “It was sheer folly. I don’t know how we ever pulled it off.”

On August 24 the Luftwaffe bombarded Bucharest. Romania seceded from the Axis, declared war on Germany and, joined by Russian forces, attacked the Wehrmacht.

Six days later, the Red Army reached the Ploiesti oil fields and entered Bucharest. On September 6, King Michael declared war on Hungary which, with Hitler’s blessings, had expropriated Transylvania.

On September 12, the young monarch signed an armistice treaty with the Russians and ordered the Romanian army, heretofore an instrument of the Germans, to turn their weapons against them. In a final round -- Field Marshal Montgomery called it “a sensational knock-out punch” -- the combined U.S. and British air forces pursued the retreating Germans, severed their supply routes and proceeded to carpet bomb Bucharest.

*

I can still hear the furious dissonance of war. My mind’s ear swells with the ghoulish wail of sirens as we dash frantically to reach damp, cold underground air-raid shelters. The long, low-pitched hum of a hundred flying fortresses cruising overhead in formation still reverberates inside my chest. The sounds, the images are all there to be retrieved when acts of human folly awaken childhood memories: the shrill whine of bombs diving earthward, the muffled detonations, the sickening groan of buildings splitting apart and collapsing like sandcastles, the smell of gunpowder, the odor of death.

*

One air raid lasted five days. I’d come down with the measles. Induced by high fever and aggravated by fear, hallucinations kept me in a constant state of agitation that alarmed my parents and lent a surreal aura to an atmosphere thick with desolation and fear. There was little to eat or drink. Braver men in the shelter, my father among them, periodically looted food stores and pharmacies as incendiary devices and concussion bombs peppered the city. Some of the men never made it back.

On the fifth day, when the all-clear signaled the end of the raid, my father wrapped me in a blanket and carried me out. Acclimated to darkness, my eyes refused at first to register the apocalyptic sight to which they were being treated. What I beheld was a scene straight out of Hieronymus Bosch’s Last Judgment. The city was ablaze. Standing amid the smoldering rubble, skeletal fragments of retaining walls rose against the sky like accusing fingers. Swirling smoke and dust fused into a gritty alloy that brought on fits of violent coughing. The streets were littered with debris. Lampposts were bent out of shape or sheared clean off their base. Automobiles, buses, tramways lay on their sides, pitted, blistered and gutted, tongues of fire still devouring combustible scrap. Sewer lines had burst and craters filled with brackish water percolated spasmodically, stirred by some subterranean convulsion. Contorted and disfigured, men, women, and children lay pell-mell amid twisted, fuming wreckage. Some had been ripped apart by the sheer force of the blasts. Others were draped around tree trunks or impaled on fence posts. Frozen in time and space by death’s hideous choreography, others yet hung limp over parapets and railings like disembodied marionettes. Eviscerated, blood oozing from their nostrils, horses stared into an emptiness that their eyes could no longer see. For them all, the poetry, the music, the cadence, the absurdity of life, had been cut short.

Cradled in my father’s arms, witness to this unfathomable landscape, haunted by the countenance of death, frightened by its irreducible totality, I remember feeling great sadness and, beneath the sadness, a powerless, childlike rage.

“Why? papa, why?”

My father tightened his embrace, placed his forehead upon mine and smiled softly.

“Don’t worry, son, don’t worry. Everything will be fine. You must believe that.”

I looked at the others as they scattered in search of survivors.

I remember closing my eyes, hoping in vain that this vision of hell would vanish somehow. Yesterday’s visions, I would learn, are what tomorrow’s nightmares are made of.

“Why, papa, why?” I kept asking, as I fell asleep in his arms. Only my own death, I understood with precocious insight, would one day put an end to the question. My father was right. There is no explanation.

When faced with the unanswerable, only questions remain.

*

On April 24, 1945, the armies of Koniev and Zukhov joined at Potsdam. The siege of Berlin began: 610 pieces of artillery rained 25,000 tons of explosives on the capital. Engaging in wholesale looting, rape and slaughter, Russian soldiers then took the city house by house, block by block.

On April 30, Hitler, Eva Braun, the Goebbels and Wehmacht Chief of Staff, General Krebs, committed suicide. Two days later, the Germans hoisted the white flag. On May 4, after blowing up the dikes of the Zuyderzee and flooding the country, German troops in Holland capitulated.

Himmler tried in vain to negotiate a deal with Swedish Count Bernadotte while Goering surrendered to an American general who promptly invited him to lunch.

At 02:41 on May 7, in Reims, the armies of the Third Reich surrendered unconditionally. Signed by General Jodl, the document was countersigned the next day in Berlin by Generals Keitel for Germany, Zukhov for the USSR, Tedder for the U.K. and Eisenhower for the U.S.

In Europe, the Second World War had ended.

I was seven.

In the frenetic few weeks that followed the liberation of Paris, court-ordered executions, military purges, political power plays and personal feuds claimed about 100,000 French lives, among them those who collaborated passively, to survive, others who had sold themselves with enthusiasm.

In his engrossing and richly detailed account, And the Show Went On: Cultural Life in Nazi-Occupied Paris [Knopf, 2010], Alan Riding writes,

“Even as Parisians finally slept without fearing a knock on their front door, a purge of the past began. No one doubted that it was necessary. France had been betrayed, dreadful crimes had been committed and now, as part of the rite of passage from occupation to liberation, the rule of law should be seen to prevail. But before an appropriate legal structure could be put in place, vengeance erupted spontaneously. As towns and villages were liberated, perhaps as many as 9,000 miliciens, collaborators and black marketers were summarily executed, both by furious individual citizens and by the resistance, now, at least theoretically, under the single banner of the Forces Françaises de l’Intérieur, or FFI.”

Condemned to death following a short trial, Henri Chamberlain Lafont, the traitor who saved my father’s life, and his accomplice Bonny, were executed. Many others were among the casualties of the “épuration sauvage” -- the “savage purge” that swept France after the liberation.

One can be a patriot and a scoundrel. The two work well together.

The Americans had fewer scruples. They helped war criminals escape, resettling some in the U.S., others in Latin America. The Cold War had begun and former enemies could be put to work to fight new conflicts.

*

With the end of the hostilities, life in Bucharest assumed a semblance of normalcy that was as deceptive as it was brief. The next four years would bring abrupt political change, repression and, finally, a reign of terror every bit as evil and ruinous as the Fascist pogroms that preceded the communist takeover. Predictably, the staunchest backers of Nazi sympathizer, Marshall Ion Antonescu, executed in 1944, became -- overnight -- the most ardent Stalinists. The very same rabble that had strutted in green shirts, black boots and leather straps, that had spewed Nazi slogans and beat up Jews, promptly donned red scarves, learned to hum the Internationale, declared their everlasting loyalty to the working class -- and beat up Jews. Rarely the fruits of conviction, such metamorphoses occur in the blink of an eye and are always accompanied by both vigorous denunciations of one's previous allegiance and pledges of fidelity to the new cause. To defect is human.

*

According to Schopenhauer, all truths go through three stages: They are first ridiculed, then bitterly contested and finally, if grudgingly. endorsed. What Schopenhauer did not say is that a shift in popular convictions, both simulated and short-lived, occurs between the second and third stages. Men are less impressed by the indisputability of an argument than by the ardor with which it is promoted.

Bill Clinton would later write, “The road to tyranny begins with the annihilation of truth,” a tactic that the fans of “law and order” adopt when “chaos” risks to upend their opportunistic version of discipline and public well-being. Much evil will be done in the name of “order,” “justice” and a one-sided, one-size-fits-all brand of morality.

It is in the name of “solidarity” that nations commit their most heinous crimes: they demand that victims of oppression forgive their tormentors who, in the name of “national reconciliation,” go scot free.

Order replaces disorder, and when order constricts and oppresses as it is wont to do, rebels and despots trade places until it’s impossible to tell them apart. The world will continue to produce would-be redeemers bent on saving us -- or else. They will preach altruism and peace and practice neither for fear that doing so might cost them their power. The spider will spin her web, the sun will rise, the cockerel will proclaim the birth of a new day, and we will spurt out of our mothers' bellies, wet and cold, only to thrash about for a time on battlefields and assembly lines, while the tax collector.... “Order” is an imaginary state contrived by the political authority of the moment. Only brute will and the survival instinct animate man. All the calamities that befell the world can be traced to the relentlessness of those who believe themselves sole masters of the truth.

Treachery is the province of man.

*

Bons-vivants, gregarious, anxious to put the war behind them, my uncle and my grandmother with whom we shared an apartment in the elegant Wilson Building, on Boulevard Brátiano, began to entertain again. These gatherings -- they called them “soirées” -- were elaborate affairs, and my mother and grandmother would often spend the day in the kitchen, creating delicacies designed to please the palate and sculpted to charm the eye. Twice a week or so, a plump young peasant woman, a bright scarf partly covering her ruddy cheeks, would run up the back stairs and deliver some key ingredients: baskets of freshly laid eggs, sour cream, several types of cheeses, red currants, boysenberries. My grandmother would candle the eggs and reject questionable ones. The woman would also bring corn meal, pork loins, rolls of Sibiu salami and live chickens. Retiring to the rear terrace, she’d slit the birds’ necks with a deft slash of a small curved knife that she kept in the folds of her multi-layered, ankle-long frock. The blood would collect in a shallow pan and I remember watching, mesmerized and horrified all at once, the desperate thrashings of the now headless birds. Squatting on her heels, her white underwear accentuating the fullness of her pink thighs, the young woman would bare a semi-toothless grin in which I discerned both reassurance and mockery. Her posture, suggestive and vaguely enticing, telegraphed more than I understood at the time. I would soon discover the tantalizing secrets that lay hidden beneath all that finery, with her help, in the maids’ quarters.