Chapter 4

You needn't, honestly. I'm releasing you. Don't come. I don't want you. Tell Aaron I said that." "Oh shut up, Natalie. Let's have the ticket." She gave him a playful smile, clutching the green and yellow ticket to her bosom. "Well! listen to Briny Henry being master of. The whole thing so is, darling, if anything does go wrong, I don't ever want to feel I dragged you into trouble." This was the first time Natalie Jastrow had-however casually-used a term of endearment to him. Byron stood up and pulled the ticket from her gloved hand. The scheduled eight-hour trip lasted a day and a half. No connections worked. Their baggage vanished. They spent the night on benches in the Budapest terminal. At Warsaw, they were the only foreigners arriving at the small field in the nearly empty, rusty, shabby LOT plane, which turned right around and took off jam-packed with people fleeing Poland. Disconsolate travellers crowded the fence and watched it go. A beefy young Pole in an olive uniform, speaking broken French, asked the two Americans many hostile questions and seemed to regard them as spies or lunatics. He confiscated their passports, muttered with other officials, told them to wait, and disappeared. They were famished, but the throng of refugees in the canteen, mostly Germans, sitting on luggage, squatting on the floor, or crowding every bench and chair, had long since eaten up all the food. Byron pounced on a couple of seats vacated for a moment. Bottles of warm Polish beer stood in the center of the table, with an opener and some glasses, so they drank warm beer and paid the waiter who came swooping down. Then Byron found a telephone and talked the waiter into calling the embassy. Slote was shocked to hear his voice. He appeared at the airport within the hour, chewing nervously on his cold pipe, in a shiny blue Chevrolet that prompted stares. Out came not only the passports, with various entry documents badly printed in purple ink on crude paper, but their luggage too, mysteriously rescued from the Balkans. They piled into the embassy car and set off for the city. Natalie looked trim and pert after a last grooming in the ladies' loungee size of a telephone booth, she said, with one cold water tap, and no seat on the single toilet bowl. 'Dens this continue, ic?" she said. "I mean, this is the airport of the capital of Poland! The further east we've come, the smaller the airports have gotten, the more loused-up the schedules, the worse the airplanes, the surlier the officials, the cruder the johns, and the rougher the toilet paper. I'm not sure my bottom would survive a trip to Russia." "Well, eastern Europe is another world, Natalie. And you're seeing it at a bad time. This little airport's usually deserted and half asleep. However -he jabbed the stem of his pipe toward her-"if you choose to go on a pleasure trip during a time of general mobilization-" "Here it comes, Briny," she said, her eyes full of dark amusement.
Slote reached a caressing hand, with a large blue-gemmed college ring, to her face. The easy intimate gesture hurt Byron's eyes, signalling the end of his exclusive (if unheated) possession of the girl's company. He slumped glumly in the back seat. "I'm thrilled to see you, darling, though you're stark mad," Slote said. "Things are looking much better tonight. England finally signed her guarantee to Poland, just today. The betting was that the pact with Russia would make her crawfish. Nothing of the sort. There's reliable word from Sweden that Hitler's calling off his h unmistakable." invasion. The English knocked his breath out, that's I hope." "Where are you putting us? A place with bathtubs, "It's no problem. In the past three days the hotels have emptied. The Europeiski has some luxurious rooms, quite Western, really, and at Eastern prices. Don't figure on staying long. The situation can still Turn sour overnight." 'I thought maybe a week," Natalie said. "Then Byron and I can fly or drive down to Cracow and visit Medzice, and then fly on back t'o Rome." "Great bloody Christ, what are you talking about? Medzice! just forget it, Natalie! 'y should I? Uncle Aaron said I should visit the family in Medzice. That's where we're all from. My gosh, this is flat country. Flat as a table." They were driving through fields of sweet-smelling ripe grain, interspersed with pastures where cows and horses grazed. Far, far ahead on the level plain, the buildings of Warsaw dimly rose. "Exactly, and that's Poland's curse. It's a soccer field, a hundred thousand square miles in size. Fine for invasions. Even the low mountains along the south have nice wide easy passes. Half a million German soldiers are in Czechoslovakia at this moment, poised at the Jablunka pass, forty miles from Medzice. Now do you understand?" Natalie made a face at him. Warsaw was much calmer than Rome. In lamplit twilight, welldressed crowds, heavily sprinkled with uniforms, were happily promenailing on the broad avenues, eating ice cream, smoking, chatting. The green parks were thronged with jocund children. Bright red buses went by with side placards advertising a movie; the name SHMEY TEMPLIE stood out from Polish words. Splashy billboards touted Cennan toothpastes, radios, and hair tonic. The long rows of four-story gray or brown buildings, the boulevards running into great squares flamboyant with statues, bordered by baroque official buildings or palaces, the electric signs beginning to flash and dance-all this made Byron think of Paris and London. It was strange to find such a metropolis at the end of the primitive air journey. The Europeiski Hotel had a lobby as ornate as any he had seen, with a massive brown-and-white marble staircase jutting down to the front door.
Natalie went up in the elevator. Slote detained Byron by touching his arm, then lit his pipe with harried flaming puffs. To Byron, seeing him after a lapse of many months, the Foreign Service man appeared impossibly old for Natalie; bespectacled, baggy-eyed, with marked lines in his lean sallow cheeks. A double-breasted chalk-striped dark suit emphasized his stodgy mature air, and he appeared shorter than Byron remembered. 'I wish I had time to buy you a drink," Slote said. "I'd like to talk to you. This Cracow trip is dangerous nonsense. I'm going to get you air reservations out of here as soon as I can. They must be booked solid for a week, but the embassy has some pull. If it takes both of us to put her bodily on a plane back to Rome, it's got to be done. Don't tell her tonight, though. She'll become unmanageable." "Okay. You know her better than I do." Slote shook his head, laughing. "I wonder, at this point. I ought to be deeply touched by this cuckoo visit-and I am, I am, of course I am-but Natalie Jastrow is too much for almost anybody. See you at dinner. The embassy's a madhouse. If I can't get away, I'll telephone." Byron sat for a while in his cavernous gloomy room with tall wl'windows facing the Bristol Hotel, wondering what the hell he was doing in Poland. He picked up the antique ivory-handled telephone, and with some haggling in German managed to get connected to Natalie's room. "Hello. Are you in the bathtub yet?" "Well, I'm glad you can't see me. What's up?, "I'm beat. You have dinner with Slote. I'm going to bed." 'Stop that rubbish. You're dining with us, Briny. You come and fetch me at nine, do you hear? Leslie has booked me into Paderewski's suite, or something. it's fantastic. I've got a fun-length mirror here, held up by two big brown wooden angels." This way," Slote said. 'Our table's ready." An orchestra in gold-frogged red coats was thumping old jazz tunes in the main dining room of the Bristol, which for size, silk hangings, white linen, gilt-and-crystal chandeliers, obsequiousness of waiters, fine dress of the thronging customers, and ineptness on the dance floor, might have been in any first-class hotel in Europe. Certainly there was no trace of a war scare. "Sorry I'm late. It's the Jews," Slote apologized when they sat down. "They're storming the embassy. We've all become visa officers, right on up to Biddle. Christ knows I don't blame them. If they can show a relative, a friend, a letter, anything, we process them. A New York telephone book, today in Warsaw, is worth a hundred zlotys, that's about twenty dollars." "That puzzled me," Natalie said. "I understood Warsaw was full of Jews. I've seen very few so far." "Oh, they're here, all right. A third of this city's Jewish." At this point a tailcoated, homing headwaiter brought a menu, and Slote had a long colloquy with him in Polish. Natalie listenedWith an admiring, envious look. "Les, was it very hard to learn? One day I'll try," she said as the waiter left. "My folks used to talk Polish when they didn't want me to understand. I'm haunted by a sense of being back in my childhood, and yet this is such a foreign place! It's all very singular." They ate amazingly good smoked salmon, a strange egg dish, and tough roast meat. Slote kept tossing off brown Polish vodka in a thimblesize glass, while the others drank good French wine. "Leslie, you're going to be stone drunk." Natalie sounded more jovial than disapproving. 'There's so little in every glass," Slote said, pouring more from the bottle. "I've had a very hard day. Even without you turning up, you fool." They smiled at each other. Byron wished he had gone to bed. Slote looked at him and with a polite effort resumed talking. "Hell, yes. It's a historical puzzle, really, how three and a half million Jews came to settle in Poland. It'
such an anarchic country. You'd think they'd have chosen a more stable place. I have a theory.(s) I sort of wonder what Aaron would make of it." "What's your theory about us Polish Jews, Leslie?" Natalie said with a grin. "That the anarchy was the inducement. Imagine a government of nearly a thousand barons, any one of whom could veto any legislation. That's the way they stumbled along here for centuries. No wonder Poland kept getting partitioned! Well, as long as the Jews could work things out with each individual nobleman they could at least live and farm and work. No oppression to fear." "Not bad," said Natalie. "But in point of fact, didn't the Polish kings welcome them in with cia sPe I protective laws? When Spain expelled them and the Holy Church was having one of its bad spasms of bounding and massacring the Jews? That's as I recall it." "I haven't studied the thing," Slote said, "but the Poles eventually took to doing that too." "That's why I was born on Long Island," said Natalie. "My grandfather got out, and a good thing." "What military shape are the Poles in?" Byron asked Slote. "Will they give Hitler a fight, if it comes to that?" "A fight?" Slote sucked on his pipe, looking up into the air. His tone turned measured and professional. "My, ask any one of them, and he'll probably tell you they'll defeat the Germans. After all, they defeated them brilliant, talking in x4lO1 Theseare strange people, Byron. They can be about politics and history, yet they don't give a damn that Germany is now an industrial giant, while Poland remains all farms and Jews and castles and mazurkas. Maybe they're right. Maybe the Polish fighting spirit will scatter the stupid unwilling cattle of Hitler. That's the talk. There are supposed to be two and a half million Poles in uniform, more men than Hitler's got. A highly questionable figure, but in this country, any statistics-"'Say, isn't that 'Stardust'?" Natalie put in. "It sounds a bit like 'Stardust." Dance with me." Byron thought Slote looked more like her uncle than her sweetheart, steering her clumsily around the floor. But Natalie's clinging attitude, closed eyes, and touching cheek weren't the ways of a niece. They exchanged a few laughing words, then Natalie said something that made Slote look serious and shake his head. They argued as they danced. "I'll find him without you," Natalie was saying as they came back to the table. "I didn't say I wouldn't help you find him. I said if you're going to talk to him about going to Medzice-" "Just forget it. Forget I mentioned it." Slote took two more shots Natalie glowered at the meat on her plate of vodka. To lighten the atmosphere, Byron asked Slote about the workings of the embassy. Looking relieved, Slote turned on the measured voice. it blurred his brain; it made him talkative. The alcohol hadn He sketched the organization and said that he was in the political section, but that since his arrival, he had been preoccupied with the flood of emigrants, as had everybody else. "Were you fellows surprised by the pact?" "Naturally. Even the Poles were struck dumb, and in their history they've seen everything. But nobody can predict Hitler. That's his genius, if you want to call it that. He does have an instinct for the breathtaking." The cloud was clearing from Natalie's face. "Leslie, why did Stalin go along?" "Honey, that's perfectly simple. Hitler offered him a piece of cake on a gold platter, and he simply said, 'Yes, thank you!" Stalin's completely turned the tables on England and France now. They froze him out o'f Munich-In effect, they handed Czechoslovakia to Hitler and said, 'Here, boy, leave us alone and go smash Russia." Now Stalin's done a Munich in reverse. 'No, no, here, boy, take Poland, and go and smash the West."' With little rapid puffs of blue smoke, clearly enjoying the chance to expound, Slote went on, "Lord, how the British have been asking for this! An alliance with Russia was their one chance to stop Germany.
They had years in which to do it. All of Stalin's fear of Germany and the Nazis was on their side. And what did they do? Dawdle, fuss, flirt with Hitler, and give away Czechoslovakia. Finally, finally, they sent some minor politicians on a slow boat to see Stalin. When Hitler decided to gamble on this alliance, he shot his foreign minister to Moscow on a special plane, with powers to sign a deal. And that's why we're within inches of a world war." "Is it going to come?" Natalie asked. "Why, I thought you and Aaron were the authorities for the view that it won't." I'm not ready to panic. It just seems to me that Hitler will get what he wants, as usual." Slote's face turned pinched and sombre. He pulled at the pipe, sucking in his pallid cheeks. "No. The Poles now have the signed British guarantee. Very gallant, very irrational, very belated, and probably futile. To that extent we're back in 1914. Poland can plunge the world in by standing firm. it's all up to Hitler. If he wants to arm some more first, the crisis will subside, and that seems to be in the Wind at the moment. But for all we know, he's already given the order to march. That's why I'm being such a pill about Medzice. Down there, in the next two weeks, you have a fifty-fifty chance of being captured by German soldiers. I do think that's a bit risky, dear." After dinner Slote drove them to another part of town: street after street of old brick houses of three and four stories, with shops everywhere at ground level. Here indeed were Jews by the thousands, strolling on the sidewalks through narrow cobbled streets, looking out of windows, sitting in shop doorways. On the street corners knots of bearded men argued with loud voices and sweeping gestures, as on Manhattan's Lower East Side. Many of the men wore kaftans, or else the boots, blouses, and caps of the countryside. There were men in ankle-length black coats and black hats, and a few youngsters in army uniform. There were some prosperous people, too, smooth-shaven men wearing bowlers and wellgroomed women looking much like the Warsaw Gentiles around the darted about at their street games, boys in caps Europeiski. Children and short trousers and girls in neat colored frocks, and their mothers gossiped as they watched them. 'I thought you said they were all storming the embassy," Byron remarked to Slote. "There are three hundred and fifty thousand of them, Byron. Maybe one in a hundred has foresight. That puts three or four thousand hammering at our doors. The rest believe what they want to believe, and vaguely hope for the best. The government keeps telling everybody there won't be a war." Natalie was looking around with an absent, pleased expression at the horse-drawn wagons and handcarts in the streets, and at an old trolley car clanking by. "My parents described all this to me when I was a child," she said. 'It seems not to have changed." People stopped and looked after the embassy car as it passed. Once Slote halted to ask directions. The Jews came clustering around, but gave only vague cautious answers in Polish. 'Let me try," Natalie said, and she began to talk Yiddish, causing an astonished outbreak oflaughter, followed by a burst of warm, friendly talk. A chubby boy in a ragged cap volunteered to run ahead of the car and show the way. They set off after him. "Well done," Slote said. "I can hack out Yiddish after a fashion, if I must," Natalie said. "Aaron's a master of it, though he never utters a Yiddish word." Natalie and Slote got out at a gray brick apartment building with tall narrow windows, an ornate iron door, and window boxes of blooming geraniums. It overlooked a small green park, where Jews congregated on the benches and around a gushing fountain in noisy numbers. Curious children ran from the park to ring Byron in the American car. Under their merry stares, as they freely discussed him and the machine, Byron felt somewhat like an ape behind glass. The faces of the Jewish children were full of life and mischief, but they offered no discourtesy, and some gave him shy smiles. He wished he had gifts for them. He took his fountain pen from his pocket, and through the open window offered it to a blackhaired girl in a lilac dress with white lace cuffs and collar. The girl hung back, blinking wary dark brown eyes. The other children encouraged her with shouts and giggles. At last she took the pen, her little cool fingers brushing his hand for a moment, and ran lightly away. "Well, wouldn't you know. He's not there," Natalie said, returning to the car with Slote a few minutes later. "Gone to Medzice for his son's wedding, with the whole family, just my luck. Aaron told me he deals in mushrooms, but can that be such a good business? He's evidently well off." 'llnusually so," Slote was starting the car. "This must be the best apartment house around here." The little girl in lilac reappeared, leading her parents, the father in a knee-length gray frock coat and a mode-brimmed gray hat, the mother kerchiefed, wearing a German-tailored brown suit, and carrying a baby in a pink blanket. 'He's thanking you," Slote said to Byron, as the father gravely spoke in Polish through the %indow, holding the fountain pen, "and he says it's much too expensive, and please take it back." 'Tell him the American fell in love with his daughter. She's the most beautiful girl in the world, and she must keep it." The father and mother laughed when Slote translated. The little girl shrank against her mother's skirt and shot Byron an ardent look. The mother undid from her lapel a gold brooch with purple stones, and pressed it on Natalie, who tried to decline it, speaking in Yiddish. Again this caused surprise and a cascade of jocund talk, the upshot of which was that she had to keep the brooch. The little girl kept the pen, and they drove off to shouted farewells.
"Well, I wasn't on a looting expedition," Natalie said. "Here, Byron. It's beautiful. Give it to your girlfriend, or your sister, or your mother." "Keep it, it's yours, " he said rudely. "I could consider staying in Warsaw and waiting for that girl to grow up "Not with those parents," Slote said. "She's for a rabbi." "Steer clear of ewish girls anyway, they're bad loss," Natalie said. "Amen," said Slote. Natalie was pinning the brooch on her jacket. "I guess I'll see Berel in Medzice, then, Too bad, Aaron said he was very clever, and could show me things in Warsaw that nobody else could. They used to study the Talmud together, though Berel was much younger." At the mention of Medzice, Slote despairingly shook his head. ATALI:G telephoned Byron in his room at seven O!clock one morning, Natter they had stayed up till well past three, touring nightclubs with Slote; dismal Polish imitations of Paris dives. In a nervously merry mood, she had pushed them on from one club to another, ignoring Slote's show of collapsing fatigue. 'Hi, Briny, are you dead?" From her chipper note, she might have had ten hours' sleep. "This is playing sort of dirty, but I have two seats on the plane to Cracow, and it leaves at eleven. I bought them yesterday. If you'd rather sleep and just stay here, okay. I'll be back in a couple of days. Half awake, Byron said, "What? Slote's got us on the plane to Rome tomorrow, Natalie, and those reservations were mighty hard to come by." "I know. I'll leave him a note. Maybe I'll phone him from the airport. If you come, we won't have to return to Warsaw at all. We'll go straight on to Rome from Cracow, Saturday or Sunday, after I visit my family." "Have you got reservations from there?" 'No. But Cracow's a hub. There are half a dozen ways to get out. We'll buy our tickets-plane or train or bus-as soon as we arrive there. Well? Byron! Have you fallen back asleep?" "I'm thinking." Byron was weighing the advantage of leaving Warsaw and Slote, against these harebrained travel arrangements. The war crisis seemed to be abating. The Poles in the nightclubs had acted gay and carefree, though Slote had remarked on the absence of foreigners, especially Germans. The streets were as calm as ever, and there were no visible preparations for war. Byron hadtaken to gauging the state of the crisis by the tone of Radio Warsaw. He now knew a few key words and phrases about the crisis, and much could sometimes be surmised from the shaky or relieved accents of the newscasters. In the United States, announcers in a time of crisis tended to use sonorous doom-filled voices, to thrill ffieir listeners. The Polish broadcasters, nearer the action, were less bent on being dramatic. In the past day or two they had not sounded quite so worried. He said, 'Have you heard any news?" "I just got BBC on shortwave. Same bulletins as last night. Henderson's talking to Hitler." "Natalie, this would be a damned wild excursion." 'y? I'll probably never have another chance to see where my parents were born. I'm here now. Leslie himself said last night that the worst seems to be over, that they've agreed to negotiate. Anyway, you don't have to come. I mean that. It'll be a bore for you, slogging around in the Polish countryside." "Well, I'll have breakfast with you." Byron packed fast. The more time he spent with Natalie Jastrow the more she puzzled him. Her relationship with Uslie Slote now baffled him too. If they were spending time in bed together-and he had to assume that this was part of her purpose in coming to Warsaw, if not all of it-they were finding odd hurried occasions for this, or taking pains to mislead him. Night after night Slote had said his farewells in the hotel lobby. She treated Slote, when they were together, with the loving warmth of a fiance, yet when Byron tried to %ithdraw from their company-for dinner, for a concert or the theatre, even for a tour of the embassy-she made him come along. It had crossed his mind, of course, that she might be using him-perhaps had even asked him along to Warsaw-to provoke Slote. If so, the tactic was failing. The Foreign Service man was cordial to Byron and appeared to take his tagging along entirely for granted. But it was hard to tell anything about Slote, except that he was weary, swamped with work, and very concerned about Natalie's presence in Poland. There had been more to her persistence in the journey-that was becoming clear to Byron-than desire for her lover. The Jewish streets of Warsaw fascinated her. No matter where they started an evening, they ended in those narrow byways. She had even dragged Byron (Slote had begged off) to a performance of O'Neill's Ah, Williss! at a little Yiddish theatre in a back alley, with a stage not twenty feet wide and a ragged curtain. For him it was a bizarre and tedious experience. But the mixture of apple-pie American characters and stylized jemish emoting in that shabby hall had much amused and moved her. "That was me, I guess," she had said, coming out of the theatre into the warm night, in the muddy alley bordered with sagging half-timbered houses.
"That exact strange mixture. I never quite understood that, and I'm still sorting it out. It's disconcerting but exciting. like seeing myself for the first time in a home movie." Evidently this same fascination was drawing her to Medzice. She was waiting for him in the restaurant. Somewhere she had bought a Polish dress, a bright flowery print with an open neck, and she had combed her heavy hair forward covering much of her forehead in an outdated American style, as the Warsaw women did. "Will I get by? I'm so bored with all these stares, as though I had horns." "So long as you've got your passport handy, okay. Don't go too nalive." "Oh sure, and there's always this." At her feet was a blue suede sack with drawstrings. 'Suit, shirt, bat, stockings, girdle. I can go into a ladies' room anytime and emerge a complete Amerikanka, full of indignation and waving dollars. Are you coming? No, of course." "Yes. My bag's in the lobby." "Honestly? You're as goofy as I am, Briny." She looked at him from under her eyebrows, with a slow blink of her dark eyes, and Byron thought of the little ghetto girl in the lilac dress. "Tell me, don't you like Slote a little better now?" "I don't dislike him. I'm sorry for him at the moment, he's certainly in over his head." The waitress put down plates of food. He said, "Well, you ordered for both of us. Fine. There's nothing like this Polish ham." She said, 'I'm even beginning to feel slightly guilty here, eating ham. Imagine!" Natalie cut and ate the thick pink meat with no visible remorse. "I don't know anything about your religion," Byron said. "Neither do I, andies hardly my religion. I dropped it before I was eleven years old-temple, Hebrew classes, everything. It grieved my father: he's a Zionist, an officer in the temple, and all that. But our rabbi was such a boring dunce, Briny! And my father simply couldn't answer my questions. He's not an intellectual like Aaron, he's a businessman. When I was eleven I'd re ad more books than he had." "But he just allowed you to drop it?" Byron said. "Like that? My father wouldn't have, that's for sure." "Possibly military men are different," Natalie said with a skeptical smile. "Most fathers can't do much with daughters. Anyway, I was an only child, and very good, on the whole. I just wouldn't keep up flummery that made no sense to me. Well!" She set her knife and fork down. "Coffee and then on to Medzice. Correct?" "I'm with you." A rickety taxi, with thick surgical tape criscrossing the cracked yellow windows, brought them to the airport. The lone aircraft on the sunny field looked so rusty and patched that Byron thought it might be a wreck; but as they arrived, People came out on the grass and beganboarding it. "I don't know," Byron said as He paid the cab driver. "Do you suppose it will leave the ground? Maybe we should have this fellow wait." Natalie laughed and went to telephone Slote; but he was not in his apartment, nor at the embassy. The terminal was still crowded with Germans, though so few seemed left in Warsaw. Only Poles, and a few Jews, boarded the Cracow plane and took the awkward iron seats. The plane did leave the ground, with bumps and shudders that slightly parted the metal floor plates, affording a view underfoot of green fields and admitting a jet of warm air that billowed Natalie's skirt. She tucked it under her thighs and fell asleep. After a half hour or so the plane dived, slamming down to a stop near a barn in an open field, amid tall grass and wild flowers. BY]ron thought it was a forced landing, but several passengers took their valises and got off. Another bop of about an hour brought them to Cracow, the plane passing from green fladands to low mountains, part forested, part farmed, all checkered with fields of yellow, black, and purple. The Cracow terminal was a wooden hut behind a wire fence. Byron was glad to leave the plane, which reeked of hot iron and gasoline, and to walk out on a sunny, breezy field as fragrant as a flo gard either de of the tar ed la weren. On sir nding strip, kerchiefed peasant women were mowing hay in the sunshine. There were no cars in sight and only one mud-caked green bus. Some Passengers, met by their relatives, climbed into heavy horse-dravm wagons and went creaking off. "Any idea how we get to Cracow?" Byron said. "That bus must go there," Natalie said. A brown-bearded Jew standing alone and erect at the gate, in a long dark coat and a wide Hat dark hat, drew near, touching his hat with his hand. 'You excuse? Americans? Jastrow?" Natalie regarded him dubiously. 'y, yes. You're not Berel?" "Yes, yes. jochanan Berel Jastrow.- He broke into a broad smile. "You excuse, poor English. Speak you Dytsche? Franos?" 'Frans, un pew,; and she switched into French. "How did you know we'd be on this plane? Wellf Byron, this is Uncle Aaron's cousin, my father's cousin. Byron Henry is a good friend of mine, Berel." The two men shook hands, and the Jew smoothed his long grayflecked brown beard, scanning Byron's face. Berel Jastrow had a broad nose, heavy eyebrows, and surprisingly blue deeset eyes with a" almost Tartar slant. His glance was incisive, Byron felt that Jastrow classed him in a second or two as a Gentile, though probably a friendly one.
"Enchants," Jastrow said. He led them to a rust-pitted car on the other side of the shed. The driver was a scrawny man in a light sweater and a skullcap, with a little bright red beard. After a parley in Yiddish they set off. Natalie explained to Byron that they were going straight to Medzice. The Jastrow family was agog to see her, and Cracow was twenty miles the other way. They regarded it as a wonderful omen that the American cousin was falling on them from the skies the day before the wedding. Natalie had telegraphed to jochanan Jastrow, Medzice, saying she expected to arrive today. But she had not mentioned the plane, scarcely expecting that the wire would reach him. 'Mais pourquoi pas? La Pologne nest pas I'Afrique ' Berel interI objected, brightly following Natalie's English. 'gest un pays tout a fait moderne et civili." Byron found it decidedly peculiar to hear clear good French spoken he would by this figure out of a ghetto painting or play. Jastrow told him arrange for their return to Rome the day after tomorrow; he had good connections in Cracow, and getting train or air tickets would be no problem at all. Swerving to avoid the worst holes, the car bounced along a bad tar road. They drove through tiny villages of straw-thatched log houses, painted with strips of blue between the logs. The driver had to maneuver around pigs, chickens, and cattle wandering in the road. Many of the houses were weathered gray, sagging, or toppling; some had no windows; but nearly all had new, or freshly varnished, doors. Close to each village, on a rise of ground, stood a church of wood. In the sun-flooded fields women and men toiled with hand implements or horse-drawn plows. The car passed massive wagons of hand-hewn wood pulled by muscular, resigned horses, and driven by muscular, resigned women and men, their sex indistinguishable except for marks like kerchiefs and beards. No tractor or automobile or any other machine appeared along the way until they came to Oswiecim, a medium-sized railroad town of brick buildings and wide streets, cut in two by a muddy river. Here the car stopped in the main square at the telephone exchange, and Natalie got out with Berel to phone Slote. Byron strolled around the square in the hot sun, attracting covert looks from the townspeople. He bought ice cream, and the shopgirl took his money without a word. Oswiecim was nothing like Warsaw: a flat town of low drab buildings, with an air of back-country dislike of strangers-Byron was glad to leave it. Natalie told him as they drove out into level green fields, on a dirt road along the river, that Slote, furious and alarmed, had said uncomplimentary things about Byron's intelligence, though she had tried to take all the blame on herself. "I think he's got a case of nerves," she said. "You don't suppose he's afraid of the Germans?" "Look, it was an unceremonious way to leave him." She said, with an odd little glance at Byron, "It wasn't all that um ceremonious. We were together till dawn, you know, talking. He ought to be tired of me."'What? I saw you Turn in at three." "Oh, yes, but then he rang me from the lobby, said he was too exhausted to sleep, or something, and I came down and we went out again." "I see. You must be really beat." "Strangely enough I feel wonderful. The nap on the plane, and now, all this sweet country air! Poland smells delicious. I never read that in a book." "Poland a foist-class country," Berel spoke up in English, stroking his beard. "Strong pipple. Hitler a big bluff. No war." Byron's stay in Medzice remained in his memory forever after as something like a trip to the moon. Though the usual church stood on the usual knoll, the villagers were almost all Jews. Medzice was a cluster of houses on crooked narrow dirt or cobbled streets, some log, some plastered, a few of brick, sloping down toward a flat green meadow and the winding river. About a mile beyond the town, a roofless great house in the style of a French chateau lay ruined on the river bank. The noble family was extinct, the house was a casualty of the World War, but the village survived. The Jastrows and their relatives seemed to comprise half of Medzice. They swarmed on Natalie and Byron and marched them joyously from home to home. The dark interiors were all much the same: tiny rooms, enormous stoves, heavy polished Victorian furniture, lace curtains, each house seething underfoot with children ranging from crawlers to adolescents. Wine, cake, tea, hard candies, vodka, and fish appeared on table after table. There was no polite way to refim. After a while Byron was physically uncomfortable, because there was never a toilet pause. In all the hours that this was going on, he never understood a word that anybody said. It seemed to him that all the Jews talked continuously and simultaneously. Natalie chattered away with these bearded men in dark blouses, breeches, and heavy boots, these unpainted work-worn women in plain dresses that reached their ankles. They all appeared enthralled by her. Outside each house a crowd gathered, joining the conversation through the windows. The visit of the two Americans was obviously one of the grandest events in Medzice since the war. what a world! No sidewalks, no shops, no movie houses, no garages, no cars, no bicycles, no streetlights, no hydrants, no billboards; not a sound, not a sight to connect the town with the twentieth century, except a string of telegraph poles stretching along the river. Yet Natalie Jastrow was only one generation removed from this place. Dr. Aaron Jastrow, the author of A jeuls Jesus, the full professor of history at Yale, the urbane friend of the archbishop of Siena, had lived here until his fifteenth year, and had looked like one of these pale, skinny, studious boys in big black skullcaps and ear curls! Byron could not imagine what these people made of him, but they were fully as cordial to him as to Natalie, substituting smiles and gestures for the talk with which they flooded her. (The next day Natalie told him that she had identified him asher protector, an American naval officer sent along by Uncle Aaron. They had accepted this without question, since anything Americans did was equally unlikely and shocking and Marvelous.) The sleeping arrangements that night were as novel as everything else. Byron was quartered at the home of the rabbi. This was the outcome of a tremendous argument in which half the population participated, including at one point the village priest, a brown-bearded man who, except for his bare head and black robe, rather resembled Berel, and whose sudden appearance on the scene sobered everybody. The parleying language shifted to Polish, then to German, which Byron well understood. The priest wanted to extend his hospitality to the Gentile American. Berel managed, with a timely word of help in German from Byron, to deflect this offer. When the priest left, both Berel and Byron became the center of jubilant triumph, and the American was borne off to the rabbi's brick house by an escort of singing, hand-clapping yeshiva boys, led by the bridegroom himself, a pale lad of eighteen or so with a wispy goatee. Here the rabbi and his wife tried to give him their own bed, but since it was obviously exactly that, the only large bed in the house, a black fourposter piled with huge pillows, Byron wouldn't have it. This caused another grand parley in Yiddish. The house had a second bedroom conraining two beds, and a plank and mattress stretched across two chairs. In this room there were already five tittering girls, who, as the discussion went on, began blushing and roaring with laughter. The idea seemed to be to put Byron into one of those beds. Evidently no decent solution could be hammered out. He ended up sleeping on the floor of the main room, a sort of parlor and dining room combined, lined with giant leather-bound books. The rabbi gave him a feather mattress to lie on, and as six of the boys from the Cracow yeshiva shared the floor With him on similar mattresses, he did not feel ill-treated. Indeed he slept better on the floor of the rabbi's house in Medzice than he had in War§aw's Europeisld Hotel. He found the feather mattress lulling. He spent much of the next day walking with Natalie around the town and in the fields and along the river, past an old cemetery to the ruined great house. The preparations for the wedding were going forward, so today the family let the visitors amuse themselves. The muddy narrow streets of Medzice-it had rained hard during the night, and the rattling on the rabbi's roof had increased Byron's sense of snugness-were filled with an autumnal fragrance of hay and ripening fruit, made more tangy by the smells of the free-roaming ducks, chickens, goats, and calves. Some of the fowl were encountering tragedy, happily strutting in the morning sunshine one moment, and the next swooped down upon by laughing children and carried off squawking and flapping to be slaughtered. In the fields beyond the outlying houses and barns-mostly one-room log structures with heavy yellow thatch roofsows and horses grazed in tall waving grass spotted with wild flowers. Water bugs skated on the surface of the slow-moving brown river. Fish jumped and splashed, but nobody was fishing. Natalie told him she had stayed up half the night talking to the family. Most of what she had heard was news to her. Her father had tended to reminisce more about Warsaw than about his birthplace, and as a child she had been bored by the little she had heard, since she had only wanted to be a true-blue American. In the village, Uncle Aaron and her father were the legendary ones who had made an American success. Aaron Jastrow was variously thought tobe great surgeon, astronomer, and cancer specialist; "Professor" had ambiguous mean(a) ingsinPolishandY(an) iddish.Nobodybu(a) t Berel knew that he had written a famous book about Jesus, and Natalie gathered that Aaron'cousin at some pains to keep the achievementquiet.Berel(thiswasafamiliarnam(s) eforjochanan(was) , his real name) was the local success. He had begun trading in mushrooms while still a student in Cracow, had branched into other exports, and had prospered enough to move his family to Warsaw; but he had sent his son back to the Cracow yeshiva, and had found the boy a bride in Medzice among the second cousins. The numerous Jastrows, like the rest of the villagers, lived by farming and by selling dairy products in the markets of Oswiecim and Cracow. Clambering around the ruined great house, Natalie went exploring out of sight, broke through some rotten flooring, and fell ten or twelve feet. Byron heard the splintering noise, her shriek, and the thud. He hurried to find her. She lay sprawled like a broken doll, her skirt up around her gartered white thighs. She had landed on dirt and thick grass; whatever the floor here had been, probably parquet or marble, nothing was left of it. Byron pulled down her skirt and lifted her to a sitting position. She was conscious but stunned, and greenish pale. In a minute or into her eyes. She shook her head. "Ye gods, I really saw stars, Byron. I thought I'd broken my silly neck." She put her head on his shoulder. "Glory, what a scare. I'm all right, help me up." She limped; her left knee bothered her, she said. She took his arm with an abashed grin and leaned on him. Byron had tried to keep her from climbing the decayed staircase, and the grin was her only apology, but it was enough. He was worried by the injury, and still angry over her casual disclosure that she had been with Slote until dawn the day before. However, to have this girl leaning on him, in a sunlit orchard full of apple scent by a river, seemed to Byron almost all the pleasure he wanted in the world. just holding her like this was sweeter than any delight any other girl had ever given him. Whatever it was that made a girl desirable-the enigmatic look in the eyes, the soft curve of a cheek, the shape of a mouth,. the sudden charm of a smile, the swell of breasts and hips under a dress, the smoothness of skin-Natalie Jastrow for Byron was all composed of these lovely glints, all incandescent with them. That she stemmed from the strange Jews of Medzice, that she was, by all evidence, the mistress of a dour man ten years older than himself, that she was only a solid and human girl-indeed very heavy, leaning on him and limping-with a stubborn streak and some unattractive, almost coarse tomboy bravado: all these drawbacks just made her Natalie Jastrow, instead of the perfect girl he had been dreaming about since his twelfth year. The perfect girl had in fact been a blonde, and something of a sex fiend, like the dream girls of most boys. She was gone now, and this prickly Jewish brunette held her place. And here they were alone on a riverbank in south Poland, in golden sunshine, a mile from any house, amid apple trees laden with ripe fruit "This will be slow work, getting back," she said. "I can try to carry you."What, a horse like me? You'd rupture yourself. I'm fine if I keep my weight off it. It's just such a bore." 'I'm not bored," said Byron. They passed an old abandoned scow half full of water. "Let's use this," he said, tipping it to empty it out. Natalie appreciatively watched him heave up the scow unaided. "No oars," she said. "We can float downstream." He guided the scow with a long rough plank that lay in it, using the plank as a rudder and as a pole. The river was very sluggish, almost oily, calm and brown. Natalie sat on the bow edge of the scow, facing Byron, her shoes in the seeping water. She said as they floated past the cemetery, "That's where all my ancestors are, I guess. The ones that aren't buried in Palestine." -Or Egypt or Mesopotamia," Byron said. Natalie shuddered. "I don't know. It's a godforsaken place, Briny." 'Medzice?" "Poland. I'm glad grandma and grandpa got the hell out of here." He banked the scow near the village. She climbed out and walked slowly, not limping. There was no doctor here, she said, and she didn't want to generate a crisis around the injured American cousin. She would have her knee taped in Cracow tomorrow. None of the villagers noticed anything the matter with her. Byron tried to find out the war crisis news. There was one working radio in Medzice, and several broken-down ones. The priest had the working radio. The rabbi told Byron, in Yiddish tortured into a barely comprehensible kind of German, that the last broadcast from Warsaw had been encouraging: the prime minister of England had gone to his country home for the weekend, and the crisis seemed to be passing. "Henderson, Henderson," the rabbi said. "Henderson talked to Hitler." And he winked shrewdly, rubbing one hand over the other to pantomime a money deal The wedding made Byron wish over and over that he were a writer and could record it; a Jew, and could comprehend it. The mixture of solemnity and boisterousness baffled him. In his training, decorousness was the essence of a wedding, except for the shoes-and-rice moment at the very end, but the Medzice Jews-though arrayed in their best, the women in velvet dresses and the men in black satin coats or formal city clothes did not seem to know what decorum was. They crowded, they chattered, they burst into song; they surrounded the veiled, silent, seated bride and discussed her vehemently; they danced, they marched here and there in the houses and in the streets, performing strange little rites; one and then another stood on a chair to speak or to singand the guests wildly laughed and wildly cried. The pallid bridegroom, in a white robe and a black hat, looked on the verge of fainting. Byron accidentally learned, by offering him a plate of cakes at the long men's table where the American visitor sat in a place of honor beside the groom, that the weedy boy had been fasting for twenty-four hours, and still was, while everybody around him continuously ate and drank with vast appetite. Byron, eating and drinking with the rest, and feeling very good indeed, was not sure for hours whether the marriage ceremony had or had not taken place. But near midnight a sudden gravity fell on the guests. In a courtyard, with the bright moon and a blaze of stars overhead, in a series of stern and impressive acts-including solemn incantations over silver goblets of wine and the lighting of long tapers-the bride and groom were brought together for a ring ceremony and a kiss, much as in a Christian union, under a hand-held canopy of purple velvet. Then the groom ground a wineglass to bits under his heel, and jubilation broke out that made everything before it seem staid and pale. Byron almost became the hero of the evening by putting on a black skulkap and dancing with the yeshiva boys, since there was no dancing with the girls. M the guests gathered to clap and cheer, Natalie in the forefront, her face ablaze with fun. Her knee healed or forgotten, she joined in the girls' dances; and so she danced, and Byron danced, inside the house and outside, far into the morning hours. Byron scarcely remembered leaving the bride's home and falling asleep on the feather mattress on the floor of the rabbi's house. But there he was when a hand shook him and he opened his eyes. Berel Jastrow was bending over him, and it took Byron a moment or two to recall where he was and who this man was, with the clever, anxious blue eyes and the long gray-streaked brown beard. All around him the yeshiva boys were sitting up and rubbing their eyes, or dressing. The girls were hurrying here and there in their nightclothes. It was hot, and the sun was shining into the room from a clear blue sky. "Yes? What is it?" he said. "Der Deutsch," the Jew said. "Les Allemands." "Huh? What?" 'De Chormans." Byron sat up, his voice faltering. "Oh, the Germans? What about them?" "Dey comink." by General Armin von Roon (adapted from his Land, Sea, and Air Operations of World War Id English Translation by VICTOR HENRY BY VICTOR HENRY I never expected to translate a German military work. For years, like many flag officers, I planned to write up my own experiences in World War II; and in the end, like most of them, I decided against it.
it was said of the late Fleet Admiral Ernest King that, if it had been up to him, he would have issued a single communique about the Pacific war: "We won." My war memoirs boil down more or less to this: "I served." Upon retiring from the Navy, I became a consultant to a marine engineering firm. On my last business trip to Germany, in 1965, I noticed in the windows of bookstores, wherever I went, stacks of a small book called World Empire Lost, by General Armin von Roon. I distinctly recalled General von Roon, from my days of service in Berlin as naval attache to the American embassy. I had met him, and chatted with him; and he came to one of my wife's frequent dinner parties. He was then on the Armed Forces Operation Staff. He had a distant, forbidding manner, a pudgy figure, and a large beaked nose, almost Semitic, that must have given him some grief. But of course, as his name indicates, he was of simon-pure Prussian descent. He was obviously brilliant, and I always wanted to know him better, but did not get the opportunity. I little thought then how well I would come to know him one day through his book! Out of curiosity I bought a copy of World Empire Lost, and found it so absorbing that I visited the publisher's office in Munich, to learn who had printed it in America. I then discovered that the work had not yet been translated into English. On my return to the States, I induced the publishers of this volume to acquire the English-language rights. I was planning to retire from business, and I thought that translating the book might ease the pain of putting myself out to pasture. World Empire Lost is an abstract from a huge two-volume operational analysis of the war, written by General von Roon in prison. He called it Land, Sea, and Air Campaigns of World War II, and he had plenty of time to write it; for at Nuremberg he got twenty years, for complicity in war crimes on the eastern front. This exhaustive technical work is not available in an English translation, and I doubt that it will be. Roon prefaced his account of each major campaign with a summary of the strategic and political background. These brief sketches, pulled out and compiled by the publisher after his death, constitute World Empire Lost. (I doubt that the general would have approved of that melodramatic title.) World Empire Lost is, therefore, not solid military history, but rather a sort of publisher's stunt. It runs together Roon's sweeping assertions about world politics in one short volume, and omits the meticulous military analysis that backed them. However, I believe the result is readable, interesting, and valuable. The remarkable thing about the book is its relative honesty. Nearly all the German military literature glosses over the killing of the Jews, the responsibility for the war, and Hitler's hold on the army and the people. About all these sticky questions, Roon writes with calm frankness. He planned to withhold his work from publication (and did) until he was safely dead and buried; so, unlike most German military writers, he was not tryingeither to save his neck or placate the victors. The result is a revelation of how the Germans really felt, and may well still feel, about Hitler's war. Here then is a German general levelling, insofar as he can do so. Roon was an able writer, much influenced by the best French and British military authors, especially de Gaulle and Churchill. His German is more readable than that of most of his countrymen who write on military matters. I hope I have at least partly conveyed this in translation. My own style, formed in a lifetime of writing U.S. Navy reports, has inevitably crept in here and there, but I trust no substantial distortion has resulted. This author, to my mind, portrays the Germans under Hitler as they were: a remarkably tough and effective fighting nation, not a horde of stupid sadists or comic bunglers, as popular entertainment now tends to caricature them. For six years these people battled almost the whole world to a standstill, and they also committed unprecedented crimes. The stake they were gambling for was, in Shakespeare's expressive phrase, nothing less than "the great globe itself." What was going on in their minds seems to me of Importance. That is why I have translated Roon. His version of events, while professional and well informed, can scarcely be taken at face value. He was a German through and through. On the whole I have let General von Roon describe the war in his own way. I could not, however, translate certain passages without challenging them; hence my occasional comments. Roon starts on his first page, for instance, exactly as Adolf Hitler started all his speeches: by denouncing the Versailles Treaty injustice imposed an honorable and trusting GermanybythecruelAllies.Hedoes(as) not(an) mentionthehistoricalc(on) atch to that. German writers seldom do. In 1917 Lenin overthrew the Kerensky government and sued for a separate peace on the eastern front. The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, dictated by the Germans a year before the Treaty of Versailles,deprivedRussiaofaterritorymuchlargerthanFran(over) ce and England combined, of almost sixty million inhabitants, and of almost all her heavy industry. it was far harsher than the Versailles Treaty. I used to bring up this little fact during my Berlin service, whenever Versailles was mentioned. My German friends were invariably puzzled by the comparison. They thought it made no sense at all. The Treaty of Versailles had of the Germans, hcippened to them; Brest-Litovsk had happened to the other fellow. In this reaction they were sincere. I cannot explain this national quirk but it should never be forgotten in reading World Empire Lost. Ookton, Virginia 27 May, 1966Victor Henry (IT Z1.6-C The Responsibility for Hitler In writing this book, I have only one aim: to defend the honor of the German soldier. To trace the rise of Adolf Hitler, our leader in World War II, is not necessary here. No story of the twentieth century is better known. When the victorious Allies in 1919 created the crazy Treaty of Versailles, they also created Hitler. Germany in 1918, relying on the Fourteen Points of the American President Wilson, honorably laid down arms. The Allies treated the Fourteen Points as a scrap of paper, and wrote a treaty that partitioned Germany and made an economic and political madhouse of Europe. In thus outwitting the nllve American President and butchering up the map, the British and French politicians probably imagined they would paralyze the German notion forever. The cynical policy boomeranged. Winston Churchill himself has called the Versailles settlement a "sad and complicated idiocy." The oppression of Versailles built up in the vigorous German people a volcanic resentment; it burst forth, and Adolf Hitler rode to power on the crest of the eruption. The Nazi Party, a strange alliance of radicals and conservatives, of wealthy men and down-and-outers, was united only on the ideal of a resurgent Germany, and unfortunately on the old middle-European political slogan of discontentanti-Semitism. A riffraff of vulgar agitators, philosophic idealists, fanatics, opportunists, bullies, and adventurers, some of them extremely able and energetic, swept into power with Hitler. We of the General Staff for the most part watched these turbid political events with distaste and foreboding. Our loyalty was to the state, however it was governed, but we feared a wave of weakening social change. it is fair to say that Hitler surprised us. Swiftly, without bloodshed, this brilliant and inspiring politician repaired one injustice of Versailles after another. His methods were direct and strong. The Weimar regime had tried other methods, and had met only with contempt from Britain and France. Hitler's methods worked. Inside Germany, he was equally strict and harsh when needed. Here too the methods worked, and if historians now call his regime a terror, one must concede that it was then a popular terror. Hitler brought prosperity and he rearmed us. He was a man with a mission. His burning belief in himself and in his mission swayed the German masses. Though he usurped much power, the masses would probably have granted it all to him freely anyway. Case RedNaturally, the swift renascence of Germany under Hitler created anger and dismay among the Allies. France, war-weary, luxury-loving, and rotted by socialism, was reluctant to take effective action. England was another matter. England still ruled the world with her global navy, her international money system, her alliances, and her empire on five continents. In ascending to mastery of Europe, and upsetting the balance of power, Germany was once more challenging her for world rule. This was the confrontation of the Great War again. Nothing could avert this showdown, for Germany early in the twentieth century had passed England in both population and industrial plant. In this sense Churchill correctly calls the Second World War a continuation of the first one, and both conflicts together "another Thirty Years' War." We of the German General Staff knew that at some point in Hitler's spectacular normalizing of Europe, England would intervene. The only questions were, when, and under what circumstances? Already in 1937 we had prepared a plan for a two-front war against England and Poland: Fall Rot ("Case Red"). We kept updating it as Adolf Hitler scored one bloodless victory after another, and our strategic situation and armed strength improved by leaps while Britain and France contented themselves with feeble scolding protests. We began to hope that the forceful Fuhrer might actually bring his new order to Europe without bloodshed, by default of the perpetrators of Versailles. Had this occurred, he could have launched his grand crusade against the Soviet union for living space in the east-the aim of his lifes a one-front war. History would have followed a different course. But on March 31, 1939, a day that the world should not forget, all this changed. The British Prime Minister Chamberlain suddenly gave Poland an unconditional guarantee of military assistance! His pretext was anger at Hitler for breaking his promise not to occupy the weak fragment of Czechoslovakia, left after the Munich partition-the deal which Chamberlain himself had engineered. Hitler's promises, like those of all politicians, were merely contingent and tactical, of course. It was asinine of Chamberlain to think otherwise, if he did. Whatever the motive for the Polish guarantee, it was a piece of suicidal stupidity. It stiffened the corrupt Polish army oligarchy to stand fast on the just German grievances involving Danzig and the Polish Corridor. it placed in the hands of these backward militarists the lever to start another world war. Otherwise it had no meaning, because in the event, England was unable to give Poland actual military help. With Russian participation the guarantee might have made sense; in fact it might have stopped Hitler in his tracks, because he feared above all things, as the General Staff also did, a two-front war. But the British gentlemen-politicians disdained the Bolsheviks, and Poland in any case utterly refused to consider admitting Russian protective troops. So foolishness and weakness joined hands to trigger the catastrophe.