A Paler Shade of Red: Memoirs of a Radical - W. E. Gutman

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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

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