Mila 18 - Leon Uris [187]
“Oh, cut that nonsense out. Those dreary people at the Gestapo won’t figure this thing out for months. How did you get the reports out? Italian diplomats?”
“Something like that,” Chris answered.
“See! I told Hitler personally not to trust the Italians. Those people are far too romantic to really carry out a first-class war of annihilation. As soon as we come to the acid tests, they abandon us.”
Chris laughed. “I’m only an Italian by passport. Come to think of it, I’m really not much of anything. But I do know the Italian people. They were sold a bill of goods that they were a reincarnation of the noble Romans, twenty centuries removed. So why in hell shouldn’t they believe it? All they really wanted was to be somebody again.”
“On German coattails.”
“The bride awoke to find her maidenhead broken, but the Teutonic god she married had turned into an ugly black gorilla. Sort of a beauty and the beast in reverse. Horst, the Italian people have no stomach for what you are doing in Poland. It was no chore at all getting five men to carry out five separate copies of the extermination-camp report.”
“Archetype German villain that I am,” Horst said, “I cannot comprehend why those who are utterly crushed insist on dying gestures of defiance. Martyrs are dreadful. I watched you sink to degeneration. What was that voice that called you out of Satan’s arms? What did it say to you?”
“It told me ... I must become worthy enough to receive the spit of a man who was once my friend.”
“Morality.” Horst shook his head. “Just before the war I saw that big hammy American baritone—what was his name?—Tibbett. Lawrence Tibbett. He sang in Paris. After a song about mother’s southern-fried cake he bellowed some more dreadful poetry. Somehow, the damned verse keeps going through my mind these days.
“Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be ... “
“ ‘For my unconquerable soul,’ ” Chris said. “To William Ernest Henley, 1849-1903.
“Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.
“This immediately brings to mind the question of why all poets have three names and why wasn’t my mother at the fifth-grade commencement ceremonies, either?”
“It will never replace Schiller or Heine—that is, before Heine became a Jew. I know, you cannot put man’s soul in a ghetto or gas his spirit at Treblinka. It looks fine in the hands of poets but puzzling when it really happens. Why did you do it, Chris? A few sermons by minor bishops, a few editorials by minor newspapers, a few pasty statements by minor politicians, a few protest suicides by minor idealists. What did you hope to gain? Ach. Now I have to spend the whole winter writing counterpropaganda.”
“I’m sorry it’s making you lose so much sleep, Horst. I thought perhaps the report itself might annoy you.”
“Don’t give me that snide journalist’s sneer. I know—how could we do this? The fine, cultured German people, after which I rattle off the names of musicians, poets, doctors, and list all our gifts to mankind. How could we do this? It will take the great philosophical and psychiatric brains a hundred years to find a standard of morals to explain this behavior.”
“I’ll simplify it,” Chris said. “You’re a pack of beasts.”
“Oh no, Chris, we are not even to be classed with beasts. Man is the only animal on this planet which destroys its own species. But how in the devil did I get involved in this? I’m no more guilty than you are. Less, perhaps. I’m trapped. But you, dear Chris, are all the moralists in the world who have condoned genocide by the conspiracy of silence.”
“The conspiracy of silence,” Chris mumbled. “Yes, I buy that.”
“Hell, my own skin isn’t important. After the war all this business will be unearthed and mankind will register a proper shock and horror. Then they will say, ‘Let us all forget about the past. Let bygones be bygones.’ And all over Germany you’ll get a chorus of ‘Amen.’ What will the song be? There was nobody here in Germany but us anti-Nazis. Extermination camps? We knew nothing about them.