Wartime lies - Louis Begley [80]
Something in the reader, as this theft of childhood takes place, wants you to go a little easier on Maciek—one might even want you to like him a little better. But during the war, Maciek dared not go easy on himself or, so to speak, sweet on himself. A single moment of self-indulgence, and all would have been lost. This may be the wartime attitude—I do not call it a lie—that lingers most powerfully into this book about his experiences.
Perhaps Maciek’s “education,” in the dark sense of your abandoned tide, when just after a Jewish visitor, Bern, has left the house, Maciek’s grandmother gives a bitter little speech, repudiating her daughter and her husband at a stroke and linking them by emotional association to, of all things, a pogrom she witnessed as a girl. This is shocking enough, but then she says that as bad as that was, what Bern has said is worse: … never, in all that time, or anytime until now, had she heard anyone talk as shamelessly as Bern.” What is so utterly shameless about what Bern has said? How could it possibly be worse than a pogrom?
LB: Here’s why. Bern, after musing about how in the town of T. the Germans have already imposed on Jews the obligation to wear the armband and the yellow Star of David, goes on to say that “If the Jewish community offices acted responsibly, and our dear café intellectuals for once avoided provoking the Poles, perhaps we could remain as we were.” Of course, this is nonsense and goes to prove—if additional proof is needed—that Bern is a fool. The disasters befalling Polish Jews have nothing to do with whether they “act responsibly” by collaborating with the Germans or with whether Jewish intellectuals “avoid provoking” the Catholic Poles. They are instead irreversible steps being taken by the German occupying forces on the road to the final solution.
The grandmother is not as bright as Tania and does not seem capable of the deep, fearless insights of the grandfather. But she has her common sense which makes her understand the shameful reality that lies behind Bern’s chatter: Bern is identifying himself with the enemy, and adopting the enemy’s point of view, probably because the German enemy is overwhelmingly strong and the Catholic Poles who abet the enemy are so dangerous. He is deserting his own side, if I may use that metaphor, although he does this for a short while only: Soon afterward he flees to the forest to join a group of partisans. Something rather similar happens to Maciek when he kills bedbugs in the various rooming houses in Warsaw and when, in the games he plays with lead soldiers, he decides that his best troops are the Wehrmacht and the SS because “they looked like winners”. Perhaps today one would conclude that Bern and Maciek suffer from Stockholm Syndrome.
Why is what Bern said worse than a pogrom? I suppose because the pogrom that the grandmother remembers did not shatter the solidarity of Jews in the face of their tormentors. Now she perceives the possibility that Jews may be turning against other Jews.
JM: Let’s talk about some more complex and costly desertions. Maciek says “Now [Tania] thought she loved [Reinhard, a German soldier who had become her lover and the family’s protector], probably as much as she had ever loved anybody.” Am I right to link this to, “The day of my first Communion came. Tania offered to give me breakfast on the sly in our room, but I refused. I wanted to be clean inside, just as Father P. had directed?”
Tania’s most extended, elaborate dissimulation involves sex; Maciek’s involves religion. She has a German lover; he