The Years with Laura Diaz

who, with or without their government’s authorization, interceded on behalf of individual Jews.

The same day the SS beat her, Raquel began to wear the cross of Christ next to the Star of David, †, with the result that she was locked into her small apartment in Hamburg, the double provocation meaning that the SS would be waiting at the door of her house with ferocious dogs, clubs, warning her, come out, if you dare, Jewish whore, rotten seed of Abraham, Slavic infestation, Levantine flea, gypsy chancre, come out, if you dare, Andalusian hetaira, try to find food, scrape around in the corners of your pigsty, pig that you are, eat dust and cockroaches, if Jews can eat gold, they can also eat rats.

The neighbors were warned that if they gave me food, their rations would be taken away, if they did it again, they would be sent to a camp. I, Raquel Mendes-Aleman, decided to die of hunger for the sake of my Jewish race and my Catholic religion; I decided, George, to be the absolute witness of my age, and I knew I would have no salvation when the Nazis declared that “our worst enemies are the Jewish Catholics.” It was then I opened my window and shouted into the street, “St. Paul said, I am a Jew! I am a Jew!” and my neighbors threw stones at me and two minutes later a burst of machine-gun fire broke my windows and I had to curl up in a corner, until the Mexican consul, Salvador Elizondo, arrived with a safe-conduct pass and told me you’d interceded so I could board the Prinz Eugen and escape to the freedom of the New World. I’d sworn I would stay in Germany and die in Germany as testimony to my faith in Christ and Moses. Then I gave in, my distant love, and I knew why-not out of fear of them, not out of fear that I’d be taken to one of those places whose names we all knew by then-Dachau, Oranienburg, Buchenwald-but out of shame that my own Church and my own Father, the Pope, did not raise their voices to defend us, to defend all Jews, but also Catholic Jews like me. Rome made me an orphan, Pius XII never spoke in defense of the human race, George, so it was not only that he did not speak up for the Jews but that the Holy Father never extended his hand to the human race. You did, Mexico did. There would be no better opportunity than the Prinz Eugen, which was going to take us to America. The Mexican President, Lazaro Cardenas, was going to speak with Franklin Roosevelt to allow us to disembark in Florida.

During the nine-day crossing, I became friendly with the other Jewish fugitives. Some were shocked at my Catholic faith, others understood me, but all thought it was a failed trick on my part to escape the concentration camps. There are no uniform communities, but Husserl was right when he asked us, Can’t we all return to a world where life can start over again, where we can find ourselves again as fellow human beings?

I wanted to take communion, but the Lutheran pastor on board refused to administer it. I reminded him that his legal function on a ship was to be nondenominational and to attend to all faiths. He had the effrontery to say to me, Sister, these are not legal times.

I’m a provocateur, George, I admit it. But don’t accuse me of pride, of the Greek hubris we learned about in Freiburg. I’m a humble provocateur. Every day during our collective breakfast in the dining room, the first thing I did was take a piece of bread in one hand, make the sign of the cross with the other, and say in an even voice, “This is my body,” before putting it in my mouth. I scandalize, irritate, annoy. The captain tells me, you’re putting the other passengers of your race in danger. I laugh in his face. “This is the first time we’ve been persecuted for racial reasons, do you realize that, Herr Kapitan? We’ve always been persecuted for religious reasons.” A lie. Ferdinand and Isabella chased us out of Spain to protect their “purity of blood.” But the captain had his answer. “Frau Mendes, there are agents of the German government on board. They’re watching all of us. They are fully prepared to use the slightest pretext to abort this voyage. If they permitted it, it was as a concession to Roosevelt in exchange for which the United States would maintain its limited quotas for the admission of German Jews. Each party is putting the other to the test. You must understand that. This is how the Fuhrer always proceeds. We have a small opportunity. Control yourself. Don’t throw away the chance to save yourself and your comrades. Control yourself.”

George, my love, it was all in vain. The American authorities did not allow us to disembark in Miami. The captain was ordered to go to Havana and wait for the American permit. It didn’t come. Roosevelt is constrained by public opinion, which is averse to allowing more foreigners in the United States. The quotas, they say, are filled. No one speaks up on our behalf. No one. I’ve been told that under the previous pope, Pius XI, an encyclical had been prepared about the “unity of the human race threatened by racists and anti-Semites,” but he died before promulgating it. My Church is not defending us. Democracy is not defending us. George, I depend on you. George, please save me. Come to Havana before your Raquel can no longer even weep. Didn’t Jesus say, “When you are persecuted, flee to another city”? Christ be praised!

4.

MAURA: Let me ask you something, Vidal. Doesn’t the ideal you defend become impossible whenever an individual is murdered for the sin of thinking with us but differently from us? Because all of us defend the Republic and oppose fascists, but we’re all different, I mean that Azana is different from Prieto or Companys or Durruti, and Jose Diaz is different from Largo Caballero, as Enrique Lister is different from Juana Negrin. But none of them individually or taken as a group is like Franco, Mola, Serrano Suner, or the repressor from Asturias, Doval.

VIDAL: We haven’t excluded anyone. There’s room for everyone in the broad front of the left-wing movements.

MAURA: As long as the left is struggling for power. But when it gets power, the Communist Party sets about eliminating all those who don’t think as you do.

VIDAL: For instance?

MAURA: Bukharin.

VIDAL: Pick another man, one who isn’t a traitor.

MAURA: Victor Serge. And another question: is it revolutionary to take no interest in the fate of a comrade stripped of public position, deported without trial, separated forever from friends and family, just because he’s only an individual and a singular, solitary individual doesn’t count in the grand collective epic of history? I don’t see Bukharin’s treason. He might have saved Russia from Stalin’s terror with his project for a pluralist, human, free socialism, which would have been stronger for all those reasons.

VIDAL: Let’s get this over with, and revenons a nos moutons. What should the Republic have done, as far as you, Maura and Baltazar, are concerned, to reconcile victory and ethics?

MAURA: Life has to be changed, Rimbaud said. The world has to be changed, Marx said. They are both wrong. We have to diversify life. We have to pluralize the world. We have to give up the romantic illusion that humanity will be happy only if it recovers its lost unity. We have to give up the illusion of totality. The word says it all: there’s only a slight difference between the desire for totality and totalitarian reality.

VIDAL: You’ve got a perfect right to disdain unity. But without unity you can’t win a war.

MAURA: But you do win a better society-isn’t that what we all want?-

VIDAL: What do you mean, Maura?

MAURA:-by placing a value on difference.

VIDAL: And identity?

MAURA: Identity fortifies a culture of differences. Or do you think that a liberated humanity would be a perfectly united humanity, identical, uniform?

VIDAL: There’s no logic to what you’re saying.

MAURA: That’s because logic is only a thing, it’s a way of saying, Only this has meaning. You, as a Marxist, should think about dialectic, which at least offers an option, this or that.

VIDAL: And gives you unity in synthesis.

MAURA: And immediately redivides into thesis and antithesis.

VIDAL: So what do you believe in?

MAURA: In both and more. Does that seem insane to you?

VIDAL: No. But politically useless.

BALTAZAR: May I say something, my Socratic friends? I don’t believe in a happy millennium. I believe in the opportunities of freedom. All the time. Every day. Unlike the poet B??cquer’s swallows-let them pass, and they will not return. And if I have to choose the lesser of two evils, I’d rather choose neither. I think politics is secondary