the woods outside a village. There in a moonlit ravine the Germans had ordered the people out of the trucks, had lined them up in groups, and had shot every last one — including the babies and the old people — and then had thrown them in a big hole already dug, and shovelled them over with sand.
Peasants who had dug the huge sandy hole had seen this horror with their own eyes; so the partisan report went. The Germans had rounded them up for the job, then had ordered them to go home, and not to linger or to talk about the excavation, on pain of being shot. A few had sneaked back through the trees, all the same, to see what the Germans were up to; and they had recounted to the partisans the massacre of the “Zhids” from the gray trucks.
To the Jews trapped in Minsk three hundred miles behind the German armies approaching Moscow this story was an unimaginable shock. The Germans were already shooting people for small offenses after swift crude trials. Bloated smelly bodies of such victims, and of captured partisans, hung in the public squares. Such things could be expected in wartime. But the sudden murder, evidently at random, of all the people who lived in two long streets — children, women, old people, everybody — exceeded their deepest fears of what even Germans could do. Either the story was a hysterical exaggeration, or if it were true — and the reports as they trickled in began to seem overwhelming — then the Germans were far worse than the most frightful rumors had ever pictured them.
Yet next day Minsk looked much the same, the sunflowers bloomed, the sun shone in a blue sky. Some buildings were ruined by bombs or fire, but most stood as before; German soldiers cruised the streets, already a common sight in their gray trucks and tanks marked with swastikas. The soldiers themselves looked entirely ordinary and human, lounging with their guns and squinting in the sunshine. Some even made jokes with passersby. Russians still walked everywhere, old neighbors of the Jews, and the same bells rang at the same hours. These streets were the scenes of the Jews’ lives, as familiar as faces at home. Only now all the houses in two streets stood quiet and empty.
Into this stunned moment, the news broke that Roosevelt and Churchill had met at sea and that America was entering the war. The word flew from house to house. People cried, laughed, caught up their children and danced them on their shoulders, kissed each other, and found wine or vodka to drink to President Roosevelt. One fact was graven in Europe’s memory: last time, the coming of the Americans had won the war. Happy arguments broke out. Would it take three months? Six months? However long it might take, there would be no more insane occurrences like the emptying of those two streets. The Germans would not dare now! The Germans were bad when they were on top, but how humble they could be when things turned around! They were all cowards. Now they would probably start being nice to the Jews, to avoid punishment by the Americans.
Berel Jastrow did not try to contradict the rumor, though he knew that it was untrue. At the bakery, he still kept his shortwave radio concealed. His papers allowed him to pass the ghetto boundaries, for the Germans needed bread and the Minsk bakers were fighting hundreds of miles away. At the underground meeting of Jewish leaders that night, in the boiler room of the hospital, Berel did report the accurate broadcast he had heard from Sweden. But he was a foreigner, and he was telling the committee what it did not want to hear. Somebody cut him short with the observation that he had probably been listening to the German-controlled Norwegian radio; and the excited planning continued for the armed uprising that would take place in Minsk, in cooperation with the partisans, as soon as the Americans landed in France.
A few days later Jastrow and his son, with the wife and baby, disappeared. They went silently in the night, asking nobody in the ghetto for permission or help, or for passwords to contact the partisans in the woods. The Jewish Board had some trouble with the Gestapo about the vanished Polish baker. But they pleaded that the Jastrows were refugees, for whom they couldn’t be responsible. The Germans had themselves issued Jastrow his special papers.
The three Polish Jews with their infant did not come back to Minsk. The ghetto people assumed they had been shot right away by the Wehrmacht forest patrols, as most Jews were who tried to slip from the town without partisan guidance. It was the German custom to throw fresh bodies from the forest into Jubilee Square, as a warning to the other Jews. But nobody saw, in these gruesome, stiff piles of dead unburied friends, the bodies of the Jastrows. That was the one reason for believing the Jastrows might still be alive somewhere.
In Rome the Germans were conducting themselves very well, at least within the purview of Natalie and her uncle. A certain arrogance toward the Italians had perhaps intensified with all the conquests, but that had always been the German demeanor. Ghastly rumors of Nazi treatment of Jews had been flying around Europe for years. To these were now added stories of the vilest atrocities against the captured hordes of Slav soldiers. Yet when Aaron Jastrow and his heavily pregnant niece dined in the hotel or some fine Roman restaurant, there would very likely be Germans at table on either side of them. Enough wine might spark a bit of Teutonic boisterousness; but to ascribe a capacity for mass murder to these well-dressed, carefully-mannered, good-looking people — so very much like Americans in some ways — passed all belief.
Jastrow at last was eager to go home. He had finished the first draft of his book on Constantine; he yearned to show it to his publisher, and then finish up the revisions in the Harvard Library’s Byzantine section. The Vatican Library was better, of course, and he had made charming friends there. But as shortages multiplied, Rome was getting drearier. Hitler’s triumphs in the Soviet Union were sending earthquake tremors through Italy and sinking the Italians in gloom. There was no real gladness even in the Fascist press, but rather some traces of alarm at these giant strides of the Fuhrer over the last unsubdued reaches of Europe.
At any price, even in the best restaurants, Roman food was bad now, and getting worse. The heavy chalky bread was quite inedible; the new brown spaghetti tasted like mud; each month the cheese grew more rubbery; the cooking and salad oils left a loathsome aftertaste; and a bottle of decent table wine was hard to come by. Natalie obtained proper milk occasionally at the embassy; Italian expectant mothers had to drink the same blue slimy fluid that sad shrugging waiters served with the fake coffee.
So Dr. Jastrow was ready to go; but he was not scared. He had read so much history that the events of the hour seemed a banal repetition of old times. He had delayed and delayed leaving Italy, almost welcoming the difficulties with his papers, because in his heart he had thought the war was going to end soon. Even if the villain with the moustache (as he loved to call Hitler) won, it might not matter so much, providing the Nazis did not march into Italy. And why should they invade a grovelling satellite?
Germany might well be the new Byzantium, he liked to say over wine: a stable well-run tyranny, geared to run a thousand years, just as Hitler boasted. Byzantium had lasted almost that long, waxing and waning through the centuries as rivals grew strong or weak, pushing its borders out and shrinking them back much like Germany; but always hanging on, and often triumphing with its military advantages of tyranny, centrality, and interior lines. A nation’s history was formed by its geography, as another villainous tyrant, Napoleon, had long ago pointed out; and autocracy was the form of government most congenial to Europe anyway. As a Jew, Jastrow of course detested Hitler. But as a philosophical historian, he could place him, and even give him good marks for willpower and political skill. He quite disbelieved the atrocity stories; warmed-over British propaganda, he said, which he still remembered well from the last war.
Natalie, however, was getting scared. Ever since Finland’s entry into the war had stopped the freighter from sailing, she had sought another way out. They were still quite free to go. But now she had to deal with the Italian railroads, airlines, and emigration offices. Altogether, they made a soft fuzzy paralyzing snarl. The thought of confinement far from home, of feeding a newborn infant the rations of pinched Italy, began to alarm her as nothing had before. President Roosevelt was intervening more and more openly in the Atlantic; a sudden declaration of war by Hitler would undoubtedly drag along Mussolini, and she and her uncle would be interned as enemy aliens!
The worst stumbling block at this stage was a thing called an exit permit. Formerly it had given her no trouble at all. The yellow card stamped in purple cost a few lire, and could be purchased as soon as one had ship, train, or air tickets to show. But now an application caused hemming, hawing, and mighty searchings of bureaucratic hearts. Once, after several disappointments, Natalie did get hold of two plane seats to Lisbon, and rushed them to the emigration office. An official took the tickets and the passports from her, telling her to come back in four days.
On her return, the same stout and amiable official, breathing clouds of garlic, handed the passports back to her with a sigh. The military had requisitioned the two places on the airplane. The exit permits were therefore not granted he said, but in due course the fare money would be refunded.
The very next day she heard the first exultant BBC broadcast about the meeting in Newfoundland. The entry of the United States into the war sounded like an accomplished fact. Out of sheer despair she at once concocted a
