think Moscow may fall in a week! I don’t, nor does Tudsbury; but our embassy people are nervous as hell, some of them, about Harriman being captured by the Nazis. They’ll be mighty relieved tomorrow when the mission flies out.
Well, as to the trip — the sea approach to Russia reminded me of Newfoundland. Up north the world is still mostly conifer forest and white water, Rhoda. It may be that man in his jackass fashion will devastate the temperate and tropical zones, and civilization will make a scrubby new start at the top of the globe.
The first surprise and shock comes at Archangel. It’s a harbor town in the wilds all built of wood. Piers, warehouses, sawmills, factories, churches, crane towers — wood. Stacks of lumber, billions of board feet, wherever you look. God knows how many trees were cut down to build that town and pile that lumber, yet the forests around Archangel look untouched. There’s an Alaskan look about Archangel, like pictures of the Klondike.
The first honest-to-God Russian I saw was the harbor pilot. He came abroad well down channel, and that was another surprise, because he was a woman. Sheepskin coat, pants, boots and a healthy pretty face. I was on the bridge and watched her bring us in, and she was quite a seaman, or sea-woman. She eased us alongside very handily. Then she shook hands with the skipper and left and all that time she hadn’t cracked a smile. Russians smile only when they’re amused, never to be pleasant. It makes them seem distant and surly. I guess we strike them as grinning monkeys. This epitomizes the job of communicating with Russians. Language aside, we just have different natures and ways.
Mr. Hopkins told me about the forests of Russia, but I still was amazed. You remember when we drove west in midsummer, I think in ‘35, and didn’t get out of cornfields for three days? The north Russian woods are like that. We flew to Moscow at treetop height. Those green branches rushed by below our wings for hours and hours and hours, and then all at once we climbed, and ahead of us was a tremendous sprawl from horizon to horizon of houses and factories. Moscow is flat and gray. From a distance it could be Boston or Philadelphia. But as you get closer in and see the onion-top churches, and the dark red Kremlin by the river, with a cluster of churches inside you realize you’re coming to a peculiar place. The pilot flew a circle around Moscow before landing, maybe as a special courtesy and we got a good look. Incidentally, the takeoff and landings are expert, but by our standards hairy. The Russian pilot jumps off the ground and zooms, or he dives in and slams down.
Well, since we got to Moscow we’ve been in the meat grinder. It’s been round-the-clock. Our orders literally are to work through the night. When we aren’t conferring we’ve been eating and drinking. The standard fare for visitors seems to be a dozen different kinds of cold fish and caviar, then two soups, then fowl, then roasts, with wine going all the time.” Each man also has his own carafe of vodka. It’s a hell of a way to do business, but on the other hand the Russians may be wise. The alcohol loosens things up. The feeling of getting drunk is evidently the same for a Bolshevik or a capitalist, so there at least you strike some common ground.
I think this conference has been an historic breakthrough. When have Americans and Russians sat down before to talk about military problems, however cagily? It’s all most peculiar and new. The Russians don’t tell hard facts of their military production, or of the battlefield situation. Considering that the Germans three short months ago were sitting where we and the British sit now, I don’t exactly blame them. The Russians have been a hard-luck people. You can’t forget that when you talk to them. This is a point that our interpreter, Leslie Slote, keeps making.
I’m not revealing secrets when I tell you the British are yielding some Lend-Lease priorities and even undertaking to send the Russians tanks. It’ll all be in the papers. They were stripped bare at Dunkirk, so this is decent and courageous. Of course, they can’t use the tanks on the Germans now, and the Russians can. Still, Churchill can’t be sure Hitler and Stalin won’t make a deal again, so the Germans may suddenly turn and throw everything into a Channel crossing. I don’t think it’ll happen. The growing hate here for the Germans is something savage; you only have to see the gruesome newsreels of villages they’ve been driven out of to understand why. Children strung up, women raped to death, and all that. Still, Hitler and Stalin seem to have mercury for blood. Nothing they do is too predictable or human, and I give the British lots of points for agreeing to send the Russians tanks.
Some of us Americans feel peculiar at this meeting, damn peculiar. The British, in danger themselves, are willing to help the Russians, while our Congress yells about sending the Russians anything. We sit between men of two countries that are fighting the Germans for their lives, while we represent a land that won’t let its President lift a finger to help, not without outcries from coast to coast.
Do you remember Slote? He’s the second secretary here now. He looked me up in Berlin, you remember, with a lot of praise for Briny’s conduct under fire in Poland. He’s the man Natalie went to visit. He still seems to think she’s the finest girl alive, and I don’t know why he didn’t marry her when he had the chance. Right now he’s trying to romance Talky’s daughter. Since she’s one of the few unattached Western girls — I almost said white girls — in Moscow, Slote has competition.”
(Incidentally, my remark about white girls is ridiculous. After two days in Moscow, trying to put my finger on what was so different here, I said to Slote there were two things: no advertisements, and no colored people. It made him laugh. Still, it’s so. Moscow has a real American feel in the informality and equality of the people, but you don’t find such a sea of white faces in any big city in America. All in all I like these Russians and the way they go about their business with determination and calm, the way the Londoners did.)
Now I have a story for you, and for our grandsons to read one day — especially Byron’s boy. It’s a grim one, and I’m still not sure what to make of it but I want to write it down. Yesterday between the last afternoon conference and the official dinner at the Metropole Hotel, I went to Slote’s apartment for a while with Tudsbury and Pam. Talky engineered this little party. He wanted to pump me about the conference, but there wasn’t much I could disclose.
Anyway, I was having a drink with them — if you get this tired you have to keep up an alcohol level in your bloodstream, it’s a sort of emergency gasoline — when a knock came on the door, and in walked a fellow in worn- out boots, a cap, a heavy shabby coat, and it was a Jewish merchant from Warsaw, Jochanan Jastrow, Natalie’s uncle! The one they call Berel. Briny and Natalie went to his son’s wedding in south Poland, you recall, and that’s how they got caught in the invasion. He’s clean-shaven, and speaks Russian and German with ease, and he doesn’t seem Jewish, though Slote remarked that in Warsaw he wore a beard and looked like a rabbi.
This fellow’s escape from Warsaw with the remnants of his family is a saga. They landed in Minsk and got caught there when the Germans blitzed White Russia. He gave us only bare details of how he got himself and his family out of Minsk through the woods but obviously this is quite a guy for maneuvering and surviving.
Here comes the incredible part. Jastrow says that late one night about a month after the capture of Minsk, the Germans came into the Jewish ghetto they had set up, with a caravan of trucks. They cleaned out two of the most heavily populated streets, jamming everybody into these trucks: men, women, children, babies, old folks who couldn’t walk. Several thousand people, at least. They drove them to a ravine in the forest a few miles out of town, and there they shot them, every single one, and buried them in a huge freshly dug ditch. Jastrow says the Germans had rounded up a gang of Russians earlier to dig the ditch, and then had trucked them out of the area A few of them sneaked back through the woods to see what would happen, and that was how the story got out. One of them had a camera and took pictures. Jastrow produced three prints. This occurrence, whatever it was, took place at dawn. In one of them you see a line of gun flashes. In another you see this distant shadowy crowd of people. In the third which is the brightest, you just see men in German helmets shovelling. Jastrow also gave Slote two documents in Russian, one handwritten and one typed that purported to be eyewitness accounts.
Jastrow says he decided to get to Moscow and give some American diplomat the story of the massacre in Minsk. I don’t know how he got Slote’s address. He’s a resourceful man, but naive. He believed, and evidently still believes, that once President Roosevelt found out this story and told the American people, the United States would immediately declare war on Germany.
Jastrow turned over these materials to Slote, and said he’d risked his life to get that stuff to Moscow, and that a lot of women and children had been murdered, so would he please guard those pictures and documents with care. He and I talked a bit about the kids; his eyes filled up when I told him Byron and Natalie’d had a boy.
After he left, Slote offered the stuff to Tudsbury. He said, “There’s your broadcast for you. You’ll hit all the front pages in the United States.” To our surprise, Tudsbury said he wouldn’t touch the story. He worked in British propaganda after he was wounded in the last war, and helped concoct and plant atrocity yarns. He claims the British invented the business of the Germans making soap out of the bodies of soldiers. Maybe this Minsk massacre happened, but to him Jastrow looked like an NKVD plant. It was too coincidental that a distant Polish relative of mine by marriage — a freakish connection to begin with — should suddenly pop up of his own free will in Moscow
