A Paler Shade of Red: Memoirs of a Radical. W. E. Gutman
justifiably, when U.S. forces shelled Vietnam, Baghdad (twice in a decade), Belgrade, Afghanistan and Pakistan.
The depraved indifference, with which the Allies -- Americans in particular -- leveled off scores of French towns and killed their inhabitants, continued after the victory in Normandy. Le Havre, which bled during the German invasion and sustained four years of “strategic” bombardments, was subsequently razed.
But the bombardments also drove a wedge in the Axis alliance. I’d learned to manipulate the radio and could fine-tune the short-wave bands and lock on the BBC for the latest news of the war. (The first four notes of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony always preceded the broadcasts. I owe a passion for classical music and a special reverence for Beethoven to these four portentous notes). The broadcasts offered up-to-the-minute reports on the latest campaigns. If the broadcasts from London were to be believed, things were looking up.
The winds of war also pushed open a window of opportunity my parents promptly exploited with a naiveté, recklessness and blind optimism that would characterize many of our undertakings.
Hard luck is more tenacious than good fortune -- and more dependable.
One trusts chance more than probability.
A fool is a brave man who won’t listen to reason.
ROMANIA, ROMANIA
In June 1944, as the battle of Normandy raged on, the formidable Russian armies launched a lightning two-pronged offensive. On the Baltic, demoralized, short on supplies, large German battle groups were surrounded and captured. For the first time, entire German garrisons were surrendering en masse.
On the southern front, the Soviets entered and seized Iasi, the capital of Moldavia where my mother and grandmother were born. Long persecuted as “Christ-killers,” hated for their affluence and scholarship, the Jews of Iasi were now accused of “communist leanings” and abetting the Russian invasion. Goaded by such suspicions, the pro-Axis government of Marshall Ion Antonescu had moved against the city’s Jewish community and prominent Jews, among them journalists, were arrested and imprisoned in Tîrgu Jiu.
Soviet bombers first strafed Iasi on June 24. The attack caused relatively little damage. The second bombardment, two days later, killed over 100 people. That same day, Police Chief Kirilovich summoned Jewish leaders to his office. He accused them of covertly communicating with Soviet pilots and threatened to kill 100 Jews for every German or Romanian casualty. In the evening, looking for evidence of complicity -- flags, flashlights, radio transmitters and “communist literature” -- 800 military and civil guards fanned out in a massive raid on Jewish homes. Many were severely beaten and robbed. Over 300 people were arrested. On June 27, Romanian soldiers evacuated more than 300 Jews from the Bessarabian town of Sculeni, forcing them across the Prut River to the Moldavian side. There, they were first forced to dig trenches then robbed, massacred and hastily buried.
In a monograph published in 1988 by the International Journal of Romanian Studies, history Professor Henry Eaton, of the University of North Texas at Denton, recalls:
“Iasi, that day, was a terrifying contrast of emptiness and violence -- silent houses and deserted streets suddenly alive with gangs of thugs, shots and screams. Towards evening, there were hurried visits to the synagogues. Five Jews were arrested and sent to the rail yard of the 13th Infantry Regiment to mark unexploded bombs and their locations. They were chosen for the dangerous work because Jews were alleged to have directed the Russian bombs onto the military compound. The five were then murdered and their bodies were dumped on the city’s outskirts.”
The following morning, Prof. Eaton recounts, thirty Romanian soldiers began looting Jewish residences on the pretext that they were looking for radio transmitters. That night, a plane dropped a white flare over Iasi, setting off sirens, triggering a barrage of small arms and automatic fire, and signaling the wholesale arrest, plunder and murder of Jews. German and Romanian military patrols, sometimes accompanied by civilian “trainees,” broke into Jewish homes, dragged residents out into the street, beating and killing those who resisted, robbing them, and hauling them off in convoys, hands over their heads, to various police precincts. About 2,000 were rounded up by daybreak. Groups of civilians, including members of the Iron Guard, joined in the lynching, roaming Jewish neighborhoods and beating people, sometimes with nail-studded clubs or lead-weighted truncheons.
“The new day brought more intense violence. Convoys of Jews, viciously abused, arrived at the Central Station and were forced, single file, through the gates into the courtyard, between rows of German soldiers swinging crowbars and clubs. Some of the prisoners were killed on the spot.”
That afternoon, another alarm sounded and automatic weapons, including machine guns placed around the police station’s courtyard, were aimed at the prisoners and fired.
“… The firing went on intermittently until about six. Perhaps 4,000 or more were killed and many of the survivors were wounded. A few managed to climb the stone wall and escape. Those who were not killed and others, rounded up during and after the massacre, were cruelly herded to the railway station and crammed into suffocating boxcars whose doors and vents had been sealed shut. Nearly 1,200 died in the cars of one train that meandered for six days south to Cálárasi. In the weeks that followed the Iasi pogrom, Romanian soldiers killed thousands of innocent people in Bessarabia. In October they slaughtered tens of thousands of Jews in Odessa.”
*
Egged on by Romanian government bulletins promising Romanian expatriates safe-conduct back home, inferring -- foolishly -- from news from the front that the war was coming to an end, and feeling increasingly unsafe as the German occupation widened across France, my parents decided to leave France. We spent three days and nights switching from crowded Pullman coaches to dilapidated wagon trains and passing through countless military checkpoints. Three days and nights spent averting the probing gaze of railroad police, internal security officers, and border-crossing constabulary. Three days and nights to reach Bucharest, convinced that peace was at hand and just in time to grasp the awful truth, that it would take yet another year, more air raids, bloodshed and madness before war gasped its last.
“We took an incalculable risk,” my father would later reflect. “It was sheer folly. I don’t know how we ever pulled it off.”
On August 24 the Luftwaffe bombarded Bucharest. Romania seceded from the Axis, declared war on Germany and, joined by Russian forces, attacked the Wehrmacht.
Six days later, the Red Army reached the Ploiesti oil fields and entered Bucharest. On September 6, King Michael declared war on Hungary which, with Hitler’s blessings, had expropriated Transylvania.
On September 12, the young monarch signed an armistice treaty with the Russians and ordered the Romanian army, heretofore an instrument of the Germans, to turn their weapons against them. In a final round -- Field Marshal Montgomery called it “a sensational knock-out punch” -- the combined U.S. and British air forces pursued the retreating Germans, severed their supply routes and proceeded to carpet bomb Bucharest.
*
I can still hear the furious dissonance of war. My mind’s ear swells with the ghoulish wail of sirens as we dash frantically to reach damp, cold underground air-raid shelters. The long, low-pitched hum of a hundred flying fortresses cruising overhead in formation still reverberates inside my chest. The sounds, the images are all there to be retrieved when acts of human folly awaken childhood memories: the shrill whine of bombs diving earthward, the muffled detonations, the sickening groan of buildings splitting apart and collapsing like sandcastles, the smell of gunpowder, the odor of death.
*
One air raid lasted five days. I’d come down with the measles. Induced by high fever and aggravated by fear, hallucinations kept me in a constant state of agitation that alarmed my parents and lent a surreal aura to an atmosphere thick with desolation and fear. There was little to eat or drink. Braver men in the shelter, my father among them, periodically looted food stores and pharmacies as incendiary devices and concussion