Antonio Molina - Sepharad

It is hard to get from one day to the next, to break with everything, with ties of the heart and habits of daily life, hard not to be crushed by the thought of losing your home, your books, your favorite easy chair, the normalcy you have always known; hard to endure despite the pounding on the neighbors’ door or the shot that in an instant has cut short a life, or the rocks thrown through the windows of the tailor shop or the neighborhood grocery where one morning a coarsely painted Star of David appeared along with a single word that in its brevity contains the greatest insult: Juden. You plan to do your buying at the usual shop every day, but today in front of it a group of men wearing brown shirts and armbands with swastikas are holding a placard, Anyone who buys from Jews is backing the foreign boycott and destroying the German economy, so you lower your head and change course as unobtrusively as possible. You go into a nearby shop, hiding your shame; after all, the boycott of Jewish businesses is in effect only on Saturdays, at least it was in the beginning, the spring of 1933, and if the next day, or that same afternoon, you meet your usual shopkeeper, who knows you didn’t come to do your shopping, you can look away or cross the street instead of going up to him and shaking his hand, or not even that, speaking a few normal words, showing a sign of fraternity that’s not necessarily Jewish, simply human, like lifelong neighbors. Things happen little by little, very gradually, and if at first you prefer to imagine that things aren’t that serious, that normalcy cannot be shattered so easily, the prophets of doom irritate you more than ever, those who point to the threat that grows nearer because they articulate it, that might go away if only they would pretend not to notice it. You wait, you do nothing. With patience and a low profile it will not be difficult to wait out these times. In 1932, traveling on a boat down the Rhine, Maria Teresa León saw thousands of small swastika-printed flags stuck into tiny buoys and bobbing along on the current. On Thursday, March 30, 1933, Professor Victor Klemperer, of Dresden, notes in his diary that in a toy-shop window he saw a child’s balloon with a large swastika. I can no longer rid myself of the disgust and shame. Yet no one makes a move; everyone trembles, hides. But Professor Klemperer does not plan to leave Germany, at least not at this time, for where will he go at his age, almost sixty, and with a wife who is ill, and now that they’ve bought a small bit of land where they hope to build a house? So many people beginning new lives other places, and here we are waiting, our hands tied. But who in his right mind can believe that a situation like this will last long, that well into the twentieth century such barbarism and senselessness can prevail in a civilized country? Surely the Nazis, so brutal, so demented, will be rejected by the German people in the end, and the international community will refuse to acknowledge them. Except sometimes, when you think you’re getting away from danger, you are hypnotically drawn to it, as if by a magnet, the powerful desire to be caught and thus end the anguish of the waiting once and for all. But neither is an expatriate safe. In remote Mexico, in a house turned into a fortress, protected by armed guards and barbed wire and concrete walls, Leon Trotsky waits for the arrival of Stalin’s emissary, who will come slipping past barred doors and guards and stand alone before him and fire a bullet into his head, or lean over him with the solicitude of Judas and sink a climber’s ice pick into the nape of his neck, as efficient as a bullet. It is summer, August 1940. Klemperer, no longer a professor, notes undramatically in his diary that after July 6 Jews are forbidden to enter public parks. In France, in the late, warm twilight of early June, three men fleeing together before the advance of the German army went deep into a forest. One of them, the oldest, most corpulent, and best dressed, turned up several months later, hanged, his decomposed cadaver fallen to the ground and half hidden beneath the autumn leaves. The branch on which he hanged himself, or was hanged, had broken beneath his weight. A German fleeing Germans, but also once a Communist, though the Communists had declared him a traitor and decreed his execution. The two fleeing with him were Soviet agents who had traveled to France with the one goal of finding and killing him. Not even hiding among the throngs of refugees from the war, or behind a cement wall topped with broken glass and a tangle of barbed wire, will you be safe. You escape your country and become stateless, and one morning when you wake in the room of a hotel for foreigners, where you are living in miserable conditions, you hear loudspeakers shouting orders in your own language, and out the window you see the same uniforms you thought you had saved yourself from by crossing borders and distance. In 1938 the Viennese Jew Hans Mayer escaped from Austria; with false documents he traveled across a Europe of black predictions and hostile borders, took refuge in Antwerp, Belgium, and only two years later the same boots and armored cars and martial music that invaded Vienna were echoing through the streets of this city in which he had never ceased to be a foreigner. In 1943 he was captured by the men in leather coats and snap-brim hats from whom he had been running since 1938, more precisely, since the night of March 15, just after Hitler entered Vienna, when he, Hans Mayer, took the 11:15 express to Prague. He had pictured the scene of his arrest for so many years that when it finally came, he felt he had already lived it. Only one thing he had not foreseen: those who arrested him, asked the first questions, and delivered the first blows did not have the faces of men of the Gestapo, or even of police. If a member of the Gestapo can have a normal face, then any normal face can belong to the Gestapo.

In Moscow, the night of April 27, 1937, Margarete Buber-Neumann noticed that one of the KGB agents who came to arrest her husband was wearing small, round rimless glasses, which gave his very young face an intellectual air. That impression is substantiated by Nadezhda Mandelstam, who suffered from the harassment of the secret police and says that the youngest of them were known for their sophisticated tastes and a weakness for literature. At one in the morning, there was pounding on the door of their room in the Hotel Lux, where employees and foreign activists of the Comintern were housed. In 1920, Professor Fernando de los Ríos had lodged there, sent by the Spanish Socialist Workers Party with the task of reporting on Soviet Russia. He had interviewed Lenin and was surprised by the man’s resemblance to the Spanish writer Pío Baroja, and by his scorn for the liberties and the lives of common people.

With beating hearts we fixed our attention on the sound of boots coming closer and closer. As happened every night, Margarete — Greta — had lain awake in the dark, listening to footsteps in the corridors, jumping every time the lights in the stairway were turned on. If the lights on the stairs and in the corridors of the Hotel Lux were turned on after midnight, it was for the KGB men, who prowled the dark, empty streets of Moscow in black vans everyone called crows. They didn’t use the elevators, maybe out of fear that some mechanical failure or interruption of electrical current would allow a victim to escape. But the victims never escaped, they didn’t even try, lying motionless, paralyzed, in their rooms, in the bleakness of their lives, and when finally the KGB did come for them, they offered no resistance, didn’t fight or scream with rage or panic, didn’t have a weapon ready to shoot their way out or blow their head off at the last instant. For years Heinz Neumann, leader of the German Communist Party, knew that he was a marked man, that his name was on the list, and still he went with his wife to the Soviet Union after the triumph of Nazism in Germany. He did not try to take refuge in a different country but lived in Moscow, aware of how the circle of suspicion and hostility was tightening around him every day, how his old friends stopped talking to him, how one after another comrades disappeared, those he had trusted but who had turned out to be traitors, Trotskyite conspirators, enemies of the people. Now no one visited him and his wife in their room in the Hotel Lux, nor did they visit anyone for fear of compromising them, of contaminating others with their always imminent disgrace, postponed day after day and night after night. If the telephone rang, they sat looking at it without daring to answer, and when they picked up the receiver, they heard a click and knew that someone was listening. There was a time when they covered the telephones with blankets or heavy clothing because a rumor said that even when the receivers were down it was possible to hear conversation in a room.