'My Destiny', by Holocaust survivor, Georgia Gabor

 

This is not a book review per se as nothing I can write is adequate.  Before commenting, this background information:

 

After reading (in college and later in my career republishing) The Psychology of Dictatorship by Gustav Gilbert (he was the head of my psychology department), and then as an adult reading Herman Wouk’s War and Remembrance as well as the Diary of Anne Frank (and later visiting the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam with Ann), I had, until this time, avoided Holocaust literature and films. There are other reasons as well.

 

As a child I found my father’s personal photograph collection from his days as a Signal Corps photographer during WW II. Among them were scenes from a concentration camp which led to thoughts, nightmares, which I couldn’t really discuss with my father as my access to those files in our basement was forbidden.  He also never talked about the war, something he just wanted to forget. I think those photos were from a satellite camp of Buchenwald, one not far from Cologne and the Rhine River where he was active during the closing months of the War.   They ultimately disappeared; either he or my mother disposed of them.  What remained of his war years was a detailed scrap book of primary sources which I gave to the WW II Museum in New Orleans after his death in 1984.

 

Gilbert was the prison psychologist at the Nuremberg Trial and the author of the Nuremberg Diary.  But his documentation in The Psychology of Dictatorship of how Rudolf Franz Hoess, who was the Colonel in charge of Auschwitz, described with scientific precision, and with some pride how efficiently they could “dispose of” some 10,000 people per day was unforgettable and horrifying.

 

When I read Herman Wouk’s War and Remembrance I had to prop tissues under my glasses to read those sections pertaining to the Ghettos that were temporary holding pens of Jews on their way to extermination camps.  The conditions of starvation and exposure simply resulted in fewer prisoners having to be transported to the death camps.  Wouk’s fictional characters made that horrid existence personal.

 

The normalization of genocide and the indescribable cruelty made me avoid such literature and now I feel, in these times in particular, guilty, and in preparation of seeing Palm Beach Dramaworks’ The Messenger, I felt compelled to read Georgia Gabor’s memoir, My Destiny. It is the work of a brilliant and passionate survivor of the Holocaust.

 

The driving force behind commissioning the play is PBD’s Producing Artistic Director Bill Hayes.  I owe him a debt of gratitude for leading me to Gabor’s story, to allow me, after all these years, to face these ugly facts and to make me and anyone who sees the play, a “messenger.” The play was written by the recently appointed Dramaworks' Resident Playwright, Jenny Connell Davis.  Silence is complicity and it is not an option, especially now in our chaotic world where hate can be found anywhere and everywhere and where there seems to be a slow slide into the unthinkable: fascism in America.

 

During WW II most Americans hardly believed that civilized German culture could possibly engage in genocide. The United States government was more aware of the extent of it, but failed to do much.  Deep antisemitism was well entrenched here as well.   And today one only has to look at the reaction on some college campuses to Israel trying to defend itself from Hamas terrorism to see it still.

 

But I am straying from the terrifying story of Georgia Gabor, her cunning ability to survive when there seemed to be no hope (as there were none for her entire family who died in concentration camps), and to witness atrocities, be subjected to unthinkable living conditions and the constant anxiety of being on the run, escaping the Nazis twice, sometimes posing as one to get by, all before she turned 16.

 

It is a high wire story, sickening in exposing man’s inhumanity to man.

 

Then there are several moments when everything seemed to be turning in her favor, such as when she and friends rejoiced hearing the Russians were pushing the Germans out of Hungary, surely they will save the Jews who managed to survive those years in bombed out buildings in unspeakable conditions.  But the Russians raped and pillaged and Gabor was on the run again.

 

She planned to go to Palestine with a Zionist group, but it was again a dangerous attempt, the likelihood she would be shot and even if she made it, she would not be able to pursue the education she wanted, and would become a laborer or farmer for the rest of her life.  Meanwhile the thought of life under communism was unthinkable to her.

 

She lived in orphanages and befriended a woman from the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration who after a labyrinth of obstacles finally was able to find a place for her in a US Congress passed bill that allowed 500 carefully selected orphan children to go to the US, becoming wards of the government until they turned 21, dispersing them in state and charitable agencies for foster care.

 

Imagine how her heart leapt at this opportunity, and when she first saw the Statue of Liberty she finally felt safe.  But that would be a nice ending for “the movie.”  Real life interceded, more terrible living conditions and finally two failed marriages to abusive men, losing custody of her two children, but finding education as her way out of a hell hole of a life (she was a brilliant mathematician) and finally resolving to be a teacher so she could gain custody of her children, find and marry the childhood friend she loved in Budapest, and secure a teaching position.

 

Again, if that was only the end of the story and indeed My Destiny, published in 1981, concludes with her happy marriage. But after that she was subjected to virulent antisemitism and harassment, and her life was again miserable because she told her story.  She was fired from her teaching job, sued the school system, and would die only two years later.  This LA Times article, ‘A Long Lesson in Hate : Holocaust Survivor Sues School District Over Harassment,’ summarizes the consequences of telling the inconvenient truth.  The world premiere of the play, which opens on Dec. 8, focuses on Gabor’s story but interacting with three different generations (1967, 1993, and 2020) all with their own reactions to her and their own stories of hate and complicity.  The audience is left to connect the dots.

 

 

Catherine Grace Katz’s ‘The Daughters of Yalta’ Brings a Forgotten Story to Life

 

When David McCullough passed away a few months ago, we lost one of our great American historians / biographers.   I think of him as being among a select group such as Walter Isaacson, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Jon Meacham, Joseph J. Ellis, and Erik Larson.

 

Catherine Grace Katz’s The Daughters of Yalta; The Churchills, Roosevelts, and Harrimans: A Story of Love and War establishes her as the “new” American popular historian worthy of being mentioned with that group.  They all have one thing in common: prodigious research does not mean that a historical work is merely for fellow scholars.  To the contrary, their work reads like historical novels, making non-fiction the stuff of literature.

 

My wife read this for a book discussion group and knowing my interest in WW II history highly recommended it.  She was right.  She had bought her copy on line and unexpectedly we were delivered an autographed copy of the clothbound edition, which we will now treasure.  The young historian, Catherine Grace Katz, is just beginning her ascent into that rarified group I mentioned.

 

This is the fascinating story of the adult daughters of two of the “big three” who attended the famous Yalta conference, Anna Roosevelt the only daughter of Eleanor and Franklin, Sara Churchill,  one of Clementine and Winston’s daughters (in full WRAF uniform), and Kathy Harriman, the youngest daughter of Averill Harriman, then United States Ambassador to the Soviet Union.  Harriman was not only a key figure at the Conference but a confidant to Churchill as well (and lover of Churchill’s promiscuous daughter-in-law, Pamela, who in later years became his wife, the third marriage for each).  Stalin’s daughter, Svetlana, did not attend with her father.  And the location, Livadia Palace, was a character in the story itself as “everywhere the delegates turned, they found opulence and primitiveness in stark juxtaposition.”

 

I wish I had time to write a full review of this important book by an equally important new historian on the scene.  In particular this book makes an appropriate “book end” to Eric Larson’s, The Splendid and the Vile; A Saga of Churchill, Family, and Defiance during the Blitz

 

They are fascinating to read in tandem, Larson covering the beginnings of the war and Katz the concluding moments of the European Theater.  Add Doris Kearns Goodwin’s No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt: The American Home front during World War II for those in between years.

 

As usual I made pages of notes but there are plentiful book reviews out there (and I thought Jennet Conant’s “Managing the Bedbugs, Bathroom Shortages and Big Egos at Yalta” in the Sept. 29, 2020 NYT outstanding), but I’ll make some bullet points, the particular things that will stay with me regarding this work.

 

·         Although Kathy, Anna, and Sarah were not included in the plenary sessions of the conference, they played a critical role in supporting their fathers and organizing aspects of the Conference.  Without them probably the outcome would have been very different.  Churchill’s wife, Clementine, always served as Winston’s confidante, but she was needed on the home front and this gave Sarah the opportunity to fill her mother’s role.  Anna Roosevelt had perhaps an even more critical task as she was one of the few people who knew the extent of her father’s congestive heart disease and needed to carefully monitor his meetings.  She “detested sycophants for her father’s attention.” Kathy Harriman was accustomed to being with her famous father, had been with him in Russia, and was the only one of the three daughters who spoke Russian.  The three were indispensable to their fathers and were ideal companions for one another.  Kathy already had a close relationship with Winston’s daughter-in law Pamela, who as I mentioned became Harriman’s third wife later in life.  It just shows one of the many connections of these three famous families.

·         Although these women served their country, their roles were essentially a family affair.  Each wanted to draw closer to their famous fathers.  Perhaps that was a particular reason for Anna to attend as ever since she was a little girl her father was serving in some governmental capacity and he was an enigma to her, remote.  All three left Yalta with a closer attachment to their fathers and in turn Winston, Franklin, and Averill had a deeper respect for each of them.

·         Diplomacy sometimes demanded treachery.  I think of the many “minor” players at the Conference – and Katz covers them all -- such as the sickly Harry Hopkins and even sometimes Averill Harriman himself.  They could easily be mistreated or ignored by their boss.  Winston too had his filters.

·         Speaking of treachery, although we have had some first-hand knowledge of life in the Soviet Union from our trip there (and as a tourist was exposed to a much idealized version), nothing quite prepared me for the details Katz recounts.  Perhaps the worst was the “work” of the Soviet Secret Police, the NKVD, under the direction of Lavrentiy Beria who was in attendance at Yalta, but who was also in charge of executing more than 20,000 Polish officers and political leaders, having those murders disguised as Nazi atrocities, so his boss, Stalin, would have an easier time of controlling Poland after the war.  Kathy Harriman was escorted to the scene of the The Katyn Forest massacre when her father was the ambassador to Russia, having her believe it was the work of the Nazis.  The NKVD was also active in Yalta, bugging virtually every meeting place, bedroom, etc.  Beria cast a ghostly, goulash presence there and Stalin always had the upper hand.  At one of the lavish banquets Stalin staged, Admiral William Leahy, Roosevelt’s’ Chief of Staff of the US Army and Navy who was in attendance, turned to Stalin and asked “’Who’s that in the prince-nez opposite Ambassador Gromyko?’” “’Ah, that one.  That’s our Himmler,’ replied Stalin…with more than a hint of gleeful malevolence…’That’s Beria.’” 

·         If one wonders why there is a Ukraine war today, one needs to look no further than Russian history and the Russian belief in empire.  Crimea is part of Ukraine but was the subject of Putin’s annexation of the Republic of Crimea in 2014.  At the time Zbigniew Brzezinski compared Vladimir Putin's "thuggish tactics in seizing Crimea" and "thinly camouflaged invasion" to Adolf Hitler's occupation of the Sudetenland in 1938.  Reading Katz’s description of the Yalta is a stark reminder of today’s times.

 

This book HAD to be written because previous histories of Yalta might have made reference to these three women, but it took a young, eager, gifted historian, Catherine Grace Katz, to capture the wide-angled truth, how Sarah, Kathy, and Anna were not just a pleasant back story, but essential in the workings of the Conference, one later deemed a failure, but alternative realities are difficult to prove.  I’m happy that serendipitously we have a signed first edition by the author, as we hope to enjoy many other histories from her for years to come. 

 

 

‘The Splendid and the Vile’ – A Masterful and Idiosyncratic History

This superb work by Erik Larson portrays the opening year of Britain’s fight for its very survival at the beginning of WW II.  Larson cleverly and suspensefully weaves the war details along with the saga of the Churchill family, friends, and Churchill’s colleagues while documenting the indisputable:  Churchill was a man for the moment, giving credence to the argument that this man made the times as much as the times made the man.  He rose to the occasion, leavened by his uncanny and eloquent oratory skills. As Larson points out, and documents on many occasions in the book, he had the ability “to deliver dire news and yet leave his audience feeling encouraged and uplifted.”  Through the darkness of those days he buoyed the spirits of the British people.

Larson makes use of many types of primary source documents including Mary Churchill’s diary. His youngest daughter’s insights cast not only details on the Churchill’s family life, but a feeling of what it must have been to live through those times. He also makes use of the network of “Mass-Observation” diarists, “an organization launched in Britain two years before the war that recruited hundreds of volunteers to keep daily diaries with a goal of helping sociologists better understand ordinary British life. One volunteer wrote ‘if I had to spend my whole life with a man I choose Chamberlain, but I think I would sooner have Mr. Churchill if there was a storm and I was shipwrecked.’“  These sources give Larson’s work as special kind insight and personalization, often lacking in historical works.

The writing is exquisite, such as when Larson describes Hermann Göring who became, among many titled positions, the Chief of the Luftwaffe, who had promised Hitler that his air force could single-handedly destroy Britain. Larson says Göring was “large, buoyant, ruthless, cruel [and] had used his close connection to Hitler to win this commission, deploying the sheer strength of his ebullient and joyously corrupt personality to overcome Hitler’s misgivings.” He gleefully went about the task of introducing hell on earth first in London, and then in smaller UK towns to break the will of the British people. Massive incendiary bombings preceded the heavy bombings to light the way for the German bombers.

The Luftwaffe had developed a guidance system which a young Dr. Reginald Jones discovered, and he was unexpectedly whisked into a Churchill Cabinet meeting to present his evidence. Here Larson writes a suspenseful narrative:  “Churchill listened, wrapped, his fascination for secret technologies in full flare but he also realized the bleak significance of Jones‘s discovery. It was bad enough that the Luftwaffe was establishing itself at bases in captured territory just minutes from the English coast. But now he understood that the aircraft at those bases will be able to bomb accurately even a moonless night and in overcast weather. To Churchill, this was dark news indeed ‘one of the blackest moments of the war.’…Until this point he had been confident that the RAF could hold its own, despite being, as air intelligence believed vastly outnumbered by the Luftwaffe….If the German planes could bomb accurately even in heavy overcast and on the darkest nights, they would no longer need their swarms of fighter escorts and no longer be restrained by the fighters’ fuel limits and they could traverse the British Isles without restriction, a tremendous advantage and laying the groundwork for invasion.”

London was always one of my favorite places to visit, and I did so frequently either on my way to the Frankfurt Bookfairs or attending the London Bookfairs and seeing our selling partners there and arrange for co-publishing projects with several British publishers.  So many personal landmarks are conjured up by this work and in my mind’s eye I can see them and imagine how they would have been then, Piccadilly, the British Museum, Hyde Park, the financial district, the River Thames, Covent Garden, and London’s wonderful underground system, which was used as bomb shelters, not always successfully.  Frequently, Londoners would have to choose whether they might potentially be buried alive or allow it to fate to stay in their homes.

The first time we stayed in London was the early 1970’s at the Dorchester. Larson reveals the Dorchester was highly sought after by ambassadors during the war because it was a poured concrete building and billed as “bombproof,“ although people evacuated the top floor during the heaviest bombings.  He describes a debutante party at Grosvenor hotel, also facing Hyde Park, the Dorchester only blocks away to the south. The ball -- where Mary Churchill had been “presented“ the year before -- took place in May 1940 on a night when there was one of the heaviest bombings and Larson spares no detail regarding the horror of that night, even decapitations, people fleeing for the safety of the Dorchester. I just had no idea until reading this work that where I stayed only thirty years later that this was part of its history..

Churchill knew that Britain was at the end of a tenuous string, that it was imperative on the one hand he impress FDR with his people’s resiliency, but on the other hand signal their need for massive help from the U.S.  FDR’s hands were tied by the election, the cry for isolationism at home, and Larson amusingly paints a picture of Churchill’s puzzlement:  if he is the President of the US, why can’t he just do it?  Ultimately, Pearl Harbor, which occurs after the purview of this book, resolves the issue of the USA’s involvement, a great relief to Churchill, but in the interim it was the Lend Lease Act which helped to fortify Britain’s resolve.

The role of Churchill’s deliberations at Chequers, the country house of the Prime Minister, about 40 miles NW of London, on most weekends except when there was a full moon leaving it vulnerable to night bombing, the locale then shifting to Ditchley Park, owned by a friend, and located in Oxfordshire, a home that was more difficult to see from the air, cannot be understated.  In these places Churchill would “hold court” with his entire staff, generals, ambassadors, anyone involved in the war effort, to talk openly and until late at night frequently his family also residing there.

It was there that Churchill befriended and impressed FDR’s personal emissary, Harry Hopkins who in turn became an important intermediary to persuade FDR.  One night Hopkins stayed up till 4:30 in the morning and writing FDR “the people here are amazing from Churchill down and if courage alone can win – the result will be inevitable. But they need our help desperately and I’m sure you will permit nothing to stand in his way.” Hopkins continues: “Churchill held sway over the entire British government and understood every aspect of the war….I cannot emphasize too strongly that he is the one and only person with whom you need to have a full meeting of the minds. This island needs our help now Mr. President with everything we can give them.“  This ultimately led to the Lend Lease Act.

A leitmotif in the work is the personal letters of so many of Churchill’s associates such as those of John Colville, one of Churchill’s secretaries, who expresses throughout the period his endless unrequited love towards Gay Margesson, a student at Oxford.  Or the unusual relationship Churchill had with a “longtime friend and occasional antagonist Max Aitken –Lord Beaverbrook – a man who drew controversy the way steeples draw lightning.”  He had made his fortune in newspapers, but Churchill recognized a special kind of genius, appointing him as Minister of Aircraft Production, a new position to get around the red tape of the military.  Churchill knew that building the RAF was the key to defending Britain and production had lagged.  He needed a trusted mover-and-shaker and Beaverbrook was it.  His friend made enemies, circumventing traditional channels, but he significantly increased fighter production.  On a number of occasions, he tried to resign but Churchill was able to inveigle him back to the yoke and gave him more and more responsibility for a number of projects.

Throughout it all his wife Clementine was a steadying keel and did not hesitate to be outspoken with guests, be they ambassadors or the military, and of course with her husband.  She too did not suffer fools lightly and managed the family life (not tolerating their son Randolph’s drunkenness and gambling).

There are so many “players” in this history that reads like a novel, too many to mention.  Larson answers one of the questions that came to my mind before reading this work.  Why?  There are so many books about the period and Churchill.  9/11 had something do to with Larson’s motivation.  He got to wonder how Londoners could endure the never-ending shock of the war.  He endeavored to rely on more than the standard histories: “I set out to hunt for the stories that often get left out of the massive biographies of Churchill, either because there’s no time to tell them or because they seem too frivolous.  But it is the frivolity that Churchill revealed himself, the little moments which endeared him to his staff, despite the demands he placed on all.”  Larson captures those moments along with the grand and frightening story.  He also thanks, by name, the entire publishing staff of Random House and Crown who brought this insightful book to life.  It was wonderful reading the hardcover edition, so handsomely designed, a treasure to keep. 

 

Are we doomed to repeat history?

Entitlement: this is what passes as a “Constitutional Right” even as we, as a nation, confront potential existential threats to our “pursuit of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”  The threats seem to be ubiquitous. Ones such as environmental degradation, political divisiveness, income inequality and racial injustice are long term, systemic, and need to be dealt with through legislation, the courts, and at the voting booth.  But another is immediate and it is a behavioral issue: COVID-19.  Changing behavior is not something that can be merely legislated or policed. It is more of a matter of acting with an esprit de corps.

During the Spanish Flu of 1918 there were no antibiotics, steroids, ventilators, and no “Hail Mary” prospects of an effective vaccine or even a therapeutic.  Some 675,000 people died yet that number would have been much higher had not certain measures been widely adopted.  Which ones?  You guessed it, wearing a mask, social distancing, use of disinfectants and cancelling schools and large public gatherings. It was proven then that social distancing works. 

Even with the advantage of modern medicine, we have more than 125,000 deaths in the United States from CV-19.  This tally is already approaching 20% of the total of the Spanish Flu 100 years before, but we’re only four months or so into this pandemic.  And, the United States seriously trails other developed nations in controlling this, proving our utter ineffectual leadership.  One only has to compare our curve (which is really not a curve, but a flattening out and now another peak) to those of Europe, South Korea, Japan, and China.  No wonder we are now on the EU list of countries whose citizens are not welcome.

There are those who claim their right to not wear masks and to congregate in large crowds as being their “constitutional” right to do so (even our Vice President implied the latter last weekend).  In an embarrassing video of a recent Palm Beach County Commissioner’s meeting where they voted for mandatory face masks (as if there was any question), impassioned opposition comments included one woman saying it was equivalent to her being denied her individual freedom not to wear underpants.

No, lady, that is a false equivalency as not wearing underwear does not endanger anyone else. Perhaps she’s never heard of the “promoting the general welfare” clause which IS enshrined in the Preamble to the Constitution. (Indeed, there is nothing about wearing face masks or panties for that matter.)

We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

The point is, in order to secure the common good in this pandemic, we all need to work together.   How in the world did we conflate not wearing face masks with an “individual liberty?” Perhaps it can be traced to our President’s statements and his behavior which his sycophants (such as our Florida Governor) mimic.  Our President even implied that some Americans might wear face masks not as a way to prevent the spread of CV-19 but as a way to “signal disapproval of him.” It’s always about him, not about our welfare. 

During WW II Americans had to sacrifice for the common good.  Ration cards were given out for virtually every commodity.  Imagine if this generation was asked to sacrifice their “right” to fuel and sugar?  We would have lost that war and we are going to have more and more needless deaths in this CV-19 war because our lack of national leadership and thus our failure to pull together as a nation. Those who refuse to follow or deny scientific advice on attacking this critical threat are not patriots, but traitors.