My Generation (22 page)

But ultimately the rightfulness of Truman's judgment rests on one crucial question. And that is whether or not the Japanese were ready to surrender. If, as virtually all of the revisionists seem to assume, the enemy was prepared to accept Allied peace terms then indeed the dropping of the bomb was not only unnecessary but morally indefensible. But there is no indication that the Japanese were going to throw in the towel, and this is a matter that the critics refuse to confront, either pussyfooting around such a critical issue or pretending that surrender was imminent, while offering no evidence to support the fact. Ian Buruma, whose analysis of the atom bomb controversy is a model of objectivity, has written: “Closer examination of what went on in Tokyo shows that the Japanese were not on the verge of capitulation before the destruction of Hiroshima. So long as there was no unanimity in the war cabinet and the Emperor remained silent, the war would go on.”
⁴
On a purely military level, too, all indications were that Japan was prepared to fight to the last man and, indeed, the last woman and child; proclamations had gone out to this effect, and if this were not enough there were the recent examples of Iwo Jima and Okinawa, where the ferocious resistance of the enemy provided a foretaste of the butchery awaiting both sides when the Americans embarked on their mainland invasion. Suppose, it has been asked, that Harry Truman—for whatever reason behind his caution—had not dropped the bomb, and suppose then that Americans and Japanese had engaged in the predicted battle, a savage struggle which, following the pattern of the bloody stalemate on Okinawa, would have taken months and consumed tens of thousands of lives. Suppose after the inevitable American victory it had been revealed that the President of the United States had possessed all along a weapon that most likely would have ended the war, but had not used it. What would countless bereaved parents have thought about that? What would have been the reaction in America and throughout the world? The question gives rise to such an awesome moment of hushed speculation that one must necessarily end the matter by affirming the truth that for Truman there was no other choice.

A journalist friend of mine who lives in Honolulu has several times interviewed
Japanese tourists who visit the memorial site at Pearl Harbor. Japanese tourists are, to say the least, numerous in Hawaii (Japan Air Lines flies an unbelievable seventy-two flights a day from Tokyo) and my friend has buttonholed quite a few of them. Some of the visitors are fairly sophisticated about modern history but most are not; the great majority tell the journalist that America started the war and the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor was in retaliation for our aggression. This is an example of the historical amnesia afflicting the Japanese people which I mentioned earlier. Except among a relatively small group of the intelligentsia it is a national article of faith that the devastation and death wrought in Hiroshima and Nagasaki was an evil phenomenon, the result of American inhumanity, with no causation rooted in the Japanese militarism of the 1920s and '30s. History books at the elementary and high school level avoid mention of the Rape of Nanking or the barbaric plunder of Manchuria. I alluded earlier to the Japanese oppression of prisoners. Nowhere is there reference to the enslavement, during World War II, of hundreds of thousands of Koreans, many of them women forced to serve in Japanese army brothels. The atrocities committed by Imperial troops during the course of the war, from Bataan in the Philippines to the farthest reaches of Southeast Asia, exist in a vacuum, unrecorded. A recent work by an Australian-born scholar, Gavan Daws, called
Prisoners of the Japanese
,
⁵
has meticulously documented the depredations of the Japanese army in Indonesia and Malaysia; employing new and original research, and interviewing dozens of Australian, Dutch, British, American, and Asian survivors, Daws provides a panorama of butchery and torture far scarier than could have been previously imagined. It shows a deliberate, carefully executed program of slave labor designed to work captives until they died of starvation and exhaustion; it was a technique of total domination every bit as ruthless as that of the Nazis at Auschwitz, and might have been considered genocidal except for the fact that it was even worse; it was panracial, condemning everyone to death without ethnic partiality. The Japanese people today, of course, refuse themselves access to such terrible knowledge, preferring the cultural comfort of timeless victimhood.

Having said this about postwar Japan, I must stress an obvious truth: no nation is without shame, or the stain of past dishonor. To the everlasting credit of the Germans, the horrors of Nazi despotism have been anatomized and dissected until scarcely a personality or event of that era remains unexamined. We Americans have pored over the disgraceful episodes of our past
with nearly morbid zeal; slavery, the decimation of our Native Americans, our unconscionable racism, the nightmare of Vietnam—all of these have received our impassioned, sometimes even masochistic scrutiny. But the Japanese have averted their eyes from history, and in so doing have jeopardized their future and perhaps our future, too. People who have no lessons to learn from their past are likely to be extremely dangerous.

I want to close with a few final reflections on racism, and on Auschwitz. When in the mid-1970s I decided to write about another racism—the Nazi racism of total domination—I realized that in dealing with the German mind of that period I had to confront certain exquisite paradoxes. Anglo-Saxons, for example, however bitterly abhorred, did not belong among the despised
Untermenschen
and were granted a certain provisional respect. A loony relativism at the heart of Hitler's racial policy is demonstrated by the treatment of various POWs. The captured British and American soldiers and airmen were usually confined in a prison where conditions were basically civilized and in fact so comparatively congenial that the farcical image conveyed in
Hogan's Heroes
or
Stalag 17
is not too far off the mark. It was reputed Nordic identification that prevented all but a small percentage of these prisoners from dying.

In contrast there is the appalling saga of the Soviet prisoners of war, who were, after the Jews, the numerically largest group of victims and whose partial annihilation—over three million, or nearly sixty percent of all Soviet POWs—is commentary enough on the Nazis' view of the humanity of the Russians and other Slavs. Which brings me to Auschwitz. I was always struck by the fact that the first executed victims of Auschwitz were not Jews but six hundred Soviet POWs. Although the Holocaust was uniquely Jewish, its uniqueness becomes more striking when we can see that it was also ecumenical, but in ways that can only emphasize the peculiar nature of Jewish suffering.

I have been criticized in some quarters for “de-Judaizing” and “universalizing” the Holocaust by creating, in my novel
Sophie's Choice
, a heroine who was a gentile victim of Auschwitz. Such was not my intention; it was rather to show the malign effect of anti-Semitism and its relentless power—power of such breadth, at least in the Nazis' hands, as to be capable of destroying people beyond the focus of its immediate oppression. At Auschwitz, as in the Inferno, Jews occupied the center of hell, but the surrounding concentric rings embraced a multitude of other victims. It would be wrong
for them to be forgotten. For years, all of them were largely forgotten, beyond the borders of Jewish remembrance. It wasn't until the late 1970s that the word “Holocaust” fully entered the language; before then, the horror of the camps had a less discernible shape.

As for that other dreadful monolith, Hiroshima, it might be said that the sacrifice of its victims presented an object lesson and perhaps a priceless warning, preventing the future use of the weapon that achieved such destruction. If so, the many deaths and the suffering—the same that assured my probable survival and that of my Tokyo comrade in arms along with legions of others—may be justified, if we who have lived so long afterward are fit to justify such a fathomless event. Certainly the bomb did nothing to eliminate war and aggression, and I am still amazed at the memory of myself, a boy optimist returned home after Hiroshima, firmly convinced—for one brief and intoxicating moment—that the future held out the hope of illimitable peace. Over fifty years after that moment the fratricidal horrors and ethnic atrocities that the world has endured, and still endures, remain at the quivering edge of tolerance and are past comprehension. Yet we go on, the earth turns. If you do what I do, you write—as the canny Isak Dinesen said you must do—you write without hope and without despair.

[
Newsweek
, January 11, 1993. The magazine text was abbreviated; the full text published here is from Styron's surviving manuscript, among his papers at Duke University.]

Edmund: The wheel is come full circle. I am here.

—King Lear
V.
III
. 185

D
uring the late 1960s I developed a brief but warm relationship with Hannah Arendt. We were both members of the editorial board of
The American Scholar
, which met twice a year alternately in New York and Washington. After these long and rather soporific meetings, Hannah and I would retire to a bar and drink scotch, for which we both had a fairly enthusiastic taste. I was an ardent admirer of her work, though as one untrained in philosophy I found much of it rough going, and the thickets of her English sometimes verging on the impassable; still I regarded
The Origins of Totalitarianism
as a great illumination, and had made
Eichmann in Jerusalem
a kind of handbook. My novel
The Confessions of Nat Turner
had recently appeared, and had been furiously attacked by members of the black intelligentsia. A book of essays had been published—
William Styron's Nat Turner: Ten Black Writers Respond
—in which I'd been accused of racism and of falsifying and distorting the story of the rebel slave leader. This assault had left me with a residue of indignation, although I was cooling off.

Hannah had read my book, and I'm sure that some small part of the affinity we felt for each other came from a shared sense of aggravation: she was still vexed over the rancorous criticism of
Eichmann in Jerusalem
, and
while she had cooled off, too, I sensed a touch of bitterness about what she continued to view as an absurd misreading of her work. She insisted that those who had accused her of asserting that the European Jews had capitulated, in a form of self-murder, before the Nazi onslaught were guilty of gross misinterpretation. I felt she was still resentful, as I was, over being hounded by special-interest groups. And so she chain-smoked, which I mildly chided her for; and we drank our scotch in a glow of rueful sympathy and mutual martyrdom.

I recall her asking me how it was that a Southern-born writer, connected tenuously to the modern European experience, could reveal a compulsive interest in anything so essentially European as the Nazi camps. Hannah always used the word “camps,” or, occasionally, “Auschwitz,” as a generic term for the Nazi terror—never “Holocaust,” which doesn't appear in
Eichmann in Jerusalem
, and which, in the late sixties, was largely a scholarly characterization, one that would begin to enter the common speech only a decade or so later. I reminded her that totalitarianism, on which she was perhaps the leading authority, had found its expression in America in the form of chattel slavery; she agreed that, in a broad and abstract way, at least, the leap from the slave South to Auschwitz formed a logical transition. It was plain that both of us were fascinated by those wellsprings of human nature out of which there boils over the need for subjugation and oppression.

I remember our discussing a book which we'd both read, a work I had encountered just after the war, when, following service in the Marines, I had returned to college. This account of Auschwitz,
Five Chimneys
, was written by Olga Lengyel, a doctor's wife who with her family had been transported to the camp from Transylvanian Hungary in 1944. Curiously enough, she does not identify herself as Jewish, although this would appear almost certain, given the chronology of the transports from Hungary. The book was one of the first narratives of its kind published in postwar America; it had affected me in powerful, unsettling ways that had lingered over the years.

Five Chimneys
deals graphically with the barbarities and deprivations of life at Auschwitz, and contains stark images of the extermination process, seen close-up. It also then provided the world with some of the earliest portraits of Dr. Josef Mengele and the awesomely depraved ogress Irma Grese. The work is still capable of evoking near-incredulity and a sense of horror beyond horror. But most chilling of all, somehow, surpassing the butcheries and beatings, was the description of the author's arrival at the camp in a
boxcar, and the decision she was forced to make about her mother and one of her children. Confused, and unaware of the lethal workings of the selection process, Lengyel lies about her twelve-year-old son's age, telling the SS doctor that the boy is younger than he is, in the mistaken belief that this will save him from arduous labor. Instead of being spared, the boy is sent to the gas chambers, along with his grandmother, whom Lengyel, again in ghastly error, helps kill. She asks the doctor that her mother be allowed to accompany the child in order to take care of him. For me, this transaction, with its imposition of guilt past bearing, told more about the essential evil of Auschwitz than any of its most soulless physical cruelties.

On another evening with Hannah Arendt, I recall that the matter of “authenticity” came up. I told her that someday I hoped to write about Auschwitz—I had in mind, specifically, a Polish Catholic survivor of that camp, a young woman named Sophie, whom I had known in Brooklyn after the war—but I was troubled by how authentic my rendition might be. What did I know about midcentury Europe in its torment and self-immolation? She scoffed lightly at this, countering with this question: What, before writing
Nat Turner
, had I known about slavery? An artist creates his own authenticity; what matters is imaginative conviction and boldness, a passion to invade alien territory and render an account of one's discoveries. That was the task of a writer, she said, and I was heartened, though still doubtful. When I demurred a little—I remember saying that I could foresee dodging an assault entitled
Ten Rabbis Respond
—she kept up her encouragement, though not without conceding that I'd probably receive flak from those who might feel, as certain blacks had, that I was, as she put it, poaching on their turf.

One matter that never came up in our talks was the idea that I shouldn't write about the subject at all—that after Auschwitz the only appropriate response was silence. I think Hannah would have been puzzled and skeptical about any such notion, if not downright offended. I became aware of this thesis much later, when I was well along in the writing of
Sophie's Choice;
and though the view was advocated by writers whom I admired, like George Steiner, it was an exhortation I refused to accept, especially when I noted that the demand for silence was often coming the loudest from those who were busy scribbling books about Auschwitz. Certainly the subject required almost unprecedented caution and sensitivity, and respect verging on reverence; but to make Auschwitz, in the literary sense, sacrosanct and beyond reach of words was a pietism I had to reject, if only because it made no sense
to me that this monumental human cataclysm should remain buried and lost to memory. Why should writers be denied the chance to illuminate these horrors for future generations?

In my own case, I began to realize, it came down chiefly to the problem of distance. I knew it would be presumptuous of me to try to duplicate the brutal atmosphere of the camps already described in the narratives of Bruno Bettelheim and Eugen Kogon and Raul Hilberg and Primo Levi—or to amplify upon such searing fictional works as André Schwarz-Bart's
The Last of the Just
or Jean-François Steiner's
Treblinka
. These books had exposed the camps' pathological anatomy, the seething cauldron of the interior of places like Buchenwald and Belsen, in sometimes microscopic close-up. What I needed was a new strategy and a dominant metaphor, and both of these came to me with flashing suddenness one morning in 1974. I had been stymied for a long time with a work in progress, and was open to new inspiration. Awaking on that spring day from a confused dream of the Sophie I had known in Brooklyn so many years before, and being swept at almost the same instant by the memory of Olga Lengyel's ordeal in
Five Chimneys
, I sensed dream and memory merging into a dramatic concept of stunning inevitability. What if I were to convert my brief encounter with Sophie in Brooklyn—she whose past had been a mystery to me, save for one or two tantalizing tales of wartime Poland she had told me, and whose tattooed arm had evoked questions I dared not ask—into a fictional narrative in which I actually got to know this young woman over a long and turbulent summer?

During that summer she would reveal to me—the callow and credulous, but not entirely unsophisticated, narrator—the secrets of her past, which would include her Polish upbringing, and the arrival of the war, and of her imprisonment in Auschwitz, and a host of other matters bearing on the Nazi terror. All of these details would be unpeeled, layer after layer like an onion, until at last there would be uncovered the most terrible secret of all: the day of her arrival at Auschwitz, and a fatal decision she would be forced to make, one that involved the lives of her children. Here, it seemed to me, was the ultimate expression of totalitarian evil: a system that could force a mother to become her child's murderer was one that had refined the infliction of human suffering to a point at which all other cruelties—the beatings, the tortures, the medical experiments—were an infernal background. And that morning, even as I realized the metaphorical authority of Sophie's dreadful choice, I realized too that I had solved the problem of distance. I would
never place Sophie inside the confines of Auschwitz, where as narrator I dared not tread. Sophie would instead, in her memory, always be located in the house of the camp's commandant, outside Auschwitz yet near enough that its vile stench and daily pandemonium would compose that infernal background.

From the beginning it never occurred to me that the Jewish experience under the Nazis was not unique, or that the victimization of the Jews was not of a far greater magnitude than the oppression of others. That others were oppressed, however, and agonizingly so, remained a fact; and among these victims was the Sophie I had known, who remained to me the embodiment of the hundreds of thousands of Polish Catholics whom the Nazis enslaved and, in numerous cases, tortured and killed. As I set out to write the novel, I had no idea how to reconcile these matters within the framework of the narrative, only trusting that my instinct, along with a regard for the historical necessities, would permit me to portray Sophie's tragedy within the more spacious context of the Jewish catastrophe. About a hundred pages into the story of Sophie, I interrupted my work in order to make a trip to Poland and visit Auschwitz. It was an essential trip—among other needs, I had to absorb some of the atmosphere of Cracow, where the real Sophie had spent her childhood—and when I returned home, picking up the narrative where I had left off, I had an amazing revelation: it was a moment that showed, to an extraordinary degree, the autonomy of the subconscious in the process of literary creation.

At this point in the novel, Sophie is describing to Stingo, the narrator and my alter ego, the nature of her relationship to her dead father, a professor of law at the Jagiellonian University of Cracow. She begins to tell Stingo of her love for her father, and of her admiration for his character and his works; among the noble deeds he performed, she says, was that of protecting and hiding Jews during the war, risking his own arrest and execution. I recall halting in midpassage as I wrote this part, saying to myself:
The girl's a liar
. I suddenly understood, of course, that Sophie, lying to Stingo as well as to me—the hapless, gullible author—was really trying to conceal from us both one of her most dire and sinister secrets. Her father, the distinguished professor, far from being the gentle humanist Sophie claimed him to be, was in truth a poisonous anti-Semite of frightening dimensions, a man she loathed. And this secret, gradually revealed as the story went forward, became a key to the entire novel, for the book in large part has to be read as a
parable of the devastation of anti-Semitism, not only of the Nazi brand run amok, but of the genteel, intellectual variety that had transformed Poland from a nation hospitable to Jews into one seething with anti-Jewish menace.

Hannah Arendt died before my novel was finished, and I often have regretted that she never read it and was unable to observe its reception. Unlike
Nat Turner, Sophie's Choice
was spared a bitter onslaught of criticism, though it had its detractors. In certain quarters I was accused of “universalizing” or “eroticizing” the Holocaust, whatever these strange terms may really mean, while Elie Wiesel, a writer I respect, took me to task for what Hannah would have regarded as poaching on his turf; Wiesel wrote that, in regard to Auschwitz: “Only those who lived it in their flesh and in their minds can possibly transform their experience into knowledge. Others, despite their best intentions, can never do so.”
¹
One other response stands out particularly, and if its fear and inflexible rage were any gauge of the effectiveness of my work, they caused me a certain satisfaction. For, although
Sophie's Choice
was translated into more than two dozen languages, including Hebrew, it was denied translation for over a decade into Sophie's native tongue. The Polish government forbade its publication on the grounds that the book's depictions of anti-Semitism were a slander against the Polish people; indeed official anger was so great that in 1982, when calls went out for Polish actors to appear in the film version, then being made in Zagreb, the authorities warned that anyone responding to the offers would be severely punished.

After the Communist downfall, the book was published in large printings and was received generally with enthusiasm. Even so there were fierce holdouts among those Poles who refused to accept the fact that Sophie and her children, while surely victims of the Nazis, were also sacrificed to a native-born enmity. They would not allow themselves to see that Sophie, through her father and his Jew-hatred, is lost beneath a wheel of evil come full circle. It is his doctrine, after all, that crushes his innocent daughter and his even more innocent grandchildren with lethal finality. Such hatred, knowing no boundary, eventually will achieve absolute destruction, consuming everyone, Jews and Christians, even one's own flesh. The annihilation that came from this vicious advocacy, Hannah Arendt perceived, was more than a crime against the Jewish people: “Mankind in its entirety was grievously hurt and endangered.”