Stage Door Canteen (11 page)

“I don’t know.” She pushed her hair back from her face. “I’m so tired of it. You or Papa would do a better job. You were both wrong, United States magazines don’t listen to me. The editor today wanted to know why we hadn’t taken the pictures to the big New York newspapers.”

He grimaced. “Liesl, don’t look like that, I’m sorry you’re having all this trouble. But I can’t do anything, you must understand that. I’m a political refugee, an alien, a member of the Communist Party.”

She shrugged. “So is Papa.”

“Your father is no longer a Communist. If you keep saying that you are going to get us in a lot of trouble. Are you trying to be funny?”

“Hah, since when am I allowed to be funny? Nothing funny ever happens to me.” She stood up and picked up the envelope. “I’m going to put these in Papa’s office.”

He followed her out of the kitchen. “Did they say you should contact some other publication? Did they give you a referral, maybe? Did you ask them about contacting another college magazine?”

“I said to the editor that yes, there had been some problem with proving they were not fake pictures that someone had made in a laboratory somewhere. And that we were familiar with this. He said they were glad we realized the difficulty, because the photos involved such inflammatory material, not just concentration camps but death camps where the Nazis were killing women and children and babies. That we claim they are starving them to death and shooting them. And if anybody published them there would be such a terrible outcry all across the county, especially in the Jewish community. That it would probably bring pressure on the United States government to do something about the Jews. He said he didn’t know what these atrocities, even if they were true, had to do with the current war effort. It might stir up anti-Semitic feeling all over again if people thought this was more Jewish propaganda. He said, ‘There was a lot of anti-Jewish feeling in this country ten years ago, and it hasn’t gone away. Like isolationism. There’s still a lot of it around.’”

He turned and paced down the kitchen, frowning. “What do you want me to do? OK, I admit the photos might look fake. I warned Foster about it when we started. This is not easy.”

She watched him. “You never told me that.”

“What am I supposed to tell you?” He ran his hand through his hair with the familiar gesture. “A Nazi guard took the photographs, and a Jew who was in charge of the other Jews smuggled them out. They could have been killed, all of them, just for a bunch of pictures of corpses. Just to prove to the world that this was happening. And then it turns out you can’t tell who is what in the photos, although they are obviously people in the death camps. But as I told Foster, what death camp? What was it the Herald Tribune, told your father? That they had seen them before, that they were photographs of people in a prison in Ninteeen Thirty Six? In the war in Spain?”

“They’re not fakes. They’re not! Why does everybody say that? What are they afraid of?”

“Liesl...”

He tried to take her arm but she pulled away from him and went into the den and slammed the door.

She put the manila envelope on the desk. The end wasn’t closed. She fiddled with it for a moment, then pulled out the top photograph. The pictures always had the same effect, one couldn’t leave them alone. Even the magazine editors shuffled through them again and again, repeating the awfulness, the horror, the impact on the senses. The first glimpse was visceral. She remembered the air around her had literally turned black. While she gasped for air her father had taken her by the back of the neck and steered her to the bathroom where he made her kneel to throw up in the toilet. She knew now that after a time one grew used to them.

The topmost photo was of a mountain of corpses so emaciated it was hard to recognize them as naked men. They looked like fossils of some sort piled in the interior of some dim, barn-like structure somewhere. Tightly-stretched pale skin, faces shrunken, dominated by gaping mouths, as if the wasted figures still continued to scream.

Elise sat down at the chair at the desk and slid the photograph back inside the envelope, and fastened the metal wings of the clasp. She put her elbows on the desk and regarded the bookcase full of leather bound books that stood against the opposite wall. In 1939, when she and her father had finally reached the United States by way of a freighter from Lisbon, the Jewish academic community had reached out to them. Professors from colleges around New York City had found them lodgings, and even more importantly found David Ginsberg, that internationally-known scholar, small jobs suited to his experience. They were still doing so. They had lived in the Bronx apartment of Dr. Samuel Moskowitz of Fordham University since June, and would continue to do so until the Moskowitzes returned from his year as visiting guest lecturer at Stanford. Before that Elise and her father had occupied the home of a member of the Yale Divinity School on teaching assignment at an Indian mission in Brazil. House-sitting, the Americans called it. For three years, since she was fifteen, they had lived in houses with other peoples’ clothes in the closets, other peoples’ pots and pans in the kitchen, their bottles of aspirin and tubes of toothpaste in the bathrooms, always ready to move as soon as the owners let them know when they were due to return, and when they could begin to search for another place.

Then, six months ago, Arnold Foster of the Anti-Defamation League had been contacted by someone who had carried the photographs from Toronto to New York to see what could be done to make the free world aware of them. By then the death camp pictures had quite a history. The Canadian newspapers and magazines that had taken the time to look them over had pointed out that, even assuming they were what the mysterious European sources claimed they were; the camera had still failed to pick up any verifiable figure, such as a concentration camp guard. Nor was there a truck, a tree, or any other glimpse of surroundings that could give a clue as to the location, or the time frame. One picture editor observed atrocity photographs surfaced in quantity in wars. Another remembered pictures of an entire town in Manchuria that had starved to death. A Quebec magazine editor recalled photographs of the Russian Revolution. So for all the terrible risk of life it had taken to get this particular set, they were not, apparently, all that convincing.

Elise opened the drawer in the desk and put the envelope in it, then pushed it closed. The door opened, and Max stood there. “Don’t come in here to hide and cry. Why are you crying?

She made a gesture with her hand for him to go away. “I’m not crying. You and my father give these photographs to me and say, we haven’t been able to do anything with them, go out and see what you can do.” She mimicked Max’s accent. “‘You’re young and pretty, maybe these American editors will listen to you.’”

“Is that what you’re crying about?” He came around the desk and pulled her up from the chair and took her into his arms. He kissed her. “I always want you, liebchen,” he muttered against her lips. “Why don’t you come down the hallway at night anymore, and into my bed?”

When she shivered, he ran his hands under her coat, lifting up her dress in back, sliding under the elastic of the garter belt to pull her panties aside. His fingers connected with the warm, bare skin of her hips.

“No.” She put her hands on his shoulders and tried to push him away. “Not in here.”

“Yes,” he breathed. “Yes. In here.” He held her more tightly, one hand going between her legs, his thumb thrusting against her to open the warm cleft of her sex. He said, “Your father won’t be back, he went to the library. You want me, Liesl, say you want me.”

She had always wanted him, that was the trouble, he was her hero. Max Kubelsky, soldier, writer, lecturer, revolutionary, refugee from Nazi oppression, David Ginsberg’s good friend and disciple who’d fought political wars in Berlin and Paris and as a volunteer in a real war in Spain. When he was not fighting wars he was writing about them. The first year they had been in America, living in an apartment on the Lower East Side, Max had moved in with an ancient suitcase and his typewriter. He had been with them ever since. That same year, Elise had found her way through the darkened apartment and into Max’s bed. She’d been surprised and delighted when he’d only laughed. Since then they had been lovers.

“Get up on the desk.” His hands gripped her thighs and lifted her. As soon as her weight settled among the papers he ripped open the front of his hiking shorts, then pulled down his underwear. His sex sprang out, dark and rigid. “Oh God, Liesl, my love, my darling.” He leaned over her, holding her knees apart.

She was aroused too, wanting him; he could still do this to her. But she managed to wriggle away. Something fell off the desk.

“No, stop! Max, I don’t want to do this.” She held him off with one hand. “Listen,” she said urgently, “pay attention. Are we trying to get these photographs published for the Russians?”

He stared down at her, wild-eyed. “What Russians?”

“The Communists.” She pushed him away and slid off the desk, pulling at her skirt. “The editor this morning said this was good propaganda for the Russians. What does that mean?”

They heard the front door lock click, then the sound of the door opening. They sprang apart.

“How the hell do I know what that means?” He bent his head to zip up his shorts. “I don’t know what these stupid people will say, that’s why we gave it to you.” He gave her a push with one hand. “No, it’s not to help the Russians, it’s to try to save Jews, dammit, in Nazi death camps. Go say hello to David.”

Elise stared at him. “Max, my father knows.” She knew her father was standing in the kitchen, listening.

He lifted his head. “He’s not going to give me any trouble, Liesl,” he said flatly. “Just tell him the magazine turned them down.”

She left him standing there.

SEVEN

On his Sunday night radio show, listened to by over twenty million people from coast-to-coast, Broadway columnist Walter Winchell paid tribute to a “very beautiful, often tarnished but always fascinating lady whose face may be dimmed in the interests of national safety, but who still holds a fantabulous place in the Free World!”

The show, The Jergen’s Journal, opened with Winchell’s hand on a radio key in the broadcast studio where he sent out—not real Morse code because “America’s one-man newspaper” had never learned it—but a random dit dit dit that accompanied, for the first thirty seconds or so, his 237 word-a-minute machine gun delivery beginning with: “Good evening Mr. and Mrs. North America and all the ships at sea....LETZGOTOPRESS!”

The lady he referred to was wartime New York City.

“Yes, ladies and gentlemen—” his staccato words shot out over the airwaves, “—the Statue of Liberty still lifts her lamp beside New York’s golden door, even though the light in her torch is out, turned off for the duration! But take heart, dear listeners, New York City is still there, more swelegant than ever in a world where the lights have been squelched—gone kaput—in the great cities of Paris, London, and Rome! For in case you didn’t know it, New York alone is supplying the dream stuff for thousands of our fighting men and women on leave!

“Let’s take a fr’instance. Are you a British sailor, a Free French flyer, an American GI with a few days in New York? Chances are you’re on your way to the stage shows at Radio City Music Hall in Rockefeller Center, and the famous prancing terpsichorines—the one and only Rockettes!

“And you Norwegian and Dutch freedom fighters—you’ll find the Broadway theater scene waiting to entertain you with hits like STAR AND GARTER (burleyque on the half shell served up by the delishus Miss Gypsy Rose Lee), and tunesmith Irving Berlin starring in his own show THIS IS THE ARMY! There’s even a new musical waiting in the wings by Richard Rodgers (formerly of Rodgers and Hart) and wordsmith Oscar Hammerstein (formerly of Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein) who have teamed up this season as—what else?—Rodgers and Hammerstein—to bring us a Broadway show with—are you ready for this?—a cowboy ballet! Yes, Auntie Ethel, you heard me—I said ballet. Cowboys, you know, in those funny toe shoes!

“La de DA...

“So—now—you Canadian paratroopers in NewYork on a three day pass—your cup of tea may be Benny Goodman’s band a few blocks away on Times Square at the Paramount, while on the silver screen you can catch SPRINGTIME IN THE ROCKIES with that lovely, leggy Hollywood confexion, Miss Betty Grable!

“Wait a minute—here’s something for members of all Allied forces to note. War plays we haven’t got! Our fighting men and women who fill Broadway show palaces to overflowing turn thumbs down on war dramas. They say, instead, give them Olsen and Johnsen’s HELLZAPOPPIN—or Ray Bolger’s BY JUPITER—or some night spot like the Stork Club—the New Yorkiest place in town—where you’re liable to see Madame Chiang Kai-shek, Earnest Hemingway and Hedy Lamarr sitting at the next table! Or go ogle the beautiful girls at the Latin Quarter and Billy Rose’s Diamond Horseshoe or Tony Pastor’s, before you stop at one of the many USO clubs located in the Times Square area! Then there’s Reuben’s Broadway delicatessen, where the famous are immortalized by having sandwiches named after them. Or try the New York Philharmonic and the Metropolitan Opera for the world’s best music. There’s even the country’s biggest bargain—the five cent ferry boat ride to Staten Island with its million dollar view of New York’s skyline! Or any nickel ride underground in the subway!

“Servicemen and women, your Uncle Walter reminds you not to forget to look into the always amazing Automat, especially the one patronized by show folks in Times Square, where you can see your food behind little glass windows! Then go off to Grand Central Station—not forgetting to stop at the Oyster Bar for clam chowder—and take a horse drawn carriage ride through Central Park, a visit to the top of the Empire State Building, down to the Fulton Fish Market, followed by Wall Street and the Stock Exchange, with stops at Gimbel’s, Macy’s or Woolworth’s for that little something to send back home to mom or that special girl.