Gold in the Furnace Page 7
So I spent two nights copying on separate papers, five hundred times, in my own handwriting—for I knew nobody in Sweden who could print such literature—the following words in German:
Men and women of Germany,
In the midst of untold hardships and suffering, hold fast to our glorious National Socialist faith, and resist! Defy our persecutors! Defy the people, defy the forces that are working to ‘de-Nazify’ the German nation and the world at large!
Nothing can destroy that which is built in truth. We are the pure gold put to test in the furnace. Let the furnace blaze and roar! Nothing can destroy us. One day we shall rise and triumph again. Hope and wait! Heil Hitler!
And now I was sitting in a corner of the railway carriage, with my precious papers in my pockets and in my luggage; waiting to throw them out of the windows of the train at every station we passed through, as soon as we reached Germany. I was sitting and thinking of the glorious past, so recent, and of the wretched present—and of the future, for now I knew we had a future.
The train rolled on. I was not the only one to think of these things. There were in the same compartment as myself three Indian girls—three dancers of the company with which I was travelling—and also two Jewesses. One of the Indians, a Maharashtrian of the warrior caste, started relating how, in Stockholm, she had read, in an American magazine, an article discussing the question of whether Adolf Hitler is alive or dead; and she added: “How I do wish he is alive! For the good of the whole world, such a man should live!” My first impulse was to press the girl in my arms for having said that. My second one was to reply that “such men always live,” but this ugly world of knaves and fools is unworthy of them. I refrained from both these forms of self-expression and merely gave the girl a sympathetic smile. With five hundred leaflets in my pockets, I could not afford to attract further attention to myself. But I thought: “Even a twenty year old girl from the other end of the world finds it impossible to feel herself nearing the German frontier without thinking of our Führer.” And I recalled in my mind the words heard long ago, in the days of glory: “Adolf Hitler is Germany; Germany is Adolf Hitler.” These words still express the truth. They always will. And I thought: “Just as, today, this daughter of the southernmost Aryans, so, for endless centuries to come, the whole world will identify, in its consciousness, Hitler and Germany and National Socialism—as one cannot help identifying to this day the Islamic civilisation, Arabia, and the Prophet of Islam.” Once more, I marvelled how broad and how eternal National Socialism is.
But the two Israelites present did not allow me for long to think in peace. “How dare you?” exclaimed one of them, turning to the high- caste Hindu; while the other sprang up like a wounded snake from the place where she was reclining and thrust herself at the girl: “Yes, indeed,” said she, “how dare you praise such a man?—Hitler, of all people! What do you know about him? You should learn before you speak . . .” Her eyes flashed. And she spat out, against the Germans in general and against the Führer himself, the vilest, the most nauseating tirade I had ever heard since the gloating of one of her racial sisters over the Nuremberg Trial in a London boarding house in 1946.
The world accuses us of cruelty. I am supposed to be “cruel,” and—if given power—would surely be more merciless to our enemies than any other National Socialist whom I personally know. And yet even I have never said—never thought—that I would “be delighted to see” any man, any devil, “torn in two.” I have not said that of the rascals who conducted the Nuremberg trial; nor of those who organised the bombing of Germany to the finish. Can a Jewess hate our Führer more than I hate those people? No. But what the world miscalls our “cruelty” is just ruthlessness—the earnest and frank use of violence whenever it is necessary. The really cruel ones are the Jews. And that is why the fate of any of us in their hands is incomparably worse than the fate of any Jew in our power.
I shuddered as I heard that young daughter of Zion speak. Nobody yet had ever, in my presence, uttered a word against Adolf Hitler without my replying vehemently. But now, though burning with indignation, I was mute and motionless. I had those precious leaflets with me. I thought of the godlike Man for the sake of whom the German people are so dear to me. Was I to defend him against that tapeworm of a woman, and create a row, and get discovered, and become useless—or distribute my message of pride and hope to the people he so loved? I held my peace. But I gave the woman such a glance of hatred that she recoiled—and was never again to address a word to me. And I rose from my place and went and wept in the one place in which, even in a train, one is always sure to be alone.
* * *
The train rolled on towards the German border. There were some difficulties awaiting me at Flensburg. I was asked to get out of the train to be questioned on the platform by a man—visibly a Jew—to whom the stage manager of my employer’s company, also a Jew, was already talking. I possess a pair of Indian earrings in the shape of swastikas. I had them on; and intended to wear them right through German territory, in sheer defiance of all “de-Nazification” schemes. I threw a shawl over my head (there was no time to do anything else) and came out. The man on the platform, I was told, was “a member of the police.”
“Are you Mrs. Mukherji?” said he, as he greeted me.
“Yes, I am.”
“Well,” he continued, “There are rumours about you. Can you tell me how far they are justified?”
“What rumours?” said I.
“You surely know.”
“I do not. I have not the faintest idea. People say so many things.”
“Some say you are a Nazi. Are you really?”
“Does it matter what one is, in a land to which you are supposed to have brought ‘freedom’—so you say?” I replied ironically.
“It does,” said the man. “We don’t welcome people likely to make the already difficult task of the Occupying Powers still more difficult.”
“I don’t see how anyone could display such might from behind the windows of the Nord Express,” I answered—wishing all the time I could.
I had hardly finished saying these words when one of the youngsters of the company, who knew I was wearing my lovely and dangerous earrings, pulled the shawl off my head from behind, “for a joke” he later explained. The “joke” could have proved a tragic one. But the boy did not know—nobody knew—what I was carrying with me and what I was intending to do. The hallowed Symbol of the Sun gleamed on each side of my face in that first German frontier station, now in June, 1948, as it did in the streets of Calcutta in glorious ’40.
“I see it is useless talking to you any longer, Mrs. Mukherji,” said the man to me. “You’d better stay off the train. We shall search your luggage.”
“You can,” I replied, with outward calm. But I ran to the principal of the company, who was taking a stroll, and took him aside at the other end of the platform.
“You must help me to get on that train again at once, without them searching my things,” said I.
“Why? What has happened?”
I explained what had happened, and the principal promised he would try to help me.
I could not tell what he said to the official or semi-official “member of the police” who had questioned me. He probably pointed out to him that no person seriously intending to indulge in Nazi underground activities would be such a fool as to advertise herself beforehand by wearing a pair of golden swastikas. And the argument, apparently, proved convincing. My very stupidity saved me. My luggage was not searched. At last the train moved on. “The Gods still love us,” thought I, as I rolled triumphantly into German territory.
* * *
Right and left the land stretched out, green and smiling, in all the glory of its summer garb—“as beautiful,” thought I, “as when ‘he’ ruled over it.”
I stood in the corridor, with as many of my leaflets as my pockets and handbag could carry—some concealed in packets of ten or twenty cigarettes or in small parcels of sugar, co
ffee, cheese, or butter (whatever I could buy in Sweden), others placed in envelopes, others just loose. The railway ran parallel to a road. Walking along the road were a woman and a child. I waved to them, and threw a little packet of sugar out of the window—a packet with a leaflet in it, naturally. The woman picked it up and thanked me. I was already far away. By the side of a small station through which we passed without stopping, was a café. A youngster and a girl were seated at one of the tables, out of doors, drinking beer. I threw them a packet of cigarettes also containing a leaflet. The packet fell a little further from the table than I thought it would. The young man got up to take it, and smiled at me while I leaned out of the window to catch a glimpse of him. He was a fine young man: tall, well-built, blond, with bright eyes. The girl—a graceful and slim maiden with golden locks—had also got up and was standing at his side. She too, was smiling, glad to have the cigarettes.
As the train carried me further and further away out of their sight, I imagined them opening the packet, finding the paper, unfolding it. I imagined their eyes sparkling as they saw at the top—once more after three dark years—the unexpected Sign of the Sun, and as they read the words written for them from the depth of my heart: “Hold fast to our glorious National Socialist faith, and resist! . . . One day, we shall rise and triumph again.”
They had thought they had got twenty cigarettes and lo, they had got that along with them: a message of hope. I was happy. The idea did not enter my head that the message was perhaps wasted on them; that, after all, they might not necessarily be Nazis. I took it for granted that they were, at heart. However much this may seem childish, nay, foolish, utterly out of keeping with the seriousness of what I was doing, they struck me as too beautiful to be anything else.
* * *
And on I went, through the lovely countryside, my head at the open window. Whenever we passed through a station, or whenever I saw anybody within my reach—workmen on the side of the railway, people walking along a road or waiting at a level crossing for our train to pass—I threw out some small parcel and a handful of loose leaflets. The faces of which I caught a glimpse were haggard and tired but dignified faces; faces of men and women who, obviously, had not had enough to eat for a long time, but whom an iron will kept alive and whom an invincible pride kept unsubdued. I admired them.
A little before we reached Hamburg, I thrust from the toilet window over a hundred of my leaflets onto the crowded platform of some station through which we passed, and then came back into the corridor. The train was rushing on at full speed. I had no time to see what happened. “But surely,” I thought, “some of my papers must have fallen in good hands.” Then it struck me that some, also, being so light, might well have flown back into the train. I knew that the Jew B.T.,78 the stage manager of the company, was sitting in a railway carriage nearer the end of the train than mine. And I shuddered at the idea of him suddenly seeing one fly in from the window and fall upon his lap. “Oh, dear!” said I to myself, “I must be more careful henceforth!”
The Sun had already gone down, and we were running through the suburbs of Hamburg. For the first time, I beheld what I was soon to see every day: the ruins of Germany. Black against the pale green and golden sky—the afterglow of the late summer sunset—I saw no end of shattered walls; of heaps of wreckage; of blocks of iron and stone out of the midst of which emerged, now and then, the skeleton of what had once been a boiler, or a wagon, or an oil tank; no end of long dark streets in which no life was left. The whole place looked like an immense excavation field.
Tears came to my eyes, not because these were the ruins of a once prosperous town, the lamentable remnants of happy homes and useful human industries, but because they were the ruins of our New Order; all that was—materially—left of that super-civilisation in the making which I so admired. Far in the distance, I noticed the steeple of a church standing, untouched, above the general desolation—like a symbol of the victory of the Cross over the Swastika. And I hated the sight of it.
Once more, as in the last days of the war and in the months that followed, I experienced for a while the feeling of despair. In my mind, I recalled those darkest days: my departure from Calcutta already at the close of 1944—when one knew what the end would be—not to hear, not to read, and, if possible, not to think about the war; not to be told when National Socialist Germany would capitulate; and then, my wanderings from place to place, from temple to temple, all over central, western, and southern India, without my being able to draw my attention away from the one fact: the impending disaster. I saw myself again in a train on my way to Tiruchendur, at the extreme south of the Indian peninsula. A man holding a newspaper in English was sitting opposite me. And I could not help reading the headlines in big letters: “Berlin is an inferno.” It was in April, 1945, a day or two after the Führer’s birthday. The man had looked up at me as he had seen me reacting and had said: “Well, we are safe out here, anyhow!” And I had replied: “It is all right for you, but I wish I were not safe. I wish I were there.” And before he had had the time to overcome his astonishment and ask me why, I had gotten up and gone out into the corridor, and there, easily abstracting myself from my tropical surroundings, I had thought of that inferno—as far as one can think of such a thing without having seen it. And I had pictured to myself the Man against and around whom raged the fury of a world possessed by demons, the Man who had striven for peace and on whom three continents were waging war: my beloved Führer—in the midst of the noise of exploding bombs and of crumbling buildings, his stern and beautiful face lighted up, now and then, by the sudden glow of new fires started in the vicinity. And I had felt all the more tormented in my security far away, because I could not look up to that tragic face in the hour of ruin and tell my betrayed Leader: “The East and West may turn against you now, but I am with you forever!” And I recalled, after that, my return to Bengal in July, 1945; the news: Germany divided into four “zones”; and then, the three long, gloomy years that had followed, until I had found in Sweden a new ray of hope.
I was thinking of all this as the train halted in Hamburg station, along the one remaining platform of the twenty-eight the station once possessed.
* * *
I soon noticed a gathering before one of the windows of our train—the window of a compartment nearer the end than the one I occupied. People were rushing forward, pushing one another, struggling with one another for something at their feet on the platform. Then, for a minute, all was calm again—all eyes were once more gazing at the window in expectation until, at last, the desired thing fell, and all again rushed to pick it up. The thing was a cigarette—a single one.
I walked down the corridor to the carriage from which it had dropped. It was the one occupied by the stage manager of the company, the Jew whom I mentioned. And there I actually saw Israel B.T. standing at the window, gloating over the ruins of Hamburg and of all Germany at the top of his voice—saying he was sorry an atom bomb had not been dropped on each town—and throwing onto the platform one cigarette at a time (only one) just to have the pleasure of seeing twenty people rush forth to pick it up. Twenty people who less than ten years—less than five years—ago, had acclaimed the Führer at the height of his glory with their right arm outstretched and the cries of “Sieg Heil!”; twenty people who had fought for the triumph of the Aryan Ideology and for the overlordship of the Aryan race in this world, were now, after three years of systematic starvation, oppression, and demoralisation, fighting for a cigarette thrown to them—like a dry bone to a pack of hungry dogs—by a fat, ugly, mean, cruel, gloating Jew! My heart ached with shame and indignation. I wanted to get down from the train, to rush to the ones on the platform—to my Führer’s people; to my people—and tell them: “Don’t pick up that thing! It is the gift of mockery. Don’t!”
But the train had already started moving on. I turned to Israel B.T. with cold, contained rage: “If you must see people fight for your damned cigarettes, you could at least throw out a packet of twe
nty—something worth having.” I loathed the spiteful, cowardly creature from the depth of my heart, but I just could not keep silent. The Jew looked around at me and said: “I keep my cigarettes for Englishmen, and would advise you to do the same, if you have any.”
“Mr. B.T.,” I replied, “what have you in common with England and Englishmen? As for advice, let me tell you straightaway that I take none from my racial inferiors.”
It was the first time I ever had shown the creature my National Socialist feelings in all their glaring nakedness! He was taken aback. “What is the matter with you?” he said. He did not know me enough—yet—to understand at once.
“What is the matter with me?” I repeated, “Nothing. We are in Germany. That’s all.”
The train moved forth between further expanses covered with ruins. Yes, we were in Germany.
* * *
It was now dark. A bright starry night, and that desolation—those endless charred and blasted walls, and those emaciated, stern, and dignified faces—beneath the splendour of the heavens; and I, still standing in the corridor with a new supply of leaflets in my pockets. “Why had I not come years before, during our great days?” I was thinking. “Why had I not stood, I too, along those now devastated streets and cried out ‘Sieg Heil!’ at the passage of the one Man of my times whom I revered as a god? Why had it been my destiny to spend all those years six thousand miles away from Europe and to come now—now that proud Germany lay in the dust?”
Tears filled my eyes as I gazed at the deep sparkling sky, and then at the rare lights scattered here and there in what was left of that immense city: Hamburg. The dark infinity above reminded me of one of the many names of the immemorial Mother Goddess, in Sanskrit, the sacred language which the Aryans once brought to India: Shyama—the Dark Blue One; Goddess of indestructible life, Goddess of death and destruction; lover and avenger; Energy of the Universe. And I recalled the words which the Mother Goddess Herself is said to have addressed to a Hindu sage: “When all is lost—when thou hast no possessions, no friends, no hope left—then I come, I, the Mother of the world.” And I remembered that, to the Hindu mind, the universal Mother lives in every woman. “In me, also,” I thought; “I too have come when all is lost, when all is in ruins; when all is dead, save the invincible Nordic soul, in Hitler’s people. Is that why I have come so late?—to speak to the German soul for fifteen hours from the corridor of the Nord Express?”