Erich Maria Remarque Promised land
Erich Maria Remarque DAS GELOBTE LAND
First published in the German language
Reprinted with permission from the publisher
Verlag Kiepenheuer & Witsch GmbH & Co. KG.
For the third week I looked at this city: it lay before me in full view - and as if on another planet. Just a few kilometers away from me, separated by a narrow branch of the sea that I could probably swim across - and yet inaccessible and inaccessible, as if surrounded by an armada of tanks. It was protected by the most reliable bastions that the twentieth century had invented - the fortress walls of papers, passport regulations and the inhuman laws of an impenetrably soulless bureaucracy. I was on Ellis Island, it was the summer of 1944, and the city of New York lay before me.
Of all the internment camps I have ever seen, Ellis Island was the most humane. Here no one was beaten, tortured, tortured to death with backbreaking work, or poisoned in gas chambers. The local inhabitants were even provided with good food, free of charge, and beds in which they were allowed to sleep. There were guards everywhere, however, but they were almost polite. Ellis Island held foreigners arriving in America whose papers were either suspicious or simply out of order. The fact is that just one entry visa issued by the American consulate in European country, for America was not enough - upon entering the country, you had to go through the New York Immigration Bureau again and get permission. Only then were you allowed in - or, on the contrary, they declared you an undesirable person and sent you back with the first ship. However, with sending back everything has long been not as simple as before. There was a war going on in Europe, America was also bogged down in this war up to its ears, German submarines were scouring the entire Atlantic, so passenger ships sailed from here to European ports of destination extremely rarely. For some poor souls who were denied entry, this meant, albeit tiny, but happiness: they, who had long been accustomed to counting their lives only in days and weeks, gained hope of staying at least for some time on Ellis Island. However, there were too many other rumors going around for me to console myself with such hope - rumors about ghost ships full of Jews that plied the ocean for months and which, no matter where they sailed, were not allowed to land anywhere. Some of the emigrants claimed that they saw with their own eyes - some on the approach to Cuba, some near the ports South America– these crowds of desperate people, begging for salvation, crowding to the rails of people on abandoned ships before entering harbors closed to them, – these sad “flying Dutchmen” of our days, tired of running away from enemy submarines and human cruelty, carriers of the living dead and damned souls, whose only fault was that they were human and thirsted for life.
Of course, there were some nervous breakdowns. Strangely, here on Ellis Island, they happened even more often than in the French camps, when German troops and the Gestapo stood very close, several kilometers away. Probably, in France, this resistance to one’s own nerves was somehow connected with a person’s ability to adapt to mortal danger. There the breath of death was felt so clearly that it must have forced a person to control himself, but here people, who had just relaxed at the sight of such a close salvation, later a short time, when salvation suddenly began to elude them again, they completely lost self-control. However, unlike France, there were no suicides on Ellis Island - probably, hope was still too strong in people, albeit permeated with despair. But the very first innocent interrogation from the most harmless inspector could lead to hysteria: the distrust and vigilance accumulated over the years of exile cracked for a moment, and after that a flash of new distrust, the thought that you had made an irreparable mistake, plunged the person into panic. Typically, men had nervous breakdowns more often than women.
The city, which lay so close and at the same time so inaccessible, became something like a nightmare - it tormented, beckoned, mocked, promising everything and fulfilling nothing. Either, surrounded by flocks of ragged clouds and hoarse, like the roar of steel ichthyosaurs, ship whistles, he appeared as a huge, vague monster, then, late at night, bristling with a hundred towers of silent and ghostly Babylon, turned into a white and impregnable lunar landscape, and then, late in the evening, drowning in a storm of artificial lights, it became a sparkling carpet, stretched from horizon to horizon, alien and stunning after the impenetrable war nights of Europe - about At this time, many refugees in the dormitory stood up, awakened by the sobs and screams, moans and wheezes of their restless neighbors, those who were still pursued in their sleep by the Gestapo, gendarmes and SS thugs, and, huddling in dark human handfuls, quietly talking or silently, fixing their burning gaze on the unsteady haze on the other side, on the dazzling light panorama of the promised land - America, they froze near the windows, united by a silent brotherhood of feelings, into which only grief brings people, but never happiness.
I had a German passport, good for another four months. This almost authentic document was issued in the name of Ludwig Sommer. I inherited it from a friend who died two years ago in Bordeaux; since the external features indicated in the passport - height, hair and eye color - were the same, a certain Bauer, the best specialist in forgery of documents in Marseille, and a former professor of mathematics, advised me not to change the last name and first name in the passport; and although among the local emigrants there were several excellent lithographers who had already managed to straighten quite passable papers for more than one passportless refugee, I still preferred to follow Bauer’s advice and refuse own name, especially since it was of almost no use anyway. On the contrary, this name was on the Gestapo lists, so it was time for him to disappear. So my passport was almost genuine, but the photo and I myself were a little fake. The skillful Bauer explained to me the benefits of my position: a heavily forged passport, no matter how wonderfully crafted it is, is only suitable in case of a cursory and careless check - it is not able to withstand any kind of meaningful forensic examination and will inevitably give away all its secrets; Prison, deportation, if not something worse, are guaranteed for me in this case. But checking a genuine passport with a fake holder is a much longer and troublesome story: in theory, the request should be sent to the place of issue, but now, when there is a war, this is out of the question. There are no connections with Germany. All experts strongly advise changing not your passports, but your identity; the authenticity of stamps became easier to verify than the authenticity of names. The only thing that didn’t add up in my passport was my religion. Sommer had it Jewish, I didn’t. But Bauer considered that this was unimportant.
“If the Germans capture you, you will simply throw away your passport,” he taught me. - Since you are not circumcised, you will probably somehow wriggle out and not immediately end up in the gas chamber. But while you are running away from the Germans, the fact that you are a Jew is even to your advantage. And explain your ignorance regarding customs by the fact that your father himself was a freethinker, and raised you that way.
Bauer was captured three months later. Robert Hirsch, armed with the papers of the Spanish consul, tried to rescue him from prison, but was too late. The night before, Bauer was sent with a train to Germany.
On Ellis Island I met two emigrants whom I had known briefly before. We happened to see each other several times on the “passionate path.” This was the name of one of the stages of the route along which refugees fled from the Hitler regime. Through Holland, Belgium and Northern France the route led to Paris and split there. From Paris one line led through Lyon to the Mediterranean coast; the second, having passed Bordeaux, Marseille and crossed the Pyrenees, fled to Spain, Portugal and ended up in the port of Lisbon. It was this route that was dubbed the “passionate path.” Those who followed them had to escape not only from the Gestapo - they also had to avoid falling into the clutches of the local gendarmes. The majority did not have passports, much less visas. If the gendarmes came across such people, they were arrested, sentenced to prison and expelled from the country. However, in many countries the authorities were humane enough to deliver them at least not to the German border - otherwise they would inevitably die in concentration camps. Since very few of the refugees had the opportunity to take a valid passport with them on the road, almost all were doomed to wander almost continuously and hide from the authorities. After all, without documents they could not get any legal work. Most suffered from hunger, poverty and loneliness, so they called the path of their wanderings the “passionate path.” Their stops along the way were the main post offices in cities and walls along the roads. At the main post offices they hoped to receive correspondence from relatives and friends; the walls of houses and fences along the highway served as newspapers for them. Chalk and charcoal imprinted on them the names of those who were lost and looking for each other, warnings, instructions, screams into the void - all these bitter signs of the era of human indifference, which was soon followed by the era of inhumanity, that is, war, when on both sides of the front the Gestapo and gendarmes often did one common thing.
Erich Maria Remarque
Promised land
For the third week I looked at this city: it lay before me in full view - and as if on another planet. Just a few kilometers from me, separated by a narrow branch of the sea, which I, perhaps, could swim across - and yet inaccessible and inaccessible, as if surrounded by an armada of tanks. It was protected by the most reliable bastions that the twentieth century had invented - the fortress walls of papers, passport regulations and the inhuman laws of an impenetrably soulless bureaucracy. I was on Ellis Island, 1, it was the summer of 1944, and before me lay the city of New York.
Of all the internment camps I have ever seen, Ellis Island was the most humane. Here no one was beaten, tortured, tortured to death with backbreaking work, or poisoned in gas chambers. The local inhabitants were even provided with good food, free of charge, and beds in which they were allowed to sleep. There were guards everywhere, however, but they were almost polite. Ellis Island held foreigners arriving in America whose papers were either suspicious or simply out of order. The fact is that an entry visa issued by an American consulate in a European country alone was not enough for America - upon entering the country, one had to go through another check at the New York Immigration Bureau and obtain permission. Only then were you allowed in - or, on the contrary, they were declared an undesirable person and sent back with the first ship. However, with sending back everything has long been not as simple as before. There was a war going on in Europe, America was also bogged down in this war up to its ears, German submarines were scouring the entire Atlantic, so passenger ships sailed from here to European ports of destination extremely rarely. For some poor souls who were denied entry, this meant, albeit tiny, but happiness: they, who had long been accustomed to counting their lives only in days and weeks, gained hope of staying at least for some time on Ellis Island. However, there were too many other rumors going around for me to console myself with such hope - rumors about ghost ships full of Jews that plied the ocean for months and which, no matter where they sailed, were not allowed to land anywhere. Some of the emigrants claimed that they saw with their own eyes - some on the approach to Cuba, some near the ports of South America - these crowds of desperate people, begging for salvation, crowding the railings of people on abandoned ships before entering harbors closed to them - these woeful “flying Dutchmen of our day, tired of running away from enemy submarines and human cruelty, carriers of the living dead and damned souls, whose only guilt was that they were people and thirsted for life.
Of course, there were some nervous breakdowns. Strangely, here on Ellis Island, they happened even more often than in the French camps, when German troops and the Gestapo stood very close, several kilometers away. Probably, in France, this resistance to one’s own nerves was somehow connected with a person’s ability to adapt to mortal danger. There the breath of death was felt so clearly that it must have forced a person to control himself, but here people, who had just relaxed at the sight of such close salvation, after a short time, when salvation suddenly began to elude them again, completely lost their self-control. However, unlike France, there were no suicides on Ellis Island - probably, hope was still too strong in people, albeit permeated with despair. But the very first innocent interrogation from the most harmless inspector could lead to hysteria: the distrust and vigilance accumulated over the years of exile cracked for a moment, and after that a flash of new distrust, the thought that you had made an irreparable mistake, plunged the person into panic. Typically, men had nervous breakdowns more often than women.
The city, which lay so close and at the same time so inaccessible, became something like a nightmare - it tormented, beckoned, mocked, promising everything and fulfilling nothing. Either, surrounded by flocks of ragged clouds and hoarse, like the roar of steel ichthyosaurs, ship whistles, it appeared as a huge blurry monster, then, in the dead of night, bristling with a hundred towers of silent and ghostly Babylon, it turned into a white and impregnable lunar landscape, and then, late in the evening, drowning in a storm of artificial lights, it became a sparkling carpet, stretched from horizon to horizon, alien and stunning after the impenetrable war nights of Europe - at this time many refugees in the dormitory stood up, awakened by the sobs and screams, groans and wheezes of their restless neighbors, those who were still pursued in their sleep by Gestapo men, gendarmes and SS thugs, and, huddled in dark human handfuls, quietly talking or silently, fixing their burning gaze on the unsteady haze on the other side, on the dazzling light panorama of the Promised Land - America, froze near the windows, united by a silent brotherhood of feelings, into which only grief brings people together, but never happiness.
I had a German passport, good for another four months. This almost authentic document was issued in the name of Ludwig Sommer. I inherited it from a friend who died two years ago in Bordeaux; since the external features indicated in the passport - height, hair and eye color - were the same, a certain Bauer, the best specialist in forgery of documents in Marseille, and a former professor of mathematics, advised me not to change the last name and first name in the passport; and although among the local emigrants there were several excellent lithographers who had already managed to straighten quite passable papers for more than one passportless refugee, I still preferred to follow Bauer’s advice and abandon my own name, especially since it was of almost no use anyway. On the contrary, this name was on the Gestapo lists, so it was time for him to disappear. So my passport was almost genuine, but the photo and I myself were a little fake. The skillful Bauer explained to me the benefits of my position: a heavily falsified passport, no matter how wonderfully crafted it is, is only suitable in case of a cursory and careless check - it is not able to withstand any kind of meaningful forensic examination and will inevitably give away all its secrets; Prison, deportation, if not something worse, are guaranteed for me in this case. But checking a genuine passport with a fake holder is a much longer and more troublesome story: in theory, the request should be sent to the place of issue, but now, when there is a war, this is out of the question. There are no connections with Germany. All experts strongly advise changing not your passports, but your identity; the authenticity of stamps became easier to verify than the authenticity of names. The only thing that didn’t add up in my passport was my religion. Sommer had it as Jewish, but I didn’t. But Bauer considered that this was unimportant.
If the Germans capture you, you will simply throw away your passport, he taught me. - Since you are not circumcised, you will probably somehow wriggle out and not immediately end up in the gas chamber. But while you are running away from the Germans, the fact that you are a Jew is even to your advantage. And explain your ignorance regarding customs by the fact that your father himself was a freethinker, and raised you that way.
Bauer was captured three months later. Robert Hirsch, armed with the papers of the Spanish consul, tried to rescue him from prison, but was too late. The night before, Bauer was sent with a train to Germany.
On Ellis Island I met two emigrants whom I had known briefly before. We happened to see each other several times on the “passionate path.” This was the name of one of the stages of the route along which refugees fled from the Hitler regime. Through Holland, Belgium and Northern France the route led to Paris and split there. From Paris one line led through Lyon to the Mediterranean coast; the second, having passed Bordeaux, Marseille and crossed the Pyrenees, fled to Spain, Portugal and ended up in the port of Lisbon. It was this route that was dubbed the “passionate path.” Those who followed them had to escape not only from the Gestapo - they also had to avoid falling into the clutches of the local gendarmes. The majority did not have passports, much less visas. If the gendarmes caught such people, they were arrested, sentenced to prison and expelled from the country. However, in many countries the authorities were humane enough to deliver them at least not to the German border - otherwise they would inevitably die in concentration camps. Since very few of the refugees had the opportunity to take a valid passport with them on the road, almost all were doomed to wander almost continuously and hide from the authorities. After all, without documents they could not get any legal work. Most suffered from hunger, poverty and loneliness, so they called the path of their wanderings the “passionate path.” Their stops along the way were the main post offices in cities and walls along the roads. At the main post offices they hoped to receive correspondence from relatives and friends; the walls of houses and fences along the highway served as newspapers for them. Chalk and charcoal imprinted on them the names of those who were lost and looking for each other, warnings, instructions, screams into the void - all these bitter signs of the era of human indifference, which was soon followed by the era of inhumanity, that is, war, when on both sides of the front the Gestapo and gendarmes often did one common thing.
I remember meeting one of these emigrants seen on Ellis Island at the Swiss border, when in the course of one night the customs officers sent us four times to France. And there the French border guards caught us and drove us back. The cold was terrible, and in the end Rabinovich and I somehow persuaded the Swiss to put us in prison. They drowned in Swiss prisons, for refugees it was just a paradise, we would have been very happy to spend the whole winter there, but the Swiss, unfortunately, are very practical. They quickly sent us through Tessinnote 2 to Italy, where we parted ways. Both of these emigrants had relatives in America who gave financial guarantees for them. Therefore, after a few days they were released from Ellis Island. At parting, Rabinovich promised me to look for mutual acquaintances in New York, comrades in emigrant misfortune. I didn't attach any importance to his words. An ordinary promise that you forget about as soon as you take your first steps into freedom.
However, I didn’t feel unhappy here. A few years earlier, in a Brussels museum, I had learned to sit motionless for hours, maintaining a stony equanimity. I plunged into an absolutely thoughtless state, bordering on complete detachment. Looking at myself as if from the outside, I fell into a quiet trance, which softened the unrelenting spasm of a long wait: in this strange schizophrenic illusion, in the end it even began to seem to me that it was not me who was waiting, but someone else. And then the loneliness and cramped space of a tiny closet without light no longer seemed unbearable. The director of the museum hid me in this closet when the Gestapo, during the next round of emigrants, combed the whole of Brussels block by block. The director and I saw each other for a matter of seconds, only in the morning and evening: in the morning he brought me something to eat, and in the evening, when the museum closed, he let me out. During the day the storeroom was locked; Only the director had the key. Of course, when someone walked along the corridor, I was not allowed to cough, sneeze or move loudly. It was not difficult, but the tickling fear that bothered me at first could easily turn into panic horror when a truly serious danger approaches. That is why, in the matter of accumulating mental stability, at first I went, perhaps, even further than necessary, strictly forbidding myself to look at my watch, so that sometimes, especially on Sundays, when the director did not come to me, I did not know at all. Whether it’s day or night, fortunately, I was smart enough to abandon this idea in time. Otherwise, I would inevitably lose the last remnants of my mental balance and would come very close to the quagmire beyond which the complete loss of my own personality begins. And I never really moved away from her anyway. And it wasn’t my faith in life that held me back; the hope of revenge was what saved me.
A week later, a skinny, deceased-looking gentleman suddenly spoke to me, looking like one of those lawyers who circled around our spacious day room in flocks of insatiable crows. He had with him a flat briefcase of green crocodile skin.
Are you, by any chance, Ludwig Sommer?
I looked at the stranger incredulously. He spoke German.
What do you care?
You don't know whether you are Ludwig Sommer or someone else? - he asked again and laughed his short, croaking laugh. The strikingly white, large teeth did not fit well with his gray, rumpled face.
In the meantime, I managed to figure out that I didn’t seem to have any special reasons to hide my name.
“I know that,” I responded. - But why do you need to know this?
The stranger blinked his eyes several times, like an owl.
“I’m on behalf of Robert Hirsch,” he finally announced.
I looked up in amazement.
From Hirsch? Robert Hirsch? The stranger nodded.
From whom else?
Robert Hirsch is dead, I said.
Now the stranger looked at me puzzled.
Robert Hirsch is in New York,” he said. - Not more than two hours ago I talked to him.
I shook my head.
Excluded. There's some kind of mistake here. Robert Hirsch was shot in Marseille.
Nonsense. It was Hirsch who sent me here to help you get off the island.
I didn't believe him. I sensed that there was some kind of trap here, set up by the inspectors.
How would he know that I was even here? - I asked.
A man who introduced himself as Rabinovich called him and said that you were here. - The stranger took it out of his pocket business card. - I'm Levin from Levin and Watson. Law office. We're both lawyers. I hope this is enough for you? You are damn incredulous. Why suddenly? Are you really hiding so much?
I took a breath. Now I believed him.
“Everyone in Marseille knew that Robert Hirsch was shot by the Gestapo,” I repeated.
Just think, Marcel! - Levin chuckled contemptuously. - We are here in America!
Indeed? “I looked expressively at our huge day room with its bars on the windows and emigrants along the walls.
Levin let out his croaking laugh again.
Well, not quite yet. As I see, you haven't lost your sense of humor yet. Mr. Hirsch managed to tell us something about you. You were with him in an internment camp in France. This is true?
I nodded. I still couldn’t really come to my senses. “Robert Hirsch is alive! - was spinning in my head. “And he’s in New York!”
So? - Levin asked impatiently.
I nodded again. Actually, this was only half true: Hirsch stayed in that camp for no more than an hour. He arrived there, dressed in the uniform of an SS officer, to demand that the French commandant hand over to him two German political emigrants who were wanted by the Gestapo. And suddenly he saw me - he didn’t know that I was in the camp. Without blinking an eye, Hirsch immediately demanded my extradition. The commandant, a timid reservist major who had long been fed up with everyone, did not argue, but insisted that the official transfer certificate be left for him. Hirsch gave him such an act - he always had with him a lot of different forms, genuine and fake. Then he saluted with Hitler’s “Heil!”, pushed us into the car and was gone. A year later, both politicians were taken again: they fell into a Gestapo trap in Bordeaux.
/ "Promised Land"
"The Promised Land" (German: Das gelobte Land)
History of writing
Erich Maria Remarque left his homeland in the early 30s. He lived in Switzerland and America for a long time. Having emigrated from Nazi Germany, the writer knew from his own experience all the “delights” of illegal life. Deprived of his homeland by the German authorities, wandering across countries and continents, in 1939 he moved to New World. Remarque received American citizenship only in August 1947.
Having started working on the plot back in 1950, the author never had time to put an end to it. Of the three surviving manuscripts, two have been published. In 1971, Remarque's widow was closely involved in his legacy - the novel Shadows in Paradise was published. One of the versions of “The Promised Land” was shortened and revised by the editors. Much later, in 1998, readers were able to see the latest version of the manuscript. The novel was published under the author's name. In Russian, some publications are published under the title “The Promised Land.”
Plot
The main character's name is Ludwig Sommer. The young art critic is just an amateur posing as a professional. His name is not his and his passport is fake. Everything real remained in Nazi Germany, from where he fled, saving his life. Sommer, a German by nationality, was helped by his friend, a Jew from France, Robert Hirsch. It is unknown how, having obtained a diplomatic passport, he saved people from death in the occupied territory.
Gloomy shadows wandering in a foreign country among unfamiliar and incomprehensible people. They are so different and with such similar destinies. Hysterical fashion model, resistance member, wealthy banker. What could they have in common? Only a ghostly hope of returning home. The main character also cherishes such a dream. But he doesn’t just want to return to his homeland, he needs to avenge his father’s death.
Reviews
The author of the novel does not describe military operations. But the plot is closely connected with the war. His heroes are emigrants who fled to America from the horrors of concentration camps and prisons. People who managed to avoid death lose the meaning of life, plunging into the quagmire of bourgeois life. Heroes live, think, hope, fall in love and die. For some of them, America has become a second home. And some could not find themselves in a foreign country.
The analogy between the novels “Shadows in Paradise” and “The Promised Land” is very clear. The names of the heroes have been changed, but the characters and destinies are still the same. Main character in “The Promised Land” - aspiring amateur art critic Ludwig Sommer, in “Shadows” - journalist Robert Ross. Sommer's closest friend is French Resistance member Robert Hirsch. Ross's friend Kahn also saved lives with false documents and was also an active member of the Resistance. The novel “Shadows in Paradise” has been finalized and has a built-in storyline. In “The Promised Land” there is a clear sense of understatement and incompleteness. But that didn't make the novel any worse. Quite the contrary, some gaps in the plot make it possible to more fully experience the depth of the images written by Remarque.
Quotes
“Loneliness is a disease, very proud and extremely harmful.”
“Poor is the one who no longer wants anything.”
“To live without roots, you must have a strong heart. Memory is the best falsifier in the world; everything that a person happens to go through, she easily turns into exciting adventures; otherwise more and more wars would not start.”
“Help comes only when it is not needed.”
“All great ideas are simple. That’s why they are so hard.”
“Be afraid of your own imagination: it exaggerates, understates and distorts.”
“Only the fallen have the right to talk about the war - they went through it to the end. But it was they who were forced to remain silent forever.”
“How far away are the times when the military ancient China were considered the lowest caste, even lower than executioners, because they kill only criminals, and generals kill innocent people. Today we hold them in such high esteem, and the more people they sent to the next world, the greater their glory.”
Erich Maria Remarque
Promised land
Erich Maria Remarque DAS GELOBTE LAND
First published in the German language
Reprinted with permission from the publisher
Verlag Kiepenheuer & Witsch GmbH & Co. KG.
For the third week I looked at this city: it lay before me in full view - and as if on another planet. Just a few kilometers away from me, separated by a narrow branch of the sea that I could probably swim across - and yet inaccessible and inaccessible, as if surrounded by an armada of tanks. It was protected by the most reliable bastions that the twentieth century had invented - the fortress walls of papers, passport regulations and the inhuman laws of an impenetrably soulless bureaucracy. I was on Ellis Island, it was the summer of 1944, and the city of New York lay before me.
Of all the internment camps I have ever seen, Ellis Island was the most humane. Here no one was beaten, tortured, tortured to death with backbreaking work, or poisoned in gas chambers. The local inhabitants were even provided with good food, free of charge, and beds in which they were allowed to sleep. There were guards everywhere, however, but they were almost polite. Ellis Island held foreigners arriving in America whose papers were either suspicious or simply out of order. The fact is that an entry visa issued by an American consulate in a European country alone was not enough for America; upon entering the country, one had to go through another check at the New York Immigration Bureau and obtain permission. Only then were you allowed in - or, on the contrary, they declared you an undesirable person and sent you back with the first ship. However, with sending back everything has long been not as simple as before. There was a war going on in Europe, America was also bogged down in this war up to its ears, German submarines were scouring the entire Atlantic, so passenger ships sailed from here to European ports of destination extremely rarely. For some poor souls who were denied entry, this meant, albeit tiny, but happiness: they, who had long been accustomed to counting their lives only in days and weeks, gained hope of staying at least for some time on Ellis Island. However, there were too many other rumors going around for me to console myself with such hope - rumors about ghost ships full of Jews that plied the ocean for months and which, no matter where they sailed, were not allowed to land anywhere. Some of the emigrants claimed that they saw with their own eyes - some on the approach to Cuba, some near the ports of South America - these crowds of desperate people, begging for salvation, crowding the railings of people on abandoned ships before entering harbors closed to them - these woeful “flying Dutchmen of our day, tired of running away from enemy submarines and human cruelty, carriers of the living dead and damned souls, whose only guilt was that they were people and thirsted for life.
Of course, there were some nervous breakdowns. Strangely, here on Ellis Island, they happened even more often than in the French camps, when German troops and the Gestapo stood very close, several kilometers away. Probably, in France, this resistance to one’s own nerves was somehow connected with a person’s ability to adapt to mortal danger. There the breath of death was felt so clearly that it must have forced a person to control himself, but here people, who had just relaxed at the sight of such close salvation, after a short time, when salvation suddenly began to elude them again, completely lost their self-control. However, unlike France, there were no suicides on Ellis Island - probably, hope was still too strong in people, albeit permeated with despair. But the very first innocent interrogation from the most harmless inspector could lead to hysteria: the distrust and vigilance accumulated over the years of exile cracked for a moment, and after that a flash of new distrust, the thought that you had made an irreparable mistake, plunged the person into panic. Typically, men had nervous breakdowns more often than women.
The city, which lay so close and at the same time so inaccessible, became something like a nightmare - it tormented, beckoned, mocked, promising everything and fulfilling nothing. Either, surrounded by flocks of ragged clouds and hoarse, like the roar of steel ichthyosaurs, ship whistles, it appeared as a huge blurry monster, then, in the dead of night, bristling with a hundred towers of silent and ghostly Babylon, it turned into a white and impregnable lunar landscape, and then, late in the evening, drowning in a storm of artificial lights, it became a sparkling carpet, stretched from horizon to horizon, alien and stunning after the impenetrable war nights of Europe - at this time many refugees in the dormitory stood up, awakened by the sobs and screams, groans and wheezes of their restless neighbors, those who were still pursued in their sleep by Gestapo men, gendarmes and SS thugs, and, huddled in dark human handfuls, quietly talking or silently, fixing their burning gaze on the unsteady haze on the other side, on the dazzling light panorama of the promised land - America, froze near the windows, united by a silent brotherhood of feelings, into which only grief brings people together, but never happiness.
I had a German passport, good for another four months. This almost authentic document was issued in the name of Ludwig Sommer. I inherited it from a friend who died two years ago in Bordeaux; since the external features indicated in the passport - height, hair and eye color - were the same, a certain Bauer, the best specialist in forgery of documents in Marseille, and a former professor of mathematics, advised me not to change the last name and first name in the passport; and although among the local emigrants there were several excellent lithographers who had already managed to straighten quite passable papers for more than one passportless refugee, I still preferred to follow Bauer’s advice and abandon my own name, especially since it was of almost no use anyway. On the contrary, this name was on the Gestapo lists, so it was time for him to disappear. So my passport was almost genuine, but the photo and I myself were a little fake. The skillful Bauer explained to me the benefits of my position: a heavily forged passport, no matter how wonderfully crafted it is, is only suitable in case of a cursory and careless check - it is not able to withstand any kind of meaningful forensic examination and will inevitably give away all its secrets; Prison, deportation, if not something worse, are guaranteed for me in this case. But checking a genuine passport with a fake holder is a much longer and troublesome story: in theory, the request should be sent to the place of issue, but now, when there is a war, this is out of the question. There are no connections with Germany. All experts strongly advise changing not your passports, but your identity; the authenticity of stamps became easier to verify than the authenticity of names. The only thing that didn’t add up in my passport was my religion. Sommer had it Jewish, I didn’t. But Bauer considered that this was unimportant.
“If the Germans capture you, you will simply throw away your passport,” he taught me. - Since you are not circumcised, you will probably somehow wriggle out and not immediately end up in the gas chamber. But while you are running away from the Germans, the fact that you are a Jew is even to your advantage. And explain your ignorance regarding customs by the fact that your father himself was a freethinker, and raised you that way.
Bauer was captured three months later. Robert Hirsch, armed with the papers of the Spanish consul, tried to rescue him from prison, but was too late. The night before, Bauer was sent with a train to Germany.
On Ellis Island I met two emigrants whom I had known briefly before. We happened to see each other several times on the “passionate path.” This was the name of one of the stages of the route along which refugees fled from the Hitler regime. Through Holland, Belgium and Northern France the route led to Paris and split there. From Paris one line led through Lyon to the Mediterranean coast; the second, having passed Bordeaux, Marseille and crossed the Pyrenees, fled to Spain, Portugal and ended up in the port of Lisbon. It was this route that was dubbed the “passionate path.” Those who followed them had to escape not only from the Gestapo - they also had to avoid falling into the clutches of the local gendarmes. The majority did not have passports, much less visas. If the gendarmes came across such people, they were arrested, sentenced to prison and expelled from the country. However, in many countries the authorities were humane enough to deliver them at least not to the German border - otherwise they would inevitably die in concentration camps. Since very few of the refugees had the opportunity to take a valid passport with them on the road, almost all were doomed to wander almost continuously and hide from the authorities. After all, without documents they could not get any legal work. Most suffered from hunger, poverty and loneliness, so they called the path of their wanderings the “passionate path.” Their stops along the way were the main post offices in cities and walls along the roads. At the main post offices they hoped to receive correspondence from relatives and friends; the walls of houses and fences along the highway served as newspapers for them. Chalk and charcoal imprinted on them the names of those who were lost and looking for each other, warnings, instructions, screams into the void - all these bitter signs of the era of human indifference, which was soon followed by the era of inhumanity, that is, war, when on both sides of the front the Gestapo and gendarmes often did one common thing.
