Mother Night

5: 'Last Full Measure ... '

I, too, knew Rudolf Hoess, Commandant of Auschwitz. I met him at a New Year's Eve party in Warsaw during the war, the start of 1944.

Hoess heard that I was a writer, and he got me to one side at the party, and he said he wished he could write.

'How I envy you creative people — ' he said to me. 'Creativity is a gift from the gods.'

Hoess said he had some marvelous stories to tell. He said they were all true, but that people wouldn't be able to believe them.

Hoess could not tell me the stories, he said, until the war was won. After the war, he said, we might collaborate.

'I can talk it,' he said, 'but I can't write it.' He looked to me for pity. 'When I sit down to write,' he said, 'I freeze.' What was I doing in Warsaw? I had been ordered there by my boss, Reichsleiter Dr. Paul Joseph Goebbels, Head of the German Ministry of Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda. I had a certain amount of skill as a dramatist, and Dr. Goebbels wanted me to use it. Dr. Goebbels wanted me to write a pageant honoring the German soldiers who had given their last full measure of devotion — who had died — that is, in putting down the uprising of the Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto.

Dr. Goebbels had a dream of producing the pageant annually in Warsaw after the war, of letting the ruins of the ghetto stand forever as a setting for it. 'There would be Jews in the pageant?' I asked him.

'Certainly' he said, 'thousands of them.'

'May I ask, sir,' I said, 'where you expect to find any Jews after the war?'

He saw the humor in this. 'A very good question,' he said, chuckling. 'Well have to take that up with Hoess,' he said.

'With whom?' I said. I hadn't yet been to Warsaw, hadn't yet met with brother Hoess.

'He's running a little health resort for Jews in Poland,' said Goebbels. 'We must be sure to ask him to save us some.'

Can the writing of this ghastly pageant be added to the list of my war crimes? No, thank God. It never got much beyond having a working tide, which was: 'Last Full Measure.'

I am willing to admit, however, that I probably would have written it if there had been enough time, if my superiors had put enough pressure on me.

Actually, I am willing to admit almost anything.

About this pageant: it had one peculiar result it brought the Gettysburg Address of Abraham Lincoln to the attention of Goebbels, and then to the attention of Hitler himself.

Goebbels asked me where I'd gotten the working title, so I made a translation for him of the entire Gettysburg Address.

He read it, his lips moving all the time. 'You know,' he said to me, 'this is a very fine piece of propaganda. We are never as modern, as far ahead of the past as we like to think we are.'

'It's a very famous speech in my native land,' I said. 'Every schoolchild has to learn it by heart.'

'Do you miss America?' he said.

'I miss the mountains, the rivers, the broad plains, the forests,' I said. 'But I could never be happy with the Jews in charge of everything.'

'They will be taken care of in due time,' he said.

'I live for that day — my wife and I will Scar that day,' I said.

'How is your wife?' he said.

'Blooming, thank you,' I said.

'A beautiful woman,' he said.

'I'll tell her you said so,' I said. 'It will please her immensely.'

'About the speech by Abraham Lincoln' he said.

'Sir — ?' I said.

'There are phrases in here that might be used most impressively in dedications of German military cemeteries,' he said. 'I haven't been happy at all, frankly, with most of our funeral oratory. This seems to have the extra dimension I've been looking for. I'd like very much to send this to Hitler.'

'Whatever you say, sir,' I said.

'Lincoln wasn't a Jew, was he?' he said.

'I'm sure not,' I said.

It would be very embarrassing to me if he turned out to be one,' he said.

'I've never heard anyone suggest that he was,' I said.

'The name Abraham is very suspicious, to say the least,' said Goebbels.

'I'm sure his parents didn't realize that it was a Jewish name,' I said. 'They must have just liked the sound of it. They were simple frontier people. If they'd known the name was Jewish, I'm sure they would have called him something more American, like George or Stanley or Fred.'

Two weeks later, the Gettysburg Address came back from Hitler. There was a note from der Fuehrer himself stapled to the top of it. 'Some parts of this,' he wrote, 'almost made me weep. All northern peoples are one in their deep feelings for soldiers. It is perhaps our greatest bond.'

Strange I never dream of Hitler or Goebbels or Hoess or Goering or any of the other nightmare people of the world war numbered 'two.' I dream of women, instead.

I asked Bernard Mengel, the guard who watches over me while I sleep here in Jerusalem, if he had any clues as to what I dreamed about.

'Last night?' he said.

'Any night,' I said.

'Last night it was women,' he said. 'Two names you said over and over.'

'What were they?' I said.

'Helga was one,' he said.

'My wife,' I said.

'The other was Resi,' he said.

'My wife's younger sister,' I said. 'Just their names that's all.'

'You said "Goodbye,'' he said.

'Goodbye' I echoed. That certainly made sense, whether I dreamed or not Helga and Resi were both gone forever.

'And you talked about New York' said Mengel. 'You mumbled, and then you said "New York," and then you mumbled some more.'

That made sense, too, as do most of the things I dream. I lived in New York for a long time before coming to Israel.

'New York City must be Heaven,' said Mengel.

'It might well be for you,' I said. 'It was hell for me — or not Hell, something worse than Hell.'

'What could be worse than Hell?' he said.

'Purgatory,' I said.