Toward the end of World War II, in the winter of 1945, two momentous events took place simultaneously at distant parts of the earth. It can be safely assumed that none of the participants in either of these grim dramas had the remotest knowledge of the others’ existence. In southern Poland, the army of the Soviet Union had finished evacuating the German concentration camp of Auschwitz. In the Pacific Ocean, 800 miles south of Japan, three United States Marine divisions were commencing the invasion stage of one of the bloodiest campaigns ever fought, the battle for the island of Iwo Jima, which would be of critical importance as a way station for the flight carrying the first atomic bomb.
It might be said that the war in Europe and the Pacific conflict took place on different planets. Most servicemen engaged in the war against the Japanese gave little thought to remote campaigns like the ones in Italy and France. It was a global struggle too vast to comprehend while it was happening. But when it was over and somewhat more comprehensible, we could see that the war left us with, if nothing else, two prodigious and enduring metaphors for human suffering: Auschwitz and Hiroshima. History has carved no sterner monuments to its own propensity for unfathomable evil.
Hiroshima had a profound direct effect on my life; Auschwitz’s would come much later. In the summer of 1945 I was a young Marine officer slated to lead my rifle platoon in the invasion of Japan. Most of us were spunky but scared, and we had much to be scared about. The carnage had reached a surreal intensity. Already on Iwo Jima and Okinawa, 17,000 Americans had lost their lives, including many of our friends. It had been predicted that the invasion would produce over half a million American casualties, while perhaps as many as three times that number of Japanese would be killed or wounded, including countless civilians.
Herman Melville wrote, “All wars are boyish, and are fought by boys.” I cannot say, from this distance in time, what is more firmly lodged in my memory-the desperate fatalism and sadness that pervaded, beneath our nervous bravado, the days and nights of us young boys, or the joy we felt when we heard of the bomb, of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and of the thrilling turnaround of our destiny. It was a war we all believed in and I’d wanted to test my manhood; part of me mourned that I never got near the combat zone. But Hiroshima removed from my shoulders an almost tactile burden of insecurity and dread. Later I often used the word ecstatic to describe my reaction. I used it again only a few years ago in, of all places, Tokyo, when a TV interviewer asked me to express my views about Hiroshima and related matters.
Afterward I had the feeling I’d misspoken badly. But later at a party a Japanese man of my vintage approached me, murmuring a little surreptitiously that he’d seen me on television and wanted to tell me something he’d never told anyone before. He said he’d also been a young infantry officer, the leader of a heavy mortar unit training on Kyushu to repel our invasion, when word came of the bomb and the end of the war. We might have blown each other up, he added, and when I asked him how he’d taken the news he said, “I was ecstatic, like you.”
After VJ Day, there was a space of a year or so when it was truly possible to conceive of a world without war. Progenitors of the baby boom, most veterans were diligently amorous. It may be that the gloom descended soon after Winston Churchill’s Iron Curtain speech. For me the sense of the future closing down permanently came only six years later, when as a Marine reserve I was called up for duty in the Korean War. Back in infantry training, I had the nightmarish perception of war as a savage continuum, not a wholesome if often lethal adventure men embarked upon, as in World War II, to strike down the forces of evil, but a perpetual way of life in which small oases of peacetime provided intermittent relief. In Asia there was an explosion waiting to happen; America stood ready to light the fuse the French had laid down, and in the next decade the sequel of Vietnam came as no surprise.
In that same decade of the 1960s I became engrossed in the issue of racial conflict in America-especially as it was reflected in the history of slavery-and found myself pondering the extent to which race and racial domination played a part in the recent wars. The stunning late-19th-century insight of W.E.B. Du Bois-that the chief problem of the coming century would be that of race-had swiftly become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Du Bois was speaking of his own African-American people but his prophecy would embrace the globe. If in the First World War nationalistic ambitions largely fueled the conflict, World War II was the incubator of a poisonous and worldwide racism. A poster I recall from the Pacific war was of a bucktoothed and bespectacled rat, with repulsively coiled tail and Japanese army cap; the legend read KNOW YOUR ENEMY.
All Americans fighting in the Pacific were racists. Marines were indoctrinated to regard Japanese soldiers as dangerously rabid animals. The paucity of enemy prisoners taken by our troops was due in part to the Japanese creed of fighting to the last breath, but it was also because of our own policy of extermination, often with an intriguing new weapon, the flamethrower, which roasted our adversaries in their bunkers and burrows. The enemy repaid our racism in kind and generally surpassed us; few people were treated more barbarically than those starving prisoners, many of them European and American but also Asian, who existed amid squalor and privation in the Japanese camps.
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 a 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 3 million, or nearly 60 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 600 Soviet POWs. Although the Holocaust was uniquely Jewish, its uniqueness becomes more striking when we can see that it also was 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 represented 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. Nearly 50 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-without hope and without despair.
