Dvr. H.Adler

PAL/30765
68 R.8. T. Coy
RASC
M.E.F.

November 1942

Sunday. Most of my friends have gone on leave. Eight days leave. I too could have got it. But I refused, explaining to the authorities that I wanted to wait until receiving our two authorisations of marriage and then spending a week with you. What would be the point of a leave without you, darling?

I still recall very clearly those five stupid days, bereft of all beauty, empty of all feeling that I last spent in Tel Aviv. Because I was alone, without you. I roamed the streets like a sleepwalker. Nothing interested me. Even my most genuine friends left me cold. My soul was continuously with you. As it was yesterday and today and will be tomorrow. And that only underlined the terrible emptiness of such a leave.

As for the formalities of our marriage, I must tell you that I received in the mail – I don’t know who from- a copy of your divorce and have sent it to you, together with the certificate of my unmarried state, in a registered letter. I hope you have already received the two documents. So I will soon hold you again in my arms, nervous with impatience and – oh delicious happiness, so longed for! – rest my aching head on your loving knees. Saying nothing. Doing nothing. Simply stay like that for minutes, for hours sublime. Without gesture; without a word. Nothing would be heard but our hearts beating as one and that would be my salutation, darling. Salutation, because it is only so that I can quite happily stop thinking a little. Not to speak is to be so very close to you, darling Yvette, my little Yvette, that will be so very sweet!

Here I am alone. Or almost. For there are always those “clever” fellows,, here and there, who make a special point of turning up to pester and get up the noses of people who only want one thing. To be left in peace; to be left bloody alone a bit to escape  rotten atmosphere that stifles them, literally strangles them. Ouf! Darling, that piece of trickery that I told you about weighs with a heavy weight on my body. Is it about to wipe me out altogether? NO, that would be to overdo its effect. For I won’t let it happen. I defend myself with all my strength and that strength I find has grown so much bigger, as big as our love, darling. In you beautiful love for me. In my memories. In the unbreakable certainty of our final triumph. The triumph of our love and of all that for which I have given the best of myself during long years of struggle, side by side with all those real men.

My soul? There it is. Listen to it but be indulgent, little one. Consider that you have done the most to keep me afloat on these troubled waters and not to sink finally into foul waters.

I am sad, darling. Horribly sad. And I know that you don’t like that. And I know that you are absolutely right. For it is the man who laughs healthily, or who at least smiles gently who is right. It is not the one who sighs, constantly wails and complains noisily about the world about men about life etc etc. But don’t misunderstand me, Yvette. I am not one of those. Not at all.  Besides, more than once I have shown you the sickliness of a Celine and the disgust with which I turn away from him.

And apart from that there can be good and beauty in sadness.  For example, when I am sad, when I think about how much I love you and how much you love me, that I think of our miserable separation, when I think that finally I have found you, my beauty, who surrounds me in so much goodness, tenderness and warmth, I now and then jump for joy (yes I do!) and I am also often sad. But who would know how to find the boundary between that sadness and the most intense joy? That sadness is good, it is beautiful, it is healthy. I don’t defend myself against it. I want it.  It only raises me ever higher; it gives me hope and makes me want you more and more. It makes me think of lovely things, it fills me entirely full of poetry, music, beauty which, I know, will be multiplied infinitely on the day, so much longed for, when we will at last be together.

So despite appearances, darling, don’t confuse me with those who whine without end, without reason and without aim. You would be wrong. Besides, all my past life so full of activity categorically contradicts it.

The cause of this sadness which has recently followed me without cease and without pity, this continuous nausea which tears at me, while forcing me to thing of painful things which lessen my manhood, must be found in the fact that I am not a soldier, fighting in this war which is mine. It is mine in so far as I am a rational socialist, as I am a Jew and above all in so far as I am quite simply a man. What makes me feel so rotten, is that I find myself here where I am.

I am a civilian, darling. Oh yes I wear a uniform, of course. But just the same all I am is a civilian in a soldier’s mask! I cannot free myself of this thought which torments me day and night. Painfully. Cruelly.  It transforms me more and more into an automaton. I wander among these men as a foreigner. I don’t know how to cope with this inertia, this aimlessness at a time when men are working, fighting and dying to the save the world from the worst pestilence that humanity has ever known.

Yvette, darling, you know my ideas about war in general. I quite simply detest war. I knew it and with the best will I can find no detail about it that is not fundamentally hideous and cruel. And despite that – despite that I went to war for the second time. Each time, voluntarily. Because I was fully conscious of the fact that peace in our conditions, in the conditions of living fascism is a bloody caricature. More hideous and more cruel.  We must gain a peace worthy of our aspirations and to that end, we

Must fight. But, alas, I am not fighting. And that’s the worst thing!

I have always been aware that I havent got what it takes to put up with the din and the tragic silly-buggery  of a barracks in peacetime.. I have always considered the barracks and all those parades an unfailing source of cretinism. Still, what can I do? What have I done during all this long year, dressed again in my uniform and steel helmet? Were I something other than this soldier, the little tin soldier that a child sets up on his table and does his best to arrange him in strange complex geometrical shapes?

We are told how the Nazi henchmen organise systematic flights, assassinate, ruin countries and exterminate entire people. It is true. They put pictures in front of your eyes where you see the bestial assassination of an unknown woman, the scientific massacre of sweet young girls, of charming boys torn apart by the fascist wild beasts. And it is true. They show you old synagogues filled with old Jewish men and women carried off by the flames of the New Order, that is to say, by sadism elevated to the ranks of law. And it is true, my little one, it is horribly true. The whole of old Europe, bloodied, passes before my eyes —– and I?

They tell us how men fight heroically for each room of each house in Sebastopol and Stalingrad. They tell us how men covered with a layer of sand and blood chase the cruel ones from Tobruk and Benghazi and Stalingrad. They tell us how throughout this miserable European night starving men, hunted and beaten, resist and fight heroically and with the little strength that remains to them hold high human dignity. And I?

I am signed up in a transport unit because the other branches, the more decisive branches were prohibited to me. Five years ago, however, I was among those who were the first to give a vigorous “no” to the criminal wishes of the fascists. And I was there, in martyred Spain, a soldier among those sharing the same  troubles the same risks and the same glory, darling, with all those who – for some (the hard of understanding or the too refined) were “vulgar adventurers”, for those men with a human heart – we were “the flower of humanity”. Oh, that flower didn’t smell very nice. It stank of blood and sweat. But how proud I was of that time!  I learnt there to hate the ugly and the cruel and to love the good, the beautiful and the just.

Signing up here in a transport unit was the only open door through which I thought at least to be able to help those who are fighting if fighting was prohibited me. But in stead of that…..

Instead of that, here I am playing the part of the little soldier in company with a band of young people who have a fixed idea that they are something very special indeed.

I consider that the Palestinian Jews are those who are contributing least to victory. On all sides, in the whole world and in Europe above all, there are Jews in the first ranks of the struggle. But not here. They have turned away from the true way, the only way, the way of the open struggle, breast against breast, against the brown plague, they have been turned from this struggle by their political leaders whose ideal is about to collapse like a house of cards under a dear little wind. They are about to fail and they lose simple good sense.  Instead of being in the same fight, instead of demanding strongly their right to be those who contribute directly to the reconquest of their dignity scoffed at by the fascist criminals, and to be out in front, instead of that they lose themselves in useless speculations on the future of Palestine, speculations which would have been stupid at any time, but now at the time of the decisive struggle against the worst enemy of the Jewish people, are quite simply shameful!

It is truly shameful to see thousands of Jewish soldiers, strolling along the streets of Tel Aviv, with a haughty and super-intelligent air. “We others, oh we are saving our skins for the holy war” that’s their slogan. But what have I to do with that stupid slogan?  I am ashamed. I feel sick. And I remember.

I remember 1937. Spain. I was there – oh no! not a God but quite simply a man. And I revisit continually the scenes that I saw during two years of cruel war against the same enemy that the whole world fights against now.  I see how from all over the world, men marched day and night, crossing enormous obstacles- savage mountains, deep rivers, closed frontiers- to come and stand at the side of the Spanish people in their struggle for justice. I see how the men who went to Spain to die, died on the way, assassinated by fascist sub-marines. They ran, clenched fists and songs of hope, towards a better tomorrow for humanity with this song on their lips. That, my dearest darling, I have seen with my own eyes. And that is so very powerful, that I lack the breath to make use of it on the platform of a meeting. No one would believe it. Imbeciles!

I have seen how men who in the same struggle, under the concentrated fire of all the instruments of death, when they were ordered to retreat several kilometres to escape being encircled, cried, sobbed and blushed for shame.

I have seen, on one bright night in Andalusia, 20 pairs of arms lift a weight of 7 tons that a tractor had not succeeded in moving. No, 40 arms could never have done that. Never! It was 30 hearts, the hearts of 20 proletarians who didn’t know how to read or write, certainly, but whose hearts had enough strength to lift a world, darling!

I have seen and I will tell it to you one night, and if you listen hard you will feel —–indecipherable because heavy writing on the other side of the page…  clearer, more gay a world which will encourage you to live, love and struggle. It is then that you will be proud to be a man and to be among us,

How insipid must be all that I am writing now.  Especially to you. working in that great sad room. But Yvette, darling, it is because I have lost in a moment of rage, the art of expressing myself. But if you could see me, in front of you, telling you what I feel I am sure that you would respond exactly as I do.

I am looking for that spirit among my new comrades.  It is there. But this spirit is dammed up  word? By those people devoid of all morality.

Press reports this week told of an “Extermination Commission” of the Jewish people directed ferociously in occupied Poland by Hitler’s commander. A million Jews massacred in a year! I believe that is a fact that speaks for itself. Any comment would diminish the ferocious reality. It revolts me to the very deepest part of my being. You, who are not Jewish, you will feel the same way. But they, these young Palestinian Jews, these “new Jews produced in the heart of the Zionist native land”, where are they? How can they sustain for a minute the idea of limiting their efforts to the secondary matters and let themselves be cradled by unrealisable dreams?  No, I do not belong to them. I would never know how to assimilate myself to these “nationalists” who betray so shamefully the 90% of their own people groaning in the European ghettos. How much more do I prefer that old breaded Jew, who in Europe struggles and dies, perhaps, but struggles, to these “new fellows” of Eretz Israel. Their leaders know it and they detest me.  But they don’t know how to hate me as much as I hate them. I will tell you the rest. It is better than writing.

I realise, darling, that this letter is rather incoherent. It reflects my state of mind. So take it as it is. But I don’t believe that I am “finished”. No. I still have a large enough amount of vitality to keep me going until more favourable circumstances arrive. And they will come for sure. I am finishing this letter now because I can’t go on until I reach some logical conclusions. Soon, very soon, I will be in action again. You can even expect a sudden visit from your Henry. “Your Henry” – it is delicious, darling. Tell me, Yvette, tell me always that I am yours, that you want me always that you love me, that it pains you to be so far from me and that you are not discouraged by my unbalanced letters. That, despite everything, you see some positive traits in me. Tell me and that will suffice to pardon everything and everyone and to fill me again with new courage.

Oh little one, little one. Even in this letter where I don’t speak to you of my love for you, you can if you wish discover traces of my heart which is yours. From the first line, to the last.  Because I love you so much, that it is impossible to pronounce a word, to express a thought which is not tied to the memory that I guard preciously in my heart: our love. I love you, my darling wife, I love you – can you feel how much? Darling.

Henri