The Sun and Her Stars

by Donna Rifkind

  The first Aktion in Sambor began on August 4, 1942. In the early morning hours the Gestapo hounded thousands of screaming Jews to the sports square near the railway station. From there they were pushed into cattle cars headed for the gas chambers in the death camp of Bełżyce near Lublin, about four hours away. The operation, which lasted until August 6, was directed by the Gestapo with the help of local Ukrainians, whom the Germans had incited to a frenzy of hatred against their Jewish neighbors.

  The second Aktion, at the end of October 1942, repeated the deeds of the first, with another several thousand Jews forcibly removed to Bełżyce. Here too, local Poles and Ukrainians contributed to the efforts, patrolling the areas around the railway station and turning over to German authorities any Jews who tried to run away. For their trouble, the Germans promised to give anyone who caught a Jew or provided information for one’s whereabouts a liter of vodka and five kilograms of sugar.

  The last Aktion in Sambor took place in April, May, and June of 1943. Hundreds of German soldiers from battalions returning from the Russian front remained in the town to help the Gestapo surround and enter the Jewish ghetto. They broke into houses and dragged out Jews who were hiding in cellars, cupboards, and chimneys, and herded them into prison cells. On April 14, they brought somewhere around twelve hundred Jews from the prison to the cemetery, first taking away their clothes. Then they led the Jews on foot, under heavy guard, toward open graves which had been dug by Ukrainians and Poles.

  The shooting began around one in the afternoon and continued until sunset. The Ukrainians loaded the clothing they had taken from the Jews onto German trucks and hauled it away.

  In early June, the final liquidation of the Jews of Sambor took place. The Gestapo and Ukrainian police destroyed and burned the houses of the ghetto, where many men, women, and children had already died from disease and starvation. They dragged remaining Jews from every conceivable hiding place and shoved them into the prison, along with a number of Jews who had been retained as slave laborers. From there the Jews were loaded onto trucks, on which they were ordered to kneel with their hands over their heads, the Ukrainian police ready to strike with their rifle butts anyone who dared to move. The trucks arrived at a wood near the town of Radlowicz, five kilometers away, where all the Jews were shot and killed.

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  SINCE AT LEAST THE NINETEENTH CENTURY and probably long before that, Jews had coexisted in Sambor among their Ukrainian, Ruthenian, and Polish neighbors. In 1889, out of a total population of 13,586, there had been 4,427 Jews. In a 1931 census, Jews had comprised nearly 29 percent of the population of Sambor. In the early years of the twentieth century, when Salka’s father had served as Sambor’s mayor, he had dedicated his efforts toward integrating the Jews into the general culture. In 1908, he went so far as to oppose the establishment of a Jewish orphanage, issuing a proclamation that Jews should not separate themselves from the general population, insisting that the town’s welfare institutions ought to be nondenominational. He won the debate, and the Jewish orphans of the town continued to be accepted into the city orphanage.

  Thirty-five years after its Jewish mayor succeeded in that ecumenical mission, every Jewish citizen of Sambor was murdered. With immense satisfaction the Germans declared the town of Sambor judenrein, cleansed of Jews.

  …as we are living in a rented place I could not do it, and since the last German Aktion I have not heard from him again.

  BEFORE THE WAR, Salka’s brother Dusko had been a star player for Korona, the football club in Sambor, one among at least five Jewish competitors on the Polish team. He then played for a variety of clubs in Lwów and Warsaw before returning to Korona in Sambor before the occupation. He had played many times in the sports square near the railway station where Sambor’s Jews were hounded to their deaths. Unlike his older siblings, Dusko had struggled to find his place in the world, had just begun to establish himself as a spouse and a father, when the Gestapo sealed his fate. After reading Viktoria’s letter, Salka could no longer pretend that Dusko was not among Sambor’s murdered. She was never granted the dignity of knowing whether he had been shot during the last Aktion or sent to the crematoria at Bełżyce, though she hoped that he had been spared the gas chamber. For the moment she was consumed with rage at the offhandedness with which Viktoria had described her betrayal of Dusko. She began to compose a letter in response. “I wrote her,” Salka said in her memoir, “that she had forfeited the right to appeal to my sisterly feelings. She had cruelly denied shelter to a hunted Jew, whose father and mother had given her love and devoted care since she was born, and that she had allied herself with murderers and torturers.”

  But then Salka stopped. She began to wonder if she had the right to rebuke Viktoria, who would have been shot without hesitation by the Gestapo if she had been found hiding a Jew. Untold numbers of people far more powerful than Viktoria were behaving with far more indifference. Salka had dedicated herself to saving Jewish lives with every resource she could gather. But Viktoria was in a vastly different position. She was uneducated, poor, and cowed by authority. Salka decided she would be wrong to judge her according to her own principles of Zivilcourage, a universe away.

  It was not so simple. It never was. In truth you could never be sure how you would behave, what choices you would make, when forced to gauge the chances of your own survival. Salka could not directly accuse Viktoria of cowardice in failing to save Dusko. She never sent her letter and she never told her mother what Viktoria reported. She arranged to send a CARE package to Sambor, as Viktoria had asked.

  Salka herself was haunted by guilt. She had failed to prevent the slaughter of her brother. How had she allowed that to happen? And why was she herself spared, by a lucky stroke of early timing? Here again she was hardly alone in her suffering. Everyone was hearing unimaginable news. There was not even a vocabulary at that time with which to speak about it, and often they did not. In 1938, Fred Zinnemann’s parents, Oskar and Anna, had bought their passage for a ship leaving from Spain and were waiting for visas when they were arrested and deported. Oskar Zinnemann was shot in the Warsaw ghetto, and Anna Zinnemann was killed in Auschwitz. Franz Waxman’s brother died in a Nazi camp. Alfred Döblin learned that his brother had been murdered in Auschwitz along with his family, while Döblin’s son Wolfgang, who had fought for the French, had killed himself so as not to be captured by the Germans. Three-quarters of Billy Wilder’s family were murdered in Auschwitz, including his mother.

  The genocide claimed one individual life after another, each with its vast network of connections. “How can one possibly stand what has been stood by millions and millions of suffering people?” Ernst Toch wrote to a friend in June 1946. Deeply depressed by the reports from Europe, he left California to seek psychiatric treatment in Illinois.

  On the evening in 1942 after Salka had first learned from the Molotov Report of the massacres of the Jews that were taking place in Poland and Russia, she had sat with Brecht and Ruth Berlau by the fireplace on Mabery Road, and Salka had confessed her guilt to them. The next morning she found that Brecht had slipped a poem under her door, which he dedicated to her. Called “I, the Survivor,” it’s a four-line cry of self-excoriation for remaining alive through sheer luck, when so many of his loved ones were dead.

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  SALKA PRETENDED to be her usual brisk and vigorous self, but grief wore her down. A lesser worry was the fact of her dwindling finances. She had to have the house painted and repaired, which cost her dearly, and she began to imagine renting it out and moving to someplace where she could live debt-free. At fifty-six, for the first time, she was feeling her age. Only to Berthold would she confess this: “I don’t want to cook or wash for strangers again because I don’t have the strength any more,” she wrote to him. “I would like to be alone and work for myself in peace…Oh, how I would like to have two hours without worrying about anybody.”
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  Auguste’s health had deteriorated in the last year. Salka suspected that her mother guessed the truth about Dusko without ever mentioning it. If so, the torment was taking its toll, as Auguste’s trembling from Parkinson’s disease had increased and she could no longer write to Rose in Buenos Aires or Edward in New York. She was also quite deaf but refused to use her hearing aid, so that Salka had to shout to make sure she understood. Despite these frustrations Salka tended to Auguste zealously. She found friends to stay with her mother whenever she had to leave the house.

  As much as Salka wished for solitude, the demands on her attention were as great as ever, and the house was just as crowded. Peter had been demobilized and was back at Mabery Road with Jigee and Vicky. Irwin Shaw had also returned from the war. He and his wife were inveterate New Yorkers, but during Irwin’s screenwriting gigs they spent part of the year in California and they visited often at Salka’s house, accompanied by a good friend of Irwin’s, the Hungarian photographer Robert Capa. Altogether the next generation brought welcome high spirits into the Sunday group of Huxleys, Manns, Brechts, Hanns Eisler and his wife Lou, and Charlie Chaplin and his wife Oona. They introduced a young Hollywood crowd, including Ava Gardner, then an MGM starlet, her bandleader husband Artie Shaw (no relation to Irwin), and the director George Stevens. Peter later wrote that he and Jigee and Irwin and Marian “were united in a common front against the European regular guests, who, no matter what innovative American play, or even film, was mentioned, would dismiss it with the words ‘Oh, that was done in Berlin in the twenties,’ or ‘We’ve seen that done before.’ Jigee said: ‘I suppose if fascism ever comes to America, they’ll say, “Oh, we had that in Germany long ago,”’ a flippant remark that provoked only polite laughter at the tea table.”

  Salka’s long days were sweetened by the presence of little Vicky—“my great joy,” she wrote to Berthold. Vicky entertained herself by lying under the piano while someone or other was playing fortissimo, or by mixing potions of bath soaps in the upstairs bathroom sink. She went to kindergarten at the same elementary school that Salka’s boys had attended. Hans and Tommy gave her piggyback rides around the neighborhood, and her roller skates clack-clacked on the pavement up and down the incline of Mabery Road. Her collection of pets had the run of the house; on one unfortunate occasion, Auguste stepped on one of her baby turtles. Every night Salka brushed Vicky’s hair with one hundred strokes before bedtime, and counted out the numbers for her in different languages.

  Peter and Jigee were longing to become homesteaders. They found a parcel of nine acres in Zuma Canyon, eight miles north of Malibu, where the land was unspoiled and cheap. In 1946 they decided to buy the plot in partnership with a young film editor named Robert Parrish, with whom Peter had served in the OSS, and his wife Kathy. Together with other willing friends and a plumber and carpenter, the two couples built a small board-and-batten house. Jigee sat up on the roof hammering down shingles, with Vicky by her side holding handfuls of nails.

  Soon after the house was finished, Peter got an offer to write a screenplay for a picture Fred Zinnemann was directing called The Search, which would star a new actor named Montgomery Clift and film in Switzerland. It was to be Jigee’s first trip to Europe and she could barely contain her excitement. Without any complaints, Vicky ended up again in Salka’s care. In Switzerland Peter and Jigee learned to ski in the mountain villages near Zurich. Their passion for the sport eventually led them to spend as many ski seasons as possible in the little town of Klosters near Davos, not far from the locale where Thomas Mann had set his 1924 novel The Magic Mountain.

  Hans was still in Germany, immersed in postwar work with the Counter Intelligence Corps. Tommy had gone off to college at the University of Vermont, wanting to be near Berthold in New York and eager to spend his holidays with him. Berthold did not have the money to travel back to California, so he and Liesel Neumann spent their vacations at the country homes of friends, most often at Dorothy Thompson’s Twin Farms in South Pomfret, Vermont.

  In the meantime, in the spring of 1946, Christopher Isherwood moved into Salka’s garage apartment with his photographer boyfriend Bill Caskey. Isherwood loved the cheerful little upstairs rooms with the view of the garden and a glimpse of the sea. He was especially fond of sunbathing on the balcony, which offered plenty of privacy if one lay on its floor, as he loved having sex outside.

  “Salka was always glad to see you and she usually had visitors,” remembered Isherwood. She was “the most perfect landlady-hostess imaginable,” inviting him and Caskey to use her kitchen and borrow her books. He spent plenty of time at the Sunday parties. And on weekday mornings he often came to have coffee with Salka on his way down to the beach for a swim, “thus reviving,” Salka wrote, “the old Wychylowka breakfast tradition.” Garbo was spending more time in New York but was back in California that summer, and came around often in the daytime looking for Salka. If she found that Salka was out, the actress was content to pal around with Isherwood and Caskey. “Being unemployed,” Isherwood wrote about Garbo, “with the whole day on her hands, she was ruthless in her demand to be talked to and walked with…At first [we] both quite enjoyed her visits; she was lively and campy and easily entertained. Then she became a nuisance.” One day, Isherwood was bemused to find himself whispering to Caskey: “Imagine—if someone had told us, six months ago, that we’d be hiding under this bed, to avoid going for a walk with Garbo!”

  Salka and Garbo were still discussing story ideas. In 1946–1947 alone, three Garbo projects went fairly far in negotiations before the actress backed out: a biopic of the French writer George Sand for producer Walter Wanger and director George Cukor, with a follow-up picture based on Alphonse Daudet’s 1884 novel Sappho; and a romantic comedy about the love affair between the Parisian salonnière Madame Récamier and the writer Chateaubriand. A friend of Garbo’s suggested that Salka ought to cowrite the Récamier script with a French playwright named Sacha Guitry. Salka firmly declined, because Guitry had been a fascist sympathizer during the war. “As Mr. Guitry’s previous collaborators from 1940 make it impossible for me to collaborate with him, I refused,” Salka wrote to George Cukor. She went on to speculate that Garbo would keep making excuses and declining opportunities, telling Cukor in confidence: “Greta is impatient to work and on the other side she is afraid of it. I understand this very well after all these years of idleness. Work is a habit and she lost it.”

  In the meantime Salka accepted a screenwriting job at Warner Bros., offered by an influential old friend, the producer Henry Blanke. Grateful to be working again, she immediately hired a Viennese woman named Anna to run the house in her absence. Optimistically, she also hired a gardener.

  For a brief time at Warner Bros., Salka at last had some professional independence from Garbo. The picture for Henry Blanke, Deep Valley, was “a strong and simple story,” as Salka described it, a doomed romance between the daughter of a poor California farmer and a road-gang fugitive. Warners was rushing it into production for the actress Ida Lupino, whose contract stipulated that she be paid a fixed amount whether she was filming or not. After the actress had collected a twenty-thousand-dollar paycheck for doing nothing in the early months of 1946, the studio was anxious to get her working again. So it wedged Deep Valley into its already bustling schedule.

  Versions of the screenplay had been around since 1942, when Warners bought the rights from a San Francisco novelist named Dan Totheroh. The studio hired at least half a dozen writers to work on various drafts, including William Faulkner, who delivered an unfinished script in March 1943. (Faulkner’s version has since disappeared.) Two other screenwriters who wrote drafts of the screenplay, Robert Rossen and Albert Maltz, would become prominent players in the HUAC hearings that began in October 1947.

  Blanke was keen on Deep Valley because it resembled Warners’ 1941 hit, High Sierra, a Western noir about gangsters on the run in which Lupino had starred with Humphrey Bogart. This time th
e role of the anguished tough guy would go to firsttime leading man Dane Clark, previously a supporting player in Hollywood Canteen and Pride of the Marines.

  Henry Blanke paired Salka with a veteran screenwriter named Stephen Morehouse Avery (“very nice but deadly boring,” Salka wrote to Berthold). “This is practically a first draft,” Blanke wrote to Jack Warner. “I know that you are trying to rush this picture into production, and I have already gotten busy with Salka Viertel this morning on improving it all the way through.” Salka wrote to Berthold: “Blanke is nice and not hurrying me but I would like to do it quickly and well. It’s a very difficult story and there are many scripts.”

  From March to June 1946, Salka, Stephen Avery, and a writer named James Gray reworked the script. Again it’s impossible to determine the precise contributions of each writer, yet there is evidence that Salka took a lead writer’s initiative. Archives show that Salka was paid $21,992, Avery $14,167, and Gray $3,000, and are full of Salka’s research questions: What procedure would be followed in disciplining a prisoner working on a road gang in California? Has the labor union put a stop to convict labor building roads in California? Would reward notices for Folsom escapees be posted in a small-town post office?