Gold in the Furnace

by Savitri Devi

  “You are going to the Russian Zone?”

  “Yes. And I am afraid.”

  “Why don’t you stay here, if you believe it is not safe for you to go?”

  “I once lived there,” she replied. “I could not stand the atmosphere, and came away. But I could not take my two children with me. They are there still. And I have had no news of them for a long time. I feel restless. I want to see them again at any cost.”

  There was controlled, but intense emotion in her voice, and tears in her large blue eyes appeared as she spoke.

  “I shall think of you, and pray for you with all my might this evening at eight o’clock,” said I. We were on the morning of the 26th of October 1948. Then I asked her about the Russian Zone. “Tell me,” I said, “how are things there; worse than here?”

  “Much worse.”

  In the course of our conversation, I had already made sure that she was a Nazi at heart. I asked her, nearly in a whisper: “How about the ‘old’ spirit, there?” She smiled faintly.

  “Outwardly, it looks as though it is dead,” she said. “But it lives in the secrecy of our hearts, even though we do not speak, even to one another, for fear of hidden listeners. Men who are—or pretend to be—drunk, sometimes sing the old songs. In such cases, the Russians say nothing.”

  “And how about Communism? Got many German adherents?”

  “None whom I know,” she replied. “Those it once had have changed their minds, after seeing what it meant in practice.”

  “So, if, one day, things took an unexpected turn, you would all be ready to welcome the rebirth of the New Order?”

  “Most certainly,” she said. And her face took on an expression of ineffable longing. “But when? When?”

  “Perhaps sooner than we think.”

  “Oh, if only you could be right!” she whispered.

  Very quietly, I gave her one of my leaflets. She slipped it into a magazine and read it, pretending to be reading the magazine.

  “Where did you manage to get that printed?” she asked me, in a voice hardly perceptible, when she had finished.

  “Abroad,” said I.

  She squeezed my hand. “I wish I could take your whole stock with me,” she said. “But I dare not. I shall keep that one paper, however. We shall copy it over and over again, be sure. Thousands will read it.”

  “So,” said I, “you are alive, in the Russian Zone!”

  “How can it be otherwise? Did you imagine for a moment that we could forget? Never!”

  One of the sentences in my leaflet had caught her attention. She pointed it out to me. “You say so yourself, don’t you?” she whispered: “We are the gold in the furnace . . .”

  “You are indeed,” replied I.

  She looked at me intently and said: “We are—including yourself. Your turn too will come, to bear witness to the truth we stand for, in suffering, as all other genuine National Socialists.”

  I felt honoured far beyond my merits by that mark of confidence from one who had already lived three and a half years in the midst of persecution. I did not know that the woman’s words were prophetic. The following station was my destination. I got down, saluting my friend of an hour, for the last time, perhaps. And I thought of her on that evening, and many times since.

  Later on, on my way to Mainz, I met a student who had also lived in the Russian Zone, and after talking to him some time, I asked him the same question: “Is it really worse than in West Germany, as so many people say?”

  “Dear me,” exclaimed the youth; “I should think so!”

  “In the Western Zones it is bad enough,” I said.

  “Yes. But at least we can grumble.”

  “Only to a very small extent,” I replied. “Go and say, for instance, in any public place, that the National Socialist régime was wonderful and that you would like nothing better than to see it come back; and watch what happens—that is to say, if there is any policeman or police informer lurking about. Or just try to salute a friend at the corner of the street in the former manner . . .”

  “Yes,” said he, interrupting me, “of course, if you go that far. But one can express much of one’s feelings without going that far. And one does. We have, for example, been talking now, for over half an hour, and we understand each other, don’t we? You know me enough to trust me at least to some extent; your last words prove it. And I think I know what you are.”

  “But, I said nothing at all.”

  “You don’t need to ‘say’ it. Nobody ever ‘says’ it. But again, you are allowed to let everybody know it, if you choose to do so. While ‘there,’ it is different.”

  “But,” I replied, “what precisely irritates me the most, not merely here, in the French Zone, but in the whole of Western Germany (I never was in the Eastern area), is that ban on my free speech; that reticence, that constant repression forced upon me.”

  “You say that because you come from the free world outside unfortunate Germany, and because you have never yet crossed the border between the Western Zones and the Eastern Zone. There, behind the ‘iron curtain,’ you could not say a quarter of what you have said now during our short conversation, without being asked to get down at the next station and to follow the policeman waiting there to take you up.”

  “But if nobody overheard me?”

  “In the Russian Zone, somebody always does overhear. There are informers everywhere, and you can never tell who is who. Parents cannot trust their own children, nor a brother his brother, nor a man his wife. Here, National Socialism is persecuted. There, it is crushed.”

  “Inwardly also?”

  “Outwardly. Inwardly, no power on earth is in a position to crush it.”

  “And how do the people react to this?”

  “They are quiet—outwardly; much quieter than here, in the Western Zones. They suffer more.”

  I asked him the same question as I had, some months before, to the woman in the train from Hanover: “How about the Communists, there?” The answer was the same: “There are no Communists, in the Russian Zone—save a handful of fellows who suck up to the Russians for what they expect to get out of them, materially. There would be none anywhere, in Germany, if only they all could have a taste of what Communism means, for six months or so, as we have had, for four years. Communism,” he added after a pause, repeating that which I have said myself so many times, “sounds like salvation, and is, indeed, perhaps, the nearest approach to salvation, for people who are both primitive and exploited, like the peasants of Russia—or China—were for centuries. If such people are, in addition to that, of an inferior stock, it will appeal to them all the more. But no highly-civilised, organised, and conscious people of a superior race, especially no people who, like we, have once experienced National Socialism, can possibly take to such a system. Even the Russians who have had a glimpse of our régime during the short time their country was occupied by us, cannot help feeling all the difference between the Communist point of view and ours.”

  “And do you believe they would have been easily kept within the pale of a National Socialist world, if Germany had won this war?”

  “With time, and adequate propaganda, and education, why not?” said he.

  “And what about those social reforms which, they say, the Russians have introduced into the Russian Zone: the division of the land among the peasants and so forth, of which such a fuss is made abroad by Communist sympathisers?”

  “Oh, that!” said the student, with a wry smile, “another piece of deceit! The peasants of Eastern Germany fare worse, now, than they ever did before. Whether the land is supposed to be theirs or not, it makes no difference. They are slaves upon it. They are compelled to give up to the Government a certain amount of goods fixed beforehand, and the same whether the crops have been plentiful or scanty, with the result that, after a bad season, they have to buy food from peasants of more fortunate areas so that they can give the Government dues and still eat. Sometimes, they even have to buy from others the v
ery goods—potatoes, for instance—that they are expected to give as a tax. You should visit the Zone yourself, and make a thorough inquiry.”

  “I would like to. But how can I go? I have no permit.”

  “If you are willing, I shall try to arrange for you to go on the sly, with relatives of mine returning there. Only when you have seen the place will you be able to understand how justified you are in your wholehearted praise of the German National Socialists of all the Zones. Only then will you know how right you are when you say: ‘Four Zones, but . . . still one people, and in that people’s heart one Führer—the Führer.’”

  I saw the young man again. I was received in his home. I had made up my mind to try my chance and do as he had suggested. But my arrest upset my plans.

  * * *

  There is a place not far from Hanover, called Celle. In the station, as in most German stations of any importance, there is a “Catholic Mission” that provides food and shelter for the night to people who cannot afford to go to a hotel. That is one of the spots where one can watch the daily arrival of refugees from the Russian Zone. I spent a couple of nights there myself, as well as at the Catholic Mission of the Hanover station, and thus got in touch with many of them.

  I shall always remember a lad of fourteen, whom I met at Celle—an intelligent, but still childish face, with large pale blue eyes that looked up to me, full of tears, with heart-rending entreaty, as I put my hand upon his shoulder, in a gesture of sympathy.

  But I could do nothing for him. “He crossed the border two days ago,” the lady in charge of the Mission told me, “and now we are sending him back. What else can we do? He has no relatives, no friends who could take charge of him in the British or any other of the Western Zones; no work; no money.” (How gladly I would have taken charge of him, had I not been, myself, but a homeless wanderer, living and carrying on my activities, on the few scraps of jewellery I had left, with no prospects of finding any work however much I tried!)

  “What prompted him to come over?” I asked, when the unfortunate boy had eaten his last morsel and was taken to the train.

  “Fear,” said the lady in charge. “They were looking for him to send him to work in the mines, somewhere far away—‘in the Urals,’ he says. And he does not want to go. He wants to remain in Germany and continue to go to school.”

  “Who are his parents?”

  “People who both played an active part in spreading National Socialism in their town, in former days, apparently. His father was taken away to Siberia and never heard of again. His mother works and maintains him the best way she can. He has two young brothers.”

  “The same attempt to uproot National Socialism everywhere,” thought I; “the same savage persecution of the élite of the world, from one end of Germany to the other! And it does, definitely, look worse in the Russian Zone than in the Western area, I must admit.” Turning to the lady in charge I said: “And there was nothing, really, that you could have done for the kid? Absolutely nothing?”

  “Alas no.”

  “You could not have sent him to a refugee camp?”

  The lady in charge looked at me as one looks at a person who does not know what he or she is talking about.

  “Have you visited any of those refugee camps?” she asked me.

  “No,” said I. “I wished to. But I was told I needed a special permission. I was thinking of applying for one on the ground that I am writing a book about Germany.”

  “. . . as a consequence of which you would never be granted a permit,” she replied, “. . . that is to say, not unless the Occupation authorities felt sure that you would shut your eyes to all that they wish to keep concealed concerning the conditions of life in their relief camps. But you are not a woman to shut your eyes to things, or to hide the truth when you know it. I can understand that, from your conversation during these two or three days. I can even understand more about you, I believe. A very, very definite reason for ‘them’ to give you no admittance to their ‘charitable’ institutions in this unfortunate land.”

  “What reason?”

  She hesitated. I knew her first impulse would have been to say: “You are a National Socialist.” But she did not say that, although she was practically sure it was true. She said: “You are a real friend of Germany”—which meant the same. “Our friend, and a writer; then surely no permit for you, my dear lady!” she added jokingly. “But if you could see some of those camps you would not think of sending a young boy there.”

  “Still, perhaps better than slave labour in the mines,” I ventured to say.

  “I am not so sure about that,” she replied enigmatically. “Moreover, there is no place in the refugee camps. Do you know how many people cross the border every week on an average?”

  “Five thousand, I was told in Hanover, by an Englishman in a responsible position in the Labour Department, at ‘Sterling House.’”

  “That is the official figure,” she said. “In fact, there are many more than that. And their position—and ours—is becoming more and more acute.”

  Two women stepped in at that moment—two more from the Russian Zone—and asked for something to eat. While they sat and ate, I talked to them.

  They were not refugees. They were people who lived with their families in the Russian Zone, and who came regularly to see relatives and to buy food across the frontier. I asked them, as I did every other person from the forbidden area, how they fared there.

  “Life is hard,” they told me, “not so much for such people whose sympathies were, from the beginning, actively and obviously with the Red Front, as for us, who were connected with the NSDAP.”

  “Connected only,” the other woman put in at once. “For had we distinguished ourselves by any special activity, or held any special position in the Party, we would not even enjoy that small amount of tranquillity. My husband was an SS man. He fell a prisoner to the Americans during the last year of the war and only came home in ’47. Well, he is not allowed to take up his former job in civil life as an electrician. He must work on the roads—break stones and dig—for the sole reason that he was a militant Nazi.”

  “The Democrats do such things here, too,” I said. “Not that I want to defend the Reds. I never was a Communist, goodness me! But I can tell you many instances of similar oppression on this side of the Elbe.”

  “I believe you. Yet I doubt whether they could match those of the Russian Zone,” she replied unconvinced. “You have no idea what we suffer over there—all Germans, but especially we National Socialists.”

  During the time I remained in Celle we got to know one another better. One day, as we were alone, I took out of my pocket a padded jewel box, opened it, and placed it before my new friends. A pair of golden swastikas—the earrings I used to wear in Calcutta and in London—gleamed before their eyes on a background of dark blue velvet. The two women repressed a cry of joyous surprise. “How beautiful!” they exclaimed, almost together. “But where on earth did you get those?”

  “In India. One can buy any number of them in the jewellery shops, there. The swastika is a widespread religious symbol held in veneration by all Hindus—who dimly remember the Nordic origin of the civilisation they glory in to this day. It is the sacred Sign of the Sun.”

  “We too call it ‘Sonnenrad’—the ‘Wheel of the Sun.’ But you don’t wear those here, in Germany?”

  “I do . . . under a shawl thrown over my head, which I take off indoors, when I know that I can trust the people I am visiting.”

  “Do you know what would happen if you were caught with those in the Russian Zone?”

  “What?”

  “You would be sent off to Siberia at once.”

  I paused; and then, producing two of my leaflets, I said: “And what would they do to me if they caught me distributing these?”

  There was another cry of surprise and then, deep silence, while each of the two women read the words of defiance.

  “Never cross the border,” said finally one of m
y new friends; “‘they’ would kill you. How many of these did you distribute in the Western Zones?”

  “Ten thousand, up till now.”

  “Without getting into trouble! Marvellous! And how long have you been doing that?”

  “Over eight months.”

  “You could not have done it eight days in the Russian Zone. ‘They’ have spies everywhere. ‘They’ are devils. Worse than the Western Democrats, I tell you. But you can give us some of your papers. We know whom to give them to.”

  “But how will you cross the border with them?”

  “No fear as far as we are concerned,” said the other woman. “We come and go every fortnight. The guards on the frontier know us.”

  “And I can trust you to distribute those leaflets at your own risk?”

  “Every German in the Russian Zone misses National Socialist rule, not just we, who supported it from the beginning. You can rely upon us.”

  I gave them each a couple of hundreds of my leaflets, as I had given several other sympathetic people returning to the forbidden area.

  When they had left, I showed my Indian earrings to the lady in charge of the Mission, a little cautiously. “I hope you don’t object to my having them,” I said: “You see . . . they are Indian . . .”

  Her face brightened as she saw the immemorial Sign. She smiled. But, along with joy, there was an ineffable nostalgia in her smile. She gazed at the symbol of National Socialism. “I, object?” she said at last. “You don’t know me. I too love that Sign . . .”

  “Do you, really?” I replied, overjoyed. “I had thought . . .”

  I had thought—and still think—that no consistent person can be a Catholic and “love that Sign.” And the woman would not have been in charge of this station mission had she not been, at least outwardly, a Catholic. So I wondered . . . She was probably no sincere Catholic after all. Or she lacked consistency—as so many people do. But she did not leave me time to wonder.

  “Shhush!” said she, in a whisper, putting her fingers to her mouth. “I am not supposed to talk frankly to you. And this is not the place. But when you come back to Celle, come to my house. If I cannot myself put you up, I know friends who will gladly do so. And then we shall talk. I am beginning to know you—and to like you.”