Journal 1935–1944

by Mihail Sebastian

  Saturday, 1 August

  July passed terribly slowly—hour by hour, minute by minute. I draw time after me, I drag myself along behind it. I live with my eyes on clock and calendar: another day, and another, and another. It is exhausting. “For now hath time made me his numbering clock,” says Richard II in prison. Our prison is more oppressive. I wish I could forget a little, be a little indifferent. I’d like to have a week of clear and simple living, without any obsessions.

  The first of August last year! What a terrible day it was! In comparison, we are now—or ought to be—grateful.

  Wednesday, 5 August

  Summer. Lazy, inert, long, heavy days. I lead a grub’s life. My only way of being awake is insomnia. But when I am lucky enough to sleep, I fall into a kind of general lethargy. I no longer ask myself anything. I couldn’t stand it. Will I ever wake up? Will I ever come back to life? Will I ever again be a living person?

  Saturday, 8 August

  Again there is great concern about what is in store for us in Romania. Are new blows being prepared against the Jews? Today’s papers—as if responding to a signal—are full of official statements concerning Jews (work, requisitioning, criminal offenses, threats, etc.). According to the Interior Ministry, “the authorities have established that most violations of the law . . . and most acts of sabotage . . . are committed by Jews.” On the other hand, Bukarester Tageblatt has a long article showing that between this autumn and the autumn of 1943 Romania plans to become “judenfrei,” through our deportation to the Bug. There is an oppressive climate, charged with forebodings, fears, and terrors that you don’t even dare think through to the end.

  And Poldy? What is happening with him? Suddenly there is talk of mass deportations of Jews from France to Poland. The nightmare is ever darker, ever more demented. Will we ever wake up from it?

  Again I have not slept the last few nights. Disgusting insomnia, with dogs howling and barking in the yard next door, with flies buzzing around the room, with bedbugs crawling all over the bed, the walls, and me. A great revulsion. But I must rise above it if I want to go on living.

  Sunday, 9 August

  Big roundups in town. This morning, apparently, the whole city was studded with checkpoints and patrols. I don’t think Jews were the only ones targeted.

  Today I looked at the map for the first time in two or three weeks in order to locate all the places mentioned in the German communiqué: Armavir, Krasnodar, the River Laba, the Sal and Don regions, Kalach. There has been an important advance from the south, but the situation still seems confused and undecided, at least in that sector. As to the rest of the front, there is no change. The German communiqué indicates a powerful Soviet offensive at Rzhev—but nothing major can reasonably be expected.

  I have reread A High Wind in Jamaica, which I first read ten or twelve years ago in French. Some difficulties with the vocabulary (because of the nautical terms), but what a beautiful, unusual book! The same strange mixture of innocence and cruelty that stunned me, I think, the first time.

  Slowly, all too slowly, I have begun to write the first act of Insula. I’m on the third scene. I can’t even say I have got to the real subject of the play. All I have done so far is a kind of preliminary setting of the scene. In fact I fear that the whole scenario for Act One is the outline of a sketch.

  Sunday, 16 August

  No big changes at the front. The German advance in the Caucasus is continuing, but now it has reached the mountains and slowed down. Piatigorsk, which fell a few days ago, is almost in the center of the peninsula. This looks impressive on the map, but the Germans probably won’t try to cross the mountains—not yet at least. For the moment they are moving across the peninsula to the Caspian, with some two or three hundred kilometers still to go. The offensive at the bend in the Don and toward Stalingrad is being maintained. The Russians are resisting, but the attack is expected to become more intense here. In the center and toward the north, the Germans are on the defensive. In general, nothing decisive. The situation is roughly the same as it was.

  What people say about the war is not interesting. Predictions, wishful thinking, fears—all are equally arbitrary. On Friday evening I dined with Vişoianu and the lawyer Gad, and on Monday I had lunch with Devechi. Although each had a different orientation (Devechi, malgré tout,7 can’t help remaining Germanophile, even if he denies it), each repeated the same formulas, the same arguments, the same pieces of information. It is uninteresting—one might even say mindless. And it is so tiring. But you never have enough of discussing the same things over and over again. The war is following us like our own shadow.

  I haven't written another line of the play all week. What did grip me, quite out of the blue, was a taste for my old plan for a novel. Suddenly things have become real, with living people and an attractive story. There are a number of series of events that I would like to bring together in the same framework, but until now I have not clearly seen how to do this. All at once everything seems to be taking shape and expanding. It will not be one epic episode but a fresco, or better a "saga," of a whole era from 1926 to the present day, which takes in not only my new heroes (whom I can already see very well) but also many characters who were not fully drawn in De două mii de ani and will now acquire reality. This time I shall probably work differently from my usual way. My books have all been written without drawing from a file, without a guiding plan, often even without a vague preliminary notion of the paths to be taken and the goal to be reached. But if I really am going to write a largescale work, I shall have to organize my material. A kind of pleasure at inventing things that I felt jostling inside me forced me to pick up my pen, not to “formulate” anything but to jot things down in haste. So at present I have filled nearly six sheets of paper with a rough summary of the material for the first five chapters. Together with what still remains to outline, this will mean a novel of three hundred pages. But in no case will I leave things at that, because the characters in this first episode interest me more for what they will become later (ten or fifteen years later) than for what they already are. This novel too, however, like all my other projects (three plays, a translation of the Sonnets, a book about Shakespeare), depends on so many things! First of all, there is the question of my health and physical resilience. Am I not too run-down to carry the load of all my work projects? Maybe not. Maybe some things are still capable of repair—though not, alas! the essential ones.

  Tuesday, 18 August

  The German advance in the Caucasus is becoming slower and slower. Yesterday evening’s communique speaks of stubborn resistance, difficult terrain, and tropical heat. The truth is that the acute phase of the struggle for the peninsula has passed, thereby diminishing the enthusiasm or the depression of observers on either side. The psychological balance is again shifting toward Britain. The game is still the same. But I don’t think it will be long before the Germans start another major offensive in one of the sectors (maybe Stalingrad or even Moscow)—and then the corresponding depressions and enthusiasms will again be de rigueur. Perhaps only later, in the autumn, will it be possible to make all the important (if not final) calculations.

  “The Jews hand in their bicycles!”—the main text on this afternoon’s newspaper boards. I burst out laughing without meaning to. The joke about the Jews and the cyclists automatically came to mind.

  Starting from tomorrow, Jews will pay twenty lei for a loaf of bread instead of the fifteen lei for Christians.

  Wednesday, 19 August

  A British landing in Dieppe! The first moment of emotion (full of all manner of fabulous hopes, dormant inside us beneath all the disappointments)—but then, very soon, a return to reality. It is not an invasion, not even an offensive, only a local incursion—more energetic than the one at Saint-Nazaire, but with no greater significance. It is, as they say, a “combined raid,” involving tanks, aircraft, and artillery. Some of the landing forces have by now reembarked; the rest are continuing to fight.

  A loaf of
bread costs not twenty but thirty lei for Jews. For us that means one thousand lei more a month—quite a lot in our poor household calculations. But for the really impoverished Jews, it is a calamity. Nevertheless, so long as we are still at home, everything is bearable.

  I am continuing with Shakespeare, though not at the same rhythm. I have read Richard III and Romeo and Juliet.

  Thursday, 20 August

  The German report on the Dieppe operation indicates that everything was over by four o’clock yesterday afternoon, that the landing forces amounted to a division and were repelled with heavy losses on the British side. All the Axis press considers this proof that a landing to open a “second front” is impossible. I don’t know the opposite point of view or the account given by London, but in any case I don’t understand very well the purpose of the operation. Whatever the explanation, one is left with some suspicion that it was not really serious.

  Sunday, 23 August

  Nothing new at the fronts.

  The week ending today brought three anti-Semitic measures: expensive bread, confiscated bicycles, and—the day before yesterday—a ban on having servants after the first of October. It is disturbing that a kind of sequence is being established, in which new oppressive measures become automatic. You wonder what will come next.

  I shall force myself to leave for Strehaia tomorrow evening. I think it has finally become possible, after endless interventions and obstacles.

  Tuesday, 25 August

  I am leaving for Corcova. A grotesque farce should be written about the adventures I had before I finally obtained the necessary papers. Once upon a time, that much effort would have sufficed to organize a journey around the world.

  I met Paul Sterian8 in the street—a Paul Sterian grown fat, almost porcine. He was so confused and embarrassed at meeting me, so eager to rush off and escape, that I did not want to rush off now myself without noting the incident.

  Sunday, 6 September

  I returned this morning from Corcova, rested and recovered, calm, suntanned, with that holiday look of which I used to be so proud. Ten days of the free life, in the sunshine and open air, can still make a new man of me. I am not yet so worn out as to be unable to respond to such a call from life. I thought I was on my last legs. But not so. I am still alive. I still have healthy reflexes. Life can be brought back out of all my decay, apathy, and collapse.

  But in Bucharest I find the same woes and troubles—with some new ones added. I am well aware that I won’t be able to stay in my present “form.” Tâchons de vivre pourtant.9

  Monday, 7 September

  I must try to stop myself from being overwhelmed by troubles old and new. I must pull myself together. If I could draw up and stick to a regular program of work (reading and writing), perhaps I would avoid letting myself go again. It makes no sense, and is of no use to anyone, simply to relapse into our common exasperation. I am in hell—but in this hell I must discover an area of solitude, to the extent that this is possible. It tears me apart just to pass by Sfîntu Ion Nou, where Jews picked up from their homes are kept while awaiting deportation. It breaks my heart to see them, and I feel ashamed to turn my head. There are atrocities that cannot be observed with one’s eyes open. They are too unbearable, like great physical suffering. Words are no longer any help at all.

  Poldy is somewhere in the countryside, in the Garonne. This gives me a certain feeling of relief. We know almost nothing about how he is, but he does seem to be safer than before.

  I haven’t found half an hour to note anything down about Corcova.

  Tuesday, 8 September

  It would have been amusing to keep a journal in Corcova, but I can no longer reconstruct it now from memory. I don’t regret this. It was a holiday—and it’s just as well that I didn’t interrupt it even for a daily journal entry. Here I am in a round of events that do not allow me to go back, even in my thoughts, to Corcova.

  This morning the people at Sfîntu Ion Nou were loaded into trucks and driven off somewhere. I am told that there were scenes of terror and despair. Some were left there for the moment, until a final decision is made about them. One of these is Sandu Eliad.

  Zissu is interned at Tirgu Jiu.1 This morning I went to visit his wife. The sympathy I have for him in principle (as the Central Office victim) was not enough to cover entirely the sense of a bad comedy which that woman always arouses in me.

  Radu Cioculescu, back from Russia, thinks the war will last another two years because the Germans are in excellent morale, are well prepared for the winter, and have all their fighting spirit intact.

  The fighting at Stalingrad is continuing. “The City’s Fate Is Sealed,” “Stalingrad Living Its Last Moments”—the same headlines in the papers for nearly a fortnight. Yesterday evening, however, the German communiqué mentioned Russian counterattacks (beaten off, naturally) to the northwest.

  Thursday, 10 September

  The train with the deported Jews left yesterday afternoon after halting a few hours at Chitila. A truck loaded with food and clothing set off too late, first for Chitila, then for Ploiesti—after which it turned around and came back. A dazed stupor. There is no room for feelings, gestures, or words.

  By chance I was with Aristide at the Bellu cemetery. He was taking flowers for Mafalda (it is twenty-two months today since the earthquake). But I thought of the millions of dead who have no name or grave. I thought especially of those long convoys of Jews, neither alive nor dead, who have been hurled into a satanic agony. A big earthquake would come as a godsend. Mafalda had the good fortune to die in a few seconds. It was a moment of terror—not days, weeks, months, and years.

  Jews will have no bread every fifth day. Their sugar ration has been cut from two hundred grams to one hundred, while for Christians it remains at six hundred grams.

  Friday, 11 September

  I told Camil about the train carrying the deportees. For a moment, he too seemed to shudder. But no . . .

  “It’s nothing,” he said. “I think that the Russians committed the same atrocities when they built the Volga Canal—and my conscience is at rest.”

  Saturday, 12 September

  It seems that Stalingrad is not expected to fall to a direct assault. Fighting is going on for each kilometer. One can see that the offensive has slowed, and that there is an awkward note in the propaganda. But I think to myself that Stalingrad will not finally decide anything, any more than did the other cities (Kiev, Smolensk, Kharkov, Sebastopol) on which all eyes were turned for a while. While the situation in Stalingrad remains grave, we have the feeling that it is a crux of the war. But when it is resolved—either through the city’s escape (which is hard to believe) or through its fall (much more likely)—we will realize that it was all just another episode in an ongoing war.

  Monday, 14 September

  I have reread Ultima oră with unexpected pleasure. In the end, it is an excellent comedy. I know its defects and what needs to be redone, but I realize that in three days I can make of it more than something merely presentable. It does not even have to be “redone”; only some technical adjustments are necessary. I’d like it to be put on stage (because my money problems again threaten to become serious), but the difficulties are considerable, and anyway I don’t feel I have the strength to see it all through.

  Yesterday evening’s German communiqué states that assault troops have entered Stalingrad from the south.

  Last night, two air-raid alerts. Bombs fell and there was a lot of antiaircraft fire. But I’ve no idea exactly what happened.

  Wednesday, 16 September

  The German communiqués of yesterday evening and today speak of “ground gained” in Stalingrad, but without giving any details. On the other hand, the press dispatches, the supplements to the communiqués, and the newspaper commentaries indicate that the city is on the point of falling; the central station has been captured, the city center is in the attackers’ hands, and fighting continues in the streets and houses. It would all seem to be a ques
tion of hours.

  After two days in which the most fantastic rumors have spread in the street, on streetcars, and so on about Sunday’s bombing (fifty dead, eighty dead . . . ), an official communiqué states that the total number of victims was fourteen. All the bombs fell in the suburbs or even farther out.

  Last night, in various districts, Jewish families were picked up and taken away. I don’t know how many or why. But from now on, none of us can be sure when we go to bed at home that we will still be there the next morning.

  Thursday, 17 September

  The number of families taken away last night was 105 or 107 (I don’t remember exactly): parents, children, brothers, sisters. The reason was irregularities in the performance of compulsory labor.

  Solacolu tells me that Stalingrad fell yesterday but that Berlin has delayed announcing this for reasons of propaganda. They are preparing a high-flown communiqué that will have the maximum surprise effect.

  Tuesday, 22 September

  The families picked up on Thursday night were deported this morning. Until the last moment it was thought that the measures would not be carried out; we still can’t believe in such a calamity. But last night another batch of Jews (I don’t know who or how many) were picked up from their homes. Gradually, methodically, the deportation plan is being put into operation.