Secret History of Vladimir Nabokov

by Andrea Pitzer

  Edmund Wilson remained skeptical about the war. He was not quite so conspiracy-minded as to think (as some did) that Pearl Harbor had been a set-up, but he recoiled from American propaganda depicting the Japanese as animals. Nabokov, who had watched Germany’s violence against its Jews escalate and had family trapped in German territory, was less eager to listen to reasons for keeping America out of the war. He registered for the draft and started a new novel filled with refractions of Soviet and Nazi totalitarianism.74

  Pearl Harbor changed neither Wilson’s nor Nabokov’s opinion of the war or their personal circumstances, but its effects would register elsewhere. Nabokov’s cousin Nicholas felt compelled to do something for the war effort outside his chosen field. He held on to his day job as music director at St. Johns College in Annapolis, but soon began doing work as a translator and analyst for the Department of Justice.75

  When the Japanese struck, Sonia Slonim was in Hollywood working for Max Ophiils, the celebrated director whose scripts she had helped translate in Paris. Ophiils, who was Jewish, had fled Germany in 1933 but managed to establish himself in France as a filmmaker—only to have been forced to flee again. His career was thwarted a third time after Pearl Harbor, when the film industry focused on patriotic films for the American war effort.76 When Ophüls’s career flagged, Slonim found herself out of work.

  Carl Junghans had shared Ophuls’s Hollywood dream and quickly tapped into his own network of German exiles on the West Coast. He had gotten his foot in the door and started helping with script ideas that fall. But two days after Pearl Harbor, he was picked up by the FBI and held in the Los Angeles County jail on suspicion of being a German spy.77

  Some inmates were released within weeks, some a year or two later, while others were forced to relocate to assigned camps for the duration of the war. One of Junghans’s bunkmates in internment would manage to convince a review board that he was Swiss, not German, thereby securing his freedom. Junghans was not so lucky.

  He had by then been named as “a thorough-going Nazi” by a Jewish refugee writing for a small newspaper in New York. The Anti-Defamation League had written a letter bringing his work with Goebbels to the attention of the U.S. Department of Justice. And it turned out that Junghans already had an FBI case file, which provided a good deal of material for review.78

  Under questioning, Junghans quickly tried to prove himself a valuable asset. He talked of a man with a wooden leg who was somehow responsible for Khstallnacht. He spoke of a special spy school in which Nazis trained agents who were blackmailed Jews, or Aryans secretly coached to appear Jewish, before sending them into Allied nations as spies.79 He talked about clandestine meteorological stations the Germans had established in the Arctic; he offered names of Communist spies. He warned that people who had arrived in America with Swiss passports were particularly likely to be hiding their true identity. He named Charlie Chaplin as a personal reference.

  Most of the testimony he gave was invented, conspiracy-minded gibberish, or taken out of recent newspaper reports. But some small statements buried in his testimony appeared to be true, and the FBI wanted his cooperation.

  Near the end of January 1942, faced with conflicting information, the hearing board recommended Junghans’s release. But someone else in the Justice Department was more skeptical. Instead of release, the Attorney General authorized releasing Junghans under parole and entrusting him to a sponsor who would supervise his liberty. He would have to stay in Los Angeles and check in on a regular basis for the foreseeable future.

  In 1942, after several weeks in detention that ended in conditional release from the San Pedro Detention Station, he found himself regarded a pariah in Hollywood and unable to find work with the major studios. Sonia Slonim’s prospects were almost as bleak; she returned to New York without him.

  Junghans represented just the kind of person Americans might have hoped the government would keep tabs on. But others who were interned and were more deserving of sympathy found little recourse or relief. Open hostility was shown to civilian prisoners. Wartime propaganda that turned American citizens against Japs and Huns would do collateral damage to the innocent.

  8

  Overseas, the success of German propaganda demonizing Jews in Germany and Austria encouraged the Nazis to export their efforts to conquered nations. But France, despite her anti-Semitism and an often obliging police force, would not prove quite as enthusiastic in adopting Nazi measures.

  Two weeks after the French police first carried out mass arrests of Jews in Paris, the Germans started in earnest to propagandize their defeated neighbor. The German Embassy helped to mount a French version of “The Eternal Jew” exhibition that had made such an impression in Germany. It would draw 200,000 paying visitors. With its careful explanation of racial degeneracy and poisonous depiction of history, the French exhibition also included lectures sponsored by Paris Soir and others linking Marxism to Jewry and discussing “the Communist, a Jewish product.”80

  And the Germans did more than talk. In direct and publicly announced retribution for an attack on German officers, ninety-five prisoners were executed in a Western Paris suburb, fifty-one of them Jewish. And in the hopes of fueling French anti-Semitism, Gestapo technicians helped anti-Bolshevik groups detonate bombs at seven Paris synagogues near Yom Kippur. They were surprised when their plan failed to trigger a KristaIInacht-style firestorm, as had happened in annexed Austria and occupied Czechoslovakia in 1938. “Although they do not like the Jews,” reported one dismayed German propagandist, “the French are displeased when they see (them) massacred and when their places of worship are blown up.”81

  It had become harder and harder for Jews to leave France, but many who had planned to wait out the war now longed to escape. Despite the odds, some of Nabokov’s loved ones managed to flee. The Marinel sisters got out through Lisbon—one of the last ports sympathetic to Jews seeking transit—arriving in New York in 1941. Véra’s cousin Anna Feigin obtained papers to travel with her brother, and also fled to the U.S. via Lisbon, arriving in Baltimore in mid-1942.82 The Hessens would run a more circuitous route, making their way from France through Spain, sailing into New Orleans just before Christmas with the help of Yakov Frumkin, who had been the moving force behind delivering the Nabokovs to America.83

  Others among Nabokov’s friends and family fell into the hands of the Nazis. Nabokov’s youngest brother Kirill was arrested and questioned, but was eventually released. After the fall of France, Sergei Nabokov and Hermann Thieme made their way east. They began to keep their distance from each other, despite the fact that prosecutions of homosexuals had dropped off precipitously since the beginning of the war.84

  Whatever distance or discretion they practiced proved to be inadequate—both were soon arrested. Hermann was released to join the German army in Africa. Sergei was charged with homosexual offenses, then jailed for several months before being freed. He began to denounce the Nazis, and somehow still managed to stand as the best man for his second cousin’s wedding late that November in Berlin. Before Christmas, he was arrested again. He was eventually assigned to Neuengamme, a concentration camp on the southeastern outskirts of Hamburg, where he arrived in the spring of 1944.85

  By the time the Hessens sailed west, hundreds of thousands of Jews faced the nightmare of deportation in the opposite direction as part of a formal shift in German policy. After nine years of assaults and the monstrous expansion of concentration camps into Poland, after the targeting of leftists, homosexuals, and Gypsies, the German government had found a way to take intolerable suffering and increase it. Jews as a race, they argued—in a policy now completely freed from the fetters of rhetorical pretense—should be exterminated.

  This new policy meant that six camps in Poland had been or soon would be optimized as death factories, with their facilities dedicated to the rapid extinction of millions who were transported over winter snow, over spring mud, over summer fields and fall desolation, to end their lives in unimaginable terror.
It meant that Goebbels, as German propaganda minister, would in the summer of 1942 defiantly announce the extermination strategy to the world, pretending that the step was taken in revenge for Allied bombing raids.86

  The reality of what this would mean, of course, was not fully comprehended in the West at the time—it can hardly be apprehended even in retrospect. After the German policy of Jewish extermination had become explicit, negotiations were held between the French government and Nazi officials in Paris to plan the arrest and deportation of all Jews in France between the ages of sixteen and sixty-five in a project named Spring Wind (Vent printanier). French President Pierre Laval balked at turning over Jewish French citizens, but in order to fill quotas, gave the Germans some refugees they had not asked for: the children of foreign Jews. In the days and weeks that followed, scenes of despair and mayhem shocked the world as the French authorities captured and interned more than ten thousand Jewish adults and children.

  Laval argued to a group of French diplomats (and perhaps to even himself), that the procedures were aimed at sending back stateless Jews who represented “a dangerous element” in French society. It was a “measure taken out of concern for national health and hygiene.” The moral issues involved, however, were clearer to others. Fighting French forces trumpeted stories of three hundred French policemen who were fired for refusing to comply with arrests, and of administrators who were dismissed for being sympathetic to the Jews.87

  Bused to the Velodrome d’hiver, a racing stadium, families were forced to wait in terrible conditions. The youths, some of whom were not even old enough to identify themselves, wore metal name tags stitched onto their clothing. Their parents were taken to Drancy, while the children remained at the stadium. After several days without food, the children were transported to other camps and then to Drancy, too.88

  More than sixty thousand Jews had been forcibly relocated eastward from France via Drancy by the middle of 1944.89 Three locomotives a week loaded with a thousand deportees rolled away from the camp—there were rumors the trains were headed to an extermination center, but there was no way to be sure.

  In preparation for their departure, the prisoners’ heads were shaved, and they, along with their possessions, were thoroughly searched. They were given a last meal and a final postcard to write to their loved ones. They were not told where they were going. The children, too, would eventually meet the same fate, packed onto trains rolling over the countryside to an unknown destination, sometimes weeks after their parents had traveled the same rail line to the same endpoint.90

  These stateless Jews were not just German or Polish refugees; they included Russian Jews, adults and children, who would no longer need the Nansen passports that had saved them from nothing. Weeks before George and Joseph Hessen made their circuitous trip south through Spain, Ilya Fondaminsky was taken from Drancy and put on a train. Less than two weeks later, Sonia Slonim’s ex-husband Max Berlstein would also be sent east, part of Transport Number 37 from Drancy that September.91 Both men found themselves where so many of the Jews deported from Paris had ended up. Carried in on the human tidal wave arriving in Auschwitz that fall, they were likely herded into the gas chambers of Birkenau shortly after their arrival, living out the fate that Véra and Dmitri Nabokov had eluded.

  9

  If the French collaborators, still thinking in terms of forced labor camps, did not grasp or did not want to grasp what they were abetting, though it was happening before their eyes, they were not alone. It was a global failure of imagination, not least in the United States. After it was understood that mass exterminations were underway, a historic eyewitness report was made to Roosevelt by Catholic Polish resistant Jan Karski in September 1943. In order to be able to testify persuasively, Karski had braved entry into the Warsaw ghetto and sneaked into the extermination camp at Belzec, Poland—and then survived torture after a brief time in captivity. On behalf of the Polish government in exile, Karski went to England and the U.S. to tell the tale of what he had seen, only to find his story disbelieved by Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter. Karski was shocked by Frankfurter’s response, and decades later described the clarification Frankfurter had made to the Polish ambassador to the United States, who was in the room at the time: “I did not say that he was lying, I said that I could not believe him. There is a difference.”92

  Karski’s testimony, which he had risked his life to get, made little impact at the highest levels of government. In his absence, Karski was denounced on Nazi radio and, as a result, was dissuaded from returning to the Polish underground. He stayed in America.

  Other Catholics joined the fight in occupied Europe. Zinaida Shakhovskoy, who had helped Nabokov with readings in Belgium, aided the French resistance. Véra’s sister Lena had begun working with the Jesuits in Berlin, despite having an infant son.93 She was taken in and twice interrogated by the Gestapo.

  Nabokov’s literary rival Ivan Bunin, who had already seen rough treatment at the hands of the Gestapo before the war, was living in southern France amid the steep mountains outside the perfume capital of Grasse. During the Occupation, Bunin hid several Jews from the Germans, including pianist Alexander Bakhrakh, who stayed underground with him for nearly the entire war.94

  In Prague, the twenty-five-year companion of Nabokov’s mother, Evgenia Hofeld, found another path to action. Family lore would recall how Hofeld indiscriminately helped Jews in Prague and became known as a Gentile who would sign as an official witness on the identity papers that would certify that the bearer was not Jewish.95

  But on the eastern front, it was a tight squeeze between Hitler and Stalin, with many compelled to choose between fascist and Communist forces. If Nabokov thought Hitler presented the graver danger of the two for the time being, not everyone in his family agreed. Boris Petkevič, the husband of Nabokov’s sister Olga, had become deeply involved with anti-Bolshevik forces, in a group apparently supported by the Nazis.96

  During the war, Nabokov knew little of his friends and families’ lives, but he had his own, smaller struggles back home. His contract with Wellesley was not renewed, in part, he feared, for his straightforwardly anti-Soviet attitude, which had become less fetching now that America was at war and Russia her ally. He had been given a small income from the Museum of Comparative Zoology to continue his work on their butterfly collection, but it was not nearly enough for three Nabokovs to live on, even in small quarters in Cambridge. In desperation, he did a lecture tour with the Institute of International Education, an organization best known for promoting American democracy abroad but whose mission also apparently extended to exposing Americans to foreign intellectuals favoring democratic ideals at home.97

  Though he still struggled to find a dependable job, Nabokov’s literary star had begun to glimmer ever so slightly. New Directions, which had published Sebastian Knight, had given him a contract to translate Russian poetry and do a short book on Russian author Nikolai Gogol, which he completed mid-war. With Edmund Wilson’s recommendation, he applied for a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1943, becoming the first applicant over the age of forty ever chosen. He even received a new contract to teach Russian at Wellesley the following year.98

  With prodding from Véra, he cut back on time spent with butterflies to focus on the novel he had begun when the U.S. entered the war. In fits and starts, he continued to build a dystopian parody of a Soviet-German police state, in which a freethinking philosopher (not unlike his earlier character Cincinnatus) is pulled into the prison system of a totalitarian society that is being forced into unthinking conformity. Nowhere close to finished with it, he pulled the first four chapters together and submitted them to a publisher.99

  The Allies’ prospects seemed to be improving as well; they soon turned the tide on the Eastern front in Europe. By the time Nabokov and Edmund Wilson met up with Sonia Slonim in New York in preparation for the locally urgent matter of ten-year-old Dmitri’s appendectomy, D-Day was just around the corner.

  Following in Véra and Car
l Junghans’s footsteps, Sonia had joined the war effort by taking her turn at France Forever. She had also, she told several friends, gone unannounced to the office of the French Military attache in Washington to volunteer her services to the French cause, only to be turned away.100

  After Normandy, the Allies poured forward, chasing the retreating Germans, and it became clear that the war would soon be over. As U.S. forces liberated Paris and moved across France, the Soviets worked their way back across Poland, Hungary, and Austria from the east, arriving in Prague on May 9. That very day, Soviet forces would go looking for Olga Nabokov’s husband, Boris Petkevič, who had chosen the losing side in the war. They would find him long gone to England. But Olga was taken in for questioning.101 Unlike so many who were interrogated and then sent to the far reaches of the Gulag, she was released after three days.

  Over the summer, the Soviets overran the location of the killing center at Belzec that Jan Karski had seen, along with the nearby extermination sites at Sobibor and Treblinka. That July, religious committees confirmed the existence of death camps at Birkenau and Auschwitz, and had seen evidence of more than a million and a half executions.102

  Writer Arthur Koestler, who years before had plumbed the psyche of true believers in Stalin’s purges with Darkness at Noon, lamented the disbelief he encountered across three years of speaking to the troops: “They don’t believe in concentration camps, they don’t believe in the starved children of Greece, in the shot hostages of France, in the mass graves of Poland; they have never heard of Lidice, Treblinka, or Belzec.”103 It soon became apparent that, if anything, the testimony of witnesses like fan Karski had understated the horrors of what had happened.

  Karski’s own book, Story of a Secret State, had come out at the end of 1944 to tremendous attention in the U.S. He had kept faith with his assignment to testify about what he had seen, but he understood by now that such testimony was not enough to alter history. In his book, a Jewish elder in the Warsaw ghetto says that of course Hitler will be defeated, and Karski’s country will rise from its ashes. But the Polish Jews, the elder explains, will by then have ceased to exist. “It is no use telling you all this,” he says. “No one in the outside world can possibly understand. You don’t understand. Even I don’t understand, for my people are dying and I am alive.”104