Here to Stay

by John Hersey

  Going to bed that night, Fekete said to Elvira that he would be surprised if his uncle from Neukirchen didn’t show up soon. Two hours later, he was awakened from a deep sleep and, looking up, saw a policeman. He had a moment’s sleepy terror, but the policeman said gently, in German, that Fekete had a visitor. Fekete went to the gate of the camp and found his uncle there, with a carful of friends. The uncle, a middle-man for Austrian dairy products, had not spoken with any member of his family in twelve years, and for a feverish fifteen minutes he questioned Vilmos; then he went off to Vienna.

  The uncle was back early the next morning. Vilmos got a pass from camp headquarters and accompanied his uncle to the capital to see what could be done to get the family started toward the United States. They drove to the American Consulate, where a clerk told Fekete that the quota of regular United States visas, sixty-five hundred, had already been heavily over subscribed, but that it might help in the long run if Fekete could get a sponsor in the United States. Fekete remembered an elderly American who had worked in the United States Consulate in Budapest just after the war and who had married a Hungarian lady—a neighbor of the Feketes, and a woman they had liked. This man had gone home to retire from the consular service ten years before. Fekete asked if he could send a message to him through the State Department, which would doubtless know where he was, and the clerk told him to write a letter; it would go to the States by diplomatic pouch. The clerk also told Fekete to register for emigration with the ICEM office at the camp. Fekete wrote the letter, and his uncle took him out and bought him a Wiener schnitzel.

  Early the next morning, Fekete went to the ICEM office, and after standing in a line for a long time he was admitted. The office was under the sweet, yet firm, command of a tiny, fragile-looking girl, half French and half Chinese, named Rose Clémann, who had been a mere stenographer in the ICEM headquarters in Geneva and was now suddenly in charge of the destinies of several thousand homeless people. She sat Fekete down at a small table, opposite a Hungarian woman with frizzy yellow hair and thick glasses, herself an émigré from Budapest to Vienna a few years back, who had volunteered to help with the new wave of refugees. Not many days before, this woman’s brother had completed a heroic double escape from Hungary. He had carried his wife, a victim of polio, in his arms over the last several miles of Hungarian farmland and across the border into Austria, and then, having deposited her at his sister’s pension in Vienna, he himself, bitterly exhausted, had returned to Budapest and fled the country all over again, this time with his two small daughters. The woman registered Fekete for emigration to the United States.

  Soon Fekete’s registration got lost. Of course, he did not know this. Not long after the Hungarian revolt, the process of screening and sponsoring refugees for emigration to the United States had been placed in the hands of a number of religious welfare agencies, the most important of which were the National Catholic Welfare Conference, the World Council of (Protestant) Churches, and the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society. In practice, this assignment of such an important part of the exodus to religious welfare organizations proved to be something of a mistake. The N.C.W.C. office in Vienna was badly undermanned and inefficiently administered, and in time the suspicion arose that the Catholic hierarchy in Austria, which evidently did not want a shortage of vigorous young Catholic men to develop in southeastern Europe, was in no hurry to ship off wholesale the fine specimens from Hungary. The Protestants and Jews quickly filled and moved their quotas, and the Catholics who were left behind in the camps came to the conclusion that Western freedom, about which they had heard such inviting details from Radio Free Europe, was a Protestant and probably, in the last analysis, a Jewish monopoly. At any rate, Fekete’s registration was sent to the N.C.W.C. office in Vienna and apparently was soon mislaid there, in a wrong pile of forms.

  * * *

  —

  Fekete decided that while he was waiting for a visa he should make himself as useful as he could, and, hearing that the Austrians in the various offices under Herr Doktor Wlach, who was now Lagerleiter, or director of the camp, were badly in need of interpreters, he volunteered for work. For one day, he worked at the top of the seemingly endless line of campers applying for passes to Vienna. Word had already spread through the camp that the refugees who were getting away to the countries of their choice were not the patient people in camps but the so-called free-livers—people with money or connections, who could stay in Vienna and murmur in the lobbies of the consulates until, perhaps just to get rid of them, the authorities sent them flying to distant places. The second day, Fekete interpreted in the camp’s office of information—a commodity of which, from the campers’ point of view, there was far too little. The third day, he worked in a room where campers could try to trace relatives who were also presumed to be refugees in Austria. And on the fourth day he was assigned to the office of Caritas, where, seeing miracles happen and finding the personification of all he had hoped to find when he left Hungary, he decided he would like to stay.

  The person in charge of Caritas was the strange, tall woman in the Girl Scout uniform whom Fekete had seen on his arrival at Traiskirchen. Her name was Frau Doktor Charlotte Teuber, and, among other remarkable things, she turned out to be indeed the Chief of the St. George’s Scouts, a country-wide Girl Scout movement in Austria. She had been at a Girl Scout meeting in Graz when the flood of refugees began to cross the border, and she had offered her services to Caritas and had wound up in command of the agency at Traiskirchen, with hardly time to change her clothes. She was a Doctor of Philosophy from the University of Innsbruck, in the field of archaeology, with a specialty in Byzantine art; she was an old hand at digging in Greece and Turkey. She had long had a habit of wintering in Italy, and studying there. Before she landed at Traiskirchen, she had been making plans to attend Princeton for a year or two, to further her researches. She was, as well, on the waiting list for a post with the Austrian diplomatic service.

  As Dr. Teuber’s interpreter, Fekete had his eyes opened to camp existence. Dr. Teuber worked twenty-one hours a day, and she did everything. She fetched toilet paper when it was needed. She talked would-be suicides out of the notion over a cup of tea. She took supplicants for scraps of string for parcels quite seriously. Fekete watched her spend all one day on the telephone trying to trace for a camper two children who had been lost at the border, one of them an adolescent boy who had been wounded as a Freedom Fighter and who turned up in a distant hospital. She arranged buses for campers to go to see plays and the opera in Vienna, and she persuaded a textile factory, Wöslauer Kammgarnfabrik, to let whole busloads of women come to its plant and take showers. She could spot a lie from a very appreciable distance. She told Fekete that she was a convert to Catholicism and therefore, as she put it, “a very hectic Catholic,” but she struck up a close working relationship with the head of the Socialist welfare agency that worked in the camp, and quite often she trotted into his office and saucily asked if his supply of rosaries was holding up all right. One day, a grave British journalist asked her to define her job, and she said, “It’s nothing but trying to explain all day that this person or that person is, after all, an angel.” Gloom and hysteria could not survive near her. “Isn’t this gay?” she exclaimed one day to a morose American volunteer. “Soap problems and soul problems!” Fekete saw her accosted, during the arrival of a fleet of buses with new campers, by a young Austrian helper who was violently furious over some minor mistake that another volunteer had made. As he poured out a stream of abuse and complaint, Charlotte Teuber simply put her hand on his cheek and held it there. His tirade faded like a mist burned off by the sun. After that, for a few minutes, Dr. Teuber seemed melancholy, but when the young man went off, she said at once to Fekete, “I couldn’t do things like that if I weren’t the camp poodle. I get my cold little nose into everything! And people don’t mind. They just say, ‘There’s that darling poodle knocking the furniture over again.’ ”

  Un
der Dr. Teuber’s frivolity Fekete apprehended that there was a deep well of sadness and strength. Her sworn enemy was Father Gombos, the priest with the sour face. This man poured a malignant zeal into safeguarding the morals of the campers. He had a system of spies and informers to tell him of cases of adultery and thievery; Dr. Teuber called this little police force the Gavot—Gombos’ Avo at Traiskirchen. She found out that the priest had a jail, with an inch of water on the floor, in the cellar of the main building, and she went to him and said, with blazing eyes, “Are these people refugees? Are they prisoners? What are they? If you make prisoners of them, you make criminals of them.” Another time, after a member of the Gavot had struck a girl in the face for flirting with another woman’s husband, Dr. Teuber said to the priest, “Ah, Father, the less power and the more love, the better we’ll catch the youth.”

  Once she intercepted the priest as he was taking a drunk down to his jail. She said, “Aren’t you at least going to give the man a blanket down there?”

  “Drunks feel warm,” the priest said.

  “But it is a well-known medical fact that the moment of sobering up is most dangerous,” Dr. Teuber said. “All sorts of germs enter the body then.”

  “He deserves a few germs.”

  “Can you really blame him? He’s probably seen plenty of Austrians drunk around here.”

  “The Austrians are not my concern. The Austrians are in Austria. They have a right to behave as they wish.”

  “But maybe,” Dr. Teuber said, “the Hungarians have better reason than the Austrians to be drunk just now.”

  A few days later, Dr. Teuber was notified that Father Gombos had filed with the bishop a written complaint that Charlotte Teuber was corrupting the morals of the campers of Traiskirchen. Dr. Teuber had to take a day off to go to Vienna and see the bishop. She was able to persuade him that corruption takes varying forms. He blessed her and sent her back to work.

  Young lovers in the camp came to Charlotte Teuber for advice, and on December 8 she made the arrangements for the camp’s first wedding. The couples were of different religions, so it was a civil ceremony, held in the Rathaus of the town of Traiskirchen; Dr. Teuber and a German student were witnesses, and Fekete was the official interpreter. After the vows, Fekete translated a heartfelt speech by the official of the Standesamt who had married the young people. “We are happy,” he said, “that this greatest festival of life could have been held in a free country. This is a small country but a free one. I hope that this event will never be forgotten. I bring you dear ones wishes—in the name of the town and its people and its leaders, and the Bürgermeister, and on my own behalf—for a good life, and a happy new life, and freedom!”

  * * *

  —

  Having had no word of his visa for two weeks, Fekete became a little worried. He had begun to hear from the outside world. One message, a telegram from Budapest, had made him very happy: “WE ARE ALL WELL. FATHER.” From Washington, D.C., from his retired consular friend, he had received a prompt and generous offer of sponsorship, money, a home, and a job. His aunt in Buenos Aires had cabled him some money. But no word came of his visa.

  An American volunteer at the camp, learning of Fekete’s worry from Dr. Teuber, offered to take him in to the American Consulate again. A vice-consul told them that there was nothing the Consulate could do. The letter from Washington was of no use. Since Fekete was a Catholic, it was up to the N.C.W.C. to sponsor him. By chance, a representative of N.C.W.C. walked into the Consulate just then, and Fekete’s American friend appealed to him. The N.C.W.C. man called his office; the phone call lasted fifteen minutes. There was no sign of Fekete’s registration, the man finally reported, but since this American vouched for him, they would take his word for it that the papers had been sent in, and then and there the man wrote a note authorizing Fekete and his family to be processed to go to the United States as parolees.

  The Feketes returned to Vienna the next day for a physical examination, and again, two days later, for an interview. On December 22nd, they were taken by bus to a transit camp at Korneuburg, north of Vienna, where for three days there seemed to be nothing but Christmas parties, given by Austrian students, a sugar refinery, a shipbuilding plant, and a labor union. The children were presented with at least three months’ supply of candy. On December 27th, the family was put on a train for Munich, and the next afternoon the Feketes boarded one of six United States Air Force transport planes at Munich Airport. The Feketes’ plane took off at five minutes after four o’clock. The day was clear; the ascent was at a remarkable angle. Fekete had never flown before, and he decided that he had never seen anything so pure as the sky above the misty atmosphere of Europe.

  A SENSE OF COMMUNITY

  Survival

  A SENSE OF COMMUNITY

  “SURVIVAL” tells the story of a crucial episode in the life of John F. Kennedy, who, seventeen years after these events, became President of the United States.

  It is a tale of a young man’s discovery of his inner funds of resourcefulness, optimism, and stamina, and it exemplifies, better than any other story in this book, the courage-giving force of a sense of community. Here the community was a small crew, Kennedy’s own; as commanding officer of a Patrol Torpedo boat, he was responsible for the ten of his twelve who survived the precipitating accident, and the extent to which he grasped his duty toward them—so that his thoughts and anxieties and actions were all turned outward from himself—may well have been what saved both him and them.

  The time of these occurrences was August, 1943. I wrote the account a few months later, when Kennedy had been returned to the United States for recuperation and for separation, in due course, from the service. He told me the story one afternoon when I visited him in the New England Baptist Hospital, in Boston, where the disc between his fifth lumbar vertebra and his sacrum, ruptured in his crash in the Solomons, had been operated upon; and I asked if I might write it down. He asked me if I wouldn’t talk first with some of his crew, so I went to the Motor Torpedo Boat Training Centre at Melville, Rhode Island, and there, under the curving iron of a Quonset Hut, three enlisted men named Johnston, McMahon, and McGuire filled in the gaps.

  Survival

  IT SEEMS that Kennedy’s PT, the 109, was out one night with a squadron patrolling Blackett Strait, in mid-Solomons. Blackett Strait is a patch of water bounded on the northeast by the volcano called Kolombangara, on the west by the island of Vella Lavella, on the south by the island of Gizo and a string of coral-fringed islets, and on the east by the bulk of New Georgia. The boats were working about forty miles away from their base on the island of Rendova, on the south side of New Georgia. They had entered Blackett Strait, as was their habit, through Ferguson Passage, between the coral islets and New Georgia.

  The night was a starless black and Japanese destroyers were around. It was about two-thirty. The 109, with three officers and ten enlisted men aboard, was leading three boats on a sweep for a target. An officer named George Ross was up on the bow, magnifying the void with binoculars. Kennedy was at the wheel and he saw Ross turn and point into the darkness. The man in the forward machine-gun turret shouted, “Ship at two o’clock!” Kennedy saw a shape and spun the wheel to turn for an attack, but the 109 answered sluggishly. She was running slowly on only one of her three engines, so as to make a minimum wake and avoid detection from the air. The shape became a Japanese destroyer, cutting through the night at forty knots and heading straight for the 109. The thirteen men on the PT hardly had time to brace themselves. Those who saw the Japanese ship coming were paralyzed by fear in a curious way: they could move their hands but not their feet. Kennedy whirled the wheel to the left, but again the 109 did not respond. Ross went through the gallant but futile motions of slamming a shell into the breach of the 37-millimetre anti-tank gun which had been temporarily mounted that very day, wheels and all, on the foredeck. The urge to bolt and dive over the side was terribly strong, but
still no one was able to move; all hands froze to their battle stations. Then the Japanese crashed into the 109 and cut her right in two. The sharp enemy forefoot struck the PT on the starboard side about fifteen feet from the bow and crunched diagonally across with a racking noise. The PT’s wooden hull hardly even delayed the destroyer. Kennedy was thrown hard to the left in the cockpit, and he thought, “This is how it feels to be killed.” In a moment he found himself on his back on the deck, looking up at the destroyer as it passed through his boat. There was another loud noise and a huge flash of yellow-red light, and the destroyer glowed. Its peculiar, raked, inverted-Y stack stood out in the brilliant light and, later, in Kennedy’s memory.

  There was only one man below decks at the moment of collision. That was McMahon, engineer. He had no idea what was up. He was just reaching forward to wrench the starboard engine into gear when a ship came into his engine room. He was lifted from the narrow passage between two of the engines and thrown painfully against the starboard bulkhead aft of the boat’s auxiliary generator. He landed in a sitting position. A tremendous burst of flame came back at him from the day room, where some of the gas tanks were. He put his hands over his face, drew his legs up tight, and waited to die. But he felt water hit him after the fire, and he was sucked far downward as his half of the PT sank. He began to struggle upward through the water. He had held his breath since the impact, so his lungs were tight and they hurt. He looked up through the water. Over his head he saw a yellow glow—gasoline burning on the water. He broke the surface and was in fire again. He splashed hard to keep a little island of water around him.