A Paler Shade of Red: Memoirs of a Radical. W. E. Gutman

      In three-quarter time, like the waltz, memory picks and chooses, records and erases.

      My memory of these troubled times is opaque, fragmented at best. Episodes I manage to recall with some clarity, like vivid snippets from an otherwise impenetrable dream, are frayed, out of context, out of sequence. All that’s left is a peripheral vision of early childhood, mangled, colorless, two-dimensional insights, mere moments that stand out, disjointed and surreal against the blackness of oblivion. Permeating each recollection, when summoned, is deep sadness.

      *

      I remember going to the cinema, at night, and scrambling out of our seats during an air raid. It’s raining. I see crowds milling outside the theater, gazing skyward in anxious anticipation. At first, I hear whispers then shouts. French and German blend in a tempest of monosyllabic commands, impassioned pleas and protestations. But I can’t make out the words. I see fear in my parent’s faces. I smell it on their breaths. I recognize the scent of cold sweat. I hold my breath against the sulfurous emanations of matches being struck and swirls of black tobacco smoke rising toward the darkened sky. The air raid is a ruse concocted by the Gestapo to create panic and lure known insurgents into its web. My father takes me in his arms. He and my mother run in the dark. Panting, they take shelter in a doorway. In the distance, the dreaded shriek of a police whistle pierces the night. I can feel my father’s heart pounding against my chest. The sound of cleated shoes grows faint then subsides. We step out of the shadows onto the sidewalk. Our own footsteps, now measured and steady, echo with an eerie resonance in the deserted street. Our shadows stretch then contract as we pass under the pallid light of a gas lamp.

      *

      I’m sitting wearing short pants on hard wood benches in cold, narrow parlors, waiting for my parents to emerge from offices -- or were they living rooms? I see anguish and exhaustion on their faces as we run down the stairs and race along gray, gloomy streets, our heads down, our coat collars upturned under hats that raise suspicion instead of conferring anonymity.

      *

      I also remember being taken on endless Métro rides, often on the spur of the moment, but I can’t say where to or why. I only recall counting the stops on the overhead chart and calling out and repeating the names of the stations on the vaulted tiled walls with a hypnotic cadence born of ennui.

      Châtelet

      Réaumur-Sébastopol

      Strasbourg St.-Denis

      Gare de l’Est

      Gare du Nord

      Barbès Rochechouart

      Marcadet-Poissoniers

      Porte de Clignancourt

      The names evoke images and sensations even now as I write them and utter them out loud, one by one, but I can’t decipher the meager clues they offer. In one of the stations, a large poster attracts my attention: Marianne, France’s voluptuous effigy, is being devoured by a large black bird, a vulture with bulging eyes, a hooked beak, a skullcap atop its head, corkscrew tresses dangling from its ears. I behold the silent manifesto, uncomprehending.

      “Look, papa, look at the funny bird. Why is he eating the lady?”

      “He’s not eating her,” my father retorts with studied impertinence.

      “She’s forcing herself down his throat and he’s gagging, so he’s spitting her out. She tastes foul, like liver or tongue.” He makes a face. He knows that the mere mention of liver can make me retch. Experience would at once arouse and sustain a loathing for other organ meats and, eventually, for all meat.

      “Is the lady made of liver [foie, in French]?”

      “Non, elle n’est pas de foi.” No, she is not of [good] faith. The wordplay is lost on me.

      “Does it hurt the lady to be spit out?”

      “She doesn’t feel a thing. Even her pride is unscathed.” A sardonic grin illuminates my father's face. Recklessly, he looks around, seeking approbation (or a hint of rancor) from the other riders. Stone-faced, they stare at a protective void of their own creation. Revolted, my father lets out a string of expletives that draw sidelong glances of discomfiture, fear and moralistic anger.

      To seize an opportunity is more difficult than to avert bad luck.

      *

      One day, at an intersection, I kick a German soldier in the shin and call him a “sale Boche!” -- dirty Kraut. The look of horror on my mother’s face is indelibly etched on my conscience. I often replay her words in my mind.

      “Please forgive him, Monsieur, he’s only a child. He didn’t mean it. He’s only four. Please sir, please don't....”

      And I relive the unimaginable, the sheer incongruity, as the soldier picks me up in his arms and says, “You know, I have a little boy just like you at home and I love him very much. I hope to see him soon again. You mustn’t say what you said. It will make somebody very angry.” My mother’s expression changes from terror to awe, to incredulity, to gratitude as the soldier sets me gently back down on my feet.

      *

      In time of war, acts of kindness by the enemy are rare and difficult to measure against a background of wholesale barbarism. When peace returns, pain, bitterness and the urge to settle old scores all conspire to enshrine the evil that men do. Memory and hatred feed upon each other in a self-perpetuating symbiosis of spite and retribution.

      “Yes, but this was an anomaly, an oddity, a random act, an eccentricity, as inexplicable as it was fortuitous,” someone quibbles.

      “The very circumstances under which this random act of compassion took place render it all the more commendable,” I fire back.

      “You’re eulogizing an exception, a chance event, because you lived to recount it.”

       “It would still have ranked as an extraordinary show of mercy even if I’d later died at the hands of another.”

      Die and you’ll be mourned; survive and you’ll be resented.

      The debate goes on. I won’t prevail.

      Breast-beating does the clenched fist more good than it does the heart.

      Summoned every time a hint of prejudice threatens to spawn glib and bigoted generalizations, this incident has taught me to challenge slogans and clichés, to reject stubborn beliefs and beware of unyielding convictions. Convictions, Nietzsche warns, are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies. In the worst of all possible worlds, let tolerance be your guide.

      When in doubt, celebrate the exception, not the rule.

      Such high-mindedness would be put to the test several years later when, traveling on assignment in Germany, I discovered that many Germans still regret having lost the war.

      *

      Altruism, in any form, is in short supply between 1941 and 1945. At the urging of the Gestapo, over 11,000 Jewish children are picked up by the all-too-cooperative French police. They are roused from their sleep, yanked out of their beds in the middle of the night, seized in the streets, snatched from their parents’ arms and taken to Drancy, outside Paris, a detention center staffed by French police. Following triage, the children are carted away in cattle wagons. Their three-day journey ends in death camps in the East where, like so much waste, they are exterminated and reduced to ashes.

      Only 300 children survive: the oldest, the strongest, the luckiest.

      *

      “Inexperience and lack of focus made for a very shaky start. We had little more than purpose and will,” my father said about the Résistance. “None of us had the slightest notion how a secret service works, and insights drawn from pulp fiction and films noirs proved