Page:The Minority of One 1961-10.pdf/7

We left home without tears. We kissed mother and sister, begging them to “be careful;” put otherwise there was hardly a display of emotion. And why should there be? Weren't we to return very, very soon? Wasn't the whole war about to be over in — let’s be pessimists — two weeks? We simply had to leave for a few days, and that was that.

We knew this with such certainty, that at the time of parting there was hardly a need to say it or even to think about it. We just knew it. We knew it from all we had been told in anticipation of war. This one was not going to be like World War I. Not with all the revolutionary weapons now in existence. Not with the heavy artillery, tanks, motorized troops, and air-forces which would render a prolonged war impossible. “Everybody” was against Hitler. A week, or ten days and the war would be over. So at worst, it was not going to be so bad. got it. Who could not endure hardships for two weeks? And why let the world rot away under Hitler if all could be changed in two weeks? Would this be too high a price to pay “to get it over with?” So I wanted war. And I was in war.

• * *

The highway to Warsaw, where we were going to put up the decisive fight against the Nazi invader, was cluttered by a mixture of the military and civilian, animals and humans with their household cargo. It was crowded by tens of thousands of soldiers on foot and in trucks, civilians dragging along, and some pulling behind them quickly improvised carts; most of the time we could only stand around rather than march to our destination. It took us four days and three nights to cover a stretch of no more than about forty miles. One could hardly think of a better target for the German war planes than that slow-moving human mass. Day and night, planes by the hundreds flew over us spreading death and devastation. They covered us with a thick blanket of bombs and bullets from their machine guns. There was no choice but to walk on the dead bodies of people and horses. The most macabre sights appeared on the highway and along its sides. Corpses with their intestines exposed, pierced through by dum dum bullets. A little girl pulling the arm of her mother: “Mama, get up, mama, come” — unaware that the mother was dead. On the fourth day of our ordeal, the human mass in front of us halted. We were told that Warsaw was virtually besieged by the Germans. The only remaining access to the city was open for military traffic only. No civilians were admitted to Warsaw. All we could do was to turn back. We made our way back toward Lodz through fields and country roads, attempting to evade the Germans. As we proceeded we knew that each step could bring us into occupied territory. One night, as we were sprawled in some farmer’s vegetable garden, we heard the sound of heavy car engines. A while later a sharp, half-blinding ray of light exposed us. Then came a burst of bullets in our direction. The group to which my father and I had clung consisted mostly of our male neighbors in the big apartment house in which we lived in Lodz. By this time the group had lost many of its members. They had remained behind, dead on the highway and in the fields. Whenever we could we had buried them. But this had not always been possible under the fire of a perpetual attack. Lying in the vegetable garden, before I fully realized that we were again being shot at, I felt a moist substance gushing on me. Then my father looked at me and screamed and the full force of his strong hands pressed my head. He and others in our party were still trying to stop the flood of blood from my head, when German soldiers came down on us like hungry wolves. They were swinging their rifle butts and beating everybody. My father, who would not let go of my injured head, was shot in the leg. The Germans cursed us and pushed us to a nearby highway and ordered us to pull dead bodies from it; they were in the way of their motorcade. My head wound was superficial and cost me no more than a substantial loss of blood. My father’s leg was attended by a doctor in a nearby village, which we reached once we had cleared the road for the Germans. Of all I saw and heard during those first days of war a few words uttered by my father everlastingly ring in my ears. He uttered them as he saw blood gushing from my head, while German soldiers stood over us shouting, pushing and beating us. These few words express man’s rebellion against himself and his being more pointedly than any I have ever heard. After his initial cry of despair my father said to me in a low, almost controlled voice: “Son, forgive me for having begotten you.”

• * *

“Let’s get it over with,” I said in the days before World War II. Why endure a lifetime of suffering, uncertainties and humiliation when one brief period of struggle could eliminate all that threatened our lives and future? And I parted from my mother and sister without a tear. Why be emotional? War would last some days, at the most two weeks. What’s two uncomfortable weeks in exchange for hope and dignity? It did not take us long to realize that the war was not going to be over soon. What we had thought to be the war turned out to be only its prelude both in time and intensity of suffering. It was to last for years, many years. And it was to consume many, many millions of lives. I survived it, one out of a family clan. What was yet to follow made these first few days of the war look relatively innocent and even comfortable. It made me regret ever having wished for war. I soon realized the absurdity of “Let’s get it over with.” I soon learned to recall with nostalgia the pre-war days which had seemed so intolerable. The world I once knew was never to return. Its consistent path from bad to worse never reached a point of final fulfillment and reversal. Had I only never prayed for war to come!

• * *

There are human pains which are too great and too choking to be talked about. Such were those I experienced during the five and a half war years I spent in the ghetto and numerous concentration camps, including Auschwitz. The epic of losing my parents and sister and everybody who ever meant anything to me, the epic of losing the whole world of which I was a part, is too painful for me to recount. If I have written of the first days of war as I lived them, it is only because I detect a dangerous similarity between the present mood of many people in America and the mood that made me say, “Let’s get it over with.” The present world situation, with all the personal uncertainties it entails, seems intolerable to many people. They too seek a drastic reversal of the nerve-wracking tensions. They too feel willing to suffer for a short while, in order to regain a life-long equilibrium. And they too believe that war, when it comes, will be brief, a swift surgery. “Let’s get it over with” they seem to say, little aware that war, if and when it comes, is going to be neither brief nor likely to restore things to “normal.” It will be no mere period in their lives, but the whole of their lives. It will either end them or debase them in utterly unpredictable ways. War will involve years, years every day and every hour of which will bring untold suffering. Modern war is a personal and unending chain of bitter events. It is a war you feed not with anonymous soldiers, but with your own body and soul and with those of your child and parents, your wife and your neighbor, with all that personal world you have known and without which you cannot imagine your own life. Its end is unlike its beginning, and no one can know it in advance. One thing is certain; its end does not bring one back to the world he has known before. Oh no, war is not a thing “to get over with.” Even if you survive physically, your scars will never heal. Nor will you truly know whether to forgive, when your father says to you: “Son, forgive me for having begotten you.”

Statement by Linus Pauling about Russian Bomb Tests 31 August 1961

It has been reported by Tass News Agency that the USSR has made the decision to resume the experimental tests of nuclear weapons and create a series of gigantic nuclear bombs with yields equivalent to 20, 30, 50, and 100 million tons of TNT. Speaking for scientists all over the world, I strongly urge that the Soviet government reconsider this decision to resume the testing of nuclear weapons and to expand its nuclear arsenal. The militaristic act of resuming the testing of these terrible weapons of mass destruction and death would be a dreadful blow to peace and morality and to the hope of people all over the world for achieving the goal of general and complete disarmament. If the Soviet Union were to resume the testing of nuclear weapons, there is no doubt that the United States would also initiate tests of nuclear weapons and that more and more nations would in the next few years develop stockpiles of these weapons. How could we then continue to hope that world destruction could be averted? major part of the misery of man’s natural The stockpiles of nuclear weapons that are now in existence are great enough to destroy our civilization and perhaps even to bring an end to the human race. There is no defense against nuclear weapons that cannot be overcome by increasing the scale of the attack. There is no way of limiting war between great powers to the use of small nuclear bombs, when great bombs exist and the great governments are unrestrained in their militarism. I strongly condemn the militaristic actions of any government that increase the danger of war and make it harder to achieve general and complete disarmament and peace throughout the world. If the Soviet government were to resume the testing of nuclear weapons, or if the American government were to resume testing, this action would be a militaristic action of this sort. I urge that the Soviet Union not embark upon this program, and that in the meantime a penetrating discussion of the great world problem of the existence of nuclear weapons and the need for disarmament through international agreement be initiated in the United Nations. The discoveries of scientists during past decades have made it possible for us to envisage a world in which human beings can live happy and productive lives, free from the major part of the misery of man's natural condition. In the name of science, I ask that the Soviet Government reconsider its decision and exert its great influence in the struggle for peace rather than in the preparation for catastrophic war.