Secret History of Vladimir Nabokov (29 page)

If Nabokov felt stranded in an alien landscape, burdened with a story that might never be told, or somehow in danger of losing his own cool during his 1941 visit to Wellfleet, the poem was as close as he would ever come to expressing it. Cryptic as it was, Nabokov still worried that he had offended Wilson, writing a week later to say, “I do hope that you do not take my ‘Refrigerator’ as implying that I spent a bad night at your house. I did not. I really cannot tell you, at least in English, how much I enjoyed my stay.”
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After Thanksgiving, Nabokov returned to Wellesley, where he awaited the publication of
The Real Life of Sebastian Knight
that December. Wilson wrote a glorious blurb for the book, but between Thanksgiving and the book’s arrival in mid-December, the American landscape shifted.

Nabokov had escaped the aftermath of the Revolution as a teenager and as an adult had become a veritable Houdini of history, slipping out of Germany before Hitler’s march into Poland, and cutting it even closer on his flight from France. But on December 7, 1941, conflict caught up with him in yet another country when hundreds of Japanese planes bombed Pearl Harbor.

The surprise attack marked the Japanese declaration of war against the United States, leading the U.S. to respond in kind on December 8. Three days later, Adolf Hitler took to a podium at the Kroll Opera House before the members of the Reichstag to declare war on America, too, in a speech broadcast and reprinted around the world. “We know, of course,” he said, “that the Eternal Jew is behind all this.”
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Overnight, the country was seized with the kind of paranoia that had led Britain to deport its civilian enemy aliens the year before. The stunned U.S. followed Britain’s footsteps in establishing its own concentration camps. In the first days after the bombing of Pearl Harbor and before the U.S. declaration of war on Germany, FBI agents rounded up and interned thousands of Italian, German, and Japanese citizens, often for arbitrary reasons.
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Initially, prisoners were held in locations both improvised and established, from county jails to immigration centers in New York and California.

On the coasts, the fear of spies and sabotage led to restrictions on handheld cameras and confiscation of shortwave radios. A wave of arrests of Austrian skiers who had married American heiresses drew bemused media attention, and enough people fired employees with “foreign-sounding” names that U.S. Attorney General Francis Biddle made a public declaration against the practice.
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An American system of concentration camps—not death camps, but internment facilities—was hastily set up. The most famous casualties of the system were the more than 110,000 Japanese and Japanese-Americans who would eventually be interned for the duration of the war. But early on, when the focus was on catching spies and speed was believed to be critical, a number of Jewish concentration camp survivors and refugees fleeing Germany—particularly those who had a history as political radicals—also found themselves detained alongside Nazi prisoners of war.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.

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.”
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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