Remembering 1945.

In memory I hear water sighing in the gutters of the swimming pool, Italian musicians playing string quartets; I see myself sun-bathing in paradise. It would have been heavenly without music or swimming, even if the meals had been inferior to those served by the German prisoners of war, so amiable and chatty you'd have thought they were G.I.s--that's how happy they were to be where they were. I had survived the war and now slept in a real bed, wore nonstinking clothes (a wool uniform in the July heat, but that was only an annoyance, one small thorn in Eden). They--I had no idea who--had chosen me to be a student in a so-called G.I. university in what had been an Italian aeronautical academy in Florence. Though still a private first class in the 135th Regiment of the Thirty-Fourth Infantry Division, I was living like a civilian, indeed like a privileged gentleman and scholar--not scholar enough in 1945, however, to be able to recite: "Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive."

Everywhere there were beautiful old buildings, churches, statues, museums, and monuments: the tourist's Firenze. Our drab, fascist-style university buildings had facades painted over with vaguely organic shapes in autumnal colors. The air raids had stopped and the camouflaging was now merely ornamental. Baking in the sun after a dip in the pool and half-listening to the music, I would transform the designs painted on the walls into a giant Rorschach test. The emerging pictures were usually erotic.

My Eden included women, but memory does not furnish many details. I see myself sitting at outdoor cafes, trying to speak a few words of Italian, pulling out of my breast pocket a pack of Camels, and knowing that the bribe I held in my hand was at least as potent as money. There were cigarettes enough to buy a harem. After half a century, I can savor the recollected pleasure of the company of women, the satisfaction of simply being with "girls" after the prison of buddyhood--male bonding, we call it now--in and out of the foxholes. For an old man, it's social, not sexual, intercourse that abides in the poorly lighted museum of memory.

There must have been refugees everywhere in Florence that summer--on the streets, in the churches, hidden in places where I never saw them. But I could not distinguish between ordinary Italian civilians (most of whom wore shabby clothes and looked malnourished) and the bedraggled men, women, and children who may have been fleeing from the Germans but did not stand out from the others on the crowded streets. Besides, who wasn't a refugee in war-ravaged Italy back then?

Swinging a black patent-leather pocket book, a prostitute might be standing only a few yards away from a fashionable cafe, and often (between, say, four o'clock and six o'clock, when the heat was beginning to ebb) I would see the English crowd having tea and cakes at the outdoor tables. They were part of an old, established British colony in Florence, and you could tell they were English--they in archaic tweeds, me in prickly wool O.D.s--even if you hadn't heard them speak. I recall a handsome Englishwoman whose white hair was coiffed in the lacquered style favored by 1930s movie stars. Thin or stout, the men tended to be red-faced and in need of dentistry. In 1994, I can imagine novelist Ford Madox Ford--fat, adenoidal, and six years dead in 1945--sharing a table with these expatriates who had sat out the war in Florence. Were they so refined and cultivated that they simply refused to give up lives habituated to the beauty of the art and architecture surrounding them? Had they tried to go home after the Allies invaded Italy in 1943? I never did find out.

Regularly on my visits "downtown" I saw a predictable sight: small clusters of men and women, two or three, sometimes as many as six or seven--I recall no children--sitting on the pavement, knees drawn up to their chests, backs propped up against a wall, eyes half-closed to ward off the sun and the impertinent gaze of passersby like me. Men and women alike wore long, baggy, khaki shorts and billowing oversized blouses--British army issue, draping lean and bony frames. This motley lot did not belong in anybody's army. Back home I might have taken them for "bums." They were "bums" all right: the human detritus of Hitler's war against the Jews, their "looped and windowed raggedness" patched over with hand-me-downs, their "unfed sides" fed by benefactors. They had been rescued by and were now in the care of the Jewish soldiers in the Palestine Brigade of the British army, who were systematically scooping them up off the roads of Europe and transporting them by any means available to Palestine. Florence was a stop on an underground railroad that would eventually carry the liberated slaves to freedom in the holy land that was not yet the state of Israel.

What did I know about Jewish refugees in the summer of 1945? The post-Kafka penal colonies of the Nazis were called, invariably, what they called them: concentration camps, not death camps. I knew that these were cruel and inhuman places, but I did not know, nor did I know anyone who knew, that these were extermination factories, satanic mills where state-of-the-art assembly lines beyond the dreams of Detroit processed Jews for death. In Italy that July, I did not ponder, I neither heard nor read the now and forever unimaginable statistic: six million dead. Soldiers were entertained with an occasional, run-of-the-mill Hollywood movie; we were never shown films documenting the genocide, those images that by now we have seen many times--too many? too few? can anyone be sure?--and whose horrors, after many viewings, remain as difficult to credit now as when first we were stunned by them.

Only after returning to civilian life, after immersion in the literature of the Holocaust, after lacerating hours spent watching films of the Holocaust, could I begin to grasp the meaning of the scenes I had witnessed but been unable fully to interpret.

In Florence that summer, I observed almost daily a poignant moment in the story of twentieth-century barbarism: liberated death-camp inmates waiting stoically for what history had next to offer. But I was an observer who could not comprehend fully what he saw. The context in which I was situated prevented me from fully understanding this superficially humdrum sight. I was caught up in the excitement of a renewed mental life--the books I was reading, the interesting students and teachers I was meeting. My liberation, the greedy happiness I awoke to every morning of the 10 weeks at the university, usurped a deep or abiding concern for the Jewish refugees. I did not try to speak to these damaged and perhaps irreparably broken survivors squatting on their haunches, waiting to be herded again into trucks. More than linguistic barriers held me back. I never questioned any of the English-speaking soldiers of the Palestine Brigade to find out more about what they were doing. I was an aspiring intellectual, cocooned in fantasies of success and recognition. Perhaps I was too happy to feel more than an easy sort of sympathy, a comfortable compassion, for those wandering Jews in khaki.

If now I ask the question, "did you say to yourself: these are my people, my fellow Jews?" I'm not certain that the answer is "yes."

I did have Italian Jewish friends: a family I'd met in the spring in a small town in the north where they were in hiding. All the names are now gone, but I remember--and there are photos to fill the gaps in the memory tape--a widowed mother, a buxom daughter, and her husband who was a physician. The family was now back in their apartment in Milano--it was August--and the mother had invited me to visit them. I hitchhiked to get there. In Firenze I had chamber music, Mozart, and Boccherini. In liberated Milano I had Verdi, full scale and with a large orchestra in the pit. La Scala had been bombed. The "dogface" (as infantrymen used to be called) attended the opera en plein air with a "date," with a woman old enough to be his mother, whose daughter might have been his sister. We sat on wooden bleachers. Along with the other names, the name of the opera is gone; I surmise that those were La Scala singers performing.

Then we were strolling back to her place. She stopped at a kiosk to buy a newspaper and held it up so that I could read the screaming headline: the United States--we, our side, the forces of decency--had dropped a leviathan bomb beyond imagining on Japan. So now the war was finally over--finished, settled, terminated, all right--and we were the victors. Oh, what a lovely bomb!

Though the fighting had ended in Europe, before the attack on Hiroshima and Nagasaki soldiers like me lived in fear of being shipped off to serve in the Pacific. I'd had more than 18 months of front-line duty, beginning at Monte Cassino in November 1943 and ending on V-E Day in May 1945. Even so, I was far from confident that I'd earned enough credit ("points") to be mustered out. The Enola Gay's mission settled the question. The atom bomb was my reprieve. Two months later, I had my discharge papers in hand.

In graduate school, which I entered in the spring of 1946, the weapons were books, examinations, papers written and papers delivered. At the University of Chicago, I discovered Dwight Macdonald's radical magazine Politics and in it his brilliant essay making the political and moral case aaainst--to put it somewhat anachronistically--the nuking of Japan. His arguments seemed overwhelming, unanswerable, I thought then and continue to believe now. The student sheltering in the groves of academe was virtually a different person from the G.I. who had welcomed the Japanese holocaust with glee and gloating. Moral sensitivity seems to need mild weather for healthy growth. Imagining hand-to-hand combat on a Pacific atoll as my fated future in 1945, I was predictably focused on personal security. I must have been incapable of moral reflection at that time and in that place.

After almost 50 years of historical inquiry, archival revelations, and strenuously argued polemic; after the documentary films that bring Hiroshima and Nagasaki home to us, the perpetrators (and yet, at the same time, alienate us from the reality of the ghastly images); after America's unabating love affair with Japan's manufactured products, most Americans--a sizeable majority, I'd guess--continue to believe that it was a lovely bomb. And all the lovelier since its use can be justified by the dubious claim that it saved American lives, that without it the war could not have been brought to a speedy and dramatic conclusion.

Serves the bastards right! That was how I greeted Harry Truman's bomb. Is there any reason to believe that 50 years have purged this ugly, probably racist, but rarely acknowledged idea from the minds of my generation? Can we expect more humane attitudes from the generation of my children? From my grandchildren's generation? It would be nice to think so.

I wrestle with insights that, sad to say, played little or no part in my mental life that watershed summer of 1945. I seem to be staking out a position that asserts that reasoned, clear thinking and principled ideas require the luxury of disinterestedness and disengagement. On the other hand, I see the danger of an argument that plants morality--imprisons it, the critic might say--in the concrete of situational contingency. Don't expect soldiers to have refined or complex moral notions? To relativism such as that the retort must be: but soldiers, with their power to dispense life and death, must, more than most of us, be morally scrupulous. If not they, who? Can, let us say, a morally bankrupt teacher--I, a far from disinterested teacher, ask the question--can a corrupter merely of learning perpetrate as much evil as a corrupt soldier? I do not think so. Can one escape from this shabby and shallow relativism?

I return to the Jewish refugees, the atom bomb, and the Holocaust insofar as they impinged on my life that summer of 1945. Had I tried then to find a link connecting the two most cataclysmic events of the twentieth century, I surely would have seen in these unprecedented horrors a stark and simple moral antithesis: Einstein's gift to us in the free world--this good and providential bomb--was directed against a nation good and providential bomb--was directed against a nation allied to Germany's evil attempt to exterminate the Jewish people.

Arather different moral stance emerges half a century later: we live in a world in which there exists a Jewish state that undoubtedly possesses an atomic bomb and (insofar as such things are measurable) is determined if necessary to use it against its enemies.

Consider this apologia: we have "a history of three wars with larger neighbor{s}...the security issue...is an issue of survival...so given {our} history, {we} feel 'Well, we don't have to go all the way. But, God forbid, if there's a threat, at least we have the knowledge to go all the way, if nobody else comes to our rescue.'" In the quotation cited, it is not an Israeli but Benazir Bhutto, the prime minister of Pakistan, who is speaking (in an article that appeared in the May 15, 1994, issue of the New York Times Magazine); for Pakistan, she tells us, sees itself as a small country threatened by countries much stronger and enemies more numerous than it is. Twenty years ago, while living in Israel temporarily, I heard pretty much the same words from friends and relatives who insisted on Israel's need to have an atomic bomb in its arsenal.

There is, of course, a crucial difference between the Pakistani and Israeli rationalizations. The eschatological justification for the Israeli bomb--sometimes frankly stated, more often hidden and mute--is so dark and bitter that one hesitates to articulate it. The argument seems to be this: were Israel to face a possible genocidal war, one initiated this time (and hypothetically) by Arab/Muslim enemies, the Jewish people--and not just the state of Israel--have the right to use the nuclear option even if in so doing we become, reluctantly and tragically, the perpetrators of a second Holocaust.

You don't need to be a novelist to imagine a military crisis in which the Ariel Sharons (who are probably as influential in Jewish affairs in the United States as in Israel) clamor loudly (or perhaps discreetly behind closed doors) for an atomic strike against Israel's enemies. It is, of course, fruitless to speculate about the ifs and maybes that might convince Israel to use or not use the bomb "to defend itself." But we have left nevernever land for reality when we acknowledge that, as a consequence of the Nazi Holocaust, many Jews--perhaps the overwhelming majority of us, here and everywhere in the world--accept the proposition that Israel has the moral right to use nuclear weapons.

Starting with a humane and admirable resolution--"Never again!"--Jewish militancy arrives at a position satirized in Tom Lehrer's anti-war song of the 1960s: "We'll all go together when we go." Jews who as a people and a pseudorace have been victimized by millennial anti-Semitism now face a new threat. If we are seduced by the debased religion of Realpolitik, we have already succumbed to the threat; if, from the slaughter of the six million, Jewish casuistry asserts our right to become the agents of universal destruction--and all in the name of the slogan "Never again!"--Hitler has won the final battle.

Is it unfair to single out Israel as the prime example of the Massada complex in nuclear politics? Who knows how many other nations there are--Pakistan? China? Iraq? Russia? and, in today's newspaper, North Korea, the latest candidate--that might be willing to "go all the way"? Proliferation alarms the United States; ever since 1945 (and now more than ever), our leaders have been trying to put a stop to the spread of these nuclear arsenals. We? The only country to have used an atomic bomb against another people? A society which seems to look back, not with shame but with nostalgic pride, to the glory days when we were the sole owners of the bomb and the Soviets had not yet ended the monopoly? We, a nation whose leaders scoffed at Charles De Gaulle's determination to give France its own force de frapper. Here, however, received opinion had it that the general was arrogant--which was what he accused the Israelis of being, though the words he used were, as I recall, stiff-necked and stubborn.

It hardly behooves the United States to counsel nuclear continence to promiscuous nations, though Israel for geopolitical reasons happens not to be on our blacklist of delinquents. When the only remaining superpower disavows being willing to risk doomsday, thereby setting an example for the rest of the world to follow, the United States will have earned the right to chastise the proliferators. With equal justice it could be said that it hardly behooves me to preach nuclear piety to my Israeli cousins. I, too, once believed in, or at least failed to question, the bomb. Nevertheless, as someone who embraces the yin and yang of a Jewish-American identity, I reject the militarism of the two countries that are, of course, mine. Appalled by the Strangelovian lunacy that can contemplate a nuclear holocaust with equanimity, I would like to sever my spiritual ties to the United States and Israel.

In the innocent summer of 1945, I could not imagine a Jewish state. Even harder to imagine when Hiroshima and Nagasaki were burning would have been a Jewish state claiming the right to "go all the way" to Armageddon.