WHEN the Nazis found themselves face to face with defeat, not long before the close of the Second World War, they became panicky, confused, vengeful, exterminatory, and Wagnerian in a gruesome vein—they visualized a vast heroic funeral pyre on which all mid-Europe would be immolated; they were determined that others than themselves would be the first to meet the flames.
The two stories that follow come from that bad time toward the end of the drama, when the grandiose scenery collapsed and the lights flickered. This pair of stories offers, as it happens, examples of survivals that depended upon almost opposite talents—one, boldness; the other, caution.
Benjamin Weintraub, the central figure of the first of these accounts, was a natural leader, an easy athlete, one who could not resist probing, an improviser, an irrepressible escapist—not always brilliant in his solutions but always one to try. I met him, still in the enclosure of the Klooga Camp, near Tallin, Estonia, about a week after the culminating events of this story, and he and a couple of his friends laboriously told me about them with the help of a Polish-English dictionary. They could still hardly believe in their having been roused from the nightmare they had endured. I saw all too vivid evidence of the veracity of their wild words, for rains had, in the end, prevented the Nazi flames from doing but a moiety of the intended work of disposal.