ROMAN HALTER

Roman’s Journey

2007

AS SOON AS I COULD concentrate on the causes and effects of the Second World War, I began to make no allowance for Germans but took against the whole lot of them. Hitler and Nazism had been a blot on humanity, and the German nation was responsible. A Gestapo

official with the name of Doctor Six had put together a list of over thirty thousand Britons destined for summary execution in the event of a successful occupation of the country and my father was on it. My mother, Viennese and Jewish, would have been deported and murdered. As I attempted to explain to myself the inexplicable, I found that the German language and the literature, even the poetry, couldn’t help but convey an uncritical sense of superiority. In culture as in soldiering, Germans were able to do what other people couldn’t or wouldn’t.

In one of his several successful but spasmodic incarnations, my old Oxford friend Alasdair Clayre was an architect. Through the Architectural Association he met Roman, an artist and designer especially in the medium of stained glass. Alasdair introduced him here, there and everywhere. Gentle in manner, usually smiling and speaking with the well-controlled bravura of a foreign accent, Roman had the air of a man of destiny. Friends with a house on the Costa Brava invited us at the same time, and there he swam with one or the other of my small daughters on his back. Physically very strong, he lifted a full gas cylinder as though it was a bottle of milk.

Sometimes he’d talk about the European past or the Middle Eastern present, always succinctly as if there was nothing more to be said. He’d send me war-time reminiscences that he’d written up and published and gave me a landscape he’d painted of Jerusalem, quite a miniature but glowing with color.

So I was aware that he had been a teenage slave laborer making Wehrmacht uniforms in the Lodz ghetto at the orders of Albert Speer, Hitler’s Minister of Production. So I was aware that in February 1945 he’d been going through Dresden on a Death March from one center of genocide to another when the firestorm bombing of that city started; the SS guards ran away and Roman and others jumped up to their necks into the freezing Elbe and stood cheering the explosions and the flames – I think of those shivering fugitives whenever the firestorm is treated as a war crime. So I was aware that Roman alone of his immediate family had survived Auschwitz. Some 800 Jews had lived in the small Polish town of Chodecz, and Roman was one of only three of them still alive at the end of the war. When he then returned on foot to what had been his family’s house, strangers had appropriated it and they shut the door in his face.

Roman had been present the day that Albert Speer had inspected the workshop making Wehrmacht uniforms in the Lodz ghetto. The director, a well-known Jewish industrialist, had seen fit to pin on his striped prisoner clothing the medals he had won in the First World War. Then and there, one of Speer’s adjutants had ripped the medals off and knocked the man to the floor. Published in 1995, Gitta Sereny’s book about Albert Speer has the telling subtitle “His Battle with Truth.” Hard-headed as she was, she came to the conclusion that Speer hadn’t been lying at the Nuremberg trial to save himself from the gallows, that he really was a lesser monster than the other defendants. Working on her book, she “grew to like” him, injecting into her account a sentimental tendency to excuse him. Roman knew better. After Speer had served his twenty-year sentence, Roman wrote to him and they met. Speer remembered the incident at Lodz, agreed that he had been content to watch the beating of the director and above all that he was responsible for dispatching the workshop slaves to Auschwitz in the knowledge that they would be murdered. That was enough for Roman. All he wanted was the truth.

Nothing could have prepared him for the unprecedented dreadfulness he experienced on his journey. When he was young, crime had taken the place of law in his life and it would have been only normal if he had expressed himself with rage, hatred and bitterness. In that case, though, this book would have taken its place as one more testimony among the many others already half-neglected on the library shelves. Roman’s complete absence of anger and self-pity instead makes for a lasting renewal of humanity.