I married, divorced, and during the war I was a correspondent with the Third Army. It was toward the very end of the war, in the last weeks, that the Steiner-Straus case came finally home to me.
We had crossed the Rhine; we were, in those weeks, all in a state of unrecognized battle shock, a kind of wind-up frenzy, and I, like some other correspondents, rode with a tank column running wild and free across Germany. For jeepmate, I had a daredevil photographer from one of the news weeklies, a man who had jumped with the paratroopers and made something of a legend of himself.
The drive from press camp to the front strung out longer each day, as the tank penetration went into high, and on those long rides, Frank and I took turns driving, and we played a kind of game. It was a game almost all men at war have played. The game was imagining a rape.
It began with tales of G.I.s, of a pair who had somehow ruled a German village for a day and had commanded the mayor to bring them two virgins. And how the townsfolk had finally conceded.
And somehow these tales evolved into a fantasy that we should find us a German girl and rape her. We had had our share of complaisant German girls and chocolate-bar girls, but this idea, this game, persisted, on the pretext that we would not truly have known war or known life until we had given ourselves this ultimate war experience.
Our game consisted in elaborating on the set-up: Some day on a road just opened by the tanks, with the infantry not yet come up to occupy the area, there would appear a lone girl…
The game held us together in a peculiar way. Only far back, in Chicago on my first job on the Globe, had I partnered so well. And here, as in those Chicago days with Tom Daly, it was because I felt my partner to be the real thing, the tough, complete newspaperman.
As for the imaginary game of rape, I told myself it gave vent to hatred burned deep into Frank in those early Normandy days when he had had it rough with his paratroop outfit. He had seen boys picked off while they hung in their caught silk in the trees, and he needed a revengeful release on the krauts.
Then one day we found the ideal situation. It came as we were drawing near the Elbe. Frank and I went a little farther forward than the others had gone. It was a nice open road, and Germans could be seen working in the fields here and there, as though there had never been a war.
As we rounded a bend, we saw a felled tree across the road. We pulled up. And there was a fraulein. She was walking along a field, carrying a lunch basket. She was everything we had specified in our game: young, perhaps seventeen, and very pretty.
Frank shouted, “Halt!” and she halted. “Come here!” She approached. We both got out of the jeep. Only a shallow ditch was between us and the girl. All around, the area was deserted. Moreover, we were beyond the final line; our army would never come here to receive complaints.
“Where are you going?” Frank demanded in pidgin German. She said she was fetching lunch to her father, in the field.
“Have you seen any Russians?”
“No,” she said, trying to keep her air of calm.
Frank looked at me. “This is it,” he said. And he ordered the girl, “Lie down.”
She stared at us.
“Lie down!” he commanded and pulled out his revolver. Though correspondents were not supposed to be armed, most of us carried pistols.
“Nein – nein-” the girl began to stutter.
I felt parched. All these weeks we had been building ourselves to this. Surely we had meant it. Surely I had meant it too.
And at the same time I felt terrified of Frank. He’d do it and then shoot her. I had shared it all the way, goaded him on; I had wanted it, too. And if I stopped him I was a quitter, a coward.
I laughed, a forced laugh. “Can it, Frank. The hell with her,” I said.
He gave me a wild look, as though he would slam me one. The whole thing could just as well have gone the other way. “It isn’t worth it,” I said. “The war’s over.”
He seemed to sway a little. Then he stuck back his revolver. He laughed. The girl gasped, turned and ran. We climbed into the jeep.
After the war I was living in New York, working on the foreign desk of a news service. One evening at a respectable kind of party of United Nations people and such, I met Ruth. She was there with her husband, an economist. She was sitting across the room from me, and for a moment we weren’t sure we recognized each other.
I got up and went to a refreshment table, and presently she stood beside me. “Yes, it’s me,” she said.
She looked nice. That was always the word, a nice girl, a nice woman. It was twenty-five years since I had seen her.
We filled in about our lives. Ruth had two kids in high school.
We didn’t speak of Judd. When the party broke up and we were both at the door in a little crowd, there was a moment of hesitation between us. Looking at her, I was thinking, It could have been. It all could have been. And it could all come back. And I thought, it could even have been, for Judd.
So I said, as she was about to invite me, “I suppose you’re in the phone book. I’ll give you a ring sometime.”
And I tended my job and married again, and we live in Norwalk.
I’m fifty this year. So is Judd Steiner.
So it happened that one day the news came through that Judd was going to have a parole hearing. And somebody around the place, an old-time newsman like myself, said, “Say, weren’t you…”
Later, I recalled Jonathan Wilk saying something about there being no thought of a chance for freedom for those two, “not until they are forty-five or fifty, when they have come into another phase of life”.
My editors put through this assignment for me to go and interview Judd in prison, for after all, perhaps better than anyone else still alive, they said, I knew the story. What I wrote about him, they said, might have a good deal to do with whether or not he would be released.
About the author
Meyer Levin (October 7, 1905 – July 9, 1981) was an American novelist who commented on the Leopold and Loeb case and wrote the 1956 novel Compulsion inspired by it. Levin had attended college with Leopold and Loeb at the University of Chicago, before the murder of Bobby Franks.
The novel, for which Levin was given a Special Edgar Award by the Mystery Writers of America in 1957, was the basis for the 1957 play Compulsion and the 1959 film based on it. Compulsion was the first ‘documentary’ or ‘non-fiction novel’ (“a style later used in Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood and Norman Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song”).
Levin was one of the first American journalists to become aware of the existence of Anne Frank’s diary, and he was also one of the first people to recognize the literary and dramatic potential of this document. He wrote to and met Otto Frank, the father of Anne Frank. Levin became convinced that he had a strong interest in the text, and he later became obsessed when Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett successfully adapted the diary into a hit play while the play Meyer Levin had written was rejected. His 30 years battle to have his play performed and the legal battles that resulted are covered in An Obsession with Anne Frank: Meyer Levin and the Diary by Lawrence Graver, as well as in the French-language book by his wife, Tereska Torres, “Les maisons hantees de Meyer Levin”, published by Editions Phebus (Paris).
