I think and hope that I’m serious enough for all the rest to be completely and utterly indifferent.
Wednesday, 29 December
A dream on Monday night.
I’m at the University. I meet Onicescu in a corridor. He is leaving for Berlin — and tells me to leave with him. A moment later I am in a small room, at Nae Ionescu’s seminar. Here he comes. He asks me the time and notes my answer on a piece of paper. Then he asks the same question to the other students in turn, noting each reply under a special heading. The times given are not the same. Then Nae asks each of us to determine the right time — and gets us to sign our names. He turns to me and tells me that I speak with a Jewish accent. But immediately after that, he puts his hand on mine and adds that he is leaving on Saturday evening for Berlin.
Thursday, 30 December
“The town of Korosten has been abandoned after heavy fighting”—says this evening’s German communiqué.
Recently I haven’t noted anything in connection with the war. But some ten days ago, after a period when things had remained fairly stationary, the Russian offensive resumed with maximum intensity, at least in the Vitebsk and Zhitomir sectors.
Since the Cairo and Tehran conferences, things seem to have again entered an acute phase. Berlin has suffered a series of devastating air raids. In the North Atlantic a German ship of the line, the Schamhorst, was sunk three days ago. Everywhere, in both the Allied and the German camps, it is thought that a landing in the west is now imminent.
Just by reading the papers — because I have no opportunity and make no effort to listen to the radio — I gain the impression of a final stiffening of positions.
I can’t believe, however, that an offensive will begin in the west in the middle of winter. The Allies are exerting great psychological pressure on Germany, which is probably needed to prepare the blow at a later date.
Friday, 31 December
Certain gestures and habits, by force of repetition, have become almost like superstitions: a letter to Poldy, a book for Aristide, some records for Leni. I went to Socec to buy a calendar refill. This evening I shall go for a meal at Alice’s. I have hastily reread this notebook.
The 31st of December. Like a year ago, or two years, or three years. When did this year pass? It seemed so heavy, so foggy, so uncertain. And yet it went. It has passed and we are still alive.
But the war is still here beside us, with us, in us. Closer to the end, but for that very reason more dramatic.
Any personal balance sheet gets lost in the shadow of war. Its terrible presence is the first reality. Then somewhere far away, forgotten by us, are we ourselves, with our faded, diminished, lethargic life, as we wait to emerge from sleep and start living again.
Footnotes
1. This World War I novel, Itzhik Strul, Deserter, described the persecution of Jewish soldiers in the Romanian army.
2. Radu Beligan: actor.
3. Mircea Çeptilici: actor.
4. All the better — all the worse.
5. In English in the original.
6. British Council employee.
7. I am on the right track.
8. "Write it straightaway. You must. Straightaway. There's not a moment to lose."
9. "Prince, do you like the Jews?" — "Mind your manners! Our friend is a Jew."
1. "She could hardly open her legs."
2. Knights of idleness.
3. Wilhelm Filderman continued to be the de facto leader of the Romanian Jewish Community. He was deported to Transnistria because he constandy petitioned Antonescu, asking the Marshal not to deport his fellow Jews and opposed various anti-Semitic decrees and decisions.
4. Petre Tutea: philosopher, ardent follower of the Iron Guard.
5. In English in the original.
6. “Money troubles are no disgrace.”
7. Anatole de Monzie: French politician, a Vichy supporter, and a former socialist.
8. Everything hangs together.
9. Jean Mouton: director of the French Institute in Bucharest.
1. “I pretend to be living — but I am not alive. I drag myself along.”
2. “Are you Italian?”—“Yes, I am Italian.”—“Sir, you are no longer at war. Your country has made peace.”
3. “Our Father, Our King”—the first words of the Hebrew litany for the days of repentance.
4. Hitler took power on 31 January 1933, and Antonescu on 6, not 8, September 1940.
5. "Puts on a brave face in adversity."
6. "You know, I have always been for the British."
7. In English in the original.
8. "I was hungry, terribly hungry."
9. The reference is to the roundup of Jews in France.
1. The premiere of Ursa Mare, renamed Steaua fără nume, took place on 1 March 1944.
2. shit
1944
Saturday, 8 April 1944
Four days after the bombing, the city is still in the grip of madness. The alarm of the first moments (no one quite knew what was happening, no one could believe it. .) has turned into panic. Everyone is fleeing, or wants to flee. The streets are full of trucks and carts carrying all kinds of jumble, as if everyone were moving house in one vast tragicomedy.
Today a few streetcars started to run here and there, but most of the lines are still blocked. Half the city is without electricity. There is no water supply. The radiators do not work. Flocks of women and children come with buckets from various wells and fountains, where long queues have formed.
In an hour (and I don’t think the actual bombing lasted more than an hour), a city with a million inhabitants was paralyzed in its most vital functions.
The number of dead is not known. The most contradictory figures are bandied about. A few hundred? A few thousand? The day before yesterday Rosetti said 4,200—but that isn’t certain either.
Yesterday afternoon I went to the Grivita district. From the railway station to Bulevardul Basarab, not a single house was untouched. It is a harrowing sight. Dead bodies were still being dug up, and groans could still be heard beneath the ruins. On one street corner a group of three women, pulling their hair and tearing their clothes, let out piercing wails over a carbonized corpse that had just been taken from the debris. It had rained a little in the morning, and a smell of mud, soot, and burnt wood floated over the whole neighborhood.
It was an appalling, nightmarish vision. Being unable to pass beyond Basarab, I returned home with a feeling of revulsion, horror, and impotence.
Five years ago, when I was doing military service at Mogoşoaia, I passed every morning and evening through that station district. I avidly read the morning paper on the way out, and the evening paper on the way back, anxiously following the press dispatches. I knew that war was pressing down upon us. I knew that our fate was at stake in those dispatches, as we set off for the training fields, and the fate too of the shopkeepers noisily opening their shutters, and of all the people hurrying on foot to the market, the station, or the railway yards. But no one imagined the grim scene that would appear on a chilly spring day five years later, when the smoke of fire and massacre would hang over ruined houses.