A day like any other continues amid the corpses and fires.
Monday, 3 July
Air raids last night and this morning. It seems that Malaxa and Distribute were the hardest hit. Nothing in the city center, which looks its normal self. But all day thick clouds of smoke have been floating across.
Tuesday, 4 July
It was a quiet night, but the sirens sounded again in the morning. Distant rumbling and the noise of engines.
In Russia there has been a major breakthrough in the center and a rush of unclear movements. Vitebsk, Orsha, Mogilev, and Bobruisk have fallen one after the other. Yesterday Minsk. Today Polotsk.
In Normandy things have not moved much since the fall of Cherbourg.
Saturday, 8 July
I have finished Les paysans with some difficulty. The book’s construction is obscure and unwieldy. A surfeit of characters clog up the action, without themselves being clearly individualized. You lose them along the way, unable to remember them. The preparation is meticulous, to the point of appearing forced, for a plot that is eventually resolved with fewer and much simpler elements. But it is an unfinished work — and I don’t know what Balzac would have done in the end with all this material.
We have had four days of quiet. No alerts. The rainy weather gives us a little security.
I have translated a short play by Guitry for Birlic. The money from it will keep me afloat — we’ll see how it goes later.
Fighting continues at the fronts, but with no great change.
Doubts sometimes creep in about whether it will all be over this year. Could it last another winter?
No, no. It’s too early to draw conclusions. We are in the middle of the summer campaign; all outcomes are possible.
I am always alone: not desperate but not happy; rather lethargic and somnolent.
Monday, 24 July
An air raid last night at one. Again we were out of the habit. It lasted a short time but seemed to be intense.
Nothing looked different in town this morning. The bombs probably fell on the suburbs.
On Friday an attempt was made on Hitler’s life at the German high command; it doesn’t seem to have changed anything.
Somewhere in the background, the process of disintegration spreads like a cancer.
In Poland the Russians have occupied Lwow and Lublin.
Friday, 28 July
We’re having another run of bad luck: an alert this morning; air raid last night; alerts both morning and evening the day before yesterday.
Last night’s bombing was terrible. We felt all the while that waves of aircraft were heading for our neighborhood. The shaking was the kind of thing you feel in an earthquake. The walls rocked. A cloud of dust blew open the cellar door and brought with it a smell of burning.
When I left the shelter, huge flames could be seen near the Central Post Office and the Metropolitan Church. I walked through the streets with Benu, Mircea, and Nora. It seemed as if a fire in Selari would engulf the whole city. White and yellow flames were bursting forth on all sides. Up the Dimbovita toward Calea Rahovei, a number of smaller fires marked out a large circle.
I haven’t been into town today, but apparently all the fires have burnt themselves out and the disaster is not as we imagined it last night.
What is the point of these air raids? Are they the prelude to a Russian offensive? Are they an attempt to shift Romania from its alliance with the Germans, now that the front in Poland has collapsed and the internal German front is tottering?
You try to find a justification, a political rationale! Otherwise the bombing would be too much of a random affair.
Bialystok has fallen in Poland, as have Dvinock in Lithuania and Narva in Estonia.
At least in the center, the German resistance seems to have been pulverized. Warsaw is the main immediate objective.
Meanwhile, farther to the south, the fall of Stanislav7 and the fighting around Kolomyya mean that the offensive may move down toward the Moldavian front.
In any event, it is hard to believe that the Romanian front, overtaken as it has been by events, will continue to remain stable.
Monday, 31 July
Another air raid this morning. It wasn’t very long or particularly heavy, but the engines in the sky had a sinister sound. For a few moments I thought that Friday night’s ferocious attack was going to be repeated.
If, as people have been saying for a few days, Turkey breaks off diplomatic relations with Germany (expected for the 2nd of August), the availability of closer bases could easily make the bombing catastrophic for us. The war seems to be approaching the end. It may all be over in ten weeks. The question is how we can survive these final weeks in one piece.
I spent the whole of yesterday at a farm not far from Bucharest, in an enchanting house like a stage set for Jocul de-a vacanţa.
Thursday, 3 August
Turkey has broken off relations with Germany.
The president of Finland has resigned and been replaced by Mannerheim. This is interpreted as a prelude to fresh peace negotiations.
In France an American push toward Rennes threatens to isolate the whole of the Breton peninsula, in a repetition of the Cotentin operation.
In the east the Russians are simultaneously attacking Warsaw, Riga, and Memel. In Italy, Florence is still holding out, but not for much longer.
As the situation grows more acute, we become more and more impatient. Yesterday and today we were constantly overexcited, as if news of something definitive might arrive at any moment.
Monday, 7 August
It is hard to follow what is happening in France. The German front, broken in both the west and the south, is crumbling away. In Brittany the “Atlantic wall” lies flat and useless. The Americans are inside Brest, Saint Nazaire, and Lauriau, while the respective German garrisons still hold the fortifications that were supposed to defend them from the sea. Armored thrusts crisscross the whole of the German rear, suddenly springing up where no one expects them. The operation is identical to the German advance in May 1940—only so far on a lesser scale. Paris is not excluded as an Allied objective: if things continue at this pace, anything is possible.
Tuesday, 8 August
I have written the scenario for a play. Act One: a perfect outline, scene by scene, with great wealth of material. Act Two: less detailed. Act Three: completely general, except for the denouement. For a moment this afternoon, working my thoughts out on paper as they jostled for my attention, I was in the grip of a kind of fever (my old fever that makes me a little dizzy when I “see” a book or a play). I felt impatient: I’d have liked to get straight down to work; I wanted to tell someone the great news.