“A simple account of what is reported about the Jews killed in Ia
i or transported by train … is beyond any words, feelings or attitudes. A bleak, pitch-black, crazy nightmare.” Thus Sebastian in his diary on July 12, 1941. A few months earlier, in April 1941, the military dictator Antonescu told his ministers: “I’ll retreat into my fortress and let the crowd massacre the Jews. After the massacre, I’ll make order.” And in September 1941, after the Iai massacre, and after Romania entered the war on Germany’s side, Antonescu explained that the fight was not against the Slavs, it was against the Jews. “It’s a mortal combat. Either we win and the world will be purified, or they win and we become their slaves.”
In the autumn of 1941, the Jewish population of Bukovina began to be deported to Transnistria. On October 20, Sebastian writes: “An anti-Semitic dementia that nobody can stop. Nowhere are there any restraints, any reason …. I see pallor and fear on Jewish faces. Their smile, their atavistic optimism freeze up. Their old consoling irony dwindles away.” The Journal goes on to record the census of residents with “Jewish blood,” the “carnage in Bukovina and Bessarabia,” the obligation of Jews to give clothing to the state and of the Jewish community to pay a huge sum of money to the authorities, the ban on Jews selling goods in markets, the confiscation of skis and bicycles from Jews. “There is something diabolical in anti-Semitism,” we read in the entry on November 12, 1941. “When we are not drowning in blood, we are wading through muck.” For a rationalist such as Sebastian to use the word “diabolical” is a measure of the bestiality provoked by the “vulgar” anti-Semitism of his time.
As Sebastian’s journal proceeds between the blood and the filth, the “atavistic optimism” and the “consoling irony” grow dim. And the “internal adversity” of the Jews, with its self-criticism and its “spiritual autonomy”? The Journal itself illustrates the awful truth that those are the natural assumptions, the necessary assumptions, of the human condition, and in no way the self-consuming aberration of a particular people. Even when external hostility is everywhere, and internal adversity appears to be a forbidden or trifling luxury, critical introspection survives, and it becomes the instrument of the spirit’s survival.
As the individual becomes just an anonymous member of a threatened community, the solitude by which Sebastian defined himself changes, even if its substance does not alter. “We can never pay too high a price for the right to be alone”: for a besieged man, surely, this sounds like a frivolous understatement. For what is the “price” of the solitude of a whole community, a whole people? It defies any normal parameter of suffering. For this reason, the tone of the Journal is really remarkable. The intimate exchange between solitude and solidarity slowly gives way to a mournful compassion. The “old” private solitude allows itself to be welcomed by the new isolation of the persecuted group, in a wounded, coerced joining.
Under the pressure of hatred and horror, Sebastian’s writing maintains the “grace” of its intelligence, which evil does not succeed in destroying. Marked now by the star of the captive minority to which he has been returned, the writer attempts to enliven the emptiness of waiting. He listens to music; he reads; he writes; he sees friends. A large and moving part of the Journal focuses on friendship, especially on his friendship with Mircea Eliade, the “first and last friend.”
After the “death sentence” handed down to him by Nae Ionescu, the “hooligan” Hechter-Sebastian no longer claimed anything but the right to perfect solitude, “without half-memories, without half-loves, without half-truths.” In the sharply worse conditions of the following years, however, he proved to be still in the painful grip of Eliade, persisting in a friendship of halves of memory, love, and truth. The crisis of Sebastian’s friendship with Eliade grew steadily worse. As early as 1936, it was no longer possible for Sebastian to ignore Eliade’s political affiliations. “I would like to remove any political references from our discussion. But is that possible?” The answer is not long in coming: “The street reaches up to us whether we like it or not, and in the most trivial reflection I can feel the ever wider gulf between us …. There are awkward silences between us … the disappointments keep piling up — one of them being his involvement with the anti-Semitic Vremea.” (Vremea was a rather liberal weekly until the mid-1930s, when it started to “evolve” according to the spirit of the time.)
Sebastian is already grasping the character of Eliade’s politics, though his lucidity is distorted by sentimentality, and by his essentially apolitical vision. In 1937, however, a “long political discussion with Mircea” leads to a sad realization: “He was lyrical, nebulous, full of exclamations, interjections, apostrophes …. From all that I’ll just choose his (finally honest) statement that he loves the Guard, has hope in it, and awaits its victory.” In the same year, Eliade’s famous declaration of faith, “Why I Believe in the Triumph of the Legionary Movement,” was published in the movement’s paper Buna Vestire. It included the following question: “Can the Romanian nation end its life … ravaged by poverty and syphilis, overrun by Jews and torn apart by foreigners?”
It was not long before Eliade’s question found an answer in the humiliations and the threats that his former friend, the alien Sebastian, born Hechter, had to endure, as he faced being overrun at any moment by the local “patriots.” And further dialogue with Eliade only confirmed this. “I told him I was thinking of leaving the country,” Sebastian writes on January 16, 1938. “He agreed, as if it did indeed go without saying.” That is how it was: the “cleansing” of the country of its Jews was a self-evident ideal, for which the Legionary movement never ceased to agitate.
“I have only to walk in the door and suddenly there is silence.” People speak about their Jewish acquaintance in one way when he is in the room and in another way when he leaves the room. On December 7, 1937, Sebastian finds Eliade’s concealment of the truth “even more sad” than the terrible truth itself, which was that Eliade had traveled from village to village campaigning for the Iron Guard as a “propagandist” and also, it seemed, as a potential candidate of the Legion in the elections. Astounding reports reach Sebastian about what Eliade says in his absence. In March 1937, Eliade is disgusted by the “Jewish spirit” of a ballet. In 1939, at the time of the German invasion of Poland, Eliade says this: “The Poles’ resistance in Warsaw is Jewish resistance. Only yids are capable of blackmail by putting women and children in the front line, so as to take advantage of German scruples.” And the example of Poland, with Jewish “blackmail” and German “scruples,” inspires in Eliade equally profound considerations about Romania: “Only a pro-German policy can save us …. Rather than a Romania again invaded by kikes, it would be better to have a German protectorate.”
Sebastian’s link with Eliade continued intermittently, until the latter left Bucharest in 1940 for the Romanian embassy in London, where eyewitnesses described him as a propagandist for the Iron Guard. Later Eliade was sent as a diplomat to Lisbon, where his fascist convictions were given more or less disguised forms of expression. About Eliade’s time in Lisbon, Sebastian notes on May 27, 1942: “Now he is more of a Legionary than ever.” (After the war Eliade referred only equivocally and in passing to his guilt.*)
So why did Sebastian cling to this friendship with a man with whom he should have been “incompatible”? Why did he himself become an example of the ambiguities that he denounced? Surely Sebastian did not delude himself that the friendship would protect him from the danger all around him? No, there was a different reason. For a rational and gentle man such as Sebastian, the illusion of friendship provided the encouragement of a normal past. Memories are “the only paradise from which we cannot be expelled,” as the German poet Jean Paul observed. Moreover, Sebastian had a calm, resigned disdain for everything ideological and tribal. He had also a writer’s curiosity about the surprises and the ambiguities he observed in himself and those around him, and this, too, perhaps, made him tolerant of his fascist friend. As early as 1936, when the ever wider “gulf” between him and his “first and last” friend could be felt in “the most trivial reflection,” he asked in his journaclass="underline" “Will I lose Mircea for so little?”