The War of Little Things

A review of David Chrisinger’s The Soldier’s Truth: Ernie Pyle and the Story of World War II

“I’ve got something I want you to have,” Grandpa Art told me, apropos of nothing, “wait here.” Pre-double knee replacement, it took him some time to climb the stairs to the second floor of the moderately chintzy two-story house he shared with his wife, my Grandma Jo, in Delaware, Ohio. My dad—their eldest—and I had flown out from Oregon for 4^th of July weekend that year, a rare trip to his home state for a visit with the grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins.

A deeply awkward teenager at the best of times, I was also deeply uncool at 15-16, and as such I had no issue leaving home if it meant getting to spend time with my only living grandfather. It certainly wasn’t a hardship: Arthur Kambury was a delight to be around. He was always quick with a funny story, a fascinating family anecdote, or a jazzy riff on his old trumpet. He loved to entertain people, especially family. His laugh was infectious, and I can still hear the whistling sibilance of his S’s when he spoke.

Our love for each other was born out of our relationship as granddaughter and grandfather, naturally, but it was deepened by our shared interest in World War II history. Unlike a lot of the men I’d already encountered in my young life who’d questioned, even interrogated, my sincere interest in the war, Grandpa Art never so much as blinked. It would be years before I truly understood how important that steadiness was to me, and how profound an expression of love it was on his part.

When he returned from his sun-drenched office on the second floor, soft shoes chafing against low-pile oatmeal colored carpet, Grandpa Art was smiling. Coming to a standstill in front of me at the dining room table where he’d left me in eager anticipation (what kid doesn’t love getting a present from their favorite grandparent?), he barely paused to catch his breath before holding out his gift to me.

“A book!” is what I think I said. Probably, since that’s my usual reaction to such a gift. (Honestly, I think my obsession with books is hereditary.) Grandpa Art certainly loved them. And I could tell he loved this book, if only because it was already so visibly worn, and it was one of the few books he ever gifted me—knowing, perhaps, that I wouldn’t need a lot of help growing my own personal library over my lifetime. But the way he handed it to me, the way he held my shoulder for a moment after, the way he talked to me about it, felt like I was being given the one book he thought I needed to own now, that he needed to give me himself, before I followed this path of study, however informal, any further.

Wrapped with librarian-level precision in crystal clear cellophane, the faded remnants of the brick red first edition hardcover dust jacket were still easy to read. The pages inside were yellow with age and probably smoke from my grandpa’s four-decade, four-pack-a-day smoking habit; the text was printed in columns of two, a hallmark of books printed during the war.

I was most struck, however, by the face on the cover looking over my left shoulder: Below a broad bald dome haloed by cotton whisps of white hair (features, I immediately thought, that closely resembled my own grandpa) was the disembodied head and neck of a middle-aged man who wore a furrowed expression of consternation above a thin-lipped open mouth, hovering large over a shadowy line of American soldiers, their helmeted heads dipped low, stretching backwards, shrinkingly, until they seemed to fall off the edge of the jacket and into space itself.

This was my introduction to Ernie Pyle.

***

Years after Grandpa Art gave me his first edition wartime copy of Pyle’s bestselling Brave Men, I jumped at the chance to receive a galley of David Chrisinger’s latest and, in a breathless ask to my fellow WBT editors, to write about this remarkable travel-memoir-meets-biography about that whip-thin chain-smoking Hoosier who told America as much of the unvarnished story of World War II as he humanly could (and as much as the war department’s censors would allow).

A prescient and engrossing story, Chrisinger intricately weaves moments of memoir and hard journalism with incredibly granular and well-rendered studies of Pyle’s life, the parts of war he witnessed, and the people he met, knew, and loved. This is history writing, which means these are rigid threads—I can begin to imagine the author caning a chair—and Chrisinger maneuvers them over and under each other with enviable deftness.

More importantly, he prioritizes them correctly: on the biographical relief map of the home front(s), mountains, valleys, and beachheads (“bitchheads,” as they were at times called by American infantrymen) of Ernie Pyle’s dynamic life, Chrisinger’s crisply written accounts of his own travels across North Africa and Western Europe rests like carefully laid cling film, transparent (this is a fairly straightforward narrative structure) but strong (I couldn’t put the book down, and not only because of personal bias).

Here, the author operates in the true spirit, as I understand it, of Ernie Pyle. He offers us a portrait, flawed and faceted, of a “middle-aged travel writer without any experience covering combat, the military, or foreign affairs.”

A man—nothing more, nothing less.

Ernest Taylor Pyle was born in Dana, Indiana in 1900, a farmer’s son; neither of Pyle’s parents had more than an 8^thgrade education. A shy, bookish child among small-town sharecroppers, his world was comprised almost entirely of humble individuals on the blue-collar scale; grandiosity, one could argue, was not in his vocabulary. In time he picked up the grease pencil and began wending his way up and down and all around the United States, befriending “pilots…outside Washington, DC…lumberjacks in the Pacific Northwest…bellhops and bartenders…” many of whom would one day be fighting in the war Pyle reported on.

By the time Pyle stepped foot on Algerian soil, he had spent most of his life churning out slice-of-life columns for the local paper, a skillset that would serve him well on the frontlines and would make him the correspondent Americans came to trust most during the war. “It was his familiarity and kinship with ‘unimportant small people and small things,’ as a writer for Time put it in the summer of 1944, that would suddenly become enormously important to millions of readers when the American involvement in the war began.”

Indeed, it was Pyle whose “version of the war…became the version America chose to remember.” Some of Pyle’s contemporaries were quoted referring to him as “more of a propagandist” than a journalist, “a public relations man [who] sold a story about the war that omitted more truth than it espoused.”

But to the folks back home with family overseas, reports about generals and machinery and troop movements—the cold, hard facts of war—meant almost nothing. To them, Pyle’s approach to describing the war, “not the mode of strategic overview, but that of moral intuition” was far more valuable. As the author writes, “Americans at home needed [Pyle] to explain the war to them, and what life for their sons and husbands was really like. If those who made it home were ever going to find some semblance of peace, Pyle realized, the American people needed to be able to understand why their boys froze at the sound of trucks backfiring, why the smell of diesel or copper transported them back to some shell-pocked battlefield, why they were coarsened and reluctant to talk about all they endured. It was the least they could do.”

Of course, no biography of Ernie Pyle the man would be complete without the woman at the center of his life. Geraldine Elizabeth “Jerry” Siebolds, Pyle’s relationship with her, and their fascinating dynamic, rightfully takes up as much space in the book as Chrisinger or Pyle do. Many of the letters quoted throughout seem to be from those Pyle wrote to Jerry while overseas, and they feature some of the most transparent writing about the war coupled with some truly sweet expressions of love and devotion.

References also abound to what could be considered affairs, but in the context of Jerry and Ernie’s relationship take on the shape of what we now might consider an “open” marriage. Jerry struggled with severe mental illness (most likely a form of bipolar disorder), a kind I personally recognize all too well, and Chrisinger does a fine job of depicting it here without judgment. (I was moved to see the author include a note in the frontmatter mentioning references to suicide in the book; he also provides the relevant hotline(s) for those readers who might need them.)

Pyle himself only ever seems to express despair over Jerry’s health and discusses the other women in his life with her freely. They share in each other a depth of love and mutual respect that seems impossible to maintain, because it is—with Pyle constantly overseas out of his immovable sense of obligation to the “goddamn infantry” and Jerry’s alcoholism and drug abuse combined with her mental illness, the pair openly acknowledge in multiple letters that their relationship seems doomed no matter how much they wish it were otherwise. They divorce; they stay together. Ernie writes about war because he must, but also because it pays Jerry’s medical bills, which he also must do because he loves her more than he hates the war. The fame that comes with his columns is indulged only barely so that she never lacks for anything, including round-the-clock in-home care and multiple visits to psychiatric hospitals and sanitariums.

It’s a fraught, destructive relationship, but one that is also full of love and respect and understanding. In the hands of a lesser writer, it’d be all too easy to reduce Jerry to a troublesome housewife, a thorn on the stem of Pyle’s upwardly mobile rose, but Chrisinger understands that nothing is further from the truth, and the truth is abundant in the countless letters the couple sent back and forth to each other. It’s also in the letters Pyle wrote to the others in his life, including his editor, his friends, and his few but cherished lovers: Pyle was a deeply loyal, loving man, who could be both to a fault, and his relationship with Jerry was as inextricable as his relationship to the war. She supported him in his pursuit of telling Americans the truth about the war even as she spiraled out in his absence, and she held the fort back at their home in Albuquerque, New Mexico as long as she could, and when she couldn’t, he supported her in turn.

It’s Jerry who, in “a letter Ernie would never receive,” expresses the sentiment that so many other Americans felt toward the correspondent: “I am thankful for whatever it is that has made me feel through the years that as long as you were somewhere, nothing could be completely wrong—or hopeless.”

The two most important relationships in Pyle’s life, his wife and his war, have equal airtime in The Soldier’s Truth, and the book is an even more remarkable accomplishment for it.

Indeed, The Soldier’s Truth further adds to my theory that some of the best war history writing isn’t written by greyed British historians or the generals who spent their war miles behind the line, but by people who, like Pyle, have lived their lives close to the ground, or in some cases, in a foxhole a few feet below it. The bulk of my personal library that is just war history is comprised of [a not inconsiderable number of] books written by individuals exclusively about individuals. Both philosophically and in practice, I leave the minutiae of things like artillery technicalities, troop movements, combat tactics, and top-brass politics out of it—as much as is possible, anyways. Because the “underbelly” of war isn’t the underbelly at all, but the whole damn digestive system: it’s the people who fight, and the people who die, and the people they leave behind.

The reason we remember Ernie Pyle, and the reason I suspect my grandpa gave me that copy of Brave Men, is because Pyle understood this fact better than anyone. Better than any other correspondent reporting from the ETO, anyways.

So, if you’ve ever wanted a “worm’s eye view” history of the North African and European Theater of Operations, The Soldier’s Truth is your book. Put another way, speaking as someone who edits this stuff for a living, The Soldier’s Truth is a phenomenal example of the hybrid memoir—a book that roots a big subject in a personal narrative—at work. It is a course correction, the kind American classrooms desperately need, to say nothing of the general adult reading public. Perhaps most importantly (to me anyways), it’s a book that does what all genuinely good books with good writing in them do: it makes you think, and it makes you feel. It’s the kind of writing Pyle became famous for, became beloved for, the kind of writing we remember even after the fighting has long since ended.

Following Chrisinger across Tunisia, Sicily, mainland Italy, and France, we are taken on a vivid, emotional road trip across space as well as time: As I read scenes from the author’s time in Normandy, I was transported back to the four separate occasions I’ve visited that particular battlefield, most recently in 2019 for the 75^th anniversary of D-Day, when I stood on a bluff similar to the one Chrisinger describes here, one overlooking the long, snaking French coastline from Pointe du Hoc to far-off Sword Beach.

In Tunisia, the author’s interpreter, Yomna, guides him as part of his tour of Kasserine Pass to a field of worn-down rubble that was once her family’s compound. It had been destroyed during the war, she explains, but “we can’t prove who did it, so we don’t know which country [Germany or the US] to ask for damages.” A few pages later, while sitting down for lunch, the author describes hearing what sound like far off explosions coming from the nearby Mount Chambi, which had become an al-Qaeda stronghold in recent years. “That’s the army,” Yomna tells him. “They must have spotted a terrorist.”

It’s the perfect encapsulation of my other theory, which is that most wars, especially one as big and all-encompassing and globally destructive and devastating as World War II, don’t end. In many cases, the fighting literally never stops, but is instead taken up by younger and younger generations as the older ones die out, or move up the ranks, or flee at their own risk. It’s not hard to draw a line, however jagged, from Pyle’s war to our own. Not if you look hard enough. The author himself draws the line all the way to the current war in Ukraine:

“War really was hell, no matter who told you different. But sometimes it was necessary, especially when some purported great power felt that its proper place in the world was to invade, conquer, and subjugate its sovereign neighbors because it had the power to do so, and because some intoxicating ahistorical claim to greatness that helped salve the humiliations wrought the last time the world went to war.”

I think anyone who’s read and genuinely appreciates Ernie Pyle’s work as a war correspondent will appreciate the tack Chrisinger took with his approach to covering the man’s life by retracing the long, arduous steps leading up to his death. We follow the author sweating, breathless, up mountains and quietly along sandy beaches in the middle of winter; we attempt to speak foreign languages and drink the local because it’s what you do when you travel, especially when the local is three fingers of a truly unique ’44 vintage, a “premixed calvados cocktail” some “enterprising residents…designed…which the Americans preferred to straight apple brandy.”

It’s the kind of detail Pyle would have loved (and a detail that literally made me shout, “You lucky bastard!” out loud when I read it).

Also to the author’s credit is his understanding that while it’s pointless judging historical characters against modern values, it behooves us who do write about those historical characters to point out their objective flaws regardless. In the case of Chrisinger with Pyle, the author does his due diligence in rendering the man honestly: Amid his worsening battle with what is now recognizably alcoholism, we see Pyle struggle with depression, his marriage, his resentful relationship to the fame that brought in the amount of money required to care for Jerry during his long absences, and his toxic attachment to the war, itself.

In one of the last chapters of the book, we read some of Pyle’s descriptions of the Japanese soldier and can easily recognize his renderings of them as being deeply racist; even after exposure to the enemy outside of combat, he struggles to adjust his thinking. “In Europe we felt our enemies, horrible and deadly as they were, were still people,” whereas “the Japanese are looked upon as something inhuman.” He would later describe them as “human enough to be afraid of us.” Sentiments that are perhaps not surprising given the sheer amount of explicitly racist and xenophobic propaganda the U.S. put out during the war, let alone the fact that there were still thousands of Japanese American citizens being forcibly interned on U.S. soil in 1945.

In all, Chrisinger offers us a detailed, unsparing, and empathetic—but never pitying—biography of a man who had plenty of chances to turn the job over to someone else but chose not to, kept choosing not to, because to do so in his mind would dishonor the doughboys, both living and dead, who’d come to see him as one of their own.

The combat scenes Chrisinger renders throughout The Soldier’s Truth embody this sentiment well. He relies almost exclusively on direct quotes and lines pulled from Pyle’s columns, veterans’ recollections, and postwar histories. Very rarely does he editorialize for the sake of it. But when he does, Chrisinger shines as a writer unto himself: One night in Italy, he writes, “The air bit a little. Not too sharply. The soothing sound of gentle surf massaging the sand was a comfort at first. Then, walking along the sea’s dying edge in the melancholy winter light, I thought about life on the beaches during that miserable winter of 1944, about young lives snuffed out capriciously. After nearly a half mile of walking, it struck me that life at Anzio was not separate from death; they were knit as tightly as the threads in a carpet.”

Or, in a beautifully restrained rendering of the first moments of the landings at Omaha Beach:

“As the first wave of landing craft drew close to shore, the deafening roar stopped, quickly replaced by German artillery rounds crashing into the pewter-colored water all around them. The flesh under the men’s sea-soaked uniforms prickled. That many of them would die was a matter of necessity. Which of them would die, exactly, was a matter of circumstance—and they knew it. So, they waited, barely daring to breathe.”

My favorite history books all have this in common: They all recognize, as Pyle did, that as ugly as war is, it is often marked by moments of the kind of exquisitely painful beauty that steals the breath from your lungs. Both should be written about in order to paint a more complete picture of what it is like to go to war. In Chrisinger’s case, these moments of beauty (his and Pyle’s blended description of flying over the Atlas Mountains at sunset comes to mind) are balanced, sometimes in the same sentence, with brutal renderings of men in combat or the aftermath of it that made the hair stand up on the back of my neck.

The author’s depiction of Jerry’s suicide attempt with a pair of scissors—a gift, he notes, from the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus to Ernie years before—is harrowing, but not overly descriptive, as Chrisinger acutely understands the profound value of restraint when it comes to portraying such a thing on the page. (Jerry, a woman of wanderlust and immense intelligence and creativity, whom Ernie’s readers knew well as “That Girl,” died seven months after her husband did, of “acute uremic poisoning,” in November 1945.)

It’s only in the context of combat that Chrisinger lets the horror truly rear its head, and even then, he lets Pyle take the reins. In one of Pyle’s most famous columns, written in the immediate aftermath of D-Day, he wrote: “As I plowed out over the wet sand of the beach…I walked around what seemed to be a couple of pieces of driftwood sticking out of the sand. But they weren’t driftwood. They were a soldier’s two feet. He was completely covered by the shifting sands except for his feet. The toes of his G.I. shoes pointed toward the land he had come so far to see, and which he saw so briefly.” Later that summer, he attempted to describe myriad scenes after battles had moved on from an area, drafting line after anaphoric line:

“From the scattered green leaves and the fresh branches of trees still lying in the middle of the road.

From the wisps and coils of telephone wire, hanging brokenly from high poles and entwining across the roads.

From the gray, burned-powder rims of the shell craters in the gravel roads, their edges not yet smoothed by the pounding of military traffic.

From the little pools of blood on the roadside, blood that had only begun to congeal and turn black, and the punctured steel helmets lying nearby.”

By the time he left Jerry for the Pacific, we understand that Pyle had reached a critical breaking point as a man and as a correspondent. Exhausted, sickly, stuck, and missing Jerry terribly but needing to be away from her, he oscillated between hyper-productivity and complete collapse regularly as he hopped, island-to-island, from Guadalcanal to Guam to Okinawa with the First and Third Marine Divisions and the 77^th Infantry Division, among others.

Alcohol became a mainstay of Pyle’s writerly tableau—if he was at his typewriter, he was probably smoking a cigarette with a drink close at hand. “Not even the end of the war, not even victory and that last trip home, would be able to bring back all the people killed or counteract the damage done to the war’s survivors,” Chrisinger writes of Pyle’s mindset toward the end of his life. “By the time the unconditional Allied victory was within grasp, Ernie had come to believe that there was simply no way the war could ever simply be a story with a happy ending.”

Indeed, one of the few detriments to a book about Ernie Pyle is knowing the ending at the start. The Allies win. Pyle is killed by a machine gun round to the head on the island of Ie Shima, during the Battle of Okinawa, in April 1945. In terms of narrative stakes, it’s about as anticlimactic as you can get. Chrisinger, to his credit and to the strengthening of an already strong narrative, embraces this fact of his subject, and it results in what I would classify as one of the finest obituaries to come out of this or any war involving the United States—a piece of writing that not only exemplifies who Ernie Pyle was in life, but underlines the importance of him as a citizen correspondent among citizen soldiers.

“Pyle was embraced by enlisted men, officers, and a huge civilian public as a voice who spoke for the common infantryman,” he writes. “With his traumas in Sicily, Italy, and France, he had, in essence, become one of them. After sharing so much of their experience, their pain and their purpose, he understood better than most how gravely war can alter the people who must see it and fight it and live it. He knew that many survivors would come home with damage that is profound, aching, and long lasting. It was a truth that he found hard or even impossible to communicate to his readers back home—and it’s a truth that is still difficult and troubling now, all these decades later.”

***

One of the many downsides of losing loved ones when you’re young, I realized recently, is this tendency to think of questions you wish you’d asked them in life but thought of too late. “Staircase wit,” or l’esprit de l’escalier; that moment when you think of the perfect response (usually a pithy one) to the person at the top of the stair’s words only when you’ve just reached the very bottom.

I have plenty of these moments, on a very regular basis, and the worst ones aren’t the witty rejoinders I wish I’d lobbed at this or that rude person, but the questions I wish I’d asked my grandpa while he was alive. Most of them are questions I was never brave enough to ask, despite knowing deep down that he would have been incredibly generous with his answers; toward the end of his life, Grandpa Art shared with me, during what would end up being one of our last phone conversations, the story of him shooting the shit with some buddies one afternoon during his time stationed in India. “I walked away for a minute,” he told me, meaning of course it could have been hours, but time can make even the strongest memories a little fickle, “and when I came back, they’d disappeared. I found out later they’d been roped into going to the Pacific, and I never saw them again.”

The subliminal, ghastly horror of it was in his voice, so I didn’t feel an immediate need to ask how the memory sat with him. I was simply honored to at last receive a piece of my grandpa’s war story, the true one, not just the one he’d spent his life burnishing into a series of charming anecdotes about trumpet playing and beer stealing and shooting off rounds into the air because he was young and bold and far from home (the last two, of course, being closely related). Both are true, in their own way, but measured by Pyle’s yardstick, only one touches on what it was actually like for the average American servicemember to be anywhere in the world during the war. And like so many who’ve seen war, my grandpa kept the darkest truths of that experience close to his chest, because how could anyone begin to understand?

Somehow, he knew I would. In his absence I try not to punish myself for not trusting that more. But I do wish I’d asked him their names, if he’d tried looking them up after the war; if he was scared about being sent to the Pacific, too, or if, like Pyle, he’d been resigned to it as a fact of his existence as a soldier in wartime. I would have loved to know how he felt when he found out Ernie Pyle died. If he, like Robert Capa, “drank himself stupid in silence,” or if he picked up his trumpet and played “Taps” while his fellow soldiers stood at attention and saluted the horizon, in the direction they knew Ernie Pyle, “the rail-thin son of an Indiana tenant farmer,” now lay dead.

Whatever he felt in the moment, however he mourned, perhaps it meant more to my grandpa that he’d found someone he could share Pyle with, even decades after the fact; they were both wordsmiths, after all, and war writers, ourselves a niche bunch, tend to recognize other war writers. Perhaps Grandpa Art giving me his timeworn copy of Brave Men was as much a gesture of that recognition as it was a lesson-by-proxy in writing about World War II, namely, in the only way that did it any justice.

As Pyle handwrote in his final, unpublished missive, a note found on his body before he was buried: “To you at home they are columns of figures, or he is a near one who went away and just didn’t come back. You didn’t see him lying so grotesque and pasty beside the gravel road in France. We saw him, saw him by the multiple thousands. That’s the difference.” Shadowed men all in a line, falling off the edge of the dust jacket.

Look harder, I now realize Pyle’s face hovering above them seems to say: Do not look away. This is not a story with a happy ending. How could it be? It is a war story. Tell it anyways.

To some people outside our circle, Charles Rist was seen as a saintly hero. Charles Rist, our grandfather, was a famous economist, and vice-governor at La Banque de France. He was among the first to sign Zola’s “J’Accuse,” in a public letter defending Alfred Dreyfus. It was a courageous act for a man of the establishment. For this gesture, he was condemned by some as a nefarious sinner.

My most vivid memory of my paternal grandfather is that he ran away from the Villa Amiel in Versailles—where he lived with his wife and mother-in-law, Olga Herzen—early on January 1, 1950. The Rist home had been designed and built for Olga Herzen at the time of her marriage.

Grand-Papa’s chauffeur-driven Hotchkiss rushed him to Paris, while at the same time, the Russian Embassy delegation sped away from the capital toward his home, to honor our great-grandmother, the surviving daughter of Alexander Herzen. Her aristocratic father had written eloquently at the turn of the century, being the first to advocate the abolishment of serfdom and the distribution of land to peasants. In exile, he published his famous newspaper The Bell outside Russia. His writings had sparked the Russian Revolution. If Karl Marx was the Revolution’s father, Herzen could be credited with being its grandfather.

The Soviets manning the Russian embassy in 1950 demonstrated their undying admiration for Herzen by delivering to Herzen’s only surviving child, Olga, the gift of one hundred roses on New Year’s Day. She became a hundred years old that year.

Each magnificent rose was an intense, brash red, trumpeting a total allegiance to Stalin. By contrast, the White Russian Community sent Olga a magnificent white azalea that stood at a place of honor in her salon. Delighted to speak Russian that day with native speakers, Olga sat in the sitting room, thanked the men, and nodded during the usual speeches, though she held her brass hearing horn well away from her ear. Then she spoke of her famous father, wished everyone a happy New Year, and told a few jokes. We children had been sent upstairs, but at least one of us managed to creep to the landing, to eavesdrop and peer through the railing.

Olga at a hundred was much prettier, more expressive and shapely than Queen Victoria in her widowhood. Like her, Olga wore black dresses down to her feet and high-laced boots. Her sparse white hair was parted in the middle, pinned over her head in a tiny bun. She had a pronounced Bourbon nose. Her forehead was as wide as Herzen’s, above blue eyes clouded by inoperable cataracts.

That day, we heard Olga speak a few sentences in a language we didn’t understand, followed by the exuberant laughter of several men. Our grandmother, Olga’s daughter, came out of her bedroom several times, wringing her hands, terrified that neighbors might have guessed who was visiting her solidly bourgeois French home, weighed down by the anticipated burden of disposing of a profusion of bloodred roses.

Our urbane, conservative grand-papa felt forced to spend the day at the Banque de France, since he refused any contact with the despised Communists. Grand-Papa had been born old, which meant he was unchanging in our eyes. He was about five feet ten, with a square face and rich gray mustache. The chain and fob resting on his vest added to his dignity. He wore immaculate, stiff-collared white shirts of fine linen, and three-piece suits made by his tailor, with discreet ties imported from England. A semicircle of gray hair ran from one ear to the other. To us, told biblical stories by our Jewish mother, he was a bald Moses dressed up as a judge.

He came home from Paris that evening well after dark. Before walking in, he checked that no black Volga cars with opaque windows and well-armed drivers had parked by the gate. Once inside his home, as a further precaution, he hid in the darkened hall, to make sure no foreign conversations were taking place in the sitting room. Silence confirmed that the enemy was again ensconced inside its fortified Russian embassy, since no fur-lined overcoats hung on the rack. At last he could take off his coat, hat, and gloves.

Grand-Papa’s birthday, coincidentally, happened to take place on New Year’s Day and was, by necessity, celebrated a few days later with many relatives. He never mentioned the crimson roses flooding his home on his special day. Twelve of the loveliest had found their way into Olga’s room, where he never set foot. The rest were apologetically given away, many to service people, so that within days, all trace of the embarrassing visit had vanished.

Germaine Monod, our grandmother, and her husband, Charles Rist, came to live at the Villa Amiel in Versailles in 1912, when Olga became a widow. It was in Olga’s welcoming home that my grandparents raised their five sons. Perhaps because he looked like a slender, younger version of Alexander Herzen, my father, with his wit and generosity, was Olga’s favorite grandchild.

My two sisters, and myself the middle child, started visiting the Villa Amiel as toddlers. In 1936, when we were in grade school, my older sister and I began to spend weekends and vacations there.

At the Villa Amiel, the day started for me when Rousseli, the spaniel, scratched at my bedroom door. I dressed and hurried to breakfast in the dining room, where my grandmother presided over a solid silver tea tray, teapot, and cream pitcher—gifts from a grateful Alfred Dreyfus and his wife to Grand-Papa on the occasion of his marriage.

Sometimes Olga, our great-grandmother, was talkative. I loved hearing stories about her devoted German governess Malwida, who’d swept her away from the Herzen household when she was twelve to live with her in Italy, or stories about her cruel stepmother, or the man with the strange look in his eyes who’d offered marriage when she was only sixteen, a man named Friedrich Nietzsche.

We children were too young to fully understand, but we’d heard whispers and had guessed there were secrets and scandals in the family. Only as adults, when biographers wrote about Herzen’s life, did we learn about our great-great-grandfather’s reluctant acceptance, twice, of a ménage a trois, as recently depicted in Tom Stoppard’s brilliant play trilogy, The Coast of Utopia.

It must have been in 1938, when Hitler marched into Austria and extreme persecutions of Jews started in Germany, that the adults began talking about pogroms and held alarming discussions about insufficient war preparations and my mother being Jewish.

“France will fall, that’s inevitable, considering…” I imagined a lady looking like our mother falling headfirst down a long flight of stairs. It was terrifying. Better to sneak upstairs and visit Olga in her room.

Having lost most of her sight, Olga managed well by feel. When she pulled out family albums filled with postcards and brown photos, she knew which page showed my father in a sailor suit, or my father and his older brother on wooden bicycles without pedals; where to turn for the photo Dostoevsky had send of himself to her father, Alexander Herzen, whom he met several times in London.

Constance Garnett, translator of Russian novels, stated in a footnote to The Brothers Karamazov that the father in that novel was modeled on Herzen’s own father, Ivan Yakovlev.

During my visits, Olga spoke not of our nebulously grim future, as did the family downstairs, but of the past, so vivid to her. Olga had shaken Garibaldi’s hand and enjoyed Wagner’s operas in his loge at Bayreuth as a friend and guest of Cosima Wagner. She knew Turgenev and had read his letters to her father and to her sister, Tata. She had met Kossuth, the Hungarian writer, and many others. All these people with ringing, mysterious names were fascinating characters in an endless story to me. I never tired of hearing about them.

Near blindness didn’t keep Olga from her favorite occupation: attending to her vast correspondence. Over her writing pad she placed a metal frame of horizontal bars enabling her to write line after even line down the page. She wrote in a slanting script in the five languages she spoke equally well: Russian, German, Italian, English, French, and Russian, to send out her own invitations.

Afternoon tea was a grand event, and the best meal of the day at the Villa Amiel. Our grandmother’s Russian grandfather Herzen and her mother Olga’s home had swarmed with guests. Olga, like her father, would have been ashamed had not two extra place settings been included daily for unexpected, last-minute guests. At tea, the adults talked among themselves and ignored the children. We kicked each other under the table. I took advantage of the situation by eating more than my share of quince paste squares and wolf-teeth anise seed cookies with impunity.

At the time, I had no idea what an illustrious group of people sat around the table. They’d come in response to invitations, jumping at the chance to talk to Olga, daughter of the famous Alexander Herzen. There was Baron Eugene de Vogue, author of a study of Russian novels, and grandmother’s nephew Wilfried De Glehn and his wife, Jane, both artists and friends of Sargent, among others. At age five, in 1936, I posed for Jane. That portrait hangs on my wall.

On our grandmother’s side, Germaine née Monod, Philippe Monod was a government minister. His brother was Jacques Lucien Monod, whose DNA studies won him a Nobel Prize. Another cousin, Jacques Louis Monod, became a well-known composer. Trocmé cousins also came to call, as well as Grand-Papa’s brother Edouard, a tuberculosis specialist. My father and his brothers were frequent visitors, with wives and children. Scientists, engineers, educators, and politicians were also drawn to the Villa Amiel because of Grand-Papa. The lawyer Alexandre Parodi broke bread with us. It was Parodi, right-hand man to De Gaulle, who, at the end of the war, influenced Von Choltitz’s decision not to destroy Paris. Several guests were intimates of Charles Rist, our grandfather. Some guests belonged to both the Olga and the Charles Rist coteries: Marguerite Bonnet, founder of the first La Maison des Etudiantes in Paris; my father’s friend Jean Milhaud, a nephew of Darius Milhaud; and a promising young novelist, friend of our uncle Noel, who recuperated from TB at my grandparents’ house in the Alps. This was Albert Camus.

Often on Saturdays before the war, Grand-Papa whistled for Rousseli, and took us with the retriever for a walk to the nearby woods of Glatigny, where we roamed beneath European oaks, beeches, and leafy ashes. On Sundays, we sometimes took a favorite morning walk on the grounds of the palace, to the delightful Hameau du Le Petit Trianon, a protected, idyllic enclave of thatched cottages with a tiny pond, a dairy, a lighthouse, and a mill, set among lilacs, tulips, and forget-me-nots. It had been created for fourteen-year-old Marie-Antoinette, whom we believed played hide-and-seek around the corner with her ladies in period costumes.

One warm afternoon, shortly before the exodus of May 1940, Grand-Papa, frowning, strode along with us for a change in the geometric gardens of the Palais de Versailles. He gave talks to elevate our minds. Yet it seems to me now that as much as he wanted to teach us French history, our grandfather was in serious need of a respite from the worries of the fast-approaching catastrophe. It was years before I understood his talk, and learned that he’d just returned from Washington, where he was received by President Roosevelt before the US entered the war. Charles Rist had gone to Washington to ask the United States and Canada to stop exporting their nickel and molybdenum to Germany, essential to the manufacture of weapons. The meeting was successful.

Rousseli yapped an accompanying chorus as Grand-Papa poked his cane straight ahead of him as in a fencing move. “Louis XIV was a wiser ruler than he’s given credit for. Look at his choice of admirable ministers, devoted to king and country, indefatigable.” He stopped in his tracks. “You’ve heard of Colbert and Vauban, haven’t you?” We nodded, afraid to interrupt. “Vauban was an exceptional architect responsible for splendid fortifications on France’s borders. Remember, to fortify means to make strong, or stronger.” After a pause, he added, “As war minister, the king chose Louvois, who introduced the musket, uniforms, regular pay, and the use of barracks for the army. Great innovations. These ministers’ work greatly increased the influence and prestige of France. Thanks to them, France was a great nation. France had power.”

Grand-Papa poked the ground with the tip of his cane, before leading us back to the Villa Amiel, and repeated with conviction, “France was a great nation. France had power,” like a spell that could keep us, and all the beauty around us, forever safe.

The following is an excerpt from Patrick Hick’s upcoming novel, Across the Lake, due out in 2024.

 

Ravensbrück did not fall from the sky. It was planned. It was built. It was managed. The only all-female concentration camp in the Third Reich was so large and complex that no single person—whether they were a prisoner or a guard—could possibly know it all. By the end of the war it sprawled deep into the woods, but it all began one day with a simple architectural drawing on a draftsman’s desk. It started with a ruler, a T-square, and a pencil.

In November 1938, boundary markers were staked out next to Lake Schwedt, an idyllic body of water ringed by spruce, pine, and oak trees. The nearby church bells of Fürstenberg echoed across the water and it was common to see storks soaring across the sky. Soon, a massive courtyard was built by prisoners and this was surrounded by a rising wall of concrete. An enormous iron gate was fitted onto hinges. Lime trees were planted to create the Lagerstrasse—the wide avenue that cut through the camp—and this would become the main thoroughfare which funneled women to work. Hammers and crosscut saws were brought out to create barracks. Electrified fencing was fitted into place and a generator hummed to life. Architects stood around, smoking. They consulted blueprints and pointed at what still needed to rise up from imagination. Roads were graded smooth by prisoners, stone stairways were fitted into hills, and homes for the SS were constructed. A large plaza was laid out before the Administration building and a flagpole was sunk into the soil. A Nazi flag was tied onto snap hooks and it was slowly raised. It fluttered and flapped in crisp wind.

Ravensbrück officially opened in 1939—the same year the war started—and when the Soviets finally liberated the camp on April 30, 1945, it had grown to monstrous size. It had expanded far beyond its original blueprint and it had become a center of gravity for a number of subcamps. Rail lines were laid out in the woods. Huge wooden warehouses with wide platforms were assembled near the tracks and goods were stacked high. These were things the prisoners had been forced to make in the camp—things like socks, blankets, electrical components, shirts, fuses, mats, and servomotors. During its ruthless years of operation, some 132,000 women passed through the gates of Ravensbrück. At least a third of them perished.

Those parts of camp that were most used by the SS and the Aufseherin (the female Nazi guards), were made functional and attractive. There was an art deco gas station near the Administration building along with a row of fine garages that kept a fleet of Mercedes safe during thunderstorms. As for the Administration building itself, it had a large foyer with a huge painted swastika and eagle on the wall. Beyond that were two wide wooden staircases; they rose to mid-floor and then merged to become one set of stairs that lifted up to the second floor. A stained-glass window was on the landing and, when the sun hit it just right, pools of color shimmered on the oak parquet floor. The upstairs corridor was long and clean. Flags stood at attention and plaques were bolted onto the walls. The Commandant’s office was in the corner of the upper floor and his desk was positioned so that he sat with the windows at his back. There was the sound of typewriters and the occasional flare of a telephone ringing. There was the frequent smell of cigarettes, brandy, and aftershave. Boots clicked quickly off the wood floor—silenced now and then by carpets—only to click off wood again. There was a small room for tea and biscuits, as well as a larger room for dinners that required fine china and silverware.

It wasn’t just the working spaces of Ravensbrück that had an air of wealth and gentility to them because the men who ran the camp also had luxury at home. The SS had family houses built on a low hill near the Administration building. Stone stairways climbed up to these mountain chalets and, in each one, was a wide fireplace, handsomely carved wooden ceilings, a kitchen, a dining area, and a bathroom with a toilet. A set of stairs curved up to the second floor, which had three bedrooms. Wives and children lived here and made their way into town for shopping and school. At night, as they climbed into their beds, an orange glow came from the chimney of the crematorium. There was the constant smell of burning kielbasa and grapefruit in the air. No one needed to ask what was being put into the ovens.

As for the Aufseherin—the female guards—they had barracks that could hardly be called “barracks” at all. These buildings looked like something out of a mountain scene in Switzerland. White walls. Carved wood. Pretty flower boxes. There was a front porch with seats to enjoy a view of the lake and, inside, was a cozy front room. Down the hall was a kitchen and individual bedrooms. Each room had a fitted cupboard, a wash basin, and a radiator. Newspapers like Völkischer Beobachter and Das Schwarze Korps were delivered each morning along with the milk. A mirror was next to the front door so that the Aufseherin could check to see if her coifed hair was properly arranged under her cap. They could make sure their capes were neatly arranged and that their truncheons hung just so off their hips.

Construction at Ravensbrück was relentless. Ever since the first boundary marker was hammered into the sandy ground, there was a need for more buildings, more roads, more housing, more rail tracks, more barracks. Just a few years after opening, Ravensbrück had factories full of sewing machines, it had villas, gardens, kitchens, huge laundry facilities, kennels, storage depots, a shoe repair shop, a furniture repair shop, a painters’ shed, and a water treatment plant. It had potato cellars, a mat weaving factory, a thread spinning workshop, huge hutches full of Angora rabbits, a telephone exchange, an electrical substation, and a furrier shop that made winter hats out of Angora wool. It had gasoline tanks, a massive sand pit, a coal bunker, chicken coops, and medical facilities that killed more women than it ever cured. There was an SS canteen that served gourmet food, a two-story prison known as the Bunker for those women who required special punishment, and there was a crematorium that had three coal-fired ovens.

After only a few years, Ravensbrück was so big that it began to gather subcamps around it like a planet collecting moons. Soon the subcamp of Uckermark was created on the southeast perimeter and teenage girls were forced into it where they had to sew and stitch. If they spoke, they were beaten, and when they turned eighteen they were sent up the sandy path to the main camp. To the south was a subcamp run by the Siemens Corporation. It was here that women were forced to build electronic components for secret wonder weapons that might change the course of the war. As with other camps like Auschwitz, Buchenwald, and Sachsenhausen, the SS at Ravensbrück rented out their prisoners to corporations for a fee. When it was suggested that the Siemens Corporation could build a factory to their exact specifications outside of the main camp—and that they could have labor at an unspeakably cheap rate—it wasn’t long before high technology came to Ravensbrück. These facilities were kept sanitary in order to protect the electronic parts that had to be built. Prisoners assigned to the Siemens Camp felt as if they had entered a different world because they were rarely beaten as long as they kept up with their daily quotas. Here, they were reasonably well fed. Here, they got their own bed and a blanket. Here, they worked long hours in clean clothes and, although the work was fast-paced, the Siemens Corporation had a vested interest in taking better care of their prisoners. All these women had to do was put electronic parts together quickly and efficiently. It was precision work. They built servomotors that were then transported to the secret underground concentration camp of Dora-Mittelbau where prisoners fitted them into V-2 rockets. The women who built these rocket parts had little idea what they were creating, but it hardly mattered because these bits of technology—whatever they were—gave them a better life. Perhaps not surprisingly, when word got out about the Siemens Camp, those in the sock factory and mat weaving factory began to look upon it with envy. To build rocket parts was to find yourself in the aristocracy of the camp. To build weapons of death meant that you might live.

 

*            *

Because Germany was supposed to win the war and make a colony of the Soviet Union, the realities of Ravensbrück were never supposed to appear in history books. After victory, the camp was meant to be repurposed, buried, forgotten. But the past often has an unexpected future. We know that Ravensbrück was a training ground for violence and we know that over 4,000 Aufseherin passed through its gates and went on to terrorize other camps, including Stutthof, Majdanek, Vaivara, Mauthausen, Bergen-Belsen, and Auschwitz. In many ways, Ravensbrück was a finishing school of brutality. And when the time was right, female guards would pack their suitcases, hug their friends, and get onto a train that would take them elsewhere in the Reich.

The women who wore the dark grey uniform of the Aufseherin had little use for school and most of them had dropped out early. They believed in the bold future that Hitler had mapped out for Germany and they signed up knowing they would be working in a concentration camp. Most of these young women were nervous and fidgety at first, but when they were given truncheons, and when they were allowed to beat others, they quickly warmed to violence. Many of them grew to like it, especially the power. Yet the idea of women enjoying violence is taboo in most societies. We like to assume that violence is a male trait and that any woman who embraces savagery has somehow crossed a border. Women who act with fury and spill blood are often seen as entering a land that does not belong to them, that they have somehow trespassed onto foreign soil and entered territory that is instinctively alien. And because of this, violent women seem far more monstrous than men who commit the very same crimes. We want to imagine that women are nurturing, caring, and motherly. We want to believe that bloodshed does not come naturally to women, and we do not want to imagine our mothers, daughters, or wives as being agents of destruction. And yet, all across the world, mythology is full of women who are at home in the dark landscape of butchery. The Furies. Medusa. Circe. The Sirens. Amazons. Banshees. Soucouyants. Manananggals. Kumiho. Succubus. Lamia. Our stories say much about our fears.

While the Aufseherin may have controlled the barracks and factories of Ravensbrück, they existed in a society that saw their gender as a limitation. The Third Reich was a thoroughly patriarchal nation and it was believed that women should stay home in order to raise children. And yet, during the war, women were allowed into male spaces that would normally be shut off to them. The Aufseherin did their hair and they used perfume. They were also given heavy boots and truncheons. Notably, they wore a culotte-style skirt, which is both a dress and also a type of short trousers, depending upon how one moves. When standing around and chatting, a culotte looks like a dress, but when marching across a factory floor to beat a prisoner, it looks more like baggy pants. Put another way, a culotte is sometimes a skirt and sometimes wide-flared trousers. These uniformed women in culottes were at peace with what they were doing in the concentration camps because it was legal and acceptable. The state, after all, had hired them to commit acts of violence. At Ravensbrück, killing became normal, beating became normal, sexual abuse and prostitution and infanticide—they all became normal. What was once forbidden was now permitted. And of course, although Ravensbrück was a place for women, it is good to remember that it was run by men. The freedom to commit violence like a man did not mean that women were trusted with governing themselves. That power rested solely with the men in the Administration building. It was only the men of Ravensbrück, the SS, that were allowed to carry a gun. Pistols were for men. Truncheons and whips were for women.

Ravensbrück was a place not just of forced labor, disease, and hunger, it was also home to unrelenting executions. Women were shot near the crematorium. Medical experiments also happened at Ravensbrück. Between July 1942 and September 1943, Professor Karl Gebhardt, a leading orthopedic surgeon who taught at the University of Berlin, had wood shavings, dirt, cloth, and bits of glass inserted into prisoners’ legs to mimic battlefield conditions. Often, anesthesia was not used. Some victims were given sulfanilamides to see if this might slow down rates of infection. In later experiments, bones were transplanted, muscles were severed, and nerves were resected to see if they might regenerate and grow back. More than eighty women were experimented upon in this way. They called themselves “Rabbits” because they felt like laboratory animals and the wounds in their legs made it very difficult to walk—many of them had to hop.

Also around this time—between February and April 1942—approximately 1,500 prisoners were taken to nearby Bernberg and murdered in a euthanasia center that masqueraded as a sanatorium. This was done under a secret program called 14f13. Nearly half of these victims were Jewish. By the early months of 1942, at least 1,500 Jewish prisoners were rounded up and sent to Auschwitz. This was an attempt to clear all Jews from Ravensbrück and make the camp Judenrein—cleansed of Jews—but within a matter of weeks new prisoners were standing for morning roll call and new prisoners were marching into the sock factory.

At least one gas chamber was at Ravensbrück and the guards called it the “New Laundry”. Built in early 1945, it was given its euphemistic name, of course, to hide its lethal purpose. This secret concrete room could hold 150 women and, according to camp survivors, it was dynamited by the SS on April 23, 1945 in order to pretend that it had never been built in the first place. There are rumors that several rail cars were hidden in the woods near Ravensbrück and that they were used as mobile gas chambers. While this is certainly within the realm of possibility, there is no definitive proof beyond the adamant testimony of camp survivors. This, however, is the nature of mobile gas chambers. They are meant to be moved and, in that moving, the reality of their existence is taken with them—they disappear into fog, dragging facts with them.

As the decades have moved on, the facts about Ravensbrück are dissolving away in memory. We may live in a post-Holocaust world, but that doesn’t mean we have come to understand the Holocaust. Not really. It is easier to look away. It is easier to let the facts disappear into the woods of places like Ravensbrück. It is easier to tell ourselves that it all happened so very long ago. But as Auschwitz survivor and memoirist, Primo Levi, warns us, “It happened, therefore it can happen again.”