Reader's Choice

BY OSCAR HANDLIN

Direct observation can sometimes be the most fallible of the instruments of human understanding. The evidence of the eyewitness has an inherent plausibility; he himself saw the event. Yet the bystander who lacks the training to evaluate adequately what falls within his field of vision may be cruelly deceived and may deceive others.

Travel accounts are often subject to such distortion, particularly when they treat a strange society which does not offer the voyager the familiar clues that ordinarily guide his judgment. The barriers of foreign language and culture limit even the most honest observations. And the odds against accuracy are overwhelming in a totalitarian society which rigidly controls every visible object and occurrence and even the perspective of the onlooker.

The inability to see correctly accounts in part at least for our difficulty in understanding Communist China. For almost two decades, our fleeting glimpses of that society have come from occasional favored visitors invited by a government which moves them along tightly regulated itineraries. Rarely do they speak the language; never do they have the opportunity to go freely where they wish. Their reports, honest in intention though they may be, are therefore totally undependable. They bring to mind the accounts in the 1930s of Europeans and Americans who wrote enthusiastically about the face of the future in the Soviet Union without noticing that famine and purges were claiming millions of victims. China, larger, less tolerant, and culturally more remote, presents even greater opportunities for deception.

BERYL GREY’S THROUGH THE BAMBOO CURTAIN (Reynal, $4.95) exemplifies all the faults of the unwary traveler. The English ballerina who composed this narrative spent four weeks in China in 1964. Everything was lovely. Her hosts were attentive, and she found enormous enthusiasm for ballet and theater. She returned from her visit with pleasant memories, which gush out in these pages.

The book is valueless as evidence. Before she left, the author dined with the artists of the Cultural Relations Society. Through interpreters, she asked them “many searching questions” in the course of “a most illuminating discussion in which everybody spoke out freely.” She was thereby convinced that the Chinese saw nothing wrong in the arts being controlled and used as a medium to present the government’s beliefs. The utter naïveté of the expectation that a candid exchange of views was possible under such circumstances illustrates the pitfalls of innocent observation.

THE THOUGHT REVOLUTION by TUNG CHI-PING and HUMPHREY EVANS (Coward-McCann, $5.00) presents evidence of another and more reliable sort on the state of freedom in Red China. Tung Chiping defected to the West in the same year that Beryl Grey visited China. He was then twenty-four years old and found little about which to be enthusiastic in his homeland. Educated at the Institute of Foreign Languages in Shanghai, he had spent his formative years under the Communist regime and was well enough regarded by the Party to be sent as a cultural attaché to Africa, where he found an opportunity to escape.

His simple, unembellished story reveals the pattern of indoctrination in Chinese education, the interminable political harangues, the constant oversight, and the rectification campaigns that stifle dissent. When even the suspicion of a tone of sarcasm in a teacher’s reading from Mao can lead to a sentence at manual labor, not many are likely to diverge from the party line. Tung Chi-ping’s experiences as an interpreter throw particularly interesting light on the techniques for managing foreign travelers — the fake friendship organizations, the censorship in the process of translation, and the manipulation of the visitors’ observations. The doubts that led to his own defection originated in glimmers of an alternative sparked by the doctrinal dispute with the Soviet Union and in such evident failures of Party policy as the Great Leap Forward. He and Evans have written an illuminating book that offers Westerners a view of China the travelers rarely see.

More than two decades after they were perpetrated, the Nazi atrocities still evoke horror. Appallingly familiar though the destruction of life has become, in war, through famine, and in the course of insurrection, there remains a horrifying quality in Hitler’s final solution for the Jews. This mad enterprise, purposeless and costly, demanded scientific organization, technical skill, and a willingness cold-bloodedly to set aside human values. The questions will not subside. Why did it happen? Why were there no protests?

GIDEON HAUSNER’S JUSTICE IN JERUSALEM (Harper & Row, $10.00) has the simplest answers to these questions. The author was Attorney General of Israel when Adolph Eichmann was captured, and he acted as prosecutor during the trial in Jerusalem. Hausner sees the issue in terms of criminality: Eichmann was a collaborator of Hitler’s in illegal actions and deserved punishment. The book states the case as it was presented in court.

The argument is no more effective now than when it was delivered to the judges. The tedious, legalistic approach is inadequate to the intellectual demands of the issue, for it cannot come to grips with the question of responsibility. “At the Eichmann trial,” the author claims in a blaze of optimism, “the rule was publicly pronounced by an authoritative and universally accepted tribunal that the perpetrator of mass murder will not find shelter in the orders of his superiors, but will be held personally accountable for his deeds.” This, alas, is far from being the case. Directly or indirectly, all of Europe was implicated in the destruction of the Jews. The lines of command reached downward from Hitler’s chancellory to the manipulator of the gas chamber valve, passing through the whole society and tainting all who collaborated or simply stood by. Eichmann’s position was by no means so unique that he should bear the total guilt. And neither the trial nor Hausner’s defense of it adds to our understanding of where to allocate the blame.

Two years ago Hochhuth’s disturbing play, The Deputy, touched on this very problem in discussing the responsibility of the spiritual leader of the Catholic Church during the agonized war years. There seems no doubt that Pius XII knew what was going on. Yet, so far as is known, he refrained from protest.

A more effective and better-balanced presentation of the question comes in SAUL FRIEDLÄNDER’S PIUS XII AND THE THIRD REICH (Knopf, $4.95). Friedländer is a historian, born in Prague, who now teaches in Geneva; and though his own parents met their death in Auschwitz, he has attempted to be scrupulously objective in this volume. From archival sources, mainly in Germany, he has extracted the documents that have a bearing on the relationships of the Church with the Nazis; and he has skillfully linked them together.

Friedländer recognizes the limitations of his materials. The whole story will not be known until the Vatican archives are thrown open. Much of his information comes from German diplomats, who wished to emphasize the friendliness of the Vatican to their government. In addition, the formal documents cannot reveal the human emotions and motives involved in the confrontation with the problem. Nevertheless, the book is effective. Through the stilted phrases of the diplomatic correspondence, one can make out the outlines of a great tragedy.

Professor Friedlander suggests two reasons for the Church’s silence. “The Sovereign Pontiff seems to have had a predilection for Germany which” was not “diminished by the nature of the Nazi regime”; and Pius XII, fearing a Bolshevization of Europe more than anything else, hoped that Hitler’s Germany reconciled with the Western Allies “would become the essential rampart against any advance by the Soviet Union.”

These factors undoubtedly played a part in molding the Vatican’s attitudes. But they do not fully take account of the moral issue or altogether explain the Pope’s dilemma. In its long history, the Church had learned to live with evil. Since it did not expect perfection on earth. it was reconciled to adjusting itself to regimes of which it did not approve. That men should sin, that rulers might transgress God’s law were familiar aspects of the human condition. The Pope could sincerely mourn the fate of the victims without feeling moved to halt the inevitable evil.

Precisely this concern with evil is at the heart of ELIE WIESEL’S moving novel THE GATES OF THE FOREST (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, $4.95). The crisis of European Jewry was a profoundly disturbing test for all men of traditional faith. Was Hitler, too, ultimately the instrument of an all-powerful God? The calamity was far too great to bear Jeremiah’s explanation, that the sins of the people had provoked a righteous God to anger. Yet without that justification, the disaster could mean only “that God is unjust and life is a farce. It means that God doesn’t love man or deserve his love.” Wiesel’s problem in examining the catastrophe is to build an idea of the world alternative to the proposition that “In the beginning God created man in order to kill him, he created him because he has no pity.”

The power of this novel emanates from its willingness to come to grips with this important issue. The language is sometimes obscure, the plot is loose, and the characters are sketched in outline rather than fully developed. The book’s rewards are its flashes of insight.

A Jewish boy of seventeen survives, alone of his family, in a cave in Hungary. Briefly he takes refuge in a peasant village, then joins the partisans in the forest, and ultimately finds safety, but not peace, in the United States. All the while he seeks, and discovers, himself.

A brilliant episode set in the peasant village is symbolic of the relationship of the Jews to Europe. The boy, who pretends to be a deaf mute, receives the confidences of the people; because he cannot hear, they express to him the painful frustrations of their lives. Then, cast in the role of Judas in the school play, he becomes the butt of their hatred. “Only yesterday these had been friendly faces. Only yesterday these people had talked to him, gripped his arm, offered him an apple, a cluster of raisins, a kindly word. . . . They were rich in compassion, and thanks to him, they could boast of it. And now here they were asking for his death.” Meanwhile, the well-intentioned priest looked on but did not interfere; “he reflected upon the transmission of sin from one generation to the next and the strange, but just, ways of providence.”

The central theme of the book is the boy’s search for knowledge of himself. How can a man live in a world in which evil exists? “We all have a share in the crime, even if we combat it.” Wiesel’s answer — the acceptance of life as it is, and prayer — will satisfy those who share his faith. But even those who do not will be moved by his state - ment of it.

The acceptance of life is also the theme of REYNOLDS PRICE’S second novel, A GENEROUS MAN (Atheneum, $4.95). The rustic innocence of North Carolina is a world away from Central Europe, and the terms of a boy’s quest for purpose are therefore radically different. Yet the outcome of this search, too, is a resolution to take life as it is.

It is a testimony to Price’s skill that his writing successfully surmounts the handicap of an improbable plot. Milo Muslian, fifteen years old, spends three days in a search for his half-witted brother, who has vanished in pursuit of his dog, who, in turn, is chasing a python called Death in the woods. In the process, Milo uncovers the old story of his cousin and alter ego, Tom, who had left home sixteen years earlier, irked by its restraints, driven by the desire for self-fulfillment. Coincidentally, the characters that Tom then abandoned now cross Milo’s path; and the need for dealing with them clarifies the boy’s understanding and thrusts him into manhood.

In the end, Milo faces a choice, He can run from the given world, as his cousin did, or stay where he is, bound year after year to the round of toil as his father and grandfather had been. His inclination is to escape the destiny established for him by his family and status. But the return of his brother creates the obligation to remain and to bear the burden of his life as it is. The story unfolds in a nice alternation of humor and pathos, tightly written, unfailingly interesting.

There is irony in the fact that much of the shape of the Western world that emerged between 1945 and 1952 is the result of the efforts of little men. Roosevelt had died before the war was over. Churchill and De Gaulle were out of power much of the time and, in any case, had little influence upon the course of events. Suddenly the dominant figures were Harry Truman, Clement Attlee, Konrad Adenauer — earnest men of probity, hardworking and conscientious, dull. Their decisions are responsible for our successes and failures.

KONRAD ADENAUER’S MEMOIRS (Regnery, $10.00) reflects the character of the man. It is honest, welldocumented, and punctilious in matters of detail. It presents a conscientious chronicle of the years between 1945 and 1953 “without omissions, without coloring.” It is also heavy and unimaginative.

Adenauer was nearly seventy years old in 1944 when the Nazis arrested him. The jailer who then feared that his prisoner, having “nothing more to expect from life,” might commit suicide could not have been more mistaken. This phlegmatic burgher had indeed already had a full career; but the dedication to duty which had kept him from collaborating with the Nazis held him in active service to his country for fifteen more years.

Under his leadership Germany emerged from the wreckage of war, regained its economic strength, and developed genuinely democratic institutions. In that achievement Adenauer’s view of society was pivotal. His reflections on the errors of the Nazi period revealed the direction that reform should take. He asscribed Hitler’s success not to any fault in German character but to “the weakness of human nature. Anyone who has ever lived in a police stale knows how much courage it takes to oppose the state.” Nazism was the outgrowth of the German people’s attitude toward the state, which they had made an idol and set upon an altar. “The omnipotence of this state, the precedence attributed to it before the dignity and liberty of the individual” violated natural law. It was the “function of the state to serve the individual. Materialist ideology turned the individual into a small, anonymous cog in a huge machine.” Hence Adenauer’s determination to found “an ideological party based on ethics.” He had already been occupied in that task in the 1920s; and as soon as peace permitted him to do so, he set to work once more. The Christian Democratic Union, which has governed Germany since the first election, owes much to his influence.

In THE TRUMAN PRESIDENCY (Macmillan, $6.95) CABELL PHILLIPS gives a lucid history of the same years in the United States. A preliminary chapter quickly takes Harry S. Truman from Missouri to the vice presidency. But the book focuses on the events of the two terms in the White House. Phillips is an able reporter, he has read carefully in the sources, and his interpretation is judicious. His competent account of the Truman era in our history reminds us of the origin of many problems which still plague us today. It is a shock to read Dean Rusk’s statement, “What we are trying to do is to maintain peace and security without a general war”; and to find that the year is 1951 and the war is in Korea.

Truman emerges from this reconsideration as an able man who rose to the challenge of crises. His decisions saved Europe from disaster. He reacted vigorously to the invasion of South Korea: putting his hand on the globe at Blair House, he grimly said, “This is the Greece of the Far East. If we are tough enough now, there won’t have to be any next step.” Nor did he lack courage in standing up to General Douglas MacArthur. Phillips is justified in referring to Truman’s “triumphant succession” as the heir of Franklin D. Roosevelt. It was a substantial achievement to have led the nation through the trying post-war years.

Would a big man have done more? With the aid of the hindsight of an additional decade, one wonders whether the qualities of foresight, imagination, and boldness might not have produced alternative policies in Germany and in the United States that would have resolved the problems that still haunt us. But this may be only the romantic preference for the heroic coup over the patient inching ahead. Perhaps the risks are too great in our time for the adventuresome big men.