The Unforgettable Night
excerpted from Savitri Devi's Gold in the Furnace (Calcutta, 1953)
I was coming from Sweden and going back to England through Germany and Belgium. The train was rolling on toward the German frontier, which I was to cross at Flensburg on the same day, the 15th of June, 1948, at about 6 P.M. All these years I had lived six thousand miles away, in India. I had never seen Germany in the grand days of Hitler's power. Now, the gods had ordained that I should have a glimpse of her ruins. Bitter irony of fate! But there must be a meaning to it, I thought. All that the gods do has a meaning.
I was traveling -- officially -- as a dresser in a theatrical company. And I marveled at the network of circumstances that had been preparing for me, of late, a new life. Never, perhaps, had I felt more grateful to the principal of the company for having taken me to Sweden two months before. That trip had been for me the welcome awakening after a long nightmare. I had met in Stockholm an old friend: the sincerest, perhaps, and surely the most intelligent of all the English Nazis I happened to know: a fine character, and the one person to whom I had been able to open my heart in London when I first came there from India in that wretched year, 1946. We had talked again, and he had managed to convince me that things were now a little less awful, from our point of view. And through that friend, I had soon met others, Swedish Nazis, magnificent men and women of the purest Nordic stock, faithful to our eternal ideals, real Pagans according to my heart. And through these -- and through the will of the gods -- I had had the honor of meeting one of the great men of the New Order, the famous explorer and the Leader's friend: Sven Hedin, aged eighty-three, looking forty-five, and speaking as only everlasting youth can express itself. I had had a four-hour interview with him on that memorable Sunday, June 6th. "Have confidence in the future," he had told me, among other things: "There are millions like you in darkest Europe. Trust them as you would trust yourself." And as I had recalled our irreparable losses, in particular, the death of the martyrs of Nürnberg, he had replied: "Germany has other such men, of whom you never heard."
After three years of despair and disgust, I had felt an inexpressible happiness fill my breast. I had known from that minute that a new life had begun for me; that all was not finished -- that all was perhaps just beginning. I had then told Sven Hedin what I intended to do during this first journey of mine through Germany. He had not discouraged me, but only told me that "times were not yet ripe" and tried to make me realize how risky my project was. Several young Swedes who had indulged in similar activities had never come back or been heard of again. Still I had said, "I shall try." The pleasure of defying those who have set out to destroy the National Socialist Idea was something too tempting for me to resist.
So I had spent two nights copying on separate papers, five hundred times, in my own handwriting -- for I knew nobody in Sweden who could print such literature -- the following words in German:
Men and women of Germany:
In the midst of untold hardships and suffering, hold fast to our glorious National Socialist faith, and resist! Defy our persecutors! Defy the people, defy the forces that are working to "de-nazify" the German nation and the world at large! Nothing can destroy that which is built in truth. We are the pure gold put to test in the furnace, Let the furnace blaze and roar! Nothing can destroy us. One day we shall rise and triumph again. Hope and wait! Heil Hitler!
And now I was sitting in a corner of the railway carriage, with my precious papers in my pockets and in my luggage, waiting to throw them out of the windows of the train at every station we passed through, as soon as we reached Germany. I was sitting and thinking of the glorious past, so recent, and of the wretched present -- and of the future, for now I knew we had a future.
The train rolled on. I was not the only one to think of these things. There were in the same compartment as myself three Indian girls -- three dancers of the company with which I was traveling -- and also two Jewesses. One of the Indians, a Maharashtrian of the warrior caste, started relating how, in Stockholm, she had read in an American magazine an article discussing the question whether Adolf Hitler is alive or dead; and she added: "How I do wish he is alive! For the good of the whole world, such a man should live!" My first impulse was to press the girl in my arms for having said that. My second one was to reply that such men always live, but that this ugly world of knaves and fools is unworthy of them. I refrained from both these forms of self-expression, and merely gave the girl a sympathetic smile. With five hundred leaflets in my pockets, I could not afford to attract further attention to myself. But I thought: "Even a twenty-year-old girl from the other end of the world finds it impossible to feel herself nearing the German frontier without thinking of our Leader." And I recalled in my mind the words heard long ago, in the days of glory: "Adolf Hitler is Germany; Germany is Adolf Hitler." These words still express the truth. They always will. And I thought: "Just as, today, this daughter of the southernmost Aryans, so, for endless centuries to come, the whole world will identify in its consciousness Hitler and Germany and National Socialism -- as one cannot help identifying to this day the Islamic civilization, Arabia, and the Prophet of Islam." Once more I marveled how broad and how eternal National Socialism is.
But the two Israelites present did not allow me for long to think in peace. "How dare you?" exclaimed one of them, turning to the high-caste Hindu, while the other sprang up like a wounded snake from the place where she was reclining and thrust herself at the girl: "Yes, indeed," said she, "how dare you praise such a man? -- Hitler, of all people! What do you know about him? You should learn before you speak..." Her eyes flashed. And she spat out, against the Germans in general, and against the Leader himself, the vilest, the most nauseating tirade I had ever heard since the gloating of one of her racial sisters over the Nürnberg Trial, in a London boarding house in 1946.
The world accuses us of cruelty. I am supposed to be "cruel" and -- if given power -- would surely be more merciless to our enemies than any other National Socialist whom I personally know. And yet even I have never said -- never thought -- that I would "be delighted to see" any man, any devil, "torn in two." I have not said that of the rascals who conducted the Nürrnberg Trial, nor of those who organized the bombing of Germany to the finish. Can a Jewess hate our Leader more than I hate those people? No. But what the world miscalls our "cruelty" is just ruthlessness -- earnest and frank use of violence whenever it is necessary. The really cruel ones are the Jews. And that is why the fate of any of us in their hands is incomparably worse than the fate of any Jew in our power.
I shuddered as I heard that young daughter of Zion speak. Nobody yet had ever, in my presence, uttered a word against Adolf Hitler without my replying vehemently. But now, though burning with indignation, I was mute and motionless. I had those precious leaflets with me. I thought of the god-like Man for the sake of whom the German people are so dear to me. Was I to defend him against that tapeworm of a woman and to create a row and get discovered and become useless -- or to distribute my message of pride and hope to the people he so loved? I held my peace. But I gave the woman such a glance of hatred that she recoiled -- and was never again to address a word to me. And I rose from my place and went and wept in the one place in which, even in a train, one is always sure to be alone.
The train rolled on toward the German border. There were some difficulties awaiting me at Flensburg. I was asked to get out of the train to be questioned on the platform by a man -- visibly a Jew -- to whom the stage manaager of my employer's company, also a Jew, was already talking. I possess a pair of Indian earrings in the shape of swastikas. I had them on and intended to wear them right through German territory, in sheer defiance of all "de-nazification" schemes. I threw a shawl over my head (there was no time to do anything else) and came out. The man on the platform, I was told, was "a member of the police." "Are you Mrs. Mukherji?" said he, as he greeted me.
"Yes, I am."
"Well," he continued, "there are rumors about you. Can you tell me how far they are justified?"
"What rumors?" said I.
"You surely know."
"I do not. I have not the faintest idea. People say so many things."
"Some say you are a Nazi. Are you really?"
"Does it matter what one is, in a land to which you are supposed to have brought 'freedom' -- so you say?" I replied ironically.
"It does," said the man. "We don't welcome people likely to make the already difficult task of the Occupying Powers still more difficult."
"I don't see how anyone could display such might from behind the windows of the Nord Express," I answered -- wishing all the time I could.
I had hardly finished saying these words when one of the youngsters of the company, who knew I was wearing my lovely and dangerous earrings, pulled the shawl off my head from behind, "for a joke," he later explained. The "joke" could have proved a tragic one. But the boy did not know -- nobody knew -- what I was carrying withh me and what I was intending to do. The hallowed Symbol of the Sun gleamed on each side of my face, in that first German frontier station, now in June, 1948, as it did in the streets of Calcutta in glorious 1940.
"I see it is useless talking to you any longer, Mrs. Mukherji," said the man to me. "You'd better stay off the train. We shall search your luggage."
"You can," I replied with outward calm. But I ran to the principal of the company, who was taking a stroll, and took him aside at the other end of the platform. "You must help me to get on that train again at once, without their searching my things," said I.
I explained what had happened, and the principal promised he would try to help me.
I could not tell what he said to the official or semi-official "member of the police" who had questioned me. He probably pointed out to him that no person seriously intending to indulge in Nazi underground activities would be such a fool as to advertise herself beforehand by wearing a pair of golden swastikas. And the argument apparently proved convincing. My very stupidity saved me. My luggage was not searched. At last the train moved on. "The gods still love us," thought I, as I rolled triumphantly into German territory.
Right and left the land stretched out, green and smiling, in all the glory of its summer garb -- "as beautiful," thought I, "as when he ruled over it."
I stood in the corridor, with as many of my leaflets as my pockets and handbag could carry some concealed in packets of ten or twenty cigarettes or in small parcels of sugar, coffee, cheese, or butter (whatever I could buy in Sweden), others placed in envelopes, others just loose. The railway ran parallel to a road. Walking along the road were a woman and a child. I waved to them and threw a little packet of sugar out of the window -- a packet with a leaflet in it, naturally. The woman picked it up and thanked me. I was already far away. By the side of a small station through which we passed without stopping was a cafe. A youngster and a girl were seated at one of the tables, out of doors, drinking beer. I threw them a packet of cigarettes also containing a leaflet. The packet fell a little further from the table than I had thought it would. The young man got up to take it and smiled at me while I leaned out of the window to catch a glimpse of him. He was a fine young man: tall, well-built, blond, with bright eyes. The girl -- a graceful and slim maiden with golden locks -- had also got up and was standing at his side. She too was smiling, glad to have the cigarettes.
As the train carried me further and further away out of their sight, I imagined them opening the packet, finding the paper, unfolding it. I imagined their eyes sparkling as they saw at the top -- once more after three dark years -- the unexpected Sign of the Sun, and as they read the words written for them from the depth of my heart: "Hold fast to our glorious National Socialist faith, and resist! ... One day, we shall rise and triumph again."
They had thought they had got twenty cigarettes, and, lo, they had got that along with them: a message of hope. I was happy. The idea did not enter my head that the message was perhaps wasted on them; that, after all, they might not necessarily be Nazis. I took it for granted that they were, at heart. However much this may seem childish, nay, foolish, utterly out of keeping with the seriousness of what I was doing, they struck me as too beautiful to be anything else.
And on I went, through the lovely country side, my head at the open window. Whenever we passed through a station, or whenever I saw anybody within my reach -- workmen on the side of the railway, people walking along a road or waiting at a level-crossing for our train to pass -- I threw out some small parcels and a handful of loose leaflets. The faces of which I caught a glimpse were haggard and tired but dignified faces; faces of men and women who, obviously, had not had enough to eat for a long time, but whom an iron will kept alive and whom an invincible pride kept unsubdued. I admired them.
A little before we reached Hamburg, I thrust from the toilet window over a hundred of my leaflets onto the crowded platform of some station through which we passed and then came back into the corridor. The train was rushing on at full speed. I had no time to see what happened. "But surely," I thought, "some of my papers must have fallen in good hands." Then it struck me that some, also, being so light, might well have flown back into the train. I knew that the Jew, T., the stage manager of the company, was sitting in a railway carriage nearer the end of the train than mine. And I shuddered at the idea of his suddenly seeing one fly in from the window and fall upon his lap. "Oh, dear!" said I to myself, "I must be more careful henceforth!"
The sun had already gone down, and we were running through the suburbs of Hamburg. For the first time, I beheld what I was soon to see every day: the ruins of Germany. Black against the pale green and golden sky -- the afterglow of the late summer sunset -- saw no end of shattered walls; of heaps of wreckage; of blocks of iron and stone out of the midst of which emerged, now and then, the skeleton of what had once been a boiler, or a wagon, or an oil tank; no end of long dark streets in which no life was left. The whole place looked like an immense excavation field.
Tears came to my eyes, not because these were the ruins of a once prosperous town, the lamentable remnants of happy homes and useful human industries, but because they were the ruins of our New Order; all that was materially left of that supercivilization-in-the-making which I so admired. Far in the distance, I noticed the steeple of a church standing, untouched, above the general desolation -- like a symbol of the victory of the Cross over the Swastika. And I hated the sight of it.
Once more, as in the last days of the war and in the months that followed, I experienced for a while the feeling of despair. In my mind, I recalled those darkest days: my departure from Calcutta already at the close of 1944 -- when one knew what the end would be -- not to hear, not to read, and, if possible, not to think about the war; not to be told when National Socialist Germany would capitulate; and then my wanderings from place to place, from temple to temple, all over central, western, and southern India, without my being able to draw my attention away from the one fact: the impending disaster. I saw myself again in a train on my way to Tiruchchendur, at the extreme south of the Indian peninsula. A man holding a newspaper in English was sitting opposite me. And I could not help reading the headlines in big letters: "Berlin is an inferno." It was in April, 1945, a day or two after the Leader's birthday. The man had looked up at me as he had seen me reading and had said: "Well, we are safe out here, anyhow!" And I had replied, "It is all right for you, but I wish I were not safe. I wish I were there." And before he had had time to overcome his astonishment and to ask me why, I had got up and gone out into the corridor, and there, easily abstracting myself from my tropical surroundings, I had thought of that inferno -- as far as one can think of such a thing without having seen it. And I had pictured to myself the Man against whom and around whom was then raging the fury of a world possessed by demons; the Man who had striven for peace and on whom three continents were waging war: my beloved Leader -- in the midst of the noise of exploding bombs and of crumbling buildings, his stern and beautiful face lighted up now and then by the sudden glow of new fires started in the vicinity. And I had felt all the more tormented in my security far away, because I could not look up to that tragic face in the hour of ruin and tell my betrayed Leader: "The East and West may turn against you now, but I am with you forever!" And I recalled, upon my return to Bengal in July, 1945, the news: Germany divided into four "zones"; and then the three long, gloomy years that had followed, until I had found in Sweden a new ray of hope.