THE PLACE TO GO 3 страница

The two Civita brothers soon realized that Paris was no safer than Milan, so they left for New York in 1939. Cesar stayed until 1941, when he went to Buenos Aires to become Walt Disney’s representative for all South America and later the founder and successful publisher of Editorial Abril in Buenos Aires and in São Paulo, Brazil. Although Cesar Civita’s name was on their firm’s New York letterhead, it was Victor who remained there as a talent agent for international artists and writers, Steinberg prominent among them. Well before they got to the United States, the Civita brothers began to sell Steinberg’s drawings to magazines as varied as Life, Mademoiselle, and Town & Country. Julian Bach, later a distinguished literary agent, was then a young editor at Life, and it was he who made the proud claim that he was Steinberg’s first American publisher, “in terrible times, 1940.” Bach wanted drawings of France’s Maginot Line, which Steinberg provided from his imagination, as he had never seen photographs, and which (as Bach remembered) “to our mutual horror, collapsed between the time the drawings went to press and were published in the magazine.”

Steinberg’s luck was better with Town & Country, where the editors raved about his drawings, and he received further encouragement when Cesar Civita wrote from South America that Brazilian publishers were interested in his work. This was very good news, because they accepted almost everything he submitted and then paid promptly. Despite the perilous political circumstances, Steinberg was earning at least part of his keep, and as long as there was transatlantic traffic, he thought he could count on checks arriving from time to time.

Meanwhile, Saul’s American relatives had been corresponding with Moritz and Rosa about sponsoring his immigration to the United States. Moritz’s brothers, Harry in New York and Martin in Denver, both agreed to sponsor him and contribute money toward his passage. Soon after Cesar Civita arrived in New York, armed with the address given by Saul, he visited Harry Steinberg to plot strategy. Cesar described the bureaucratic flood of paperwork they would have to navigate in order to bring Saul to New York, but Harry, on behalf of his entire extended family, was willing to do what needed to be done, not only for Saul but also to help Moritz, Rosa, and Lica to immigrate. This plan was short-lived because the Romanian political situation made it impossible for them to leave, but there were still possibilities for Saul to travel through neutral countries, so they continued their efforts.

Harry was fortunate that his daughter Henrietta, the charming thirteen-year-old who posed next to Saul in family pictures when she visited Romania, was now well connected in terms of bureaucratic niceties. She was married to Harold Danson, an employee of Paramount Pictures, who was familiar with all sorts of international avenues of communication, and she was also private secretary to Cornelius Vanderbilt, Jr., a man-about-town related to the original commodore of the same name, a relationship he used often to further his career. He made contacts with all the right people and published a newsletter, Vagabonding with Vanderbilt, that fell somewhere between a travelogue, a political tip sheet, and a gossip column. This well-connected Vanderbilt had influential contacts in Washington as well as New York, and he agreed to use them on Saul’s behalf.

The Dominican minister plenipotentiary in Washington told Vanderbilt to contact James N. Rosenberg, who was president of an organization called the Dominican Republican Settlement Association, headquartered in New York and working with the approval of the dictator Rafael Trujillo to grant asylum to European Jews. Rosenberg put Vanderbilt in direct contact with his colleague Mrs. Rebecca Hourwich Reyher, who had seen and liked Steinberg’s work in Life and was eager to help her friend, “dear Neil” (as she called Vanderbilt), get him on a ship as soon as possible. There was, however, one major obstacle to overcome: Jews were most welcome in Santo Domingo as long as they paid the Trujillo regime $1,000 for each immigrant’s first year in the country and $500 for every year thereafter. The Denver and New York Steinbergs pooled their money and raised much of the necessary sum, while Harold Danson gathered letters from various banks for the U.S. Department of State to certify and forward to the Dominican authorities.

As the extended family geared up to expedite Saul’s transit, he was working his way through his own bureaucratic nightmare, his fears intensified by the Italian government’s rush to round up all civilians who were considered a danger to the Fascist regime. This category ranged from political dissidents to harmless foreign students like Steinberg, who, through no fault of their own, found themselves trapped.

Daily police roundups became standard operating procedure on weekdays (but not weekends, when the relevant branch of the government did not work). Steinberg was sure he would be arrested after the Ministry of Foreign Affairs singled out Hungarian and Romanian Jews as particular undesirables who had to be “expelled from the Kingdom.” He had been living in a room above the Bar del Grillo, but he often slept somewhere else, sometimes at the studio Aldo shared with Luciano Pozzo. Ada and her girlfriends had apartments throughout the city, and various friends from the publishing and design worlds allowed him to sleep at their homes. Andrea Rizzoli let him hide out in the Bertoldo offices, Arnoldo Mondadori took him into his family’s capacious apartment, and Giovanni Guareschi loaned him a bicycle to use for quick getaways.

Steinberg knew that the roundups always took place between six and seven in the morning, so he got up early, washed and dressed quickly, and hopped on the bike to ride around town as if he were an ordinary Milanese citizen going to work. Even in such perilous times, he saw the city with an artist’s eye: “The air in Milan was excellent…the light was beautiful, and I saw something I had never seen before, the calm and silent awakening of a city.” He usually returned to Bar del Grillo a little after seven, knowing that if the police had not come by, he was safe for another day. He had breakfast and went back to bed for a nap, satisfied to have “a whole free day ahead of me, more than a vacation, almost a life gained.” He did this for the better part of a year, sneaking out through the back courtyard when the police came early and he could hear them coming up the front stairs. Carla, the youngest of the four Cavazza sisters who owned the bar, laughed as she told him how one of the policeman, “like a real Sherlock Holmes,” felt the bed and declared it “still warm.”

While Steinberg was on the lam, he was working hard to secure both the necessary travel documents and the money to pay for his voyage. Harry and Martin Steinberg and Harold Danson all contributed; Aldo gave what he could, as did Cesare Zavattini, and Cesar Civita gave advances against earnings and made sure that money owed from various publications arrived promptly. Still, he was dealt a crushing setback in the spring of 1940: with most of the money in hand, and despite a letter from Cornelius Vanderbilt, Jr., to the American consul in Naples requesting a U.S. visa, his application was rejected because the Romanian quota had already been filled. Cesar Civita tried briefly to obtain a visa for Ecuador but gave it up when someone—Henrietta Danson, Vanderbilt, or perhaps Steinberg himself—came up with the idea of using the Dominican Republic as a temporary haven until he could get to New York.

Steinberg knew of other Romanian Jews who had been granted asylum in Santo Domingo, and he had already gone to Genoa to put in his application at the consulate. It was on file there when a letter, perhaps composed by Henrietta but signed by Vanderbilt on June 1, 1940, arrived in the office of “The Minister of the Dominican Republic” in Washington, D.C. Vanderbilt asked the Dominican consul to cable his Genoa counterpart to ask him to secure an entry visa for “a very talented and worthwhile resident” whose agents and editors guaranteed that he would earn “a considerable amount of money in the United States, which he will, naturally, spend in the Dominican Republic.” The Washington consul’s reply was a curt rebuke, saying it was “out of the question” for him to contact his Genoa colleague, as he had “no jurisdiction over any European consul.”

A period of wild uncertainty, confusion, and travel followed, as Steinberg tried to get the transit visas that would permit him to board a ship of the American Export Lines. Harry and Martin Steinberg and Cesar Civita gathered the money in New York to purchase a ticket in his name on a U.S.-line ship, and it was being held for him in the Lisbon office. All he had to do was get to Lisbon. From July 26 until November 27, 1940, Steinberg raced back and forth across several countries, trying to put his travel papers in order. He did acquire a visa from the Dominican Republic in Genoa, which enabled him to obtain a tourist visa from the Portuguese consulate in Milan; he went to Rome several times to secure a transit visa from the Spanish consulate to use on his way to Lisbon; and he had to secure a second Spanish transit visa as well, specifically for the brief time he was in the Barcelona airport. He also needed a letter from an American consul (which he got on another trip to Rome) that guaranteed an “affidavit of travel” so that he could book passage on a ship that docked in New York, where he would transfer to another, which would take him to Santo Domingo. And after all that racing around, just when it seemed that everything was in order and he could depart, none of these documents mattered, because the Portuguese government denied his tourist visa.

Portugal was being flooded with Romanian Jewish refugees, and the Salazar government was worried that there were not enough ships to carry them to other countries even if they had the necessary money and documents. With everything else in order, Steinberg was shocked when stony-faced customs police would tell him only the official reason, that his application had expired. He never learned the real reason, that “Romania is facing a serious problem … of disposing of an undesirable, numerous and mounting population of the Jewish race.”

All Steinberg knew of these political machinations was that he had been denied a visa in Lisbon. Undeterred, he contacted the Portuguese consul in Milan again, and on August 29, 1940, that consulate disregarded a new secret memorandum that had been issued in Lisbon and granted him a transit visa. What the Milan officials ignored and Steinberg did not know was that Salazar’s government was so alarmed by the huge influx of European Jews from many countries that they had issued a secret directive closing the border entry points. Thus Steinberg became an unwitting victim of police secrecy and silence: when he landed at Sintra airport on Friday, September 7, after a flight from Milan, he was told to take the next flight back, and no reason was given.

As if being sent back to Italy were not bad enough, he was convinced that the Lisbon authorities had confused him with “another Steinberg, a Communist Steinberg, on their list.” Being labeled a Communist was a red flag in every country he needed to pass through on his way to immigration, and once labeled as such, he would find it nearly impossible to have the stigma removed. Even though such a mix‑up was never proven, it made a convenient excuse as he headed back to Milan in abject despair.

Steinberg never learned about the secret directive of Salazar’s secret police and spent the rest of his life thinking that he had somehow lacked one or more of the proper travel affidavits for the United States. As soon as he returned to Milan, he started all over again to round up a new set of documents, casting widely for help. He even enlisted the aid of the Panamanian consul, who told him to go to Rome and deal directly with the Romanian legation. He took the overnight train and spent three hours in the waiting room the next day, but when his turn came, his passport was not renewed and he was not told why. The most likely reason was that without it, he would have to find his way back to Bucharest, where he could be drafted. That was never an option for Steinberg, but as long as he had to stay in Rome overnight, he went sightseeing.

When he returned to Milan he had further bad news from the Spanish consulate. His transit visa through Spain had been revoked because he no longer had a valid Romanian passport. Now he was not only stateless but also unable to leave Italy. To deal with the misery, he began to keep a cryptic diary-journal of his travails, something he would do off and on for the rest of his life when he needed to think things through and sort out how to deal with them. On December 6, 1940, he noted that it was almost three months since he had been sent back from Lisbon on that dreadful Friday, September 7. He remembered this date for the rest of his life as his “most dramatic disaster, my Black Friday.” He also remembered the “other Steinberg,” who might have kept him from leaving; what hurt most about this confusion was what he decided was an “accusation of bad faith,” that is, that he had not been honest. But he refused to dwell on it: “enough” was his last written word on the subject.

His natural tendency toward superstition now became focused on Friday as the day that “more and more often brings me bad luck.” He had gone to Rome for the Spanish transit visa on a Friday and to Lisbon hoping to board a ship on a Friday, and both times he had been turned back. However, when December 6 arrived, it was “a really black day Friday.” He had never been religious, but uncharacteristically he prayed: “God will help me get through these years.”

There was unrelieved misery on every front. On November 10, Romania was devastated by an earthquake so severe that it caused damage as far away as Hungary, Bulgaria, and Ukraine. Bucharest was less badly damaged than other Romanian cities, and the homes and shops of the Steinbergs and their relatives were relatively unscathed. They were terrified for Saul’s safety when they listened to Romanian radio and heard reports of the air raids and bombings in Milan, while he tried to convince them that he was in good health, had enough work, and was not in any real danger. It was still hard to write cheerful letters when he was feeling far from optimistic. He told the diary, “I am anxious right now, as I always am when something eludes me and my desire for it grows stronger.”

The ship he hoped to sail on, the Siboney, was due to leave Lisbon for New York in twelve days, and he had to face up to the fact that he would not be on it. The police roundups had become infrequent, and in depression he began to sleep until noon. When he woke up he read, first, Manzoni’s I Promessi Sposi (The Betrothed), “a great and fine book,” and then The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini. He felt “more and more empty in the head,” and when he finally roused himself to wakefulness, daily life was all “malaise.”

Money was getting tight again, so he could not afford to indulge in self-pity for long. He courted Giovanni Mosca at Bertoldo with an early Christmas gift of painted wood blocks, possibly one of the earliest examples of the wooden books, pens, tables, and boxes for which he would become famous later in his career. Unfortunately, when Mosca was unable to send much work his way, Steinberg’s general financial strain resulted in a brief falling-out with Aldo Buzzi. He was now sharing a design studio with Luciano Pozzo, but they did not have enough work for themselves and were too poor to be able to pass any along to Saul. He found this difficult to accept and told the diary, “I would not treat a friend this way.”

To further complicate his life, there was Ada. They fought, they argued, they made up. They spent entire days in bed while he sated himself, then he pouted because she preferred to spend evenings with her girlfriends rather than with him. He was irritated while they lolled in bed because she spent too much time chattering about silly, ordinary things he didn’t want to hear about. In a better mood, they met in restaurants for tea and went to movies, which he adored, particularly American films like Stagecoach, with John Wayne, and Jamaica Inn, with Charles Laughton. By the end of April 1941, he referred to Ada as his “dear girl” and didn’t know how he could function without her radiant presence in his life.

And then, just before her birthday at Christmastime in 1940, Rosa threatened to complicate his life even further. She pretended to be worried about how he was scrambling to survive in Milan, but in truth she was more worried about his possible emigration. Rosa was determined to get to Milan so she could “take care of him,” probably a euphemism for persuading him not to go. He tried to calm her down with a letter full of repetitive statements about how well he lived and worked and how he always “tried to do everything in the best way possible.” He assured her that he had many friends and was “not really alone and without any support.”

Saul was never a diligent correspondent, but when he did write to his parents, he was always careful to give only as much information about his attempts to leave Italy as he thought they could handle; otherwise, he assured them repeatedly that even though the winter was cold, he had enough warm clothes; he ate regular, healthy meals; and his work brought in enough money to keep him going. Moritz and Rosa wrote far more frequently, and the letters (particularly hers) were filled with flowery complaints of sleepless nights, panic attacks, “fears and woes.” When Moritz wrote, it was to beg Saul to write more frequently so Rosa would calm down. Fortunately for Saul, if Rosa did make any concerted effort to get to Milan, it came to naught. The exchange of letters during these years set the pattern for how Saul and his parents would relate to each other for the rest of their lives, with Rosa imploring him to write, Moritz begging him to do so to placate her, and Saul responding only when he could no longer avoid it.

POGROMS BEGAN IN EARNEST THROUGHOUT ROMANIA shortly after the New Year in 1941. Thugs rampaged through the Jewish quarter of Bucharest, but Moritz’s shop was in a courtyard and not as badly damaged as those that fronted the street. Moritz kept the girls who worked in his factory inside until the attacks were over, so nobody was injured and nothing was lost. The Olteni (Christian natives of southwestern Romania) who kept the dairy store on the corner surprised the Steinbergs by aiding them with much-appreciated “Gentile kindness.” The attacks, however, were merely the start of sustained persecution. Mail censorship had already begun, so communication even with another Axis country like Italy was slow and sporadic. Jews were still allowed to read newspapers, but soon their radios were confiscated, and shortly after, deportations began.

Meanwhile, in Milan there was a genuine possibility that Steinberg would be sent to prison. Even though his Romanian passport had expired in December, he was more or less ignored by the various ministries that monitored the status of foreign students. The local police knew he was still around, but no higher authority told them to arrest him, so he was left alone. He actually formed cordial relations with some of them, particularly “a certain Captain Vernetti,” who arranged for him to have “postponements” from arrest or deportation. It also helped that everyone from Buzzi to his colleagues from the Politecnico and his friends in the publishing world had influential friends or relatives who worked within various government agencies and were eager to help him. He wrote in his diary that 1940 had been the worst year of his life, but even so, he was proud of having earned his degree, taught himself enough English to make out what a newspaper article was about, and had his drawings published in distinguished American periodicals. Despite these triumphs, he was still certain that 1941 was going to be a bad year, at least at the beginning.

He was not surprised when a telegram from the prefect of Milan arrived at the Grillo on February 21, 1941, stating that the Ministry of the Interior had been informed that the former student Steinberg who had been “warned to leave the Kingdom” was still there. Steinberg went to the ministry to affirm that he would be more than happy to leave the kingdom, but even though a “tight-lipped” American vice consul had granted him a transit visa to pass through the United States, he had not yet been able to secure the new ones that would allow him to pass through Spain en route to Portugal. He was in the frustrating position of trying to line up a stack of legal dominos in order to make them fall in order, but on every occasion the one he needed to start the tumble was missing.

There must have been other former foreign students who fell into this curious Catch-22 situation, but a specific file was compiled in Rome devoted to resolving the situation of the “Ebrei stranierei,” the foreign Jew “Steinberg Saul, di Moritz.” His case created such a bureaucratic muddle that the prefect of the ministry in Milan did not know how to resolve it and had to cable the head office in Rome to ask for “directives.” Rome told Milan to “formulate concrete proposals,” and two weeks later the prefect decided that, as “the foreigner in question is unable to leave the Kingdom, he should be assigned to a concentration camp.” By the time Steinberg received this decree on April 16, he had resigned himself to going.

THE SYMPATHETIC CAPTAIN VERNETTI WAS THE officer who arranged the details of his arrest. On April 17 he told Steinberg to put his affairs in order and to report back in one week, prepared to be sent immediately to a detention center, most likely Tortoreto, a small town in the province of Teramo on the Adriatic coast. Steinberg spent a frenetic week trying to clean up all the loose ends connected with his various projects. He rushed to put final touches on the panel for the Sacerdotti villa in Rapallo, submitted cartoon captions for Bertoldo, drew one “vignette” for Settebello and two for the magazine Tempo. He presented himself as scheduled to Captain Vernetti on April 24, only to be told that the police were not ready to receive him and he could have two more days of freedom. He spent them with Ada, mostly in bed, rousing only to take her to the movies and eat at the Bar del Grillo.

On Sunday morning, April 27, promptly at 10 a.m. he presented himself to Captain Vernetti in the local police station, San Fedele, and one hour later they were on their way by taxi to San Vittore al Centro, the main prison in Milan. Steinberg was placed in a holding cell with thirty-six other prisoners, all of whom slept on the floor. The next day he was transferred to the second floor of San Vittore and placed in a cell with a Soviet Russian named Zessevich, who had already been incarcerated for fifty-six days, and a Hungarian named Erdos, who had been there for fifty. Both were being held “under suspicion,” a vague generality that meant their papers were not in order, but they were in no hurry to be repatriated or to fight in the war. They were content to pass their time in what was, for them, the relative comfort of a Milanese prison, even though they were housed among common criminals who lived there under the most primitive, unsanitary, and unhealthy conditions.

Steinberg helped them pass the time by creating a deck of playing cards “with tobacco papers, bread crumbs and soup … all drawn with a copying pencil.” For the red ink needed for hearts and diamonds, they pricked their fingers and used blood. When they tired of cards, they had tobacco and other entertainment, such as a variety of daily and Sunday newspapers, a sports journal, and one devoted solely to comic strips. They could buy jam, chocolate, dried figs, walnuts, beer, wine, cheeses, bread, and warm milk. They had cigarettes, but matches were chancy; they had soap and were permitted showers every other day or so. Cells were inspected around 3 p.m., and there were three nighttime checks. Soup was served at eleven, with two small loaves of bread for each prisoner, and from nine to ten they were permitted to walk in the prison grounds. All in all, it wasn’t so bad. Steinberg knew he would not be in San Vittore for long so he did not try to settle in, spending his days instead in genuine terror that he would be sent not to Tortoreto but to Ferramonte di Tarsia, a far harsher camp in the southern province of Cosenza, Calabria.

ALTHOUGH BOTH ITALIAN AND GERMAN CAMPS were called concentration camps, the main difference between them was that the Italians interned but did not exterminate. Those confined to Italian camps ranged from persons deemed dangerous to the Fascist regime to citizens of enemy states and everyone else who fell between the cracks of official bureaucratic rulings, including foreign students who overstayed their welcome. The two major categories of detainees, however, were Jews (both Italian and foreign) and political dissidents who were outspoken in their distaste for fascism.

There were also two different classes of internment. “Free” meant that the person was sent to a small village or town and had to find a way to live there at his own expense. Spouses or family members could join the offender, who had to report for curfews and roll calls but was otherwise free to go about his business. Steinberg was in the other class, the one sent to the so-called concentration camps, where prisoners were segregated by sex, lived in collective housing, and were permitted only limited contact with outsiders. Most of these camps were in the isolated mountainous regions of central Italy or in the even harsher mountains of the most backward provinces in the extreme south. He was greatly relieved when he was finally told that he was going to Tortoreto, one of the better camps, in east-central Italy. It was near enough to Milan that Ada, Aldo, and some of his other friends would have a fairly easy time trying to visit and packages sent by mail were more than likely to be delivered.

On May 1 at 9 a.m., he was taken down to the main floor at San Vittore, where he was allowed to telephone Ada and tell her where he was going. In her inimitable fashion, his “dear girl” already knew it and had gone to Ferraro’s, the shop near the Grillo where they usually bought food and other provisions. Steinberg was put into a taxi with two policemen as escorts and taken to the railroad station, where a small group of friends gathered to see him off. Aldo was waiting with his luggage and their friend Dr. Pino Donizetti, who brought a large sack full of various medicines, especially quinine against the rampant malaria that plagued the camp. Ada was there too, her eyes nervously scanning the crowd for a glimpse of him, and she made “a little jump” when she saw him. He noted, as he always did, what she was wearing: “gray overcoat, black dress with her aunt’s brooch.” He kissed her “lightly, wet mouth, she cries. I won’t see her anymore. Dear Adina.”

Escorted by policemen from Sicily, he and the other prisoners were put on board a train for the relatively short but roundabout journey to the Abruzzi, which would take several days. They went from Bologna to Rimini, where they were taken off the train long enough to eat lunch in a workers’ café, then ushered back on to ride until midnight, when they arrived in Ancona. The prisoners were herded into the railway station waiting room and told to sleep as best they could, but Steinberg managed to get out long enough to buy a stamp and a postcard to send to his parents. He told them he was “constantly on the road in my attempt to leave [Italy],” but he didn’t tell them he was writing while on his way to an internment camp. At 6:30 a.m., another train took the prisoners to Tortoreto, and Steinberg caught a brief glimpse of the sea before he was taken to his final destination.

THERE WERE ACTUALLY TWO SEPARATE CAMPS in Tortoreto; Steinberg was in the one called Tortoreto Alto, and the other was Tortoreto Stazione. Each camp had its own separate governance and police security, and supervision was, to say the least, casual. At Tortoreto Stazione, a corporal and four other patrolmen from the local station occasionally patrolled the grounds or made roll calls at the Villa Tonelli, where the prisoners lived. It was a large, ramshackle building built in the Moorish style and represented a castle. Steinberg called it “a truly romantic prison,” consisting of ten rooms on the first floor, ten on the second, and nine other supposedly habitable rooms. The authorities deemed it suitable to hold a maximum of 115 inmates, but conditions were so primitive and unhealthy that when Steinberg arrived it was overcrowded with just 79. Most of the prisoners were officially labeled German Jews, and twenty-four had already been interned for two years.

In 1940 the Villa Tonelli’s sewage system, bathing, and toilet facilities were supposedly improved, but in 1941, while Steinberg was there, the building had no running water owing to a lack of water pressure; inmates were permitted to shower once every week to ten days, using buckets of cold water raised from the well that also provided their drinking water. Sewage was still disposed of in nearby cesspits. There was an infirmary of sorts consisting of three cots, supervised by the local “health officer,” whom everyone took care to avoid. A primitive kitchen provided meals that prisoners ate in a refectory, and those who had friends or family to bring them extra food were exceedingly grateful and considered themselves lucky. The government allowed a daily stipend of a few lire to prisoners who had no family to bring them food or money. In later years Steinberg liked to tell friends that the pope supplemented the stipend with an extra six lire every day “as an allowance, and for his own peace of mind.” They needed this money because they had to buy so much of their food in order to survive.

Дата добавления: 2015-10-30