Books: Terrible Test

THE SEVENTH CROSS—Anna Seghers—Little, Brown ($2.50).

Author Seghers’ book is a new kind of novel about the Gestapo and its victims. Geoffrey Household’s Rogue Male and Ethel Vance’s Escape were dramatic stories of flight from the Gestapo. As a story, The Seventh Cross is just as good—and a lot more. The desperate lunges of its hunted fugitive hero against the constricting circle of Nazi pursuit generate the same kind of breathless fascination with which people watch a rabbit trying to escape the coils of a snake.

But Author Seghers does not set out simply to tell the story of her hero. She uses him as a device to stir the fetid waters of Nazi life in order to bring to the surface of that stagnant pool those individual emotions, beliefs and acts of courage and humanity that the Nazis like to keep concealed. This is a book of people, not of techniques of escape.

Second Circle. The story begins with the flight of seven political prisoners from the Westhofen Concentration Camp. Twenty minutes after the break, the camp lieutenant spread out his map, “stuck the point of his compass into the red dot marked CAMP WESTHOFEN and drew three concentric circles.” Somewhere between the red dot and the second circle the fugitives must be. From this circumference bloodhounds padded out into the foggy evening, the camp sirens screamed incessantly, police began the precise combing of every tree and tussock.

But the human element came into play at the same moment as the machine. When the lieutenant drew his circles, he was thinking not so much of the job, but of what a wonderful break he had—”as though made to order by God, the master tailor!” He would not be blamed for the escape. He might be advanced for his promptness in dealing with it.

By contrast, the prison commander’s nerves collapsed at not having prevented “an event which must never be allowed to happen.” He saw himself demoted to his pre-Nazi destiny—a plumber’s assistant. He went out to the space grimly known as the Dancing Ground and ordered nail-studded cross boards attached to the seven plane trees which grew there. As each fugitive was recaptured, he would be forced to stand strapped tightly to the nails.

Seventh Tree. The prisoners watched the recaptured men strapped to six trees. But the seventh tree still stood empty.

The seventh tree was for George Heisler. Hiding in a swamp, Heisler planned his moves with the shrewdness of an experienced political prisoner. Soon he would have to get out of the bog and seek help from man. To whom should he go—to his estranged wife, to his former mistress, to his best friend of pre-prison days, to his former political friends?

He decided at first that it would be easier to slip from corner to corner, to steal a jacket from a gardener’s shed, a cloak from a blind man, to lie hidden in a nearby cathedral “under the eyes of six arch-chancellors of the Holy Roman Empire.”

But here too the incalculable human factor was at work. Fritz, the owner of the jacket, was furious over its loss and reported the matter promptly to the police. But when the jacket was found and with the Gestapo net closing in, something in Fritz made him deny (he did not quite know why) that this jacket was his. And when George’s prison clothes were found hidden behind the tomb of Bishop Siegfried of Epstein, the cathedral priest stuffed them into a stove.

Last Judgment. Meanwhile the Gestapo was working over the very same human problems. To whom would George go for help, they asked, whom would he trust? It was easy to plant innocent-looking men in the street in front of his wife’s house, to shadow her every move, to pounce on and beat to a pulp not George, but his wife’s lover. It was easy to pick up helpful wisps of information from little snoopers who knew George’s friends and could report on their movements. What the Gestapo could not do was to see into George’s mind, to weigh as he weighed, with the accuracy of utter desperation, the courage and reliability of his onetime friends, “a last judgment without trumpet blasts, on a clear autumn morning.”

Author Seghers describes with force and sympathy the people who were caught without warning in this battle between the inhuman Gestapo machine and man’s humanity, people to whom George finally turned for help. Some had settled down under the Nazis. They sighed sometimes for the old, free days, but had long decided to be “sensible.” In them, the arrival of the battered political fugitive stirred up long-forgotten instincts of brotherhood and charity, and moved them to join a single helpless man against the powers they dreaded most. Some were married, their families growing every year in response to the Führer’s demand for children. For them was the awful decision between family and friend. Some had worked out a balance between home and state, joining the storm troops and Hitler Youth, while keeping alive their true loyalties at home. George could tip over their delicate house of cards.

Then there were the members of George’s old political party, now driven underground. For them there was only one question: Is. it worth our while to help this man when discovery might destroy valuable members of the underground network? Most of these people faced this terrible test with a terrible courage. Their combined efforts brought George to safety at last.

Meanwhile in Westhofen Concentration Camp a new commander had replaced the old. By his order the seven trees were cut down. But their message remained for the prisoners, who told themselves, as they fed the stove, that the kindling came from the seventh tree. “We felt nearer to life,” they said, “than at any time later—much nearer, too, than all the others who are under the impression that they are alive.”