HERBERT GOLD
633
editorials. I prefer to recount: I've come here and it's amazing.
Surely some young men have larger feelings than I had . I was a
soldier during the war, 1943-1946, and glamorized to myself by weapons,
military intelligence training, risk. I heard of horrors; perhaps I even believed
in them. What I really believed in was my own needs. At eighteen when I
entered, I was thrilled by the luck of finding a good war, benefiting from pure
hatreds; history did me this favor. I was looking for girls, comrades, fun. I
imagined heroism for myself; I sought hazard as a means to waking up .
Please make me a fighter pilot like my college friend Marty Rosenberg (shot
down , killed on the ground because he was a Jew); please make me a
paratrooper-I've got good ankles, like to jump-which they promised to do,
once I learned Russian. I could jump with our gallant Soviet allies.
Since I was immortal, I feared nothing but boredom or deprivation.
Danger, even discomfort was a kick to the metabolism. The suffering of
others left me somewhat astonished.
Other young men are different, maybe more generous. This is how I
was. Later, I've admitted to my children that at first I felt no joy about the
idea of becoming a father; it seemed to be a distant and irrelevant form of
immortality; I let it happen because somebody nearby seemed to want it.
Who said I needed this help toward living forever? I could manage by
myself.
My daughters taught me to love my daughters. My sons taught me to
love my sons. The love of children is a common human experience, but this
one had to learn it from his kids. It seemed that I had to experience events
before I could value them.
If no one in my family had happened to survive in Europe, I might not
have missed that family. But two did, one of them a French doctor, Alain
Waynberger, gone to Paris as a boy from Eastern Europe when most of the
relatives chose America. He liked the idea of dozens of varieties of cheese,
he said; also French painting, French girls, the nervous language. He became
a French doctor, served in the French army. When France collapsed, he was
one of the few who found his way across the Swiss border, paying for the
chocolate he was offered by official Swiss police hospitality. "Paid enough for
many cups of chocolate-for chocolate, a watch, and a cuckoo clock." He was
able to bring his wife and their child.
When the war was over, he found no surviving relatives in Europe.
His wife had no surviving relatives. They had their son. And so when the G.
I.
Bill, Fulbright scholar cousin appeared from Ohio, during those days of
rationing, no heat, black market, I became instantly family, to be fed ,
entertained and fathered by a m'an who had lost almost everyone. The trials
of
les collabos
filled the newspapers. What did he do, was what you asked
