Promised Land (novel). Erich Maria Remarque - The Promised Land

Promised land Erich Maria Remarque

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Title: Promised Land
Author: Erich Maria Remarque
Year: 1998
Genre: Foreign classics, Classic prose, Literature of the 20th century

About the book “The Promised Land” by Erich Maria Remarque

A work powerful in its depth of tragedy German writer Erich Maria Remarque's unfinished novel “The Promised Land” was released after the death of the author. The work tells the reader about the fate of emigrants in America.

Erich Maria Remarque himself experienced the tragedy of the migrant. He had to leave Nazi Germany and find a new home in the USA. It is about such people who have lost native home, we're talking about in the novel "The Promised Land".

The heroes of the novel - a fashion model, a successful doctor, a banker - are different, but united by one problem. They are emigrants who find it difficult to adapt to a world without who knows war, having forgotten about totalitarianism, in a world of victorious democracy and universal happiness in paradise.

The settlers encounter friendly smiles and complete misunderstanding. They are left to their own devices and forced to survive in sunny and indifferent America. And dream about one thing - one day they will return, and everything will go as before.

At first glance, it may seem that the characters in the novel “The Promised Land” live in illusions, but this is not so. With their minds they understand that returning to the past is impossible, but they drive away this destructive thought.

Erich Maria Remarque depicts people looking for their promised land, warm and dreamed of for long months in the ghetto. America has become this land, but does reality live up to expectations? Outwardly very similar, but is everything so perfect?

Erich Maria Remarque is looking for answers to these questions, going through the stories of the heroes, like tarot cards. The whole novel is a kind of solitaire that just doesn’t work out, but the characters don’t give up trying.
The story is told on behalf of one of the settlers, whom fate was not at all kind to. The Nazis destroyed his family - escape and help saved him good people. And now he is walking along the shaky path of an emigrant, meeting the same lost people, cut off from the usual world, driven by the deadly hurricane of war.

The novel “The Promised Land” is permeated with melancholy and sadness, which you feel and empathize with difficult destinies heroes, you look for answers to questions together with them. The novel was not completed by the author, but still gives hope for the best.

The work has been republished many times. First as “Shadows in Paradise”, and later in 1998 with the original author’s title. It is certainly worth devoting time to this immortal and emotional work of Remarque.

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Erich Maria Remarque DAS GELOBTE LAND

First published in the German language

Reprinted with permission from the publisher

Verlag Kiepenheuer & Witsch GmbH & Co. KG.

I

For the third week I looked at this city: it lay before me in full view - and as if on another planet. Just a few kilometers away from me, separated by a narrow branch of the sea that I could probably swim across - and yet inaccessible and inaccessible, as if surrounded by an armada of tanks. It was protected by the most reliable bastions that the twentieth century had invented - the fortress walls of papers, passport regulations and the inhuman laws of an impenetrable soulless bureaucracy. I've been to Ellis Island 1
A small island in Upper Bay off New York City, south of the southern tip of Manhattan; in 1892–1943 – main center for the reception of immigrants to the USA, until 1954 - a quarantine camp. – Note here and below. ed.

It was the summer of 1944, and the city of New York lay before me.

Of all the internment camps I have ever seen, Ellis Island was the most humane. Here no one was beaten, tortured, tortured to death by backbreaking work, or poisoned in gas chambers. The local inhabitants were even provided good food, and free of charge, and beds in which you were allowed to sleep. There were guards everywhere, however, but they were almost polite. Ellis Island held foreigners arriving in America whose papers were either suspicious or simply out of order. The fact is that just one entry visa issued by the American consulate in European country, for America was not enough - upon entering the country, you had to go through the New York Immigration Bureau again and get permission. Only then were you allowed in - or, on the contrary, they declared you an undesirable person and sent you back with the first ship. However, with sending back everything has long been not as simple as before. There was a war going on in Europe, America was also bogged down in this war up to its ears, German submarines were scouring the entire Atlantic, so passenger ships sailed from here to European ports of destination extremely rarely. For some poor souls who were denied entry, this meant, albeit tiny, but happiness: they, who had long been accustomed to counting their lives only in days and weeks, gained hope of staying at least for some time on Ellis Island. However, there were too many other rumors going around for me to console myself with such hope - rumors about ghost ships full of Jews that plied the ocean for months and which, no matter where they sailed, were not allowed to land anywhere.

Some of the emigrants claimed that they saw with their own eyes - some on the way to Cuba, some near the ports South America– these crowds of desperate people, begging for salvation, crowding to the rails of people on abandoned ships before entering harbors closed to them, – these sad “flying Dutchmen” of our days, tired of running away from enemy submarines and human cruelty, carriers of the living dead and damned souls, whose only fault was that they were human and thirsted for life.

Of course, there were some nervous breakdowns. Strangely, here on Ellis Island, they happened even more often than in the French camps, when German troops and the Gestapo stood very close, several kilometers away. Probably in France this resistance to one’s own nerves was somehow connected with a person’s ability to adapt to mortal danger. There the breath of death was felt so clearly that it must have forced a person to control himself, but here people, who had just relaxed at the sight of such a close salvation, later a short time, when salvation suddenly began to elude them again, they completely lost self-control. However, unlike France, there were no suicides on Ellis Island - probably, hope was still too strong in people, albeit permeated with despair. But the very first innocent interrogation from the most harmless inspector could lead to hysteria: the distrust and vigilance accumulated over the years of exile cracked for a moment, and after that a flash of new distrust, the thought that you had made an irreparable mistake, plunged the person into panic. Typically, men had nervous breakdowns more often than women.

The city, which lay so close and at the same time so inaccessible, became something like a nightmare - it tormented, beckoned, mocked, promising everything and fulfilling nothing. Either, surrounded by flocks of ragged clouds and hoarse, like the roar of steel ichthyosaurs, ship whistles, he appeared as a huge, vague monster, then, late at night, bristling with a hundred towers of silent and ghostly Babylon, turned into a white and impregnable lunar landscape, and then, late in the evening, drowning in a storm of artificial lights, it became a sparkling carpet, stretched from horizon to horizon, alien and stunning after the impenetrable war nights of Europe - about At this time, many refugees in the dormitory stood up, awakened by the sobs and screams, moans and wheezes of their restless neighbors, those who were still pursued in their sleep by the Gestapo, gendarmes and SS thugs, and, huddling in dark human handfuls, quietly talking or silently, fixing their burning gaze on the unsteady haze on the other side, on the dazzling light panorama of the promised land - America, they froze near the windows, united by a silent brotherhood of feelings, into which only grief brings people, but never happiness.

I had a German passport, good for another four months. This almost authentic document was issued in the name of Ludwig Sommer. I inherited it from a friend who died two years ago in Bordeaux; since the external features indicated in the passport - height, hair and eye color - were the same, a certain Bauer, the best specialist in forgery of documents in Marseille, and a former professor of mathematics, advised me not to change the last name and first name in the passport; and although among the local emigrants there were several excellent lithographers who had already managed to straighten quite passable papers for more than one passportless refugee, I still preferred to follow Bauer’s advice and refuse own name, especially since it was of almost no use anyway. On the contrary, this name was on the Gestapo lists, so it was time for him to disappear. So my passport was almost genuine, but the photo and I myself were a little fake. The skillful Bauer explained to me the benefits of my position: a heavily forged passport, no matter how wonderfully crafted it is, is only suitable in case of a cursory and careless check - it is not able to withstand any kind of meaningful forensic examination and will inevitably give away all its secrets; Prison, deportation, if not something worse, are guaranteed for me in this case. But checking a genuine passport with a fake holder is a much longer and troublesome story: in theory, the request should be sent to the place of issue, but now, when there is a war, this is out of the question. There are no connections with Germany. All experts strongly advise changing not your passports, but your identity; the authenticity of stamps became easier to verify than the authenticity of names. The only thing that didn’t add up in my passport was my religion. Sommer had it Jewish, but I didn’t. But Bauer considered that this was unimportant.

“If the Germans capture you, you will simply throw away your passport,” he taught me. - Since you are not circumcised, you will probably somehow wriggle out and not immediately end up in the gas chamber. But while you are running away from the Germans, the fact that you are a Jew is even to your advantage. And explain your ignorance regarding customs by the fact that your father himself was a freethinker, and raised you that way.

Bauer was captured three months later. Robert Hirsch, armed with the papers of the Spanish consul, tried to rescue him from prison, but was too late. The night before, Bauer was sent with a train to Germany.

On Ellis Island I met two emigrants whom I had known briefly before. We happened to see each other several times on the “passionate path.” This was the name of one of the stages of the route along which refugees fled from the Hitler regime. Through Holland, Belgium and Northern France the route led to Paris and split there. From Paris one line led through Lyon to the Mediterranean coast; the second, having passed Bordeaux, Marseille and crossed the Pyrenees, fled to Spain, Portugal and ended up in the port of Lisbon. It was this route that was dubbed the “passionate path.” Those who followed them had to escape not only from the Gestapo - they also had to avoid falling into the clutches of the local gendarmes. The majority did not have passports, much less visas. If the gendarmes caught such people, they were arrested, sentenced to prison and expelled from the country. However, in many countries the authorities were humane enough to deliver them by at least not to the German border - otherwise they would inevitably die in concentration camps. Since very few of the refugees had the opportunity to take a valid passport with them on the road, almost all were doomed to wander almost continuously and hide from the authorities. After all, without documents they could not get any legal work. Most suffered from hunger, poverty and loneliness, so they called the path of their wanderings the “passionate path.” Their stops along the way were the main post offices in cities and walls along the roads. At the main post offices they hoped to receive correspondence from relatives and friends; the walls of houses and fences along the highway served as newspapers for them. Chalk and charcoal imprinted on them the names of those who were lost and looking for each other, warnings, instructions, screams into the void - all these bitter signs of the era of human indifference, which was soon followed by the era of inhumanity, that is, war, when on both sides of the front the Gestapo and gendarmes often did one common thing.

I remember meeting one of these emigrants seen on Ellis Island at the Swiss border, when in the course of one night the customs officers sent us four times to France. And there the French border guards caught us and drove us back. The cold was terrible, and in the end Rabinovich and I somehow persuaded the Swiss to put us in prison. They drowned in Swiss prisons, for refugees it was just a paradise, we would have been very happy to spend the whole winter there, but the Swiss, unfortunately, are very practical. They quickly dumped us through Tessin 2
Canton in Switzerland, bordering Italy.

To Italy, where we parted. Both of these emigrants had relatives in America who gave financial guarantees for them. Therefore, after a few days they were released from Ellis Island. At parting, Rabinovich promised me to look for mutual acquaintances in New York, comrades in emigrant misfortune. I didn't attach any importance to his words. An ordinary promise that you forget about as soon as you take your first steps into freedom.

However, I didn’t feel unhappy here. A few years earlier, in a Brussels museum, I had learned to sit motionless for hours, maintaining a stony equanimity. I plunged into an absolutely thoughtless state, bordering on complete detachment. Looking at myself as if from the outside, I fell into a quiet trance, which softened the unrelenting spasm of the long wait: in this strange schizophrenic illusion, in the end it even began to seem to me that it was not me who was waiting, but someone else. And then the loneliness and cramped space of a tiny closet without light no longer seemed unbearable. The director of the museum hid me in this closet when the Gestapo, during the next round of emigrants, combed the whole of Brussels block by block. The director and I saw each other for a matter of seconds, only in the morning and evening: in the morning he brought me something to eat, and in the evening, when the museum closed, he let me out. During the day the storeroom was locked; Only the director had the key. Of course, when someone walked along the corridor, I was not allowed to cough, sneeze or move loudly. It was not difficult, but the tickling fear that plagued me at first could easily turn into panic horror when a truly serious danger approaches. That is why, in the matter of accumulating mental stability, at first I went, perhaps, even further than necessary, strictly forbidding myself to look at my watch, so that sometimes, especially on Sundays, when the director did not come to me, I did not know at all. Whether it’s day or night, fortunately, I was smart enough to abandon this idea in time. Otherwise I would inevitably lose the last remnants peace of mind and would come very close to the quagmire beyond which the complete loss of one’s own personality begins. And I never really moved away from her anyway. And it wasn’t my faith in life that held me back; hope for revenge was what saved me.

A week later, a skinny, deceased-looking gentleman suddenly spoke to me, looking like one of those lawyers who circled around our spacious day room in flocks of insatiable crows. He had with him a flat briefcase of green crocodile skin.

– Are you, by any chance, Ludwig Sommer?

I looked at the stranger incredulously. He spoke German.

– What do you care?

– You don’t know whether you are Ludwig Sommer or someone else? – he asked again and laughed his short, croaking laugh. The strikingly white, large teeth did not fit well with his gray, rumpled face.

In the meantime, I managed to figure out that I didn’t seem to have any special reasons to hide my name.

“I know that,” I responded. - But why do you need to know this?

The stranger blinked his eyes several times, like an owl.

“I’m on behalf of Robert Hirsch,” he finally announced.

I looked up in amazement.

- From Hirsch? Robert Hirsch?

The stranger nodded.

- From whom else?

“Robert Hirsch is dead,” I said.

Now the stranger looked at me puzzled.

“Robert Hirsch is in New York,” he said. – Not more than two hours ago I talked to him.

I shook my head.

- Excluded. There's some kind of mistake here. Robert Hirsch was shot in Marseille.

- Nonsense. It was Hirsch who sent me here to help you get off the island.

I didn't believe him. I sensed that there was some kind of trap here, set up by the inspectors.

“How would he know that I’m even here?” – I asked.

– A man who introduced himself as Rabinovich called him and said that you were here. – The stranger took it out of his pocket business card. “I’m Levin from Levin and Watson.” Law office. We're both lawyers. I hope this is enough for you? You are damn incredulous. Why suddenly? Are you really hiding so much?

I took a breath. Now I believed him.

“Everyone in Marseille knew that Robert Hirsch was shot by the Gestapo,” I repeated.

- Just think, Marcel! – Levin chuckled contemptuously. - We are here in America!

- Indeed? “I looked expressively at our huge day room with its bars on the windows and emigrants along the walls.

Levin let out his croaking laugh again.

– Well, not quite yet. As I see, you haven't lost your sense of humor yet. Mr. Hirsch managed to tell us something about you. You were with him in an internment camp in France. This is true?

I nodded. I still couldn’t really come to my senses. “Robert Hirsch is alive! – was spinning in my head. “And he’s in New York!”

- So? – Levin asked impatiently.

I nodded again. Actually, this was only half true: Hirsch did not stay in that camp more than an hour. He arrived there, dressed in the uniform of an SS officer, to demand that the French commandant hand over to him two German political emigrants who were wanted by the Gestapo. And suddenly he saw me - he didn’t know that I was in the camp. Without blinking an eye, Hirsch immediately demanded my extradition. The commandant, a timid reservist major who had long been fed up with everyone, did not argue, but insisted that the official transfer certificate be left for him. Hirsch gave him such an act - he always had with him a lot of different forms, genuine and fake. Then he saluted with Hitler’s “Heil!”, pushed us into the car and was gone. A year later, both politicians were taken again: they fell into a Gestapo trap in Bordeaux.

“Yes, that’s true,” I said. – Can I look at the papers that Hirsch gave you?

Levin hesitated for a second.

- Yes, sure. But why do you need it?

I didn't answer. I wanted to make sure whether what Robert wrote about me coincided with what I told the inspectors about myself. I carefully read the sheet and returned it to Levin.

- It's like that? – he asked again.

“Yes,” I answered and looked around. How instantly everything around me changed! I'm not alone anymore. Robert Hirsch is alive. A voice suddenly reached me, which I had thought had been silent forever. Now everything is different. And nothing is lost yet.

- How much money do you have? – the lawyer asked.

“One hundred and fifty dollars,” I answered cautiously.

Levin shook his bald head.

– Not enough even for the shortest transit and visitor visa to travel to Mexico or Canada. But it’s okay, this can still be sorted out. Is there something you don't understand?

- I don't understand. Why should I go to Canada or Mexico?

Levin grinned his horse teeth again.

– There is absolutely no need, Mr. Sommer. The main thing is to get you to New York first. A short-term transit visa is the easiest to apply for. And once you are in the country, you may get sick. So much so that you will not be able to continue the journey. And you will have to apply for a visa extension, and then another. The situation may change. Sticking your foot in the door - that’s the most important thing for now! Do you understand now?

A woman walked past us crying loudly. Levin took black horn-rimmed glasses from his pocket and looked after her.

“It’s not much fun hanging around here, is it?”

I shrugged my shoulders.

- It could have been worse.

- Worse? How is this possible?

“Much worse,” I explained. “You can live here and die from stomach cancer.” Or, for example, Ellis Island could be in Germany, and then your father would be nailed to the floor in front of your eyes to force you to confess.

Levin looked at me point blank.

– You have a damned peculiar fantasy.

I shook my head, then said:

- No, just a damn peculiar experience.

The lawyer took out a huge colorful handkerchief and blew his nose loudly. Then he carefully folded the handkerchief and put it back in his pocket.

- How old are you?

- Thirty two.

– And how many of them are you already on the run?

- Five years soon.

This was not the case. I wandered much longer, but Ludwig Sommer, on whose passport I lived, only since 1939.

I nodded.

“And the appearance is not particularly Jewish,” Levin noted.

- Maybe. But don’t you think that Hitler, Goebbels, Himmler and Hess also don’t have a particularly Aryan appearance?

Levin again let out his short, croaking laugh.

- What is not there is not there! Yes, I don't care. Besides, why on earth would a person pretend to be a Jew if he is not a Jew? Especially nowadays? Right?

- May be.

– Were you in a German concentration camp?

“Yes,” I remembered reluctantly. - Four months.

– Are there any documents from there? – Levin asked, and in his voice I heard something like greed.

– There were no documents. They just let me out and then I ran away.

- It's a pity. Now they would be very useful to us.

I glanced at Levin. I understood him, and yet something in me resisted the smoothness with which he translated all this into business. It was too disgusting and creepy. It’s so creepy and disgusting that I myself managed to cope with it with great difficulty. Not to forget, no, but to control it, melt it down and immerse it in yourself until it is no longer needed. Unnecessarily here on Ellis Island - but not in Germany.

Levin opened his suitcase and took out several sheets of paper.

– Here I have some more papers: Mr. Hirsch gave me testimonies and statements from people who know you. Everything has already been notarized. My partner Watson, for convenience's sake. Maybe you'd like to take a look at them too?

I shook my head. I knew these indications from Paris. Robert Hirsch was good at such matters. I didn't want to look at them now. In a strange way, for some reason it seemed to me that despite all the success today I have to leave something to fate itself. Any emigrant would immediately understand me. He who is always forced to bet on one chance in a hundred, for precisely this reason, will never block the path of ordinary luck. There was hardly any point in trying to explain all this to Levin.

The lawyer began to stuff the papers back with satisfaction.

“Now we need to find someone who is willing to guarantee that during your stay in America you will not burden the state treasury.” Do you have any friends here?

“Then maybe Robert Hirsch knows someone?”

- I have no idea.

“Someone will find it,” Levin said with strange confidence. “Robert is very reliable in these matters. Where are you going to live in New York? Mr. Hirsch offers you the Mirage Hotel. He himself lived there before.

I was silent for a few seconds and then said:

- Mr. Levin, don’t you mean to say that I will really get out of here?

- Why not? Otherwise why am I here?

– Do you really believe this?

- Certainly. You are not?

I closed my eyes for a moment.

“I believe,” I said. - I believe too.

- Very well! The main thing is not to lose hope! Or do emigrants think differently?

I shook my head.

- You see. Don't lose hope is an old, tried and tested American principle! Do you understand me?

I nodded. I did not have the slightest desire to explain to this innocent child of legitimate law how destructive hope can sometimes be. It devours all the resources of a weakened heart, its ability to resist, like the inaccurate blows of a boxer who is hopelessly losing. In my memory, disappointed hopes have ruined much more people than human submission to fate, when the curled-up soul concentrates all its strength on surviving, and there is simply no room left for anything else.

Erich Maria Remarque

Promised land

Erich Maria Remarque DAS GELOBTE LAND

First published in the German language

Reprinted with permission from the publisher

Verlag Kiepenheuer & Witsch GmbH & Co. KG.

For the third week I looked at this city: it lay before me in full view - and as if on another planet. Just a few kilometers away from me, separated by a narrow branch of the sea that I could probably swim across - and yet inaccessible and inaccessible, as if surrounded by an armada of tanks. It was protected by the most reliable bastions that the twentieth century had invented - the fortress walls of papers, passport regulations and the inhuman laws of an impenetrable soulless bureaucracy. I was on Ellis Island, it was the summer of 1944, and the city of New York lay before me.

Of all the internment camps I have ever seen, Ellis Island was the most humane. Here no one was beaten, tortured, tortured to death by backbreaking work, or poisoned in gas chambers. The local inhabitants were even provided with good food, free of charge, and beds in which they were allowed to sleep. There were guards everywhere, however, but they were almost polite. Ellis Island held foreigners arriving in America whose papers were either suspicious or simply out of order. The fact is that an entry visa issued by an American consulate in a European country alone was not enough for America; upon entering the country, one had to go through another check at the New York Immigration Bureau and obtain permission. Only then were you allowed in - or, on the contrary, they declared you an undesirable person and sent you back with the first ship. However, with sending back everything has long been not as simple as before. There was a war going on in Europe, America was also bogged down in this war up to its ears, German submarines were scouring the entire Atlantic, so passenger ships sailed from here to European ports of destination extremely rarely. For some poor souls who were denied entry, this meant, albeit tiny, but happiness: they, who had long been accustomed to counting their lives only in days and weeks, gained hope of staying at least for some time on Ellis Island. However, there were too many other rumors going around for me to console myself with such hope - rumors about ghost ships full of Jews that plied the ocean for months and which, no matter where they sailed, were not allowed to land anywhere. Some of the emigrants claimed that they saw with their own eyes - some on the approach to Cuba, some near the ports of South America - these crowds of desperate people, begging for salvation, crowding the railings of people on abandoned ships before entering harbors closed to them - these woeful “flying Dutchmen of our day, tired of running away from enemy submarines and human cruelty, carriers of the living dead and damned souls, whose only guilt was that they were people and thirsted for life.

Of course, there were some nervous breakdowns. Strangely, here on Ellis Island, they happened even more often than in the French camps, when German troops and the Gestapo stood very close, several kilometers away. Probably, in France, this resistance to one’s own nerves was somehow connected with a person’s ability to adapt to mortal danger. There the breath of death was felt so clearly that it must have forced a person to control himself, but here people, who had just relaxed at the sight of such close salvation, after a short time, when salvation suddenly began to elude them again, completely lost their self-control. However, unlike France, there were no suicides on Ellis Island - probably, hope was still too strong in people, albeit permeated with despair. But the very first innocent interrogation from the most harmless inspector could lead to hysteria: the distrust and vigilance accumulated over the years of exile cracked for a moment, and after that a flash of new distrust, the thought that you had made an irreparable mistake, plunged the person into panic. Typically, men had nervous breakdowns more often than women.

The city, which lay so close and at the same time so inaccessible, became something like a nightmare - it tormented, beckoned, mocked, promising everything and fulfilling nothing. Either, surrounded by flocks of ragged clouds and the hoarse whistles of ships, like the roar of steel ichthyosaurs, it appeared as a huge blurry monster, then, in the dead of night, bristling with a hundred towers of silent and ghostly Babylon, it turned into a white and inaccessible lunar landscape, and then, late in the evening, drowning in a storm of artificial lights, it became a sparkling carpet, stretched from horizon to horizon, alien and stunning after the impenetrable war nights of Europe - at this time many refugees in the dormitory stood up, awakened by the sobs and screams, groans and wheezes of their restless neighbors, those who were still pursued in their sleep by Gestapo men, gendarmes and SS thugs, and, huddled in dark human handfuls, quietly talking or silently, fixing their burning gaze on the unsteady haze on the other side, on the dazzling light panorama of the promised land - America, froze near the windows, united by a silent brotherhood of feelings, into which only grief brings people together, but never happiness.

I had a German passport, good for another four months. This almost authentic document was issued in the name of Ludwig Sommer. I inherited it from a friend who died two years ago in Bordeaux; since the external features indicated in the passport - height, hair and eye color - were the same, a certain Bauer, the best specialist in forgery of documents in Marseille, and a former professor of mathematics, advised me not to change the last name and first name in the passport; and although among the local emigrants there were several excellent lithographers who had already managed to straighten quite passable papers for more than one passportless refugee, I still preferred to follow Bauer’s advice and abandon my own name, especially since it was of almost no use anyway. On the contrary, this name was on the Gestapo lists, so it was time for him to disappear. So my passport was almost genuine, but the photo and I myself were a little fake. The skillful Bauer explained to me the benefits of my position: a heavily forged passport, no matter how wonderfully crafted it is, is only suitable in case of a cursory and careless check - it is not able to withstand any kind of meaningful forensic examination and will inevitably give away all its secrets; Prison, deportation, if not something worse, are guaranteed for me in this case. But checking a genuine passport with a fake holder is a much longer and troublesome story: in theory, the request should be sent to the place of issue, but now, when there is a war, this is out of the question. There are no connections with Germany. All experts strongly advise changing not your passports, but your identity; the authenticity of stamps became easier to verify than the authenticity of names. The only thing that didn’t add up in my passport was my religion. Sommer had it Jewish, but I didn’t. But Bauer considered that this was unimportant.

On Ellis Island I met two emigrants whom I had known briefly before. We happened to see each other several times on the “passionate path.” This was the name of one of the stages of the route along which refugees fled from the Hitler regime. Through Holland, Belgium and Northern France the route led to Paris and split there. From Paris one line led through Lyon to the Mediterranean coast; the second, having passed Bordeaux, Marseille and crossed the Pyrenees, fled to Spain, Portugal and ended up in the port of Lisbon. It was this route that was dubbed the “passionate path.” Those who followed them had to escape not only from the Gestapo - they also had to avoid falling into the clutches of the local gendarmes. The majority did not have passports, much less visas. If the gendarmes caught such people, they were arrested, sentenced to prison and expelled from the country. However, in many countries the authorities were humane enough to deliver them at least not to the German border - otherwise they would inevitably die in concentration camps. Since very few of the refugees had the opportunity to take a valid passport with them on the road, almost all were doomed to wander almost continuously and hide from the authorities. After all, without documents they could not get any legal work. Most suffered from hunger, poverty and loneliness, so they called the path of their wanderings the “passionate path.” Their stops along the way were the main post offices in cities and walls along the roads. At the main post offices they hoped to receive correspondence from relatives and friends; the walls of houses and fences along the highway served as newspapers for them. Chalk and charcoal imprinted on them the names of those who were lost and looking for each other, warnings, instructions, screams into the void - all these bitter signs of the era of human indifference, which was soon followed by the era of inhumanity, that is, war, when on both sides of the front the Gestapo and gendarmes often did one common thing.