How Scum Die
by George Jonas
Queen's Quarterly
September 1, 2008
"Well -- you were an eyewitness to history," I said to him.
"History is wasted on the innocent," he replied.
This exchange came back to me this summer after I read in the paper about the capture of Radovan Karadzic, the one-time president of Serbian Bosnia. Having been indicted for genocide in The Hague in 1995, Karadzic had eluded his international accusers for 13 years, until his Serbian countrymen sold him for undisclosed pieces of silver and the hope of gaining admittance to Europe.
The news reminded me of a conversation I had with an American who wanted to be known as Freddie. It happened many years ago.
As Freddie told me his story, he was all set to become an architect when Pearl Harbor interfered. Following family tradition, he took a commission in the Navy. He saw no action, which suited him fine. He hated guns, whether they were revolvers or torpedo tubes, and was just as happy that the war ended without him having to fire any. Having just married, he decided to stay in the service until he could figure out what to do with his life.
It was then that his only overseas assignment seconded him to the U.S. military mission in Bucharest, Romania. His commander described it as a cushy job, involving mainly attending diplomatic receptions, ideal for a newlywed liaison officer whose wife had just given birth to their first child. It was with expectations of champagne and caviar that Freddie arrived, after an 18-hour flight, at the U.S. military mission in Romania's dusty capital on a balmy Thursday in May.
The Cold War was about ten weeks old; the Iron Curtain had barely descended. Freddie had never heard about either. A duty officer showed him to his quarters, then handed him a schedule book in which the first item read: Jilava, June 1, 1946, 1700 hours.
"What's a Jilava?" he asked the duty officer, a crisp Marine Second Lieutenant.
"A prison," he told Freddie. "At the outskirts. Just a hop, skip and a jump."
"A prison! What am I doing there?"
"Escorting the attaché."
"Okay -- what's he doing there?"
"You can ask him on the way."
"I had a long trip, Lieutenant," said Freddie. "I'm asking you."
The Marine stiffened, but then let Freddie pull rank. "They want the attaché to witness the execution, sir."
"What are you talking about?"
"The former government, sir. You know. The ones we handed over." The duty officer shrugged. "We handed them over, at least the Russians did, so now they want us to stand by as they shoot them."
"Oh," said Freddie. "Thanks; that's all." He had no idea what the Marine was talking about. Shoot the government? Freddie had only the vaguest notions about the whys and wherefores of the gigantic war that had ended about nine months earlier, and had never heard of a new one that started on March 5, 1946, with Churchill's speech about the Iron Curtain. The complexities of East European politics had eluded him altogether.
Two days later, on a Saturday afternoon, he was sitting at the back of a Zim limousine driving through cobblestoned streets leading to a narrow highway at the outskirts of Bucharest. The attaché turned out to be a morose gentleman from the Office of Strategic Services, with the rank of a lieutenant-colonel and the manners of a platypus.
"I see here you speak French," he said to Freddie, looking at a sheet of paper. "How come?"
"After Mother died, Father re-married," said Freddie. "My stepmother came from Alma, Quebec. She raised me."
"I see."
The OSS man assumed that everybody knew the nuts and bolts of international intrigue as well as he did, and had no time for anyone who did not.
"'Orion' tried," he said to his nonplussed aide after they rode in silence for a while, "but it was too little, too late. A miss is as good as a mile. What do you say?"
"Yes, sir," said Freddie. "You bet."
Even if the attaché had not used the OSS code name "Orion" for Ion Antonescu, Freddie would have had no idea that he was talking about the unsuccessful efforts of Romania's wartime Conducător, or leader, to break away from the Nazis and negotiate a separate peace with the Western allies in 1943. Had he known, he would not have cared. All Freddie could think about was that he was going to have to watch some men being shot.
The whole episode seemed like a bad dream. First there was an old fort, rather in need of repair, where he found himself shaking hands with a Romanian colonel who, speaking French, introduced himself as the commandant of Jilava Military Prison. Then Colonel Pistravu introduced the commandant of the execution platoon, an officer who said: "Enchanté!" Then there was a country road leading from the back of the prison into some scrubland, overgrown with low bushes and weeds. There was a platoon of about 30 soldiers, rifles in hand, marching briskly in front, beside, and behind a group of civilians, maybe fourteen in all. Ten appeared to be officials, carrying briefcases. Four were the condemned men, carrying only their hats. They all marched in loose but fairly orderly formation, as if out for a Sunday hike, a group of government colleagues, going for a picnic.
The ones who were about to be shot were not handcuffed, blindfolded, or otherwise restrained. They wore the same kind of crumpled, ill-cut business suits as the others. One could tell that they were the hares rather than the hounds only by the generous space left around them by the escort. It seemed all too unrehearsed, informal, and pedestrian. Or mundane, that was a better word. It was conspicuously lacking in any hint of dignity, catharsis, or denunciation. As one who almost became an architect, Freddie used the world "Bauhaus" to describe it, but then he added that it was not even deliberately functional. It was just a no-frills, no-brand, generic, wartime execution.
Four posts stood in a clearing, three or four yards apart, and the condemned men walked up to them, one after the other, without anybody showing them where to stand, as if they had done nothing else all their lives. Next they turned to face the soldiers who marched to form a double line opposite, all except six, who took positions on a scrubby knoll behind the posts. For a second the insane idea crossed Freddie's mind that the six soldiers on the mound would fire at the prisoners from behind, in which case he and the attaché had better take cover.
"Old rifles," said the attaché, sotto voce. "New cameras."
About thirty feet to one side a film cameraman started cranking what indeed looked like a brand-new Paillard-Bolex on a tripod, slowly panning to a man who stood a few feet away. He began reading something in a wooden voice, rarely raising his eyes from the paper in his hand. The soldiers stood in a double line, at ease, resting the butts of their rifles on the ground. The grass at their feet was sparse, coarse, and yellow.
Freddie had never felt trapped out in the open before; he did not think it would be possible. He looked at the attaché. What was he going to ask? Permission to be sick, sir?
"Petrescu," the attaché said, mistaking Freddie's look. "Or maybe Săndulescu. One of the local prosecutors. I can't tell them apart."
"Permission to be sick, sir?"
"Don't be an idiot," said the OSS man, suppressing a smile. He was convinced Freddie was clowning. "They may be scum, but all the same ... Behave!"
The scum at the post farthest from the camera looked avuncular. He held both ends of his stylish grey scarf in his hands. He was the former Minister of the Interior, General Constantin Vasiliu, as Freddie was to find out the following week while helping the attaché label a file of photographs before shipment to America. As Petrescu's (or Săndulescu's) wooden voice droned on, Vasiliu put his hands on his hips and shook his head with what seemed a slight smile. At the next post a balding man, wearing a suit and buttoned up shirt but no tie, absent-mindedly picked his teeth a couple of times before turning his impassive glance at the speaker again. Gheorghe Alexianu, a former professor of history and philosophy, about to be shot for having been the Governor of Transnistria where nearly a hundred and eighty thousand Jews perished, seemed frozen, lost in another world. The man at the next post, shorter than the others, had been the Vice-President of the Council of Ministers. Mihai Antonescu, no relation to the Conducător, wore a crumpled grey suit and no tie. He had sharp features and the fidgety movements of a rat. And finally at the near post stood the Conducător himself, Ion Antonescu, the Führer of Romania, the only person Freddie had vaguely heard about, although he would never have recognized him. He stood in front of his post, in a dark striped suit, narrow tie, white handkerchief in his breast pocket, looking like a high school principal attending a commencement ceremony held outdoors.
Insects buzzed in the low grass. It seemed as if Petrescu/Săndulescu would never stop reading, but finally he did, ending with a question. Freddie assumed it was to ask if anyone had anything to say before the sentence would be carried out. He hoped they all would, but only General Vasiliu did, with a slight smile, holding the ends of his scarf in his hands. He sounded vaguely sarcastic but did not say much, and when he finished, he draped the scarf around his head, put his hands behind his back, and leaned against the post. The others said nothing. They stood in front of their posts, Alexianu with his hands by his sides, stomach slightly sticking out; Mihai Antonescu looking left and right, trying to find a place for his hat, and finally dropping it on the ground.
Freddie noticed that the six soldiers behind the condemned men on the mound had vanished. He did not see them withdraw, but they must have moved out of the line of fire. When he glanced at the firing squad he saw that the front line of soldiers -- or maybe prison guards, he could not tell from their uniforms -- had dropped to one knee. Twenty-four rifles pointed at the four men, twelve soldiers kneeling, twelve standing. A command rang out. Freddie's eyes shifted back to the men waiting to be shot. Suddenly the Conducător, as if he had just remembered something, raised the hat he was still holding in his hand and shouted at the firing squad. It sounded like an exhortation, perhaps "Do your worst, traitors!" or "Long live Romania!" In the next instant the four figures tottered, crumpled, spun, and fell. Freddie had no idea why. He had heard no shots.
Incongruously, out of the blue, a fat little man in a hat rushed up to the Conducător, but scurried immediately away as a single shot rang out -- this time, Freddie heard it -- indicating that the doctor had literally jumped the gun: the execution was not yet over. The commander of the firing squad, the officer who had said "Enchanté!" to Freddie, was firing a pistol into the head of General Vasiliu. Moving crisply, the enchanted officer walked over to Governor Alexianu to deliver the coup de grâce, then to Mihai Antonescu, whose body jerked as he pulled the trigger, and finally to the Conducător. After shooting him in the head as well, he stepped away and was about to holster his sidearm when he had second thoughts, turned back, and shot Antonescu in the head again. Whether he had detected movement or thought that a Führer ought to be shot twice, Freddie could not say.
"The rest is housekeeping," said the attaché, motioning Freddie to start walking back to the American mission's Russian limousine. Things proved to be more complicated, because for some reason they were obliged to give a lift back to town to the fat little gun-jumping physician, Dr Ionescu, who turned out to be a talkative soul. It was when he went to sleep in his quarters on the evening of June 1, 1946, that Freddie decided he would not be happy spending his life as a soldier, although it took him nearly ten more years to resign his commission.
"Lesson?" I asked Freddie when he finished. Back in those days I was still smoking, and I remember fishing for a cigarette in my pocket.
"You really want to know?"
"Well, yes."
He was silent for a while. "Scum die well," he said finally.