![]() ![]() When they saw Mitz, the crowd shrieked with delight. Leonard himself recounted in his autobiography: As they continued on, the scene was repeated again and again along the German roads. He loved it - loved it! At last he stepped back from the car, clicked his heels together, and raised his arm. And what was the sweet little creature’s name? When he heard it he laughed and repeated it several times, slapping his thigh. He burbled and cooed, offering wurst fingers to Mitz, one by one. Bite it she did, though - but this seemed only to increase his delight. The man wagged a finger at Mitz, and Virginia closed her eyes and sent up a prayer that Mitz would not bite it. He leaned into the car, and Leonard inhaled a mixture of beer, onion, leather, pomade, and sweat. The storm trooper had eyes only for Mitz. Surprise, then puzzlement, then tenderness showed in his face. Mitz, excited by the noise and the flags and now this amusing fellow, leapt onto the steering wheel and screeched. Leonard felt for the letter in his pocket. He was a swastika himself, all angles, twisted, black and red. He threw up his hands, he shook his fists, he lifted one knee and then the other and stamped his feet. In her improbable and charming book Mitz: The Marmoset of Bloomsbury ( public library), Sigrid Nunez paints a vivid vignette:Ĭame a man in black uniform, face very red. All around them uniformed schoolchildren - hundreds of them - were singing and waving red swastika flags.Īs the car crawled through the frenzied mob with the top rolled down, Mitz once again became their ticket to safety. But when they tried to cross the Rhine, they found themselves trapped in a Nazi procession along a street lined with armed Nazi officers and adorned with banners that read THE JEW IS OUR ENEMY. In Bonn, they made a pilgrimage to Beethoven’s childhood home. In Cologne, they were awed by the majestic Gothic cathedral. We become obsequious - delighted that is when the officer smiles at Mitzi - the first stoop in our back. Virginia grew giddy with relief, then immediately horrified by the grisly incongruity of evil and delight: The Nazi, still laughing, let them through. Just then, as Virginia watched a little boy open his bag at the barrier with a Heil Hitler salute, the German officer - a “grim man” - came out and issued a jolly laugh upon seeing Mitz - the sickly pet marmoset the Woolfs had taken along on a whim, now perched on Leonard’s shoulder. Ought I to go in and see what is happening? A fine dry windy morning. A car with the swastika on the back window has just passed through the barrier into Germany. Sitting in the sun outside the German Customs. Lawrence while shuddering at the passing minutes - it was taking much longer than at the Dutch border. Virginia stayed in the car, trying to read D.H. Leonard disappeared into the customs house. Ahead of them, trucks with swastikas were passing through. Leonard and Virginia WoolfĪfter a week of savoring Rembrandts and Vermeers and fine weather in Holland, the Woolfs reached the German border. In the spring of 1935, traveling through Nazi-occupied Europe, Virginia Woolf and her Jewish husband Leonard came face to face with this haunting paradox of human nature - an experience both sinister and strangely hopeful. The dissident poet Joseph Brodsky captured this as he contemplated the greatest antidote to evil, observing that “no matter how evil your enemy is, the crucial thing is that he is human.” Little Prince author Antoine de Saint-Exupéry experienced it first-hand when a smile and a cigarette exchanged with an enemy saved his life while captive as a prisoner of war. The most discomposing thing about people capable of monstrous acts is that they too enjoy art, they too read to their children, they too can be moved to tears by music.
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