—RUMANIAN SCENE

When will it be recognized in Europe that peoples have only that degree of liberty in and among themselves which their courage wrests from their cowardice? STENDHAL

I came to the Athene Palace the day Paris fell, in the summer of 1940. The Square before the hotel was still and hot that day, the only comfortable spot it offered being the short shadow cast by the canopy over the Athene Palace entrance. There was a patch of lawn before the hotel, bordered with gigantic red gladiolas, but all around this bit of vegetation was a vast expanse of asphalt, with nothing growing on it but a beautiful bronze horse with a bronze rider, high on a red-granite base. The rider was Carol I, founder of the present Rumanian dynasty. Facing as they did, horse and rider seemed about to jump over the gate right into the present Carol's palace.

The Athene Palace lined the width of the Piazza Atheneului, Bucharest's magic square that opens on the most glamorous artery of the Near East, the Calea Victoriei. Imagine the White House, the Waldorf Astoria, Carnegie Hall, Colony Restaurant, and the Lincoln Memorial, all standing together around a smallish square blossoming out on an avenue which is a cross between Broadway and Pennsylvania and Fifth Avenues, and you understand what the Piazza Atheneului means to Rumania. Here was the heart of Bucharest topographically, artistically, intellectually, politically—and, if you like, morally.

At the left of the hotel, on the long side of the Piazza, was an ugly building designed along classical lines in a dirty yellow. This was the Athene, the concert hall that gave the Square and the hotel their name and where Georges Enesco, Rumania's beloved maestro, conducted his concerts. Next to the Athene was smart Cina's Restaurant with its lovely garden, the rendezvous of Bucharest's real and café society.

Only a stone's throw away, at the right of the hotel where the Piazza merged with the Calea Victoriei, King Carol's white palace began. One says "began" because the palace, looking very new and unfinished all the way, sprawled on and on up the Calea Victoriei, Rumania's road of destiny on which the Turkish conquerors had descended upon the city from the South and the German conquerors from the North, and which had witnessed all the passing glories and miseries of the country.

Built in 1910 and styled originally after the fashionable Paris hotels, the Meurice and the Ritz, the Athene Palace had two years ago been scraped clean of its caryatides and turrets and its façade streamlined into white smoothness with all the shutters painted a brilliant blue. The entrance hall, too, with its modernistic desk and gleaming showcases of glass and aluminum, had the same forcibly functional look. Even in the mirrored green salon with its low sofas and tables, a modern decorator had tried his hand; but for the rest you did not find much streamlining inside the hotel. You were apt to live in a pseudo-Louis XV room hung with blue brocades, and the restaurant was red and gold and white in the manner of the French restaurants of the second Empire. In the large darkish lobby where you spent most of your days, rows of yellow marble pillars formed three naves as in a church.

When the revolving door first discharged me into the cool entrance hall of the Athene Palace, I felt little beyond the traveling journalist's curiosity for the most famous hostelry of the Balkans. Landing in Naples in May, I had travelled leisurely through an Italy more poignantly beautiful than ever on the eve of her disastrous folly. I had spent a fortnight in Jugoslavia, where the abandon with which every racial group and political- and court- faction was busy hating every other racial group and political- and court-faction was bewildering in view of the pressing danger from outside. Rumania was meant to be merely the next short stage on a long journey around the war. Such at least had been the plan with which I had set out from America for Europe, and I could not know that here at this odd, elegant Grand Hotel I would get the perfect close-up of the Nazis' conquest and colonization of Europe; a close-up which, though it covered only a slab of Europe, lost nothing of its significance by its size—a blood test is taken from only a drop of blood.

When I came to the Athene Palace on that hot June afternoon in 1940, I was an American who had felt, and still did feel against my will, that Hitler might not only win the war but could win the peace and organize Europe if he did. When I left the Athene Palace on an icy morning at the end of January 1941, I was convinced that under no circumstances could Hitler win the peace or organize Europe.

Hitler's recent military victories had little to do with my earlier conviction that he could win the war and the peace. It went farther back than that, back to a night in March 1936, in Berlin. Hitler's troops had just marched into the Rhineland and I saw high German officials tremble in their boots for fear of the consequences. One of them confided to me that each German troop commander who marched carried a sealed order telling him to retreat from the Rhineland area—the second the French and English made a warlike move, Hitler would have given the sign to open that order. This was, I felt, the last moment when a strong stand on the part of France and England could have blown away the nightmare of Hitlerism. It would not even have been necessary to fight. But the democracies let the moment pass.

From then on everything I saw on my travels across the European continent seemed to confirm this conviction. The statesmen of the democracies, vacillating, weak, petty, betrayed the principles they were supposedly living by; failed in every effort to present a united front to dictatorship; ignored every opportunity of finding generous and imaginative solutions for the emergencies created by the cruelty of totalitarian revolution; failed especially to provide a program which appealed to the European peoples.

These European peoples themselves had become increasingly indifferent to democracy, which was advertised to them in intellectual terms of freedom of thought and freedom of speech, but which in terms of their daily experience meant chiefly freedom to starve. I saw that not more than ten percent of the people on the European continent cared for individual freedom or were vitally enough interested in it to fight for its preservation. As to the remaining ninety percent, they were partly unaware of the real nature of Hitler's menacing shadow, partly indifferent to it, and partly ready to take a chance on the Führer.

Facing this torn-up, stagnant world was the German nation powerfully united in the one purpose of conquest, a purpose which appealed to the people's most intimate dreams. Added to this was the amazing phenomenon of the German leaders, who deceived and lied all the time but who...