Of Terror & Trade
Of Blood and Hope.
by Samuel Pisar.
Little, Brown. 311 pp. $12.95.
Samuel Pisar is an international lawyer best known for his tireless advocacy of trade between the Soviet Union and the West. Only by increasing the volume of such trade, he argues, will the Soviet Union be induced to modify its behavior, and become an acceptable member of the community of nations. A survivor of two years under Communist rule in Poland, and four years under the Nazis, Pisar claims to have no illusions about the nature of totalitarianism, or Soviet intentions. If he advocates détente, it is not, he insists, out of wishful thinking, but rather because in his view it is the only alternative to a nuclear war that would annihilate civilization. So strong are his feelings that Pisar has now written an autobiography in which he draws upon his Holocaust experiences to underline this point. Gripping though it is as a document of personal survival, the memoir is somewhat less convincing as a foreign-policy brief.
Pisar was born in 1929 in Bialystok, a middle-sized Polish city with a flourishing Jewish community. In 1939, the vibrant Jewish life of that city came to an end as World War II broke out and Bialystok, by the terms of the Hitler-Stalin pact, fell to the Russians. In the two years that followed, young Samuel received a steady dose of Stalinist indoctrination at school, and was at first impressed by the seeming dynamism of the new Soviet society. Then in 1941, Hitler’s army attacked; and the swift collapse of Soviet defenses as well as the speed with which formerly loyal Communists changed their allegiance revealed the crumbling structure behind the ideological façade. For the Jews of Poland it was the end; fewer than 2,000 of the 50,000 Jews of Bialystok were to survive the war.
Those who were not killed outright were herded into the ghetto, and it was here, under conditions of unspeakable privation, that Pisar celebrated his Bar Mitzvah. When the time came to liquidate the ghetto, men still capable of work were separated from women and children, marked for immediate extinction. Pisar’s mother, sensing what lay ahead, dressed him in long pants and sent him out with the men. She herself perished along with Pisar’s younger sister and father, who was tortured to death by the Gestapo for attempting to smuggle children out of the ghetto.
Over the next four years, Pisar managed to survive through a combination of luck and resourcefulness. When children, on one occasion, were being offered extra rations of white bread and milk, he kept himself forcibly from joining them, thus evading one selection for the gas chambers. A second time he cheated death by pretending he could work a button-holing machine, talking his way into a group of tailors bound for a slave-labor camp. Yet again, on the very threshold of the gas chamber, he picked up a broom and bucket, pretended he was an orderly, and mopped his way out of the room. By dint of such stratagems Pisar managed to keep alive long enough to witness the allied liberation of Europe. One day in 1944 an American tank rolled across a German field and Pisar emerged from the bushes to greet it: a sixteen-year-old skeleton screaming the three English words his mother had taught him a lifetime before: “God bless America.”
That same determination which helped keep Pisar alive in the camps has served him equally well in the years that followed. Emigrating to Melbourne in 1946, he devoted himself zealously to making up for the formal education he had missed, and learned English well enough within a very short period to win a scholarship to the University of Melbourne, where he eventually earned a law degree. This was followed by a Ph.D. at Harvard for a massive study on the legal aspects of trade between the Communist and capitalist worlds. After several years with UNESCO in Paris he returned to Washington where he took a congressional staff job and became closely involved in shaping the foreign-trade policy of Kennedy’s New Frontier.
In the early 60’s Pisar opened a law office in Paris and became enormously successful as an international lawyer specializing in multinational corporations—an ideal vantage point from which to pursue his private dream of contributing to a gradual moderation of the inhuman regimes of Eastern Europe and ultimately the Soviet Union via the liberating effects of trade. For a while, Pisar found his hopes rather widely shared as the politics of détente flowered in the early 1970’s. More recently, however, his views have come under considerable challenge, thanks to the general economic situation in the U.S., the shocks administered by OPEC, and the mounting aggressiveness of Soviet behavior. Still, Pisar continues, from his position as a supremely successful multinational insider, to argue the case for East-West trade.
In the present volume he carries the argument even further, attempting to make his unique personal history serve as a somber backdrop to his view that the alternative to removing East-West barriers is a regression to something resembling the barbarism of forty years ago. But the attempt fails. For one thing, his descriptions and analyses of actual political situations seem oddly off center and naive, especially for a man of his considerable experience in the ways of the world. Writing about Australia in the early 1950’s, for example, he describes the country as a bastion of old-world courtesy and gentleness, in contrast to the United States, where he found ruthless competition and a shocking McCarthyite climate. Not only does this compliment to Australian manners fly in the face of reality (an old joke describes an Australian as a man who calls a spade a bloody shovel) but it totally ignores the fact that Australian politics in those years was dominated as much as was American politics by the issue of Communism, with a hard-fought referendum over a proposed constitutional amendment to outlaw the Communist party, a scandal involving a spy ring operating out of the Soviet embassy, and an opposition party destroyed by the issue.
This is perhaps a peripheral point, but it illustrates Pisar’s penchant for ignoring awkward considerations which would interfere with his rhetoric. Other illustrations are found in his outright condemnation of the Vietnam war, with no reference to the victims of totalitarianism; in his assertion that a continuing arms race must lead to a nuclear Armageddon, unqualified by any discussion of the real issues which must be faced before meaningful arms-control measures can be enacted; and in the crude economic determinism underlying his exlanation of how Nazism triumphed in Germany.
Pisar urges the West to invest huge amounts to develop Siberia’s mineral and petroleum resources in order to reduce the dangers of conflict over Persian Gulf oil. But he does not consider that this policy might well provide an incentive for the Soviets to encourage the oil-producing nations to become even more intractable. He offers a grim example of the dangers of partnership between private enterprise and dictatorships in the wartime exploitation by I.G. Farben of slave labor, yet he fails totally to address the even more taxing problems which would arise should democratically elected governments make their economic welfare, and hence their political survival, hostage to trade with totalitarian governments. Unfortunately, such problems cannot be solved simply by allowing men of good will on each side gradually to build up mutual confidence, as Pisar would have it.
Pisar’s life bears witness to his sincerity, but sincerity is unfortunately no guarantee of correct analysis. The fundamental point driven home to Pisar by his own experience is that the structure of civilization is fragile indeed; it does not follow, however, that the way to protect the fragility is to befriend those who would destroy the structure.
