What Heroes Learn

A EUROPEAN EDUCATION (248 pp.)--Romain Gary--Simon & Schuster ($3.75).

French Novelist Romain Gary has created a gallery of heroes who are willing to die for liberty but have to settle for the lesser victory of self-knowledge. Whether they enter the lists on the side of justice and liberty (The Colors of the Day) or fanatically defend so unlikely a symbol of freedom as the disappearing elephant (The Roots of Heaven), they wind up knowing that man's nature itself precludes the achievement of worldly grace. A courageous fighter himself (in the French and Free French air forces for eight years). Gary saves his writing from downright pessimism by the conviction that the idealists will always continue the struggle through some inner human compulsion.

The latest of Gary's books to appear in the U.S. is actually the second book he wrote, was published in France. Its heroes are the partisans of Poland during the Nazi occupation; and even now. after shelves have been jammed with books superficially like it. A European Education conveys its horror and its message with stubborn authority. Author Gary (for the past four years French consul general in Los Angeles) is a French citizen born of Russian actor parents. As a boy he went to school for a year or two in Poland, speaks its language and understands its plight. His hero is a boy of 14 who is led into a forest by his doctor father and left with a supply of potatoes in a dugout. His mother has been taken to one of the brothels set up by the Germans, and it is a long time before Janek knows that his father was killed when, alone, he attacked her keepers.

Like many a wartime child in whatever country, Janek becomes a man long before he stops being a boy. He learns about bravery and suffering before he can comprehend their motivation. His first and only love affair is with a girl not much older than he who is both a prostitute for the German troops and a spy for the partisans. He sees his comrades die while other Poles play the black-market game, digs for acorns in the snow when the last potato is gone. And all the time he remains in part a baffled child who avidly reads about American Indians. He also learns to kill. But not even his patriotism and his hatred of the enemy can protect him from the shame he feels when he shoots a German soldier who is sitting down, unarmed.

Janek's hope, like the hope of many another innocent, is that Russia and the U.S., as victors, would "build a new world together." But already some know better. "You are such a child, Janek," says his child-mistress.

Author Gary's writing success, in a book from which the years have extracted some force, lies in the fact that the heroism swamps the despair. The ultimate lesson of this bitter European education is that, in Gary's words, "we still are, and will be for a long time, condemned to heroism."

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