HE IS SILENT on the walk back to the square. She feeds his dread. “Funny thing, we never see those old red wooden boxcars anymore.” He snaps at her too quickly, “That’s just talk. Who really knows what happened to her?” And the woman’s sneer says, Suit yourself.
He is embarrassed that their search proved to be so simple and relieved when his guide quits him at the corner where, just down the street, her dark red church thrusts up from its grove of small black winter trees. “Satisfied, Baron?” she inquires.
Baron? Hadn’t Wanda said that, too? He had talked too much, arriving in Oswiecim. Then, this morning, he had mentioned to this Erna woman that the “estate agent” referred to by those old people had been an unprincipled lawyer for his family. A grunt was her one comment. She already knew.
In no need of thanks, Erna is off to help welcome the new priest transferred here by his bishop from a parish north of Warsaw near Treblinka. “Let’s hope he’s not one of those!” she calls over her shoulder. “One of which?” he calls back, disingenuous. She emits a loud bark devoid of mirth.
MISS EMMELINE ALLGEIER, schoolteacher. Throughout his youth, that name was scarcely mentioned. Eventually, his father married, then the old Baron died. On his last visit to his grandmother, he found her semi-comatose, disputing someone in her head. Was there anything he could bring her? Slowly opening her loose old eyes, sardonic to the last, she croaked thickly, “Bring me death,” then closed her eyes and seemingly withdrew into her coma. He had risen, on the point of leaving, when her voice said briskly, “I suppose the mother might have had some Jew in her. Hard to tell about those people.”
He sat down again, in silence. “You should have told me, Grandmother,” he said finally. Her eyes opened so quickly he had to believe the old cobra had known from the start that he was right there by the bed. Invigorated now, she actually sat up a little.
“Now why on earth would we burden you with such a story, David, even if we thought it might be true? Why on earth would you ever wish to know?”
“Grandmother? What are you saying here—?” He took a deep breath. “Is she dead or isn’t she?”
“Dead?”
Never before had he dared speak to her in such a tone. The old woman shrank back as if whipped across the face. Not that she retreated, far less tried to reassure him. What she said was, “Don’t be silly, David. How would I know?” What possible difference can it make to me when I’m as good as dead myself? “No, no, it’s that other matter I’d worry about if I were you, boy. The Jewess. But of course,” she continued, “that’s long forgotten, David, no one need ever know. I mean, you look all right, tall and fair and almost as handsome as your father in your way. No one would suspect a thing. So you needn’t mope or go snooping about, pestering people. You don’t have to be ‘David,’ that’s all I’m saying.”
You look all right. You don’t have to be David—he never forgot a word. Nor could he ever quite forgive that deathbed vengeance wreaked on him for bringing suspect blood into the family. So you needn’t go snooping about in Poland, that was there, too. That had always been there, like her unfailing use of “David” in association with any mention of his mother. How naive he’d been, that awful moping little David! But afterward he could not be sure what she was really saying. Was it just possible that Emi Allgeier was still alive?
In the end, he felt deeply frustrated and bitter but also very sad about the absence in his boyhood of all boyhood’s robust aspects and events—the fun of all that running and shouting out in the wild joy of bursting forth, the rushing to welcome every moment of his life, the games and excursions, the presents and those birthday parties celebrated by other children (“Birthday party? But we don’t know your birth date, dear, you see?”), the solace of warm loving hugs, safe sanctuary: even apes had that much, Anders said. What had always been missing was a true bond with others, women especially, and perhaps also with himself. Apart from a few unremarkable poems and some modest distinction as a scholar, who in hell was he?
HE NEEDS TO SORT OUT crumpled feelings before joining the others at Birkenau; perhaps he’ll feel better if he pays his respects at what may have been the final station of his mother’s cross. The last prisoners in the Cracow ghetto, he has read, were transported to Auschwitz-Birkenau in August 1942, so Emmeline Allgeier and her mother and young sister (known as “Peek,” according to his father) would have arrived before the railway was extended through the tunnel into the camp and the platforms built to accommodate the horde of Jewish prisoners from Greece and Hungary. Before that, they would have been off-loaded at the original terminal, the so-called Judenrampe, which must still be out there in the buffer zone between the Lager and the town. Somewhere a spur must branch off from the main line; the junction can’t be very far from where this farm road crosses the tracks.
Just beyond that point, he follows a broken disused road that roughly parallels the tracks; it passes north along a wall of thorn and bramble, emerging eventually in an abandoned railway yard of frost-split broken concrete paving and wind-banged rusty sheds. Here, sure enough, a spur splits off from the main line in the direction of the Lager. In the fork, still monitoring the junction, stands what looks like a defunct whistle-stop, a nondescript blockhouse of dirty industrial concrete with one cobwebbed broken window.
Across the yard where the spur disappears into the overgrowth, he enters a narrow lane between walls of thicket. Glimpsed through the branch tops, a slow freight rumbles past on the main line. Farther on, around a wooded bend, the lane skirts a cluster of knocked-down dwellings overwhelmed by weed trees, saplings, hawthorne—presumably one of the condemned rural communities in the no-man’s-land surrounding the new camp, torn down and scavenged by those famished prisoners for its wood and bricks. Not far beyond, the spur reappears on open ground—the original terminus, the Judenrampe. On the tracks, still coupled, stand two short-bodied red cattle cars, darkened by weather.
The wooden cars sit oddly high above the platform (the children, he thinks, and the elderly and the disabled must have landed hard) and the bolted doors evoke at once the doors in the SS photographs of the disgorged cargos, the confused figures amidst piles of old suitcases and bundles and the knapsacked children whose yellow stars, deathly white in those old prints, loom so large on the dark suits of those little boys wearing neckties and knickers, the better to make a favorable impression at their destination.
NOT A STONE’S THROW from the cattle cars, a sulphur-yellow cottage with orange-red tile roof squats on bare clay. On its farther side, a brick patio still under construction has a matchless prospect of Birkenau’s main tower, a mile away across low swampy ground crisscrossed by crows. The entrance, like a huge black grotto at this distance, looks more than ever like a cave. In the early days, in every weather, the doomed were driven all that way across that mile on foot, ragged lines of reeling figures dragging those last precious belongings they’d been ordered to bring with them. On some unknown date, perhaps not long after his own safe arrival in North America, Emi Allgeier and her mother and her little sister Peek must have walked that road.
A young man clutching a blueprint appears around the corner of the house, and seeing Olin, grins. But Olin turns on him, exclaiming, “My God, man, why in hell would you wish to live in such a place?” He is pointing at the Cave, the tower, the red wall.
The young man stares at this intruder who dares berate him in archaic Polish. His face closes. Stolid, he considers the death camp tower and the gate.
“Mirek? Oh hell. Listen, I’m sorry.”
“Because it’s cheap,” says Mirek. He points at a second cottage under construction in the trees beyond. “Good mortgages out here, too.” He rolls up his blueprint, heads for the other house, not looking anymore at the guest of Poland.
FROM THE JUDENRAMPE, the rails disappear into thorn thicket. Finding no path, he walks an earthen dike across the meadow to the new paved road from Oswiecim
that comes to the Lager by way of a high bridge over the tracks farther down the line. This dike crossing the low ground must be the path taken by his mother and her terrified family, and this knowing undoes him, striking down the last of his dispassion.
Emerged from the tunnel, he hurries down the endless platform, gaining on the stragglers as they draw near the memorial terrace between crematoria. From a distance, seen through the gauze of a light snowfall, those dark amorphous figures trudging in that same direction might be the prisoners of long ago, herded toward the wood.
LEADING THEM THROUGH the broken gate of #2’s steel fence, the beatific cantor Rabbi Dan is singing in sweet tenor a hymn adapted from the Psalms, “Pitkhu li shaarei tzedek; avo bam, odeh Yah . . .” Whispering, Adina translates for Olin’s benefit (“Open for me the Gates of Righteousness, I will enter through and praise the Lord”) as they make their way around the ruin to join a service on the farther side. Invoking the Prayer for the Dead, the congregants surround a rain-filled pit which after fifty years of weather is a greasy pool heavily matted with green-yellow duckweed. Into this pit in the early days, so he has read, the ash produced daily in this single building from an estimated fourteen thousand corpses was dumped before a market for commercial fertilizer could be developed. (“A criminal waste,” hisses Earwig, tossing a scrap of brick into the pond. But he has sense enough today to mutter his ironies under his breath.)
Apparently Father Mikal has forsaken his welcome in Oswiecim to attend this ceremony. On behalf of a Jewish-Christian reconciliation society in Warsaw, he steps forward to express stiff formal hope that their ecumenical retreat in this “Golgotha,” as His Holiness called it on the great occasion of his visit, will help to heal any last schisms between faiths in “our new Poland.” He spreads his arms wide in blessing as the congregation murmurs in approval, and appears discomfited when Sister Catherine steps forward unbidden as soon as he steps back. Olin and Adina exchange a worried glance: the novice’s intense expression signals her opinion that the priest’s pro forma speech at the ash pit of Birkenau’s main crematorium had been inadequate.
The novice sinks onto her knees in the wet snow. In a taut voice, hands lifted in prayer, she begs the Lord’s mercy for those Christian Poles who abetted the oppressors in their hideous cruelties to the Jewish people and the sinful indifference of those high prelates of the Church who knew the truth, yet out of prejudice and cowardice and—worst of all—indifference, failed to protest or attempt to intervene.
Here Sister Ann-Marie forsakes her with a chirrup of dismay, roiling the congregation in the commotion of her flight, but Georgie Earwig, a rare grin lighting his face, is raising clasped hands above his head, and even austere Adina Schreier smiles approval as Catherine, glancing just once at the priest, concludes in a resolute pure voice, “In coming here, may we humbly offer our great sorrow that this dreadful thing was done by Christians in a Christian country.”
The priest glides forward to hover like an avenging angel at a point just off her shoulder; he bends low to speak into her ear. But surely he must know from her demeanor, Olin thinks, that not even a papal edict would suffice to still that voice.
In the silence, Olin lifts his hands, thinking to defend her with applause, but her eyes have found him and her bleak gaze stays him. I am destroyed, it says. For a near minute, head sinking to her breast, she remains kneeling in the snow. At the very least, she has gone too far and has frightened herself badly.
A year ago, according to Adina (who has picked the simple brain of Ann-Marie), Catherine was suspended from her teaching ministry and her novitiate for questioning the papal ban against the ordination of women priests. Under the terms of her provisional reinstatement, this public criticism of the priest entrusted with her spiritual guidance makes her vulnerable to another bad report. And this from a man, Olin has noticed, who during his own prayer never touched knee to the muddy ground and is now retreating into the congregation as if to separate himself from a heretic’s ravings.
Rising at last, Sister Catherine is approached by Moishe T., the lone Ostjude survivor. Tottering forward, the lachrymose old man takes her hands and peers into her eyes for second after second before turning to the gathering without releasing her. In a thin, scratched voice, he testifies that what he has just heard is the first heartfelt repentance from a Roman Catholic he has experienced in all the years since his own deliverance from hell fifty years before.
When finally old Moishe lets go and moves away, Catherine stands motionless, pale and trembling in the cold, as if a wand must be waved or an ogre slain to break the spell and set her free. Olin longs to go forward and hug her. Hey, great idea, boy! Go make things worse for her, why don’t you?
Now Priest Mikal is there again. Ignoring the novice, he raises his palms high to command attention, then asks permission to correct a certain inference made here today, that most Catholics in Poland collaborated in the Nazi evil. On the contrary, he says, drawing a paper from his pocket, many would have agreed with the spirit of this leaflet circulated in Warsaw in September 1942, when the stain of a huge genocide was already spreading through the West. That he quotes it from memory suggests to Olin that he has resorted to it often.
The world observes this crime more terrible than any seen by history—and it is silent. The massacre of millions of defenseless people is taking place amid a universal, ominous silence. He who does not condemn condones! We do not have the means to act against the German murderers, we can save no one, but we protest! This protest is demanded of us by God.
The brave young Catholic who risked her life was imprisoned here in late 1943 but was freed by Russian soldiers a year later: her miraculous survival should be understood by persons of true faith, adds Priest Mikal, as a manifestation of the Lord’s great mercy.
ALREADY SHAKEN by his morning in Oswiecim, then the Judenrampe, Olin finds himself painfully distracted by a cold draught from the direction of the fallen wing of the crematorium, some forty yards off to his left; it pierces his clothing on that side, chilling his skin under the armpit as if his parka had been slit by a knife of ice.
Uneasy, he remains behind as Rabbi Dan concludes the service at the ash pit and the others drift away. Then he turns—he feels turned, rather—toward that concrete tumble he has shunned instinctively since his arrival. He can neither withdraw that blade of ice nor set the pain aside as morbid or absurd: if anything, it has intensified, like the hard bite of winter in his frozen boots.
Unsteady, he draws near the ruin. In some cranny of his brain, he thinks, this place has awaited him all his life, ever since those nightmares of his boyhood.
Only the far end of the cellar chamber lies exposed. The rest is filled by huge tilted slabs pierced by rusted rods hard-twisted in the explosion by the falling mass of concrete. Behind the crematorium, over there in that thin wood, poor naked Emi, dragged at by her howled-out little sister, must have stumbled forward on numb lacerated feet at the shouted order, arms crossed over her breasts, hunched down so that her elbows might shield the dark patch of her pubis from the greedy cameras.
He retreats into his parka hood and pulls its throat cord tight against the cold, against the phantasms and spirits—the “wandering souls” of Sister Catherine, the hungry ghosts (Ben Lama and his Buddhists), the horde of the lost inhabiting the emptiness of this flat river plain in Poland. But inevitably he succumbs to the terrifying vision of that young woman seeking to hush her gnashing mother, shriek her love to the child clasped to her thigh as naked as a frog in the press of cold-fleshed bodies as more and more are packed in with them, giving off queer heat; gone wild, she fights to save her dear ones from being drawn under in the crush and suffocation.
The iron door, slamming, smashes feet and clawing fingers. A crack of light as, jammed by arms, the door reopens for a moment, is slammed again and bolted—that clang perhaps the signal to executioners overhead peeping filthily as demons as they seed the pand
emonium below with white cyanide pellets dumped from black-and-orange canisters—this, perhaps, in those very moments when her baby was being dandled in the New World. He can’t get past this nor can he escape the screams and coughs of violent gagging, the raw stench as fluids spatter, the bursting eyes of the mad creatures below this rim where Emi’s only begotten child kneels shuddering a half century later. In the death struggle for the last exhausted air, the strongest clamber onto piles of weaker, and the young woman shrieks back at her voiceless sister as Peek is drawn beneath the human biomass that wipes her stare, the round hole of her mouth from the face of earth.
DID HE BLACK OUT? How long has he crouched here on the cellar rim, on the point of vomiting, and so close to the edge that he must reach back and grab his bootheels so as not to topple in?
Regaining his feet, he staggers to find balance. He totters past the ash pit, peering about him until finally he locates those clumped figures far off down the platform toward the Gate. Dazed, he makes his way to the meditation circle, where he is overwhelmed at once by that silence of dead centuries and a universal solitude far lonelier than any he might ever have imagined.
TOWARD DUSK, a weeping German woman leads the circle in a lullaby for the slain children. Guten Abend, gute Nacht / Mit Rosen bedacht. The voices are tentative and shy at first, a low whispery singing, and some sniffle.
On the long trudge back to Auschwitz I, Olin is still slow and unsteady, and people peer at him as they pass by. Without turning, he is presently aware of Catherine overtaking, drawing near, with the chastened Sister Ann-Marie somewhere behind.
Now she walks beside him. He looks pale, she murmurs. Is he all right? “Well, I have felt better, it is true.” Still entangled in that ruin, his thought is jumbled and his voice hollow, faraway. In truth, he has no very clear idea how he is feeling—he feels quite literally beside himself, and has to concentrate to compose his face into some semblance of alert human expression.