Like perpetrators of atrocities worldwide, Rudolf Hoess would lay all blame on his superiors, describing himself as “a normal person overcome by a ruthless concept of obedience.” This appraisal of his own character seems almost rational when compared to the vainglory of Adolf Eichmann, for whom the knowledge that he helped consign five million Jewish human beings to their deaths was a source of “extraordinary satisfaction.” “I shall leap into my grave laughing,” Eichmann said.
The house is silent, its windows dead, yet in some dimension it is still inhabited, Olin thinks, by fat old Widow Hoess. “My family, to be sure, were well-provided for here in Auschwitz,” Hoess would write. “Every wish expressed by my wife or children was granted them. The children could live a free and untrammeled life. My wife’s garden was a paradise of flowers.”
The Hoesses and their four offspring, waited on by emaciated slaves, inhabited a brute heaven of gourmet delicacies, silks, furs, jewelry, and assorted loot stripped from doomed prisoners. His wife would sigh, “I want to live here till I die,” according to one slave (who may have survived, Olin supposes, thanks to furtive access to the family’s garbage). But Frau Hoess’s gourmandizing rapture, uninhibited by her surroundings, was matched by the indifference to human suffering not only of her husband and the SS and the Kapos in the camp but of those local people who took jobs inside these gates.
A surge of hatred: he is suddenly out of breath. (“They grew fond of certain slaves, we’ve heard,” red-haired Rebecca, his friend from Warsaw, has told him, “but as good Germans, they let them be taken to the ovens when their turn came.”)
After the war, the fugitive Hoess worked on a German farm until his arrest; like Hans Frank, the Nazi governor in Cracow who made off with the Leonardo, he was found guilty at Nuremberg of crimes against humanity, returned to Poland, and condemned to death. In April 1947, the last breath was yanked from stocky stone-faced SS Obersturmbannführer Rudolf Hoess on gallows erected near the entrance of his Krematorium #1.
SIX
Separate prayer services for Buddhists, Jews, and Christians will be held each day on the platform or at the crematoria, and this morning, Olin accompanies the Israeli professor to the Christian service, which is led not by Father Mikal, who stands apart, but by Sister Catherine in the blue beret. Though Adina mostly agrees with Earwig’s anti-clerical opinions, she deplores his abuse of the young women as inimical to the spirit of the retreat. Furthermore, she has formed a good opinion of the older novice, whom she has sought out and spoken with.
He listens dutifully to Sister Catherine, bows his head during the prayer, and under his breath joins in the simple hymn caroled by the novices as they lead their little congregation back toward the circle. The pure voices rising and falling on a cold east wind out of Ukraine seem to him beautiful.
During meditation, breathing mindfully moment after moment, his awareness opens and dissolves into snow light. But out of nowhere, just as he had feared, the platform’s emptiness is filled by a multitude of faceless shapes milling close around him. He feels the vibration of their footfalls.
AT NOON EACH DAY outside the Gate, a wagon dispenses chunks of dark bread and a plain broth: the symbolic meal is eaten standing, using mouth and fingers in memory of those whose daily ration was foul watery gruel with a hunk of moldy crust.
In the shadow of the Arch, Sister Catherine dips her bread, neat as a squirrel. When he approaches to thank her for her morning service, she says, “All are welcome, sir.” The other novice gawks at him with peasant frown. “Here is Sister Ann-Marie,” says Sister Catherine, as if presenting a dull child, and her companion, closing her mouth, performs a clumsy sort of curtsy. Sister Ann-Marie is a short, heavy girl of thick complexion who, Olin suspects, has had less difficulty than she might have wished obeying her vow of chastity and probably has always known that she exists to serve. To judge from the sullen look of her, this does not mean she understands why this should be so, far less why she should accept her ordained lot without complaint.
When Sister Catherine attempts to thank him for intervening at the Kolbe chapel, he assures her he had meant only to protest that loud bullying of defenseless young women—here he stops short, for she is trying not to smile.
Is it because of his own prejudice that nuns make him so nervous? “You are Sister Katarzyna,” he says in Polish. “And your maiden name?” She closes her eyes for a moment before watching him turn red. Who would ask such a fool question? In English, she says, “I am called Sister Catherine.”
From the start, Sister Ann-Marie, with little English and no apparent interest in acquiring more, seems excluded from their conversation, though she stands right there. This bothers him more than it seems to bother Sister Catherine, who has scarcely glanced at the other woman since introducing her.
Sister Catherine has noticed after all that he’s been taking notes, for she holds up her own diary. “You see? Nuns bear witness, too.” When he confesses he has not come here to bear witness, she shrugs this off, not interested. “Doctor Professor D. Clements Olin, Polish-borned teacher-poet, yes? Who disapprove our Roman Church?” She waves the small green book at his eyes as if it contained proof.
“Not at all,” he lies, taken aback. “I attended your service this morning—”
The second novice suddenly exclaims, “You speak our tongue!”—accusingly, as if he were trying to conceal this fact for nefarious reasons. “Well, yes, Sister,” he says, holding Sister Catherine’s eye. “At least I used to.” And Sister Catherine, gazing straight into his face, says, “Sir, your spirit is hostile. Like your friend.”
“He’s not—” But he stops right there. To repudiate Earwig at this point would be weakness, perhaps some sort of betrayal, though in this moment he cannot think why.
Inspecting the bottom of her bowl, Sister Catherine is frowning now and blushing, too, apparently discomfited by her own bluntness. She is taller and older than the other, probably in her early thirties and similarly dressed in an ill-cut black cape and brown wool suit and galoshes. Her expression is quick and in its way fresh and appealing. Bright hazel eyes, uneven teeth, round red cheeks chafed—her skin looks sort of scraped. Gray-brown lips, plump but unpainted—a pity, he thinks, that she knows nothing of cosmetics. She doesn’t really need to look so plain.
He wants very much to be straightforward; her candor demands no less. “It’s only all that antiquated dogma—”
Sister Catherine actually steps backward as if slapped hard in the face. Sensing trouble from this foreigner, this male, her sister groans. “Yes,” frowns Sister Catherine after a moment, “yes, there is much to understand.” She taps her diary. “So far not much,” she admits. That small pained smile comes and goes.
On impulse, she thrusts the journal into his hands. “In here I practice my bad English,” she says. “Nothing is hiding.” Startled by such recklessness, he hastens to explain that while he is interested, of course, in a nun’s impressions—
“And you?” She points at his own notebook. “What is it? You reveal dark secret of Jew persecution by Saint Maximilian?” Her voice is soft but her face is tight.
To avoid any obligation to exchange notes, he tries again to return the diary, at the same time smiling to assure her that this fraught moment need not come between them, but she, perverse, won’t extend her hand to take it. “So. Dr. Clements, Dr. Olin, no need for nice nun witness after all?” More irony. Challenged, he opens the diary to this morning’s entry.
Just as he feared, she has discovered that the atmosphere in Birkenau is still swarming with “lost souls.” Oh Lord, he thinks, all those poor wandering souls! Many retreatants, he suspects, share her belief that the unburied dead—“the hungry ghosts,” as Ben Lama’s Buddhists call them—still haunt this emptiness, unable to find rest because they were forsaken. The more devotional go further, seeking to console through prayer the keening spirits that their mission has stirred
up like a wind of bees. How fatuous, he thinks. Those multitudes are gone forever into a disappearing past beyond all healing, leaving no trace more tangible than the near-dust of all that hair in the museum.
She watches intently as he reads. And he is intrigued, despite himself, because she, too, has already been swarmed by those imaginary multitudes.
“Those feet passed right in front of me,” he whispers. “Some in ripped shoes, as you say, but many naked!”
But she seems uninterested in any bond their visions of naked feet might create between them. Her expression says, Never mind those feet, get on with it.
Her hazel eyes search his face until he finishes. It’s those brows that curve down around the eyes that bring a wistful cast to her expression, a shadow of sadness, he decides. He extends the diary again, nodding judiciously. “Well said, Sister Catherine. Rather beautiful, I think.” Braving that gaze, he insists, “And please believe me, Sister, I do not feel hostile. I’m just troubled by the whole idea of papal infallibility—”
She snatches back her notebook, sets his empty bowl in hers, and returns both to the tailgate of the food truck on her way to the tunnel, Sister Ann-Marie stumping behind. Not until she nears the meditation circle on the platform does she turn to face him. She takes a deep breath. “Sir, His Holiness . . .” She is unable to finish.
At the circle bundled figures turn toward the burr of their low voices. He must clear things up quickly, put this bad start behind them.
BY MIDAFTERNOON soft snow is falling, muffling four voices that rise from the cardinal points around the circle, north, south, east, and west, intoning names from registration lists obtained by Rainer from museum archives in Berlin—long lists that represent but tiny fractions of that fraction of new prisoners who survived, however briefly, the first selections on this platform and were tattooed with small blue numbers. The impeccable lists include city and country of origin, arrival date, and date of death, not infrequently on that same day or the next.
Column after column, page after page, of the more common family names ascend softly from the circle of still figures to be borne away on gusts of wind-whirled snow. Schwartz, Herschel; Schwartz, Isaac A.; Schwartz, Isaac D.; Schwartz, Isidor— Who? Isidor? You too? The voices are all but inaudible as befits snuffed-out identities that exist only on lists, with no more reality than forgotten faces in old photo albums—Who’s this bald guy in the back? Stray faces of no more significance than wind fragments of these names of long ago, of no more substance than this snowflake poised one moment on his pen before dissolving into voids beyond all knowing.
MENTION OF NAME-CHANTING that evening sends one German, Horst, off on another rant. To speak seriously of murder facilities with impeccable registration lists is utterly insane, the man is yelling, because death camps themselves are beyond all sane discussion, even by those few who survived. So how could mere visitors hope to grasp something unrecognizable even as pathology to anybody who is not insane himself?
Ben Lama nods. “There’s no space left on that platform for interpretation. It’s just there,” he says. “It just is.”
TOWARD TWILIGHT, the sharp-winged silhouette of a small falcon crosses the no-man’s-land of charred black chimneys—the only wild thing he has seen besides rooks in raucous flight over the snow-patched fields between the great dead camp and the world out there on the horizon, no farther from the platform than those faint church bells, that far rumbling of trains.
Olin? You’re right here in the region. Why do you wait? He must at least try to locate some old inhabitant with a dim memory of the burned manor house or even, possibly, a clue as to the fate of that other family. He will go make inquiries, of course. Perhaps tomorrow.
AS A LANDED ARISTOCRAT, ill-read and a bit obtuse, the Anglophile old Baron in his cuff-scuffed suits from Jermyn Street, his Lock hat and Lobb shoes from St. James’s, had been by his own comfortable description “a damned unrepentant snob.” His son Alexei had inherited his father’s prejudice against “the Romans,” which was not only permissible, damn it all, but a prerogative of one’s legacy and common sense, and as a consequence of anti-clerical family attitudes, Clements worried that he himself might be a reflexive anti-papist. However, what worried him far more was how careless bias against Roman Catholics was used to paint over the mold and rot of a far more pernicious prejudice against the Jews.
Olin’s Lutheran grandparents and their émigré friends had no hesitation in blaming Rome-stoked hatred for the demonizing of the Jews; for a thousand years, thanks to the clergy, anti-Semitism had been as ingrained in the coarse hides of Polish “serfs” as the earth under their fingernails, the old Baron said. Why else would so many uneducated Poles—and Croats, Ukrainians, Romanians, and other Catholics—have done so much of the dirty work for the Gestapo and the SS and, farther east, for the Soviet secret police?
Though escape abroad had spared them harsh experience of either, the family had of course abhorred the loutish Nazis, then the barbaric Red soldiery who despoiled their chalet and estate. Appalled by that upstart in Berlin (“He brings his mouth to his food, they say, instead of his food to his mouth”) they professed great sympathy—mais oui!—for those unfortunate “Israelite” victims. (Was “Jew” a dirty word?) But the old Baron’s sniffing enunciation, his sifting of such words like small bones in the fish course, instantly (and to some degree intentionally, his grandson suspected) laid bare that time-honored disdain—not quite overt, always deniable, yet as pervasive in that house as the faint reek of Alexei’s old retriever.
Growing up and learning more, Clements came to recognize the racist slights that surfaced in dinner conversations, those casual unkindnesses, occasionally quite clever (and considered more permissible on that account), that soiled his sense of self-respect when he smiled, too. The meanness was in the timing, the inflection. And in his youth, he’d often wondered what awful secret about Jews these émigré aristocrats seemed to know, when as a class, he was discovering, they knew so little of real substance about anything.
The boy supposed he loved his family, what was left of it, since that, said his English grandmother, is “what one did.” But eventually he realized that in this household, the Shoah had never been experienced as an immense tragedy involving unthinkable numbers of fellow Europeans, but only as an abstract calamity, as far removed from real concern as mention of some overcrowded ferry lost in the eastern seas. And as time went on, he came to understand that he himself had been unseen in the same way.
IN THE COLD MESS HALL, the evening meal is somber. Olin eats in silence with Anders and Rainer, the intense retreat leader from Berlin, and Eva, a Czech whose mother had survived the first selection only to die within the next few hours (of heartbreak, says her daughter). With Eva is another elderly survivor who smiles gently when spoken to but rarely speaks; he takes no notice when Eva whispers, “Mr. Malan is a great, great artist.”
Sounding tired and discouraged, the old lady comments that to judge from the rude impatience of the few young people on this retreat, the Shoah has already lost its power as a cautionary lesson. Olin agrees. In reactionary circles in America, he tells them, despite the massive documentation, its very historical existence has been questioned, and even the degree of German guilt. He cites a right-wing Catholic review that bitched in print after the war about America’s “over-exposure to the luridities . . . the countless corpses and gas ovens, and kilos of gold wrenched out of dead men’s teeth. There is underway a studious attempt to cast suspicion upon Germany . . .”
“Cast suspicion?” Rainer yelps. “What nonsense! My country of Germany was guilty! Guilty, guilty, guilty! We admit this freely! Our own historians were already documenting every horrible detail in the very first days after the war! A thousand years will pass and still Germany’s guilt will not have been erased. Hans Frank, the head Nazi in Cracow, wrote that in his death cell memoir!”
(Borowski said it better,
Olin thinks: In German cities the store windows are filled with books and religious objects but the smoke from the crematoria still hovers above the forests.)
“Well, that’s something to our credit, at least,” sighs a German woman sitting nearby. Already offended by Earwig at her own table, she is taking refuge in their conversation.
“Bullshit.” Earwig’s voice is low and hard. “Give credit? To Kraut butchers mopping up the blood after they finish? Postwar Germany is crawling with old Nazis and fucking skinheads. Does this hausfrau”—he points his full fork at her face—“honestly believe that under the covers it’s any less anti-Semitic than it was before?”
“Ja, ja! I don’t only belief it, sir, I know it—!”
“Or Poland? Or anywhere in Europe?” He turns back to his food. “In your dreams, Fräulein.”
There’s no bottom to this sonofabitch, Olin thinks. But rather than provoke another scene, he turns his back on Earwig with a loud scrape of his chair and changes the subject. What sort of Shoah education is received these days by Polish youth? he asks the table: he is thinking of Wanda and Mirek. All unhappily agree with Earwig that anti-Semitism, deep in the European grain, is probably ineradicable. “Polish kids made dreadful signs to passing cattle cars,” Eva recalls, drawing a weak finger across her throat. Anders says that his fellow Swedes, despite their bland and neutral reputation, are just as prejudiced as all the rest. He doubts that bringing schoolchildren here on field trips as a cautionary lesson would accomplish much.
“Besides giving ’em some good ideas for next time, maybe,” Earwig calls, the words dripping from his tongue like cold drops from the tip of a dirty icicle.