Anders brays and others snicker and the coven of Warsaw intelligentsia looks sardonically amused to hear the youth of Poland being jeered at. And Olin, amused, too, but determined not to show it, wonders aloud if even in this camp’s darkest days—or in those darkest days perhaps especially—there weren’t little eruptions of black humor.
“In the extermination camps? Never,” old Eva whispers with a palsied shaking of the balding skull of airy white hair that perches atop her spine like a worn-out duster. “Not ever. Never.” She cannot recall seeing an inmate smile in all her long years in the camps, not even the Kapos: that expression those brutes wore, she moans, could never be mistaken for a smile. And she recalled once more how Kapos greeted the new prisoners by pointing at the smoke: “The only way you will ever leave this place is up those chimneys”—that was Kapo humor. Poor Eva is so shaken that when Olin apologizes for being insensitive, she chooses not to hear him, and when the conversation turns in a new direction, the old woman falls aside in a kind of trance.
Dr. Anders Stern commandeers a stilted silence, warming instantly to his own favorite subject. Auschwitz-Birkenau, he pontificates, is all the proof needed that as a species, the human animal has never lost the most primitive traits of the primate predator-scavenger on the savanna, the incipient killer. Morally, man’s consciousness has made no progress in all the millennia since his graffiti first defaced cave walls. “We regress, in fact,” he says, as Adina Schreier, attracted by any opportunity to debate her fellow academic, draws up a chair. “Our man-ape ancestors, being merely animal,” he is saying, “were surely less sadistic than the Homo species we call ‘sapiens’—”
“Yes, yes, of course, but these are scarcely new ideas,” the professor says. “‘Our much-praised technological progress, and civilization generally, could be compared to an axe in the hand of a pathological criminal.’ That’s Einstein, in a letter to a friend while still in Germany. He already understood these things in the early thirties.”
Anders looks cross because Adina has derailed his disquisition just as it was gathering steam, and Adina is cross because Ben Lama had not consulted anyone before giving permission to a small film crew to come document his pioneer retreat. (“No starring role for the famous Israeli professor, that’s what annoys her,” Anders advises Olin in a stage whisper, loud as usual.)
“Is it really so simple?” Olin asks, impatient with them both. “Incipient evil in human nature? Technological progress versus pathological axe murders? Why can’t I take that on faith, even from Einstein?”
“Nor I, sir! I don’t believe that either!” protests Eva. “There were kind acts also—extraordinary acts!”
The ironical Swede marvels aloud that this old woman sentenced to death for partisan activities had survived five years in a Slovenian camp.
“What are you suggesting, sir?” Her frail voice rises. “I fought hard to save my soul! I fought hard, yes,” she whispers as tears come. “And yes—if this is what you wish to hear, sir—yes, I was defeated. My very soul, it was defeated.”
Triumphant, Anders grins at Olin, who awards him a cold stare in return.
Adina Schreier, patting the old woman’s hand, is glaring at the Swede: “You are happy now, sir? Shame on you!” But there it is, the fatal question, like an arched scorpion taut on the doorsill. Five years, you say? Not so fast, madame. Pray tell us, how did you manage to survive so long? And at what cost to others?
SEVEN
After supper, people gather slowly in the auditorium. On this second evening, most look stunned by Birkenau, and the mood is darkening. The German woman who rejoiced the day before in the forgiving spirit of the gathering complains tonight that she is barely tolerated here as “just another guilty German”: never before has she felt the burden of her nationality in this painful way.
“It’s about time, then!” taunts She Who Won’t Eat with Germans.
“So maybe yes, it is ‘about time,’ so maybe you are correct, madam.” The German woman concurs earnestly but perseveres. “Still, it is hurting very much. Today the singing of our hymns is weak because few come to join our Christian service. Today even, I see some turn their backs. We Christians seem to be in the wrong place here.”
“We Germans, you mean.”
“Nein! Nein! She does not mean!” Rainer jumps up to defend her. “Many Germans—nowhere near as many as now claim it but maybe more than our Jewish comrades here may think—they hated the Nazis, too.”
“Only because of your lost war and your bombed-out cities and the piles of your own dead and no damned food—you Germans love to eat,” calls Earwig. “Nothing to do with murdered Jews.”
But the audience has had enough of Earwig, and some who have only muttered now speak out: Who is that guy? What’s he doing here? someone complains. Another: Is he with us or against us, for Christ’s sake? And a third voice, louder: Hey, Ben? Come on, man! Throw him out!
Before we lynch him? Olin thinks. Is that already in the air?
Ben Lama slips into one of the seats beside Earwig, which are always empty. He does not remonstrate or even speak; the action itself subdues the man. Almost alone among the Jews, Ben seems untroubled by that lacerating tongue; in fact, he has already told Olin how much he appreciates this guy’s remarks, which cut away the devotional hushed speech and pseudo-spiritual manner that afflict too many participants, getting in the way of true empathy and clarity. “I agree, he’s pretty rough. But have you heard him say anything untrue?” Yesterday Olin saw Ben quake with silent mirth when Earwig, in a mock response to a reproof from a Zen monk, stared in alarm at the monk’s shaved pate, then pushed his palms upward just above his ears like a woman adjusting her hat. “Please, sir,” he whined, “would you mind fluffing that up a little?”
In the bad silence, Ben Lama tells the audience a story about Master Joshu and his monk, who come to a clearing in the forest only to see all the animals run away. “Why do they flee?” cries the monk. “Don’t they know you are a great Zen master?” And Joshu smiles. “Perhaps. But they also know I am a killer.” And Ben smiles, too.
Earwig surprises Olin with the lack of edge in his attitude toward the teacher. “This Ben guy,” he says later. “I thought he was soft but he’s really pretty tough. No mushy feel-good New Age jargon, stays real cool about other people’s bullshit. ‘I see,’ he says. And what does he see? He sees what a stupid asshole you can be but leaves you space to see that for yourself.”
“So you see it for yourself now, right?”
There it is, the chink: what flickers across his face is less grin than grimace. He can welcome public denunciation, but hard teasing is another matter. Olin regrets having made fun of him, but not much; the man’s own teasing is never well-meant or constructive, it is merely hard.
OLIN HAPPENED to be watching Sister Catherine when she was approached before the meeting by a man arrived earlier that day—“a defrocked monk,” according to Adina. When the man attempted to draw her aside, she stiffened, wouldn’t be led: the two stood at odds, too far apart, in a sort of wary sideways confrontation. She was expressionless, gaze cast down, and his forced smile was painful. They entered the auditorium and not together.
Before the testimonies can resume, Sister Catherine rises. She wishes to thank Jewish and German friends who have attended Christian service on the platform at Birkenau and to welcome any who might wish to join them in coming days.
Looking discomfited, Priest Mikal shifts in his seat. If the priest feels the novice is out of order, as he seems to, why hasn’t he welcomed all these Jews himself?
The auditorium is still grumbling and restless. Voices rise in complaint and chairs are barged around more noisily than necessary, until finally Rainer bounds onto the stage, shouting harshly for order. Apparently Rainer has been chided about his forceful Kaddish at the Black Wall that first morning, because hearing the resonance of his own shout in the startle
d room, he shakes his head in disbelief at its officiousness and apologizes sheepishly for “being so Cher-man.” Olin realizes he likes this man very much.
Relating his experience as a boy in wartime Munich, Rainer describes how his gentle Uncle Werner, in the naive hope he might protect her, confessed his love for a Jewish girl to the authorities; not only did he fail to save her, but found himself immediately conscripted and cynically assigned to the SS here in Auschwitz, where he was bullied, beaten, and eventually castrated for refusing to carry out some sadistic command.
“I am here to honor him,” Rainer says. Until his death many years after the war, his uncle remained an outcast in the family. “Why? Because in their hearts they had never forgiven him for disgracing the family with his love for a Jew.” Rainer coughs, fighting down his grief all these years later for “that brave good man,” who long after the war was scarcely permitted to slink along the edges of family occasions.
In his distress, Rainer has reverted to that big voice of his. Like so many Germans, he shouts, his family contracted the disease of that sick fascism in which what formerly would have been condemned as unspeakable cruelty was extolled as patriotic duty. Worse, they clung to their delusion even after three million of their own soldiers and civilians were destroyed. Worse still, he says, that mortality was widely seen in Germany as more than sufficient compensation for the Third Reich’s share of the estimated fourteen million Europeans, most of them Jews, who had been murdered by Germany and Russia. “Can you believe this?” he asks bitterly. “They were actually sorry for themselves.”
EAGER TO DECLARE their nation’s shame before others can imply it, the Germans have been far more forthcoming than the Poles, including the group of Warsaw intelligentsia who have adopted Clements Olin.
At the edge of this group, never quite included, is Stefan, the man Olin has observed trying to speak with Sister Catherine; a former monk, Stefan had trained in the same seminary as Priest Mikal. Stefan’s priory is in the region of the notorious Treblinka death camp north of Warsaw, by repute even more terrible than Birkenau; nobody, he says, ever escaped Treblinka and survived. He claims this with an air of perverse pride as if vaunting his district soccer team. He also seems proud of his excommunication from the Church for submitting a reform petition to the new Polish pope without seeking approval from the bishop, knowing that any such attempt to circumvent the hierarchy would be useless. In a symbolic but futile gesture, he says, he finally knelt before the altar and stripped off his rope belt and brown cassock.
The Polish group has also adopted Eva’s friend, the artist Malan, a self-taught painter who survived four years in this camp, then returned from Warsaw in old age to create a huge fresco on the cellar walls of a closed chapel within distant sight of the high tower at Birkenau. Malan has invited Olin to come inspect his work-in-progress, which Eva calls extraordinary, and Olin has promised he will visit there in the next days.
The first Pole to go forward is his friend Rebecca, who clomps onto the stage and promptly offends some in her audience with her reminder that Auschwitz had dealt mostly with the Jews of western Europe, and that by the time the death factory at Birkenau became operational in the winter of 1942, a far more extensive genocide had already decimated the so-called Ostjude of eastern Poland, the Baltics, Byelorussia, and Ukraine. Before the war, Becca’s home city of Warsaw had the largest Jewish community on earth, she says, but few of its Jews wound up in Auschwitz: more than a million, transported eastward, died in smaller, more primitive “facilities” such as Treblinka.
“Correct,” quavers a long-bearded old man who as a boy had witnessed from hiding the bloody murder of his family in Ukraine’s Babi Yar ravine. Most of those Jews in the East were never arrested or imprisoned, he says, simply rounded up with the aid of local Slavs and confined in open pens without shelter, food, or water until they died; others were asphyxiated by exhaust fumes piped into the backs of idling vans and trucks. But most were marched into the forests, where the SS made do with bullets in the back of the head as they knelt in prayer at the edge of enormous pits dug by themselves. That so few survivor accounts emerged from the ruins of eastern Europe was partly because so few literate victims survived to testify, and also because the new satellite states stifled all reports of Russian participation in atrocities. In the histories, the wretched millions killed from Warsaw eastward became little more than a chapter note in the great modern tragedy of the Jewish people.
ONSTAGE, BECCA is lamenting an irrepressible young cousin whose father had constructed a secret hiding place in his Warsaw house. As the Gestapo broke their door down with violent shouts and banging, the terrified little girl wailed in the dark and could not be hushed. Rather than suffocate his favorite child, she said, the father led his family out of hiding, pleading for mercy. All would die at Auschwitz but that little girl crouched unnoticed in the hiding place, an irony that the child herself, as the agent of her family’s end, would mourn forever.
Her friend Nadia’s wince confirms Olin’s suspicion that the noisy child had been Rebecca, who in her warm, abundant way remains unstifled to this day.
The Polish men, arms folded on their chests, continue to maintain a weary silence. Their recalcitrance is leaving the impression in the hall, as Becca warns them, that those damned Poles, unlike the Germans, have never faced up to their past and therefore have learned nothing for the future.
The men grin uncomfortably, indulging her, but none go to the podium. Knowing how harshly their country’s collaboration has been condemned in the West, they seem to fear that any witness they might offer would be instantly dismissed as disingenuous or self-serving, probably both, and that the Jewish majority in this hall would only jeer them. When a voice calls out, “Time for you Poles to speak up!” Zygmunt, a sculptor, shouts back, “Unlike you, we Poles have learned to keep our mouths shut!”
“And yet you came,” Olin reminds them quietly, inviting an explanation. The men shrug. Plainly they don’t feel answerable to this pseudo-Pole, this damned American academic. Aggressively defensive, Zygmunt grumbles that they are here only as Zen practitioners, to lend moral support to Ben Lama’s “well-meaning” retreat. The ex-monk Stefan hints that he might be doing penance for the role played by “certain clergy” in his country, but when Ben Lama, noticing him whispering, invites him to come forward so that everyone can benefit from his witness, Stefan points at Earwig instead. “Ask this man here. This man is very disagreeable, he is maybe a big liar, but he does not lie about the Vatican and Jews.”
Jaroslav, Becca’s companion, a violinist with long black hair (that he probably slaps over his brow during performances, decides Olin, who dislikes him), speaks so rarely that first he must excavate his throat at unpleasant length. “That Jew prayer at the Black Wall the first morning? For the Dead? Why no mention of the Polish martyrs?” After all, he says, it was mostly Poles who were executed at that wall; the great majority of Jews came later and were taken straight to Birkenau. “Today these Israelis fly their big blue flag here, and Israel didn’t even exist yet, for God’s sake!”
“Why raise a flag at all? Who’d want to claim this place?” Rebecca broods. “Sure, those Nazi pigs disgraced themselves. They soiled themselves. Disgustingly.” She looks frankly at the Germans. “Yet in some way,” she continues, “all those centuries of pogroms, then the Shoah—hasn’t all this suffering soiled the Jews, too?
“Who can we be as a people,” she demands, “when century after century our fellow men despise us, cast us out? What is so hateful about Jews that others need to demonize and kill us? Bulldoze piles of our naked bodies into pits like so much offal? What is this curse the so-called Chosen People suffer? Can persecution be the fate that we were chosen for? And if so, why? What did we do?”
She tosses her hands high—“Aach!”—to return that old question to the rabbis. “These good kind Christians,” she tells Olin, indicating her friends, “rebuilt my city
, all but—can you guess?—the Jewish quarter! Is that because there was nobody to put in it?”
“I AM FROM THE OTHER SIDE.” Thrashing to her feet, a large raw-boned Polish woman with coarse hair tied back hard, baring her ears, speaks with defiance. The faces stare. The other side? What can that mean? Who is she? Why has she come? She does not say. She simply stands there, apparently on the point of another utterance, but when the cameraman turns his lens her way, she sits back down. Professor Schreier complains peevishly to Olin about losing their first local witness to that damned camera, which Adina sees as Ben Lama’s hunger for publicity as well as an inexcusable intrusion. She intends to return to Israel on the very first flight out of Cracow day after tomorrow.
THE IDEA THAT A GENOCIDE far greater and more terrible had already occurred in eastern Europe has rankled many Jews from Europe and the United States, who are accustomed to having the Holocaust all to themselves. Anders parodies the sullen mutterings he pretends to have heard outside the hall: “Filthy potato-eaters. Oy! Good riddance!”
Olin smiles carefully, having learned long ago not to show too much amusement when Jews are being funny about Jews, not even when hilarious tales are told among his closest Jewish friends. Also, he wishes to be sure that his empathy with the people killed here is authentic, visceral, not merely an idea. As an American, he is embarrassed by loud Miriam, therefore a bit worried about the latent anti-Semitism in his own background: Would her crude manner be sufficient provocation, were he Jewish, to make him a genteel bigot like Kafka and Appelfeld and Bruno Schulz—all of them admirable Jewish writers whose cultured bourgeois families had been careful to avoid spas and public places infested by such people?
“Infested,” Olin? You sure that’s the word you want? Be very careful.