Each barrack held seven hundred women and a few children in the animal reek of small tight rooms. He locates the fading crayon drawings depicting a schoolhouse and some happy kids pulling a hobbyhorse and a toy dog—the famous “children’s paintings,” so poignant in their effort to be cheerful, whose height above the floor suggests that they were actually the work of mothers desperate to help starving children through those endless hours.
Alone in the last of the bare rooms, he calls out to the missing Ann-Marie. Nobody answers. Fearing the scrape and whisper of thin shoes, he retreats outside to find his breath.
THAT AFTERNOON, Olin walks into the town, armed only with a surname and his precious snapshot of that dark-haired girl leaning out of her thatched window. The melancholy nature of his quest and its high likelihood of failure—are these the real reasons he has put this off? Nobody is left at home who might hold him to account; they hadn’t wanted him to come here in the first place. Yet he feels a peculiar obligation to the girl in the photo, and perhaps a vague responsibility to his late father as well. And he also needs the knowledge that he tried.
With no realistic ambition, then, beyond putting a duty behind him, he locates the town hall–courthouse on the square. Here nobody, it seems, much wants to help a nosy foreigner hunting through old records, a stranger speaking archaic Polish and quite possibly intent on bringing more notoriety to their town. Next he walks the streets on the lookout for some older citizen who might point him toward a neighborhood where another elder might recall that name or recognize the window of the old thatched house in his photo or even, impossibly, the girl herself. Could that be our young schoolteacher? The old doctor’s daughter? But knowing the unlikelihood of any such encounter, he only feels more aimless and depressed.
The few pedestrians in the shabby streets look poisoned by a stranger’s cordial smile and deaf to his greetings. Windows appear tight shut all over town. But rumors must have flown before him, for on the next corner four men stop to stare in a hard knot of closed faces. After a consultation, they turn toward him, forming a loose line that does not quite bar his way.
His greeting is met with suspicion and his queries mocked doltishly, with feigned incomprehension. The guy in front, a bareheaded man in a red scarf, hands jammed into torn pockets of his scruffy jacket, pretends that the stranger’s accent is outlandish, unfathomable; another masticates the name he seeks, turning it over and over on his tongue as one might test a suspect mushroom. Finally, with a small stiff bow, Olin turns his back on their hard raillery, retreats the way he came. Wandering around town this way is useless. His mind assures him he has done his duty, so why won’t his heart tell him he has done his best?
On his return, Olin is startled to be hailed cheerily by a girl’s voice: he turns to see Mirek’s pretty Wanda in an upstairs window. “Baron Olinski!”—can that be what she said? Before he can respond, she is summoned rudely by a voice somewhere within; a quick wave, then the smile is gone and does not reappear.
GLAD TO BE FINISHED with Oswiecim, he is curious to see what might have become of that part of the estate indicated on his old family map of Brzezinka village and environs which he’d compared with the chart in the museum; it appears to be located beyond the farther crematoria, in an outlying area of the vast camp.
Georgie Earwig, suffering sore knees, readily abandons meditation and uninvited tags along when Olin follows the path through the low wood that separates Crematoriums #3 and #4 from the fallow winter fields outside the fences.
Beyond the wood, a storm-split tree stands by itself in a long meadow of thick high grasses that according to his map might have belonged to the estate. On the camp chart, this meadow seems to be the site of a mass grave used when the overloaded ovens fell behind schedule: is it only his imagination that under these heavy grasses glazed with ice the ground is soft, unstable, that it quakes in a sickening way beneath his boots like a great grassy jelly? His companion steps gingerly as if he, too, had noticed that in this place the very ground is rotten.
They do not speak of it, nor even mutter, until well clear of that meadow. But the unspeakable experience weakens their defenses, and Olin risks a rude retort by asking where the other man was born. He means, Who the hell are you, anyway? Why are you here? Earwig only shakes him off. He growls but does not answer.
AFTER THE WAR, the escaped prisoner Stanislav K., or “K” as he is known, self-identified as the only fugitive from Auschwitz-Birkenau never recaptured, became a folksinger of medieval ballads in Warsaw. In a strange “homesickness” mysterious even to himself, K keeps returning in old age; he camps in an unheated room in Auschwitz I, even sets out winter seed for little birds.
Olin’s Polish friends, who knew K in his Warsaw days, have invited him to come this evening to tell his story.
Like the artist Malan and other brave boys and young men, K fled the Nazi invasion in the fall of 1939 and headed for France to join what was left of the Polish army. Arrested with four comrades as they crossed Slovakia, he’d been turned over to the Gestapo and trucked to Auschwitz, where even in those early days, K says, the smallest misstep or neglect of a detail was a matter of life or death. “It was mad and it was terrible,” he sighs, a bit theatrically, “and human beings designed it.”
Here in Auschwitz I, in those first years, the bodies of Polish prisoners could be retrieved for burial by their families. K recalls a young SS guard at the main gate, smiling and whistling as he checked the coffins, slipping an ice pick from his boot and pushing it casually through the heart of each cadaver to make sure no prisoner escaped by playing dead, then returning to his booth, still whistling, still smiling. “‘Lili Marlene,’” K says. “Always ‘Lili Marlene,’ over and over and over.”
In those early days, it was permitted to write letters home, although the SS destroyed them. K still seems astonished that the Jewish prisoners, unlike the Poles, made no effort to send Christmas greetings to their families. “Jews don’t celebrate Christmas, for Christ’s sake,” a harsh voice informs him. “And anyway, they had no family to send greetings to because any family still alive was in here with them.”
In the late spring of 1942, when K’s work party ran off through the woods behind the crematoria, most were killed quickly or recaptured and hanged before the assembled prisoners. K survived by running all night through the forest and lying down at dawn in a deep furrow in a field of new green grain. Covering himself with soil, he lay in that furrow like a dead man for two nights, three days—“right out in the open, where nobody thought to look,” grins this old man, still boyishly delighted—before he was discovered by a farm girl. The girl crept back after dark and led him home, and because her brother had been murdered by the Gestapo, her mother vowed to save this young man instead.
One hundred fellow prisoners were hanged as a consequence of K’s escape, Zygmunt the sculptor whispers to Olin, looking cross when Olin refers to the moral burden this old man must carry. K himself shows no sign of any burden, nor does he mention the executed prisoners. Instead he observes that he survived only because he was a hardy Pole blessed by his Christian faith: no Jew tried to escape this place, he informs his mostly Jewish audience, because “as everyone knows,” Jews are not fighters like the Poles but a weaker and more passive race, bending their necks to their fate.
Gratuitous insult, incorrigible Polish prejudice! A young rabbi jumps up with righteous commotion and storms out. The speaker has ignored the fact, calls an angry voice, that the odds were somewhat better for escaping Poles than for fugitive Jews crossing hostile landscapes in zebra-striped tunics without food or water, knowledge of the language, or sane destination. And how about that famous rebellion at Treblinka? And the Warsaw uprising in which Jews of the Polish underground were leaders—?
Trying to ease matters, Ben Lama reminds K’s audience that theirs will be the last generation that can truly say, We have heard the firsthand witness of survivors—witne
ss all the more important, he adds, at a time when neo-Nazis and malignant others are yelping more stridently than ever that “the so-called Holocaust” has been greatly exaggerated if indeed it had ever occurred. Once the last of these firsthand witnesses are gone, this villainous lie will only spread.
Unmollified, many Jews complain next day that none of the retreat leaders rose to protest K’s offensive remarks except that one young rabbi who marched out. K’s friends concede that the brave old man might have been untactful about what is, after all, a well-known behavioral distinction; from their point of view, a national hero has been repaid with ingratitude for coming to contribute his hard experience to their clearly very limited understanding.
NINE
At her request, Olin shows Catherine the proofs of his new anthology of verse by Herbert and Milosz and Szymborska and other great modern writers of her country: as a group, he says, only the Polish poets rival the modern Americans as the finest in the world today.
In their discussion of the poems, Catherine mentions that her namesake, St. Catherine of Siena, that gentle Dominican of the fourteenth century, had been a poet.
“‘All the way to Heaven is Heaven,’” Olin smiles, and she raises her brows in pleased surprise, gratified that a nonbeliever can quote St. Catherine’s sublime teaching. And though he fears he may be making a mistake, he can’t help mentioning an apocryphal parable that seems to express St. Catherine’s teaching in a darker way.
Christ crucified is importuned by a penitent thief, in agony on his own cross on that barren hillside. “I beseech you, Jesus, take me with you this day to Paradise!” In traditional gospels, Jesus responds, “Thou shalt be with me this day in Paradise,” but in older texts—Eastern Orthodox or the Apocrypha, perhaps?—Christ shakes his head in pity, saying, “No, friend, we are in Paradise right now.”
She stares at him.
“No hope of Heaven,” he says gently. “No Trinity, no Resurrection. All Creation right here now.”
“That is not our idea of things,” she says evenly, retreating among his pages. And when he asks if while she reads he might glance over her notes from yesterday’s meditation, she passes him her diary without looking at him.
. . . the prisoners are hurrying in fear of death, yet I hear faint voices. They are singing . . .
Oh Lord, those wandering souls again, with their infernal singing! Her stuff is strong but it is also sentimental, a bit “poetical,” he thinks. As metaphor, her voices from on high might have some merit if so many of their companions weren’t also tuning into them in their platform meditations. Some even report a tinkling of little bells in the winter sky—the music of the spheres, perhaps? Some weird acoustical contagion?
To spare them both the strain of a forced compliment, he returns her diary with a wordless bow that he trusts might convey the sincere respect of one poet for another, but feels duplicitous when it seems to work. In that sudden smile of hers is a gleam of fresh white teeth and breathless innocence. My God, man, what’s got into you? You’d like to kiss her, right? You’re a damned fool, Olin. Truly.
TEN
The skeletal caretaker staff at Auschwitz I stays mostly out of sight; Auschwitz II at Birkenau shows no sign of life whatever. The long two-story building flanking the Gate stands gaunt and empty. At Auschwitz-Birkenau there is no conceivable Borowski research to be done nor any real reason to remain. So when Ben Lama inquires amiably how his work is progressing, he can only say that something feels unfinished.
This evening that big woman “from the other side” appears again, and this time Olin stands nearby and translates her rude dialect into English. This woman does not associate with Olin’s coven of educated Poles (nor, he feels sure, would she be welcome) and takes no part in the mess hall conversations, bringing her own rough food in a sack and devouring it without interest on a concrete bench out in the courtyard. A local peasant, Rebecca’s friend Nadia decides, nodding her head with a tolerant smile and a cold eye of unabashed intolerance.
Granite-faced, eyes aimed straight at the wall behind their heads, the woman forces out her words between hard pauses. “I think . . . I am a natural oppressor. I know I am. I would be good at it.” Braving the shocked silence, she states this flatly without trying to excuse it, yet spits up years of bitterness about the beatings and sexual abuse endured in childhood at the hands of a drunkard father, then the batterings and rape by a drunkard husband; sarcastic, she asks “you educated people” if there might be some connection. She declares she has no sympathy for the people killed here except for those few who fought back.
One night, in a dream that recurred often, she found herself among naked wailing women being pushed and packed “like sausage meat” into the gas chamber. Though she fought like an animal—“I bit them,” she says—she could not keep her footing in the tide of bodies and went under.
“That’s when I woke up. I was very surprised to be alive.” With a ragged cough, she points in the direction of the town. “I live all my life in my dark hole over there. As a little kid, I saw the black smoke rising. I have come here many times and I feel nothing, nothing. I feel nothing tonight. But here I am again, okay? So why?” She glares around the room. “Can you tell me why I must come back, and back again?” Like K and Malan, Olin reflects. Is this the same weird longing?
Despite her torment, she is too honest to pretend she is troubled by late-life compassion for the victims, nor does she feel the least sympathy with their mission, and because she refuses to give ground, even those who recoil from her are stirred. In consequence, in a spontaneous response that no one can quite fathom, her listeners seek to comfort her as she flees the hall. Olin’s temples prickle strangely when women reach out to touch her as she blunders toward the exit, plainly mortified by her own tears and fighting to repress the jagged grin that cracks her raw red face.
OUTSIDE THE AUDITORIUM, “Big Erna,” as Anders calls her, waylays Olin. She has learned from neighbors that a Polish-speaking foreigner has been snooping around town inquiring about some long-forgotten family. “You?” She points a bony finger at his eyes. (Is that the harsh odor of her hairy armpits or just old boiled cabbage?) In what he takes to be clumsy appreciation of her warm reception a few minutes earlier, she declares her intent to assist him in his search, which he then confesses he has already abandoned; after so many years, he says, any such quest seems hopeless.
That he may have seized on an excuse to give up out of some fear of succeeding occurs to him in the same moment it occurs to her. Big Erna is openly suspicious. Absolutely some elder can be found who will recall the family. In those days, Oswiecim was a small market town “where everyone was neighbors” and the name of an established doctor would be common knowledge. “We search,” she grumbles. Shown the photo, she becomes excited: there might be just such a thatched house in the older neighborhoods behind the square: after all, there are not so many left. Nostrils twitching, she is already on the hunt.
Next morning he is marched by Erna past the Hotel Glob and on across the small central square of low dull buildings and scrawny Cold War shop fronts and that faded yellow courthouse on the corner. In a side street leading downhill toward the river—and she points—stands her Roman church; over there somewhere—that backhand wave of upswept fingers seems dismissive—is the last of the five synagogues that once served the old Jewish community. “What? Five, yes, why not? This was a Jew town: maybe two out of three Jewish.” She whinnies in triumph when he looks astonished. “Many cemeteries,” she adds as they turn the corner. “Polish, German, Russian—many dead here. Old Jew cemetery, too, but nobody takes care of it.”
“Maybe nobody left to tend it.”
“Yes, maybe nobody,” she agrees. “Only the weeds.” Even those few who returned after the war were expelled in 1968. “This time Communists,” she adds as if to say, Who knows who will come hunting those Jews next? “And our priests cooperated with the secret p
olice, same way they did with the Gestapo.” She shrugs, indifferent. “Rumors, rumors. But that’s what people say.”
Standing before an old unpainted house, they compare it to what may be seen of the thatched dwelling in the photo and agree that it may be the same. Flushed from his cottage next door by Big Erna, who spotted him skulking behind curtains, an aged neighbor confirms that this decrepit place was once the fine home of the doctor. “That is correct. Allgeier was his name.” The old man’s wife has crept outside behind him, already complaining that her husband like the rest of those young boys was always sniffing after the Allgeier daughter, the pretty schoolteacher. Shown the photo, she cries, “Oh Lord, that’s her! She went away!”
The old man nods. After the Allgeiers disappeared, he says, the Olinskis’ lawyer moved right in. “Informer, they say. Collaborator. Never moved out till they carried him out. Started to stink, I guess.”
“Those people never came back,” his woman sighs, uneasy. These old people, exchanging glances, seem to know something about Erna that they don’t much like. Erna ignores this. Her nudge is heavy: Ask!
But having noticed Erna’s nudge, the old people grow wary and retreat indoors. “Never came back? Why?” Olin calls after them, already knowing, hoping they won’t answer.