But Enough About You: Essays Page 14

  Here is a large pile of spectacles, a spidery mass of rusted wire-frames and dusty lenses. These were left with the clothing in the dressing rooms, so the last things seen through these glasses would have been nervous kapos and Death’s-Head guards.

  Behind another wall of glass is a jumble of rusted artificial limbs, canes, crutches, braces. Like the hair, it blurs into abstraction until the eye settles on a child’s fake leg. Now it’s into another room and the suitcases, piles and piles of shriveled leather suitcases. They wrote their names on them in large white letters. Jarek points out the word for “orphan” in Dutch. Hundreds of names. I write down one: PETR EISLER 1942 KIND. The year of his birth and his child—kinder—status. In the next room comes the display of children’s clothing, pacifiers, rattles, hairbrushes. Then the shoes, a mountain of them. Finally the empty canisters of Zyklon B, perhaps a hundred or more, in a pile. By the calculations of Rudolph Hoss, Auschwitz’s first commandant, it required seven kilos of Zyklon to murder—not the word he used—1,500 people, so this pile here might have sufficed for perhaps 75,000 or 100,000 human beings. It appears from the tops that they refined the process of opening the cans. Some are jagged, others have been smoothly cut, as if in one motion by a machine. Across from this display is a clay diorama of a gas chamber in action. Once everyone was inside, between 700 and 1,500, depending on which of the five gas chambers it was, the doors and windows were sealed tight. The bluish pellets of diatomite soaked in hydrocyanic acid were poured through chutes. Exposed to oxygen, the pellets gave off prussic acid, blocking the exchange of oxygen in the blood. Those close to the chutes died instantly, the ones farther away took longer. Hoss watched one gassing through a peephole. In his Reminiscences before he was hanged in 1947 he describes clinically that it took two or more minutes before the screams turned to moans. Still they didn’t open the doors for half an hour, just in case. After that it was safe for the Sonderkommando, the prisoner work crews, to wade into the tangle of bodies, vomit, and excrement to get the hair and the gold teeth and drag the bodies next door to the crematorium. The work paid well and was competed for: one-fifth liter of vodka, five cigarettes, a hundred grams of sausage for each job.

  It’s gotten colder outside. We’re approaching Block 10 now, where Professor Doctor Carl Clauberg, a university professor of gynecology described by Borowski as “a man in a green hunting outfit and a gay little Tyrolian hat decorated with many brightly shining sports emblems, a man with the face of a kindly satyr,” sterilized women and men with chemicals and roentgens and infected children with disease, for science. He was released from prison by the Soviets in 1956. Jarek says, “He went back to Germany and took out an advertisement in the newspaper saying, ‘Dr. Clauberg is seeking an assistant.’ He did not even change his name.” A trace of a smile. “He was arrested and died the same year, of poor health.” Elsewhere at Auschwitz-Birkenau, Dr. Josef Mengele performed his experiments on twins and dwarves.

  In the courtyard between Block 10 and Block 11 is the Wall of Death. There is a sign urging quiet, so you approach slowly and reverently, as you might an important tomb. Visitors have placed six bouquets of flowers at its base. A woman is crouching, trying to get a red votive candle lit. People have left pebbles in every inch of the creases in the wall, in the Jewish manner of mourning. Jarek tells what happened here. Prisoners who had been tried by the SS, for trying to escape, taking food, for whatever reason, were taken out into the courtyard naked, in twos. A strong kapo, who before he came here had worked in the circus, held them face to the wall. An SS man shot them at the base of the skull, with a short air pistol if there were a lot of executions to be done, so that the camp would not ring with incessant gunshots.

  A former prisoner, a Dr. Boleslaw Zbozien, described what he witnessed here one day:

  Sometime, I cannot remember the exact date, we encountered [SS sergeant-major Gerhard] Palitzsch on the streets of the camp at Auschwitz. Before him, he was driving a man and a woman. The woman was carrying a small child in her arms, and two larger children, around four and seven years old, walked next to her. The entire group was walking in the direction of Block 11. I made it with some colleagues to Block 21 in time. From a window in a room on the ground floor, we gazed out at the courtyard to Block 11, standing on a table in the room. As long as I live, the scene that played out before my eyes will be engraved in my memory. The man and woman did not resist when Palitzsch stood them before the Wall of Death. It all took place in the greatest calm. The man held the hand of the child who stood on his left side. The second child stood between them; they both held his hand. The mother clasped the youngest to her breast. Palitzsch first shot the baby through the head. The shot to the back of the head exploded its skull . . . and induced massive bleeding. The baby struggled like a fish, but the mother only held him more firmly to herself. Palitzsch next shot the child standing in the middle. The man and woman . . . continued to stand without moving, like statues. Later, Palitzch struggled with the oldest child, who would not allow himself to be shot. He threw him to the ground and shot him at the base of the head while standing on his shoulders. He then shot the woman, and at the very last, the man. This was the greatest monstrosity . . . After that, although many executions were carried out, I did not watch them.

  We place our pebbles. Jarek says, “Between five thousand and twenty thousand people were shot here.”

  We go into Block 11. The faded sign above the door reads, BLOK SMIERCI.

  Block of Death. Just inside the door on the left is the room where they held the proceedings. Jarek remarks that the SS officer who sentenced five thousand Poles here to die was still alive last year, living in Germany, age ninety-two. We ask why. He shrugs. At the far end on the corridor, on the left, looking out into the courtyard, is the room where the condemned were stripped and held. An illustration depicts a naked girl holding on to her mother’s legs as the SS guard comes for them. High on the wall, a prisoner scratched graffiti, a name and the date and the words, “Sentenced to die.” Beneath that is the date of the next day and the words, “I’m still here.”

  In the basement of Block 11, the first gassing with Zyklon B took place. Six hundred Soviet POWs and two hundred and fifty Poles were locked in. They poured in the pellets. It took twenty hours to kill—murder—them all. This is how they learned the correct dosage.

  Cell 18 was the “Starvation Cell.” If a prisoner escaped, the Lagerfuhrer, or commandant, would select ten prisoners from the escapee’s block. They would be shut in this cell without food or water and left to die. Generally this took a week.

  In August of 1941 there was an escape. One of the prisoners, Father Maximilian Kolbe, a Franciscan missionary, asked the commandant to let him take the place of one of the ten men selected to starve. Father Kolbe was still alive in the cell two weeks later, after the others had all died. They finished him off with an injection of carbolic acid. He was canonized as a Roman Catholic saint by Pope John Paul II in 1981. Candles burn in the cell for him and the others who were murdered here.

  In another room in the basement of Block 11 are the four “Standing Cells.” Each measures about a yard square, with a small hole for ventilation. Four prisoners were crammed in at a time and left all night, sent out to work in the morning, and returned here at night. This punishment might last three days, or two weeks. The sign says that it produced “extreme emaciation and a slow, agonising death.”

  In the hall as we leave the basement I ask what the pipes are. Jarek explains that it’s the only cell block in Auschwitz with central heating. “Because it was officially a Gestapo prison, it had to be heated.” The second and last smile of the day. “Rules.”

  We walk past Cell Block 21, where Doctor Zbozien witnessed the murder of the Polish family, past a memorial stone left by President Chaim Herzog of Israel with a quote from Psalms 38:18, “My sorrow is continually before me.” We walk past the gallows where they hanged prisoners twelve at a time, past the cell block where the whorehouse was on the seco
nd floor. “It was Himmler’s idea, to give incentive to the non-Jewish prisoners.” Borowski wrote about this in one of his stories. The prisoners’ name for it was “Puff.”

  Outside the barbed wire you come to Gas Chamber and Crematorium Number I, Auschwitz’s first functional one after the initial experiment in the basement of Block 11. Seventy thousand were murdered here. It’s the only intact crematorium out of five at Auschwitz. The SS dynamited the other four at Birkenau as the Red Army was closing in.

  We stand inside and look up through the opening where SS men in gas masks poured the pellets. Through the door at the end are the ovens. These could incinerate 340 bodies a day. Jarek shows how the slide worked. It still does. A bouquet of roses has been left on one. The German company that made these, he says, finally went bankrupt in the 1960s.

  A short lunch in the cafeteria, borscht and croquettes and nonalcoholic beer, since they don’t serve alcohol at Auschwitz, no matter how much you could use a drink. Soup for the prisoners consisted of nettles and water. Morning tea was brewed from oak leaves. For dinner, wormy bread with a smear of lard. Some of the survivors weighed sixty pounds.

  Birkenau is a five-minute car ride. This is Konzentrationlager Auschwitz II, Auschwitz concentration camp number two, built in 1942 in pursuance of the Wannsee Conference goals. “Compared to Birkenau,” Jarek remarks, “Auschwitz was a Hilton.” Birkenau is how the Germans said Brezinzka, which means Birch Wood, the name of the Polish village that was here. Auschwitz was how they said Oswiecim. Oz-vee-chim. The town once had a sizable Jewish population of its own.

  The rail line that approaches Birkenau runs through a red brick guard tower and this is familiar from photographs and documentaries. The prisoners called it the Gate of Death. From May to October 1944, 600,000 Hungarian Jews—a line of numbers in the Wannsee document—came through here. In the spring of 1944, at the height of Auschwitz’s efficiency, ten thousand arrived here each day.

  We go up into the tower. Jarek opens a window and stands back and says quietly, “Birkenau.” It’s here, rather than at the Wall of Death or Cell Block 11, that many visitors break down and weep. Perhaps it’s because of vastness that confronts them. You’re looking out on an area 3,000 feet wide by 2,100 feet deep: 174 barracks, 4 crematoria, surrounded by double fences of barbed wire and guard towers. The crematoria could handle only about five thousand bodies a day, so at times to keep up they had to burn bodies in the fields by the woods in the distance. The stench from that, and from the early mass graves of Soviet POWs, is described in the literature.

  Jarek gets a key to the gate and we drive to the rail platform where the arrivals got off Eichmann’s transports after journeys of sometimes three or more days, no food or water, packed in so tightly that in summers water from the humidity ran off the ceilings. About 80 percent of the arrivals, those unfit for work, the older men and women, women with babies, children under fourteen, were immediately murdered in the gas chambers. Borowski’s book of stories is titled This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen.

  We stand where the families were separated. Jarek points. We look and see a dozen deer on the other side of the barbed wire, running down an alley between barracks, white tails going up and down in the ruins as they leap.

  On one side of the rail platform was the women’s camp. “When the trains came,” Jarek says, “women would shout to the women arriving, ‘Give the baby to the granny.’ That way you might not be selected for the gas chamber. This was the choice.”

  We drive past a small pond of foamy water where they dumped the ashes, to Gas Chamber and Crematorium II. On the maps, these are designated KI, KII, KII, and so on. KII is larger that the one at Auschwitz. Jarek’s uncle lived six kilometers away and told him about the smell. We stand on the ruins of KII, which is more or less as it was after the dynamiting, collapsed onto itself, but the foundations still clear. Jarek points, “Mengele’s laboratory.”

  Between KII and KIII is the memorial, a raised terrace of moss-lined granite bricks, a low stone sculpture, and nineteen plaques, one for each language of the people murdered here, French, Greek, Norwegian, Italian, all the rest. The one in English says,

  FOR EVER LET THIS PLACE BE

  A CRY OF DESPAIR

  AND A WARNING TO HUMANITY,

  WHERE THE NAZIS MURDERED

  ABOUT ONE AND A HALF

  MILLION

  MEN, WOMEN, AND CHILDREN,

  MAINLY JEWS

  FROM VARIOUS COUNTRIES

  OF EUROPE.

  AUSCHWITZ-BIRKENAU

  1940–1945

  Jarek explains that they changed the wording after Communist rule ended in Poland. Originally, the plaques made no specific mention of Jews. “In Poland then the idea was officially that you didn’t point out one group above the other.” After communism, it was no longer politically incorrect. Ninety percent of Auschwitz’s victims were Jews. Next came Poles, 70,000, then Gypsies, 23,000.

  On the drive back to Cracow we don’t say much, my father and I. It leaves you quiet, Auschwitz, even as it impels you not to be quiet about it, to witness what you saw, no matter that it is all by now so well known and documented and familiar. At the airport in Zurich, the front page of the local Sunday paper has a photo from a recent rally in Switzerland, hundreds of shaved-head neo-Nazis, giving the salute.

  —The Daily Beast, January 2009

  LONDON, REMEMBRANCE DAY

  I arrived in London a bit after noon, having gotten off the Queen Mary 2 in Southampton a few hours earlier, so I missed the eleven o’clock two-minute moment of silence. On the way in, I wondered if the cars on the M3 motorway might pull over in observance and would not have been surprised if they had.

  But in Trafalgar Square and at Whitehall and Westminster and St. Paul’s, everything did come to a stop. The British observe this sacred ritual every November 11, commemorating the armistice that began on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of 1918.

  Walking in the rain to the Cenotaph in Whitehall, I saw that practically everyone in London was wearing the traditional red paper poppy. As you surely know, the symbol derives from a poem written in 1915 by a Canadian military doctor. The occasion was the funeral service for a friend who’d been killed by an exploding shell. The chaplain was unavailable, so McCrae scribbled a few lines, which begin:

  In Flanders fields the poppies blow

  Between the crosses, row on row.

  And conclude two stanzas later:

  If ye break faith with us who die

  We shall not sleep, though poppies grow

  In Flanders fields.

  The Great War ended nine decades ago, but seems fresh in memory. When I reached the Cenotaph, with its problematic inscription “The Glorious Dead,” I found the roadway around it entirely with wreathes of paper poppies, many of them personally inscribed. There were tiny wooden crucifixes, with names inscribed in ink now runny from the rain. If it wasn’t as lavish a floral display as the one outside Princess Diana’s residence in 1997, it was still impressive. I made my belated two-minute observance.

  I say “problematic” above because there was so little glory in their terrible deaths. They left us extraordinary and moving literature, most indelibly in the poetry that came from the trenches. The day’s The Independent had a moving article by Robert Fisk titled “Language of the Lost,” in which he quoted his own father, a veteran of the war, telling him that it had all been “just one great waste.” A year into the war, Kaiser Wilhelm was asked what the war was about. He’s said to have responded, “I wish to God I knew.”

  I had lunch the next day with Sir Alistair Horne, one of Britain’s preeminent military historians. Among his many books is one on the Battle of Verdun, The Price of Glory. (That word again.) I remember reading in it the arresting statistic that the ten-month battle was fought on ground not larger than Manhattan’s Central Park, at a cost of 700,000 casualties.

  Paul Fussell wrote in The Great War and Modern Memory that World War
I continues even now to define and determine. Germany was defeated and then driven to humiliation and despair by the draconian terms of the Versailles Treaty. From that toxic soil rose Adolf Hitler, whose Jew-hatred wrought the Holocaust, producing a diaspora and Israel. So the bullet that Gavrilo Princip fired into Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo still ricochets.

  The front page of The Independent was not entirely given over to Armistice Day, but shared a sad and moving photograph of hearses bearing the bodies of six British soldiers killed in Afghanistan. Beneath the photo was a headline: AFGHAN WAR IS BAD FOR SECURITY, VOTERS SAY.

  Nearly half the British electorate now believes that keeping British troops in the same country that humbled Victorian England increases, rather than decreases, the threat of terrorism.

  And there was this, just in from our British Prime Minister Gordon Brown Desk. (Mr. Brown seems to get so many things wrong these days that one reflexively inserts “Poor” in front of his name.) The latest kerfuffle concerns a letter that he wrote, by hand, to the mother of a slain British soldier. Mr. Brown is no doubt a genuinely sympathetic man. He has written two hundred of these letters. The problem was that he told the soldier’s mother that he felt her pain, being himself the father of a child who died at the age of ten days. The loss of a child is a tragedy whenever it occurs. But the mother in question did not apparently feel that the prime minister’s allusion to his own loss was appropriate.

  Then there were the misspellings. He got the soldier’s name slightly wrong. His name was “Jamie,” not “Janie.” And either the PM’s handwriting or spelling needs work to judge from the words “cumfort” and “cuntry.”

  —The Daily Beast, November 2009

  EASTER ISLAND

  Easter Island is—well, put it this way: its closest neighbor is Pitcairn Island. Pitcairn Island, as in Mutiny on the Bounty. Which is to say, Easter Island is not near much at all.