Ashes and Miracles: Extract
I run into the same couple at Auschwitz-II, known as Birkenau. They are standing in front of the main guardhouse, a forbidding, familiar structure known a the Gate of Death. It was here that new prisoners were made to disembark, after days of travel in cattle cars, to face the selection committee that would decide their fate; here that families found themselves irrevocably separated.
“Left, you died; right, you became a slave,” says the bespectacled Pole. He speaks knowledgeably about the camp, telling his wife a fact new to me: some of the Jews actually had to pay for the ticket that would bring them here! I have hung about, eavesdropping on their conversation, aware of a growing reluctance to go through the gate. Birkenau by all accounts was the ultimate hellhole, the most horrific part of the Auschwitz complex, with four steadily smoking crematoria.
“In comparison with Birkenau, Auschwitz-I was a resort,” a passing tour guide says, eliciting rueful chuckles. When one of the tourists asks where the Carmelite convent stood, the guide points vaguely over his own shoulder. He is not, his gesture makes clear, about to plunge into this particular controversy, not with Elie Wiesel’s speech still echoing all over Poland.
The Nobel Peace laureate, in Poland for the fiftieth anniversary of the 1946 Kielce pogrom, has stirred up an old hornet’s nest with his demand that all Auschwitz crosses – “an insult to Jews” – be removed from the former death camp. The Poles, having reluctantly moved the nuns (but not the twenty-three-foot crucifix standing on the site), as well as halted plans for a nearby shopping complex, have been in an uproar over Wiesel’s latest demands; a little cowed by the notoriety dredged up at Kielce but equally resentful of Wiesel’s opportunistic timing. The ensuing controversy has raised few moderate voices, surprising among them that of Marek Edelman, a commander in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. “Poles, too, died in Auschwitz and it’s understandable that they should want to have their monuments too,” he stated. “Remarks like those made by Wiesel incite people to xenophobia, nationalistic feelings, and religious fanaticism.” Edelman shied away from using the more charged antisemitism, but sentiments have been running high. On the train from Warsaw, I overheard a heated discussion between two couples, fetching up the war and much else besides.
“What does he mean “an insult’ anyway?” one of the men argued. “Why should a cross be an insult but not their star – are their dead more important than our dead; is their suffering greater than ours?”
“That’s how it is,” his wife stated. “Don’t get so worked up about it,” she pleaded. “It’s not worth risking a heart attack, is it?”
I have followed the tour group into Birkenau, a shockingly vast area bisected by a railroad track and enclosed by a barbed-wire fence, towers. The ruined camp grounds are punctuated by the remnants of burnt or demolished barracks, of which only sixty-seven have survived intact. There were once three hundred of them, made of brick or timber, standing in long grim rows in an open, 430-acre field. Originally used as stables designed to shelter fifty-two horses each, the barracks came to house hundreds of inmates, sleeping on straw in three-tier bunks, subsisting on turnip soup and bread. A Toronto friend has a snapshot sent by a surviving uncle. It shows several live skeletons reclining on the pine planks, valiantly raising their heads to look into the eye of their liberators’ camera. “Don’t ask what I had to do to survive,” said the accompanying letter. What I do ask, imagining the striped figures scurrying in the mud, the crematoria smoke, the heaps of dead bodies, is the obvious question, How could anyone who did survive go on to lead what we think of as “a normal life?”
“You can’t imagine the daily degradation,” an Auschwitz survivor told me years ago. “The fights over the slop bucket, a scrap of dry bread from the garbage dump.” Mrs. S. survived because, after weeks spent digging trenches, she was transferred to work in the camp’s kitchen. She would never stop dreaming, however, of whips and gongs and whistles; the endless dread of finding herself among those selected for the gas chambers. It was hell on earth – you really can’t imagine,” she said yet again.
And perhaps she was right just then. With the benefit of countless books and documentaries, however, I find myself imagining it all too vividly now. I also find myself somewhat disconcerted that it should be so easy, though I am for the moment prevented from exploring all the reasons for my vague discomfort.
What distracts me is the voice of an elderly woman who stands with her back to one of the ruined crematoria, pointing to what used to be the Birkenau women’s camp. It was their barrack’s proximity to the chambers of death, she says, that made it doubly difficult for the women to hold on to their sanity. Some of them just couldn’t take it and tried to escape, or else threw themselves against the electrified barbed wire. The elderly survivor tells all this to an English teenager – perhaps her granddaughter? – to whose arm she clings and clings. One day, she says, one of her own friends made a dash for the barbed wire, only to be pounced on by the SS guards’ vicious dogs.
The woman begins to weep, and I turn away, swept by a sudden, peculiar sense of shame. I may be a Holocaust survivor’s daughter, but I have come here with a notebook in my bag, a fountain pen full of ink. I have come to pay homage, I thought, but all at once feel like a trespasser, one groping to make sense of my own chaotic feelings.
Overcome by the need to be alone, I walk away briskly, eventually coming to a small pond where ashes from two of the crematoria were routinely dumped. But here, too, tourists come and go, among them an adolescent with…a walkman? Yes. He pauses with his parents and looks down at the gray water, then strolls away, his fair head bobbing rhythmically. This is one of the most unnerving things I see at Auschwitz, and it reminds me of the Nazis’ own passion for music: the waltzes and tangos that greeted new arrivals at the Gate of Death, the concerts that gifted inmates routinely put on for their jailers’ pleasure. In her fine memoir, Playing for Time, Fania Fenelon, a French singer, recalls her experience as a member of Birkenau’s women’s orchestra. It was headed by Alma Rose, Gustav Mahler’s niece, who had been unexpectedly arrested on a musical tour in Holland. When the distinguished musician died at Birkenau, her corpse was ceremoniously laid out and blanketed with flowers; a great profusion of white lilies ordered by the grieving SS. The uniformed officers all came to pay their respects, filing past with bowed heads, many of them in tears.
It is the thought of this scene, its power to shock, that eventually leads me to an inner articulation of what has been bothering me. Simply and brutally put, it is the awareness that Auschwitz, a fifty-year-old metaphor, has gradually become a grim cliché. This may seem an offensive observation to some, and an obvious one to others; to me, it is underscored, and made intolerable, by the presence of flesh-and-blood survivors in this haunted landscape. And there is something else, equally disconcerting: one cannot write about the horrors of Auschwitz any more. One can only write about the difficulty of trying.
It is late afternoon when I retrace my steps, leaving Birkenau. Slowly, I make my way back toward town, eventually arriving at the apple orchard blocking all view of Auschwitz-I. In the dappled shade, birds sing and doves call and the apple trees spread their fruit-laden branches over the fence. I think of Yevtushenko reading his poem, “Stolen Apples,” his face aglow, recalling the incomparable taste of forbidden fruit. Impulsively, I reach out and pluck my own red apple; then stop, look at it and, once more filled with repugnance, throw it over the fence.
Only then do I see the child watching me from the house across. I look at the houses – the flower boxes, the billowing curtains – and find myself thinking of Zofia Russak’s family, sitting down to a Sunday meal, with the smell of roasting flesh carried in by the summer breeze. I imagine them awakened in the night by trains, watching through drawn curtains the unfolding of others’ nightmare. I see them shuffling back to warm beds, eventually learning to sleep through it all.
I imagine all his, and an old Holocaust poem echoes in my head, vying with theologian Michael Wyschorgrod’s words: “it is forbidden to make art out of the Holocaust because art takes the sting out of suffering.”
To be sure, but is there any virtue in perpetuating suffering? Haven’t people often turned to art precisely in order to make the unbearable less so?
This is the last question I ask myself as I board the bus, looking out the window at this place called Auschwitz. It is a disconcertingly ordinary town, on whose streets children ride bikes, dogs bark at cars, and women pause to chat under shop awnings. The bus stops, an elderly man gets on, and a soldier jumps up, offering his seat. Beside him sits a flushed woman, steadily wiping perspiration from the face of her Down syndrome daughter. Just over half a century ago, girls such as this were among the first to be herded into the gas chambers. But half a century is a very long time, and this is the sort of summer day on which the Romantics couldn’t resist putting pen to paper. Across from me, on the bus, the Down’s girl hums to herself. People smile kindly. Outside, in front of a cornfield, an arrowed sign says: TO THE MUSEUM.