In Paradise Read online

  THE GUIDED TOUR after the film has been slow in getting started; by the time he returns, his companions have only just entered the museum, moving slowly up the stair to the exhibits on the second floor. He trails after them, but on the landing he hangs back to avoid the droning of the guide (who reminds him not agreeably of that seedy local who had peered too long into Mirek’s car the night before).

  Hunched in his cocoon of statistics, the guide moves sniffing through the midden heaps of humble things—grayed toothbrushes, tins of cracked shoe polish, tangles of wire spectacles, their old-fashioned round lenses broken out or missing, all protected behind walls of glass. From whom? What breed of scavenger would pilfer such sad stuff?

  Needlessly—senselessly, he thinks—the guide identifies these objects. This big pile of little shoes, he rasps, contains two thousand pairs removed from the killed children. “So who was counting?” an American complains under his breath. Nobody smiles but none look offended, either. Nobody knows whom to be angry with in such a place, unless it’s these mute Germans with warm breakfast in their guts who stand among them. Afraid of glancing at a German by mistake, they look straight ahead, glaring at nothing.

  The nagging is monotone, mechanical—the voice of a tour guide in Hades, Olin thinks: Over here, please, ladies? You are please looking over here? Is grand scenic attraction! Is world-famous River Styx!

  And there it is, oh Christ, the hair. Hacked from the heads of mothers, lovers, daughters, whole bins of it, like dusty heaps of ancient hay left behind by war.

  Feeling faint, he touches the wall to find his balance. He knows his resentment of the guide is no more reasonable than his rage last night at the local guy at the car window. Still, this little rat might at least inform these people that because human hair resists the damp, whole bales were harvested for the manufacture of winter garments and coat linings, even sofa stuffing for the further comfort of heavily upholstered German asses. The display includes hideous sweaters spun for wartime consumers in the Fatherland: How were such items labeled in the shops? Would knowledge of their origin have discouraged sales among pious German Christians? Was there no moral disapproval, no distaste for their vile provenance, no tremor of foreboding? No squeamishness about “Jew hair” from “Jew bodies,” the last residue of despised Jewishness? Pulling these sweaters on over their heads, had they held their breath to spare themselves queer Hebrew odors?

  He emits a gasp that the others, all eyes to the front, take great pains not to notice. Oh Lord. Hadn’t Borowski and the rest discovered in the end that rage and bitterness, not to speak of vengeful fantasies, were only different prisons? And unlike many of these Europeans, he had suffered no hardship in the war and has nothing, really, to complain of; he cannot even claim he missed his mother, having never known her.

  So where is all this indignation coming from? It seems so unlike the man he thought he knew, the urbane, soft-spoken Clements Olin, academic poet and historian, cultured, multilingual, dryly ironic (a rather dark humor, some might complain), and on occasion moody and volatile enough to be thought “interesting.” Divorced and childless, he has been prey most of his life to loneliness and nameless melancholy—well? who hasn’t?—which he keeps to himself where it belongs. Even so, he holds fast to the hope that one day he might remarry somebody with children (well-mannered, of course, and unobtrusive) though well aware that, at fifty-five, the day grows late.

  FOOTSTEPS ON the bare wood floor resound too loudly. A stifled cry and many weep. Still, they do not look at one another. Like the first sinners fleeing Paradise in a medieval painting, hands clasped to their errant genitals, they cannot in this moment face the shame they see reflected in the eyes of other human beings.

  At the exit, the guide turns toward him, the better to draw attention to his truancy. Awaiting the laggard, the herd stands stupefied, like cattle at the gate. Olin, approaching, inquires in Polish, “You’re a local man, are you? From Oswiecim?” Though the man nods, his silence is sullen to the point of rudeness. He knows he has not been questioned but accosted.

  IN THE OGRE’S CAVE

  FOUR

  Outside, all huddle in the cold, awaiting entry to the camp itself. On this December morning of soot-dirtied snow, the grainy air tastes bitter. A gray scene with harsh black outlines as in old news clips of the camps, as if with the extinguishing of life, the last colors had drained away into the earth.

  The compound with its rigid rows of two-story redbrick blocks looks much as it had in prewar days when it served as a harvest labor camp, then a military barracks. After the Occupation, in 1939, it was reconstituted as a holding camp for some ten thousand “élites,” or educated Poles—intellectuals, aristocrats, artists, military officers, and other potential dissidents and leaders, categories that would certainly have included Olin’s father, the young cavalry lieutenant, and his grandparents, too, had they not escaped abroad.

  In the barracks, in SS photos on the wall, white clustered faces peer out from their shelves like families of opossums from their holes. Along the corridor hang stylized photo portraits of prisoners shorn bald—the handiwork, Olin supposes, of some sensitive fascist of artistic inclination. In bewilderment and fear, dark-shadowed sleepless eyes stare out of bony falcon sockets. (“If the Germans win the war,” Borowski wrote, “how will the world ever find out about what happened to us?”)

  In Block 10 were administered the assorted sadisms of “experimental medicine.” Block 11, called “the Death Block,” housed the quest for efficient methods of mass “roach” extermination. In its basement are cramped torture cells: the Darkness Cell, the Standing Cell. In the Hunger Cell, a fresh candle is offered by two Catholic novices in black street habit, faces half-lit in the chiaroscuro of the dungeon darkness.

  “What’s that, some kind of a damned altar?” The loud, sudden voice is just outside the thronged cell door.

  Eyes closed, palms together, calm, the candle lighter raises her fingertips to her chin and her younger companion, frightened, does the same. “For Saint Maximilian, sir,” the candle lighter answers softly without turning, “who offer his own life—”

  “‘—to save a fellow prisoner, a family man,’ correct? The Myth of Auschwitz!”

  The brutal voice in this cramped space scrapes Olin’s nerves. “Hey!” he shouts as if silencing a dog, hating his own rude intrusion. The novices stare from one shouter to the other. “Earwig,” Anders whispers.

  The man’s eyes squint, his nostrils flare. He meets Olin’s glare for a long moment before turning to ape the consternation of a Polish priest who stands nearby, pale hands half-raised in protest. When the priest won’t engage him, he turns on the novices again. “You holy Romans don’t belong here, girls.” The junior nun looks stunned, on the point of tears; the candle lighter stills her with firm fingers on her forearm. The priest says nothing. He is a husky man with a blue jaw that will always need a shave, but his eyes look broken and his mouth uncertain, and his skin is glazed by perspiration even in the cold. (When he thanks Olin later for speaking up to defend the novices, Olin says brusquely, “All I said was Hey.” What he wanted to say was, Where in hell were you?)

  Ben Lama says mildly, “Everyone belongs here. These sisters are very welcome.” Having noticed Olin’s agitation, he signals to him to let the whole thing pass. “Take nothing personally, Dr. Olin,” he advises sotto voce. “Not this week.”

  THE PROTOTYPE GAS CHAMBER and crematorium at Auschwitz I is located in a bunker mound camouflaged by a knoll of scraggy pines; the guide points out what he claims are the faint claw marks made by human finger bones on the concrete ceiling. On the wall of a brick building opposite the mound, a wire mesh enclosing seed and suet is visited by quick blue tits. Who is it, Olin wonders, who sets out winter food for little birds in such a place?

  Watching the bird feeder, Olin grows aware that he is being watched by the older novice, the one chastised for offering that can
dle; intercepted, her gaze holds for a moment, flicks away.

  The cul-de-sac between Blocks 10 and 11 is blocked at the far end by the Black Wall: the heavy wood used in its construction, says the guide, nodding gravely out of deep respect for his inside knowledge, had to be replaced with concrete after the wood was shot to splinters. In the first years, thirty to forty thousand people, mostly Poles, were executed here; he points out gutters along the base of the side walls that channeled all that inferior Slav blood down rusty drains.

  At the Black Wall, candles and incense are offered to the martyred as voices rise in Kaddish, the Prayer for the Dead, in which the Lord and all his works are glorified.

  (“Death camps included?” The hoarse whisper is ignored.)

  May the Great Name be exalted and sanctified in the world that He created according to His will and may His kingdom reign in your lifetime and in your days and in the lifetime of the house of Israel. And say, Yes, Amen.

  The sacred text is read aloud in the original Aramaic and in Hebrew, then murmured in the half dozen languages of this convocation. A young man named Rainer, Ben Lama’s retreat assistant from Berlin, recites forcefully in his native tongue, unaware how his harsh Teutonic intonations might grate upon the ears of mostly Jewish listeners.

  The agonized sound of the ram’s horn blown before and after Kaddish is man’s last cry of protest against his fate, a glum American rabbi called James Glock instructs them. Of all sounds, the shofar is the loneliest, says Rabbi Glock. It is the voice of the living calling out prayer across the void to the nameless, numberless dead who do not answer. In Olin’s mind, it awakens a memory of a huge pumpkin collapsing in upon itself in an October field in the New England dusk, a sight that had struck him in boyhood as the loneliest thing he’d ever seen.

  Above the Wall, thin black branches of the naked birches flail the gray overcast like exposed nerves. “You too?” a young Frenchman whispers, noticing Olin’s fixed expression. “This accursed air? We breathe in, n’est-ce pas? But nothing is coming out.” Olin nods politely. He has no comfort to offer.

  AUSCHWITZ I, with its upstairs museum, is all most visitors, descending for a quick half day from their round-trip charter bus from Cracow, might feel inclined to see; he imagines them reeling back aboard, undone by so much evidence of huge cold crimes. But Ben Lama’s would-be witness bearers are no tourists, and neither are they Holocaust voyeurs come to indulge a morbid curiosity; most seem to be here on painful missions incompletely understood, by themselves perhaps least of all. By the look of them, some must have sacrificed savings and vacations to travel here from other countries. Many had relatives among the victims, Ben Lama says; others are stricken descendants of the “perpetrators.” One shocked woman has collapsed and must be helped back to her room, but she soon sends word that she intends to see this through: she will not retreat to Cracow and fly home.

  “That’s the choice,” Ben Lama comments publicly at the noon meal. “We pass through quickly, sickened and depressed, or we stay for days and sit with it in meditation; we immerse ourselves and are transformed—” Here he stops short, grinning sheepishly as the wave of his own rhetoric overtakes him. “Anyway,” he smiles, “that’s our game plan for the next few days.”

  Olin trusts this man’s wry tone and absence of pretension. Respecting the good intentions of the others, he resolves to suppress a wince at sentimental rubbish about “closure” and “healing” and “confronting the Nazi within,” or when this gathering is referred to as a “spiritual retreat”: what “spiritual” business can these people have here? What transcendence do they aspire to, hope to attain? (And come to that, how “spiritual” had many of the victims been before their martyrdom? Surely a few in every transport had been cruel greedy bastards, never much missed at home.)

  As for “bearing witness,” the term strikes his ear as anachronistic and over-earnest. Excepting the few elderly survivors among them, what meaningful witness can any of them bear so many years after the fact? Witness to what, exactly? The emptiness? That silence? What can they hope to offer besides prayer in belated atonement for the guilt of absence, of having failed to share in unimaginable sufferings? Or hope to experience in this dead place beyond unearned gratification of shallow spiritual ambition? Their mission here, however well-intended, is little more than a wave of parting to a ghostly horror already withdrawing into myth.

  Not that he questions their sincerity. But who among them, Clements Olin included, has truly understood the conclusion of Borowski, Primo Levi, and others: that no one in the death camps, not even the victims, was wholly innocent of what was perpetrated here or wholly different from the perpetrators? Hadn’t all participants been compromised if only as members of a species capable of such cruelty? Perhaps only the occupants of those small shoes had died unstained.

  So even if these companions witness truly, what could “truly” mean? Spreading word of their impressions of this scene of heinous crime? Too late, too late. There had been so many such scenes, so many million crimes. Anyway, as he teaches in his classes, humankind has known forever what needed to be done to bring its own propensities under control, yet whole millennia of civilizations and religions and ever more complex scientific knowledge, all that striving with its high purpose and beautiful accomplishment, has not sufficed to tame the inner beast even a little. On the contrary, the first half of this century was surely the most villainous in recorded history, if only in sheer numbers of human lives systematically destroyed by human beings. Surely the time, means, and good will of would-be “witness bearers” might be better spent out in the world, helping the hordes of refugees and other sufferers for whom some sort of existence might yet be salvaged. The point of life is to help others through it—who said that? We must help the living while we can, since the dead have no more need of us.

  In this empty place then, in winter, 1996, what was left to be illuminated? What could the “witness” of warm, well-fed visitors possibly signify? How could such “witness” matter and to whom? No one was listening.

  LACKING WINDOWS, the mess hall is oppressive, and the noon meal is mostly silent; in the aftershock of the first morning, the crash of heavy white crockery in the steel sinks subdues the few feeble conversations, all but one insistent female voice. Over her cold hard sausage, hard potato, stiff black bread, an American woman in a fur-lined leather coat is complaining that nothing had prepared her for anything so terrible as this morning, not even that movie about the kind German enamel manufacturer in Cracow who saved his whole list of productive employees, a team of lovable Jews. “It made me want to run right out,” she cried, “and do something for those people!”

  At a nearby table, Earwig rounds on her like a poked badger. “Do something, lady?” he snarls. “Like what? Take a Jew to lunch?”

  “You’re horrible!” she protests. “You don’t belong on a spiritual retreat!”

  Her antagonist stabs an underboiled potato and hoists and inspects it on his fork, thereby somehow conveying his opinion that her damned movie was exploitative and her distress irrelevant. When Ben Lama sighs and rises slowly to approach his table, Earwig is already on his feet on his way out of the room.

  THAT NEED TO EXPERIENCE the silence of the death camp undistracted still unsatisfied, Olin sets out for Birkenau again directly after the noon meal. This time, knowing others will be coming, he enters the cavernous mouth of the arched gate—the Ogre’s cave, he thinks oddly, the cave of Glob the Ogre—and passes quickly through the tunnel, raising his hood to fend off a cold wind as he emerges in the camp and sets out toward the crematoria.

  He has not gone far when, despite himself, he glances back toward the tunnel. No one. What he sees instead, emerging slow as a horse turd from that orifice, is the snout of a locomotive and with it the shriek of iron he’d first heard crossing the Cracow road, as if that phantom transport through the forest were just now arriving, a half century late.

&nbs
p; Far down the platform, a figure stands facing the woods. Leaving the mess hall before the meal was finished, that scold of the young nuns had come straight here. When Olin approaches and attempts to pass, the man barks “Hey!” in mocking imitation of Olin’s shout earlier this morning, then steps into his path, hiking a bristled chin at him in a street challenge.

  The unshaven G. Earwig is squat, round-shouldered, compact—a build Olin associates with city cabbies and cigar store proprietors, thickset short men with loud hoarse ballpark voices. His mouth is hard-set in a short sardonic smile that never widens, and his eyes stay all but hidden by thick lids. Black leather cap, black pants, black leather jacket bulked by dirty-looking sweaters, he looks like Olin’s idea of an old-time revolutionary, a veteran of some lost cause, hard, cold, remote.

  The man clears his throat and spits. “The Polack Holocaust authority, right? You here to write about it?” He waves his hand to indicate the vast dimensions of the camp. “Think you can handle it?” Earwig’s eyes have a disconcerting way of rolling back in disbelief, baring too much white, as if he’d been struck blind. “You got some new angle on mass murder, maybe, that ain’t been written up yet in maybe ten thousand fucking books?”

  Olin turns on him so abruptly—“What?”—that the other actually steps back, raising half-closed fists. Feeling foolish, Olin shoves his own hands into his parka pockets. “Okay, calm down,” he says. “I’m not qualified to write about it. I wouldn’t know where to begin.”

  “You know that much anyway.” Having already lost interest, Earwig turns toward the tunnel, where others are starting to appear. “So what are you people really up to? What are you kibitzers really here for?”