In Paradise Page 4

  Olin ignores this, stepping around him to avoid some grotesque showdown: Pissed-Off Trippers Duke It Out on Platform Where Millions Died! Mock tabloid headlines have always amused him, and when he does not bother to hide a little grin, the man shouts at him again. But this time his “Hey!” is a parody of his own shouting, and he thrusts out a thick hand and a growled name, Somebody Earwig.

  Still in bad temper, Olin stalls, in no hurry to accept the proffered hand. “Georgie, you said? Sorry. Gyorgi, maybe?” For despite that New York City voice, the man seems distinctly European.

  Earwig doesn’t answer. “So I was too rough on those nuns, you think?” He nods when Olin nods. “Yeah, probably. But Kolbe?” He is off again. “And fucking Pius? And this Polack pope they got in there now trying to sanctify those Jew-haters!”

  Despite his mistrust of the Vatican, Olin is offended: he has never heard a Jewish friend or colleague speak of the ancient enemy with such contempt. Why is that? he once inquired. Maybe because we’re still outnumbered, his friend joked, finessing an argument doomed to go nowhere.

  Earwig nods as if Olin’s discomfort was precisely his intent. “Okay, okay,” he says. “But what I heard, we got one of their sick priests here with us. Somebody at the convent passed the word. Next thing you know, he’ll be corrupting one of our nice ecumenicals.”

  There are several priests attending this retreat. Olin doesn’t take the bait by asking the man’s name, in fact says nothing.

  Now that travel to Poland is possible again, says Earwig, already off in a new direction, it’s only a matter of time before “outings” such as this retreat become an industry. “This year it’s crummy room and board in the old SS quarters in winter: next year, new dorms, Jewish school groups, spring seminars, conventions. Then come your package tours and jumbo buses, youth hostels, snack bars, kosher fast food, souvenir tchotchkes—the whole matzoh ball. And See Historic Auschwitz postcards: Awesome, man! Check it out! Signed, Yr pal, Schlomo.”

  Olin’s smile is sour and Earwig grunts, fed up with wasting his inspired spleen on such an audience. He surveys the half-mile ramp. “Ever seen those cattle cars?” He’d seen one as a kid, early in the war. “Stuck on a railroad siding. Hot, hot, hot, no air, no water. Jesus! I mean, how long had those people been there?”

  “Probably kids in there, too,” Olin agrees.

  “No good sniveling over little shoes. Got to hear ’em shuffling along this platform, smell their rotten little socks. Got to smell ’em, man! Smell their dead breath right there where you’re standing. You got to feel those people.”

  “The way you do, right?”

  Earwig turns on him, suspicious. “Hell no, I can’t feel ’em! Not in that kick-in-the-balls way I’m talking about. And you can’t either, pal. So you better just set your ass down on this platform and ‘become one’ with their suffering along with your Zen buddies over there.” He is suddenly incensed. “You people are amazingly full of shit, you know that?”

  Olin walks off before his own anger gets away from him. “Keep talking, Georgie,” he calls over his shoulder. “Just keep shooting your damned mouth off and maybe you’ll be all right.”

  Certainly he had not meant to suggest that he himself had any special insight. In fact, his vision of the locomotive emerging from the tunnel mouth has scared him. What if, in the coming days, his identity should be subsumed into a horde of doomed humanity milling and bumping around him on this platform? Not those blurred figures in the SS photos, those bulky shapes in dark overcoats with white blanks for faces but real live sweating human beings with real voices still remembered in real communities back home? What if here at the terminus, the final destination, his feelings laid open by this silence, he no longer experiences the victims as ciphers separate from himself, but as terrified creatures clamoring for water and some word about their whereabouts or destination, still clinging to the hope of life on this long ramp that led from the sane world they thought they knew straight into hellfire and the void?

  In the image that disturbed him most among the thousands he has studied, a young mother, staggering in summer heat under her load of winter clothing, shrieks at her three kids. Of different heights, the three are pressed shoulder to shoulder, tight as nestlings, close as ill-matched beads, perhaps more frightened of their mother’s howls than of the bored trooper in the background, rifle slung over his shoulder, there to see to it—they don’t know this yet—that these despised creatures proceed in good order to their deaths within the hour. Years later, he can still see the dirt smudges on the bare calves of those children, feeling thankful that they stand backs to the camera, scared faces mercifully concealed.

  Presumably Tadeusz Borowski witnessed or in some way experienced most of his own frightful scenes. “All of us walk around naked”—that first line of his book—had struck Olin at once as a glimpse of genius.

  “Vorarbeiter Tadeusz,” he called his narrator, who is also addressed by the author’s nickname. Had the real “Tadek” survived here only as a Vorarbeiter, a privileged facilitator of the dirty work? Otherwise why give that name to his hard-nosed, cynical, but also horrified anti-hero? In guilt and shame? Seemingly, his reader is meant to think so.

  EARWIG, OVERTAKING HIM, is plainly indifferent to how unwelcome he has made himself and misreads Olin’s expression: “Who is this morbid Jew sonofabitch shooting his mouth off in my face—that what you’re thinking? Who needs him? And so naturally you are pissed off like the others, and maybe you people are right.” He holds Olin’s eye. “And maybe you’re wrong. Think about it. Maybe you’re just wandering around out here with your thumb up your ass, waiting for some answer that might let you off the hook. Because you don’t know why you’re here or what you’re looking for, correct?”

  Olin says quietly, “I’m not looking for anything. I’m listening. To this silence, I mean.”

  “That why you came all the way to fucking Poland? To hear silence? Bullshit. You think you’ll hear lost voices, right? Like all the rest of ’em.” When Olin ignores him, Earwig, exasperated, points at the people straggling behind them. “Look, why don’t you just go tag along with all the good guys, Prof? Bear some nice witness or whatever the hell they think they’re doing.”

  “And G. Earwig? What’s he up to in this place?” Olin demands.

  “Who knows? Death camp ghoul, maybe?”

  Opposite an entrance into the women’s compound, Olin steps down from the ramp onto the tracks. “Look, man, I can’t answer your question, and anyway it’s none of your damned business.” He starts across the tracks, then turns and tries again. “I just needed to come out here by myself, all right? I hadn’t thought about the why. Who knows?”

  “Oy! Who knew?” the other scoffs. “The Holocaust authority, maybe? Unless he doesn’t want to know—that’s another story.”

  FIVE

  On a stretch of platform between tracks where discerning SS doctors selected those few prisoners with enough strength left to be worked to death, the first silent meditation in homage to the dead is being organized. Furnished a cushion, Olin joins the oval circle, wondering how well his crossed legs will hold up in the next days; he sits roughly opposite the candle lighter and her companion.

  In hooded capes, the nuns perch side by side, as stiff as penguins. The cropped dark hair of the candle lighter, uncovered briefly in adjusting a blue beret, looks oddly wild, as if hacked off without a mirror. Occasionally she writes in a small green notebook, fingertips pinched white at the pen tip like a schoolgirl’s. Their eyes meet briefly as she puts her notes away, and since she seems to be the only other person with a notebook, he lifts his own to salute hers, in token of this bond; she looks away and resumes her meditation. She is a rather plain young woman, he decides; it is the intensity of her composure that is interesting.

  Following traditional yogic practice, he adjusts his posture, regulates his breath. However, he is restless and his mind soon wanders. From his vantage point in the long oval, looking eastward through high skeins of barbed wire, he can see across the winter fields to a low horizon of rooftops, power lines, a steeple. He will go to Oswiecim to make inquiries, of course, which will come to nothing. It was all too long ago.

  LATE IN 1939, fearing arrest by the new Nazi regime in Cracow, Olin’s grandparents had prevailed upon their son Alexei, a young lieutenant of the cavalry, to escort them in their flight abroad to England and America. Old Baron Olinski had lugged across the sea into the New World his antique red leather boots denoting his hereditary schlachta class (together with the family copy of the Almanach de Gotha) and displayed this evidence of Old World status in a glass-topped table in the corner of the modest New World drawing room his British-born Baroness referred to acidly as “the great hall.”

  Throughout Olin’s boyhood, in their small émigré circle, his grandfather had extolled the glories of the ancien régime, all the way back to the old Kingdom of Poland and its grand traditions of religious tolerance, individual freedoms, literature, and music. As refugee expatriates (the term “immigrants” they reserved for the working classes, the so-called Polish-Americans), they reminded one another that for ten centuries their ravaged homeland had been a nation of proud warriors and noble statesmen. Who were the heroes who saved Christian Europe from the Mongol hordes in 1241 and the Islamic empire in 1683 when those heathen Turks were finally driven from Vienna? Hadn’t fifteenth-century Poland ruled all Europe from the Baltic east to the Black Sea? Alas, they cried, not once but twice in the centuries since, lawless seizure of her territories by Prussia, Austria, or Russia had erased the Kingdom from the map of Europe. After the first world war she had to be resurrected as a sovereign nation. But Poland’s
enemies still coveted her mighty grainlands, and scarcely a quarter century later, those German criminals and vile Bolsheviks were back, swarming over her borders from east and west, bent on the partition of all Poland between them, and the first step of the dictators had been elimination of the educated “élites”—“our own sort, for a start,” said the old Baron. The plan was to diminish the average intelligence of a whole people on the cold theory that the decadent West would never come to the defense of hordes of leaderless illiterates in a vast backward hinterland too amorphous and uncivilized to be taken seriously as an independent nation. The campaign of denigration used derisive propaganda—Polish cavalry charging German tanks was a great favorite—including “Polish jokes” (much enjoyed, it is said, by Der Führer himself) that mocked the alleged native ignorance and stupidity. Inevitably such jokes spread to the U.S.: he had heard the term “dumb Polack” used in his own house, where slurs against “Polish-Americans”—those with no intention of returning—were cheerfully tolerated.

  On occasion these “expatriots,” as his father called the old Baron’s inner circle, would fairly shout at “Alexei’s boy,” so concerned were they for his political education. Hadn’t those Red barbarians (“Drunken rapists to a man, I’m told,” sniffed the Baroness, with an uneasy lifting and shifting of old hips in her stiff chair) gobbled up all central Europe, burying centuries of history and culture under the hideous concrete of their vassal states? And once again these down-at-heel patricians would invoke the persecution of their class by ancient enemies, never omitting hairbreadth escapes, all those close shaves that drew closer with each telling, like the starving wolves that pursued their sleighs across the Baltic snows in dead of winter.

  PERHAPS SIX MONTHS after their arrival in the U.S., Olin’s grandparents had heard from their estate agent in Poland a disturbing rumor about a baby boy. Confronted, Olin’s father had confessed to a liaison with a young schoolteacher in Oswiecim. Though his story wavered, Alexei seemed to be saying they’d been secretly engaged, and furthermore that he’d urged her to flee with him, but alas, his headstrong Emi, unwilling to forsake her aging parents and a younger sister, had refused.

  “But of course she refused!” snapped the Baroness. “I recall that girl! She had real spirit! She had character!” And she peered down her long nose at her son, who looked injured but said nothing. Subsequently, of course, the old lady would adjust her recollections and decry the disgraceful morals of “that little trollop,” the lack of breeding evident at once to any but a lovesick idiot, in short her son, who in addition to his other defects and shortcomings, it appeared, had ignobly abandoned the unwed mother of his unborn child.

  As Alexei himself would complain in later life, the old Baron had protested his wife’s disparagement, not of their son but of that pretty Emi. Living in Silesia, ruled formerly by Austria, her family like his own spoke German, having long ago adopted the Hapsburg culture of Prague and Vienna: that girl, he declaimed, was “not some peasant wench for a young wastrel to wrong without a care!” Her father, Dr. Allgeier (a blond blue-eyed “blockhead,” in the opinion of the old Baron) had failed to flee to save his family as the old Baron had so wisely done but instead persisted in his blockheaded intent to live out his life in the old family house outside Oswiecim and pursue his own practice out of his own sunny office, being persuaded that no physician of Prussian heritage and excellent repute would be interfered with by that new regime over in Cracow.

  THE COLD of the winter afternoon falls quickly. Toward twilight, as the witness bearers straggle back toward the town, a weak sun, smoggy red, sinks behind the cropped misshapen trees along the road. A woman murmurs that a faint odor of burning flesh still lingers here a half century later, and someone else recalls her mother’s account of a woman who had smelled her fate while approaching Oswiecim in the cattle cars. Told she only imagined things, she said, “The smell of my hand passed over a red-hot stove—that is the smell that is coming from this place.” But today that odor is no more than the sulfurous pall of low-grade coal descending from the overcast as thick brown fog.

  Olin’s legs ache from cross-legged meditation in the cold, but as he observes to Anders Stern, any discomfort they might suffer in their good boots and fat parkas, looking forward to warm rooms and a hot supper, is paltry compared to the agonies of the slave prisoners described by Primo Levi on their return along this road from the factory at Monowitz, or Auschwitz III, exhausted and half-frozen in wooden clogs and coarse striped pajama tunics that offered no protection from the weather. What price had the author of Survival in Auschwitz paid for what remained of his own life—Levi who seemed so fearful of survival at a fatal cost to others and the consequent lifelong guilt? For many years after he was freed, the Italian writer had reinhabited his former life, recording his ordeal in two tortured, brilliant books, but in the end, or so it seemed, the death camp reclaimed him. In 1987, he destroyed himself—a belated victim, Olin suggests to Dr. Stern, of that fabled “survivor guilt” which one survivor-writer would dismiss as “Holocaust cant.”

  “Holocaust cant?” Anders shakes his unkempt head. Perhaps that writer had felt threatened by the widespread suspicion that survival in a death camp’s desperate conditions without betrayal of one’s own humanity was impossible for all but a very few. “‘We who have come back, we know. The best of us did not return,’” he says, quoting the Viennese survivor Viktor Frankl. The best of us—these are the ones who fascinate them both, the ones whose witness was lost before the source of their extraordinary fortitude could be revealed.

  The Franciscan sisters would be sure that source was faith, Olin supposes, noticing the two of them along the road. Faith of our fathers, holy faith, we shall be true to thee ’til death—the chorus of a hymn sung in the Anglican chapel of the British boarding school to which his family had consigned him soon after the war, at the age of eight. Olin is wondering about faith when Earwig joins them. “Faith?” he jeers. “In Birkenau? Forget it.” Olin glances at the novices, wishing to avoid any appearance of fraternizing with their tormentor, but they give no sign that they have noticed anything at all.

  In the next days he will ask himself over and over the question that must plague all of them to some degree: Could I have borne it? Could I have endured unceasing fear for even one day, far less a year, without succumbing to base acts of survival-at-any-cost for an extra crust or ladle of thin gruel? He doubts it. Those heroic few, he feels quite sure, would never have included the sheltered Clements Olin. “Know something, Olin?” Anders broods. “Our digestive tract is about all we have in common with those poor doomed bastards.”

  If the death camp was so terrible, how is it you survived?—the dangerous query, spoken or unspoken, that many survivors were condemned to deal with, as Borowski noted. Dread that others who had known this hell (“known what the fuck they were talking about, unlike us,” says Earwig, unconcerned that the novices are still well within earshot) might tolerate one’s varnished truth even as they despised it—surely that could help explain why so few had borne honest witness. To immure one’s ordeal, to seal one’s shame away in some cavity behind the brain, might well have seemed the one way home to one’s lost life. Was this, in the end, Anders suggests, what Primo Levi could not manage? And Olin’s man Borowski? (For a boisterous man, the Nordic Jew seems rather preoccupied with suicide.)

  THE WRUNG-OUT would-be witness bearers, one hundred and forty strong, gather after supper in the small museum auditorium. Ben Lama, opening the meeting, offers the microphone at once to Father Mikal. The priest formally protests this morning’s attack on Saint Maximilian Kolbe, the revered Franciscan martyr who offered his own life in exchange for that of another prisoner, a family man, one of ten condemned to death by the SS in a random selection—

  “Oh shit, here comes that ‘family man’ again!” calls Earwig, slouched graceless in his seat. The Vatican had always encouraged the belief that its martyred priest offered up his life to save some luckless Hebrew: Earwig scoffs at the absurdity of that idea. “Hell, in those first years most of the prisoners in Auschwitz I were Poles. Kolbe’s ‘family man’ was probably another Catholic who hated Jews as much as he did.”