In Paradise Page 5

  When Father Mikal turns the other cheek, resumes his seat, Earwig’s voice pursues the novices in their retreat toward the door. “Your Polish pope installed his convent right outside the wall—that’s where Christ’s little sisters there are staying. Not your fault, girls,” he hollers after them, “but your convent has no more business in this place than you do!”

  A British clergyman protests, “You say those young women are not welcome on an ecumenical retreat that promotes a healing of the faiths?”

  “Healing of the faiths? In a fucking death camp? Never, my friend. Not ever.”

  The disgruntled audience turns toward Ben Lama in hopes he might intervene, perhaps banish this agitator from their group. Sleepy-eyed Ben merely blinks once, slowly, watching Earwig settle back into his slouch. And when Ben rises, it is only to introduce the distinguished Israeli historian and teacher Professor Adina Schreier, a small waistless woman, all of a piece, whose Art Nouveau necklace of heavy orange baubles seems to pull her head down and set it forward in belligerence. Professor Schreier reminds her audience that the Shoah or Cataclysm or Catastrophe (the term “Holocaust” merely signifies a burnt offering, she instructs them) is only the most recent of the great persecutions of the Jews and may not be the last. Scapegoats have been essential to autocratic regimes throughout history, and the Roman Church—here she glances at the priest—has been the archenemy of “us Christ-killers” for nearly two thousand years: the Crusades, the Inquisitions, centuries of pogroms and murderous persecutions, culminating in the Shoah. But some of that martyrdom, she says, has been invited by Judaism itself, which in its centuries of struggle to survive without losing its spiritual integrity developed a reclusiveness that aroused suspicion and prejudice, then expedient hate.

  “We Jews must recognize our provocation,” she suggests provocatively, visibly gratified, even stimulated, when the cluster of Orthodox Jews groans in disapproval.

  Earwig again: “Think those nuns were ever told how Hitler’s pope sat on his holy hands while Jews by the millions were going up in smoke?”

  “Much as I deplore the brutal way you talk, you’re not altogether mistaken,” Professor Schreier tells him coldly. “But that sort of inflammatory language will get us nowhere.”

  Ben Lama’s raised hand cuts off Earwig’s retort: Olin is mildly relieved to see that this amiable man can be tough when he has to be, and that, for whatever reason, Earwig accepts his authority.

  THOSE IN DISTRESS are presently encouraged to come up onto the little stage and, using the microphone, to “bear witness” to their own experience. The neediest, most eager speakers are the Germans. (“Me-firsters even in grief, these people,” whispers Anders.) Jumping up red in the face, a young man shouts right from his place, so frantic is he to spit up his revulsion after this terrible day.

  “AUSCH-vitz iss zo fockink CHERman!” he shouts, throwing his arms wide in the uselessness of his despair. What he especially detests, he says, is the obscene effici-ence of this death factory.

  “Ja, ja!” a woman agrees, fairly trembling in her hatred of “our German perfectionism.” What a great relief it is, she sighs, with a hopeful smile at the closed faces that surround her, to find herself with understanding people who do not regard her as “a German devil.”

  Olin winces at her premature relief; hearing her speak of it, a few faces set hard and others turn away.

  Close to tears, the elderly daughter of a Wehrmacht soldier killed on the Russian front confesses that at the prayer service at the Black Wall this morning, she had dared recite Kaddish in her father’s memory.

  “Only this most horrible of places permits my heart to speak!” She spreads her arms, baring her heart to the hall, then repeats her countrywoman’s mistake, blurting out how grateful she feels to be here bearing witness with all of these good friends from many nations. Again, cold silence.

  Several Germans are still struggling with their discovery that beloved menfolk in the family were implicated or worse in “the Final Solution of the Jewish Question.” One woman’s late poppa turned out to have been an SS guard in this very Lager. “Perhaps he was ordered to assist in unspeakable actions,” she mourns, starting to sniffle. “And always so kind he was to dogs and children.”

  A no-nonsense woman from the Netherlands pounces on this cliché. “Jewish dogs, too? Jewish kids? Like our poor little Anne Frank?” Here a soft moan in honor of the young diarist’s sacred memory mixes with a groan of disapproval of the unsporting kill. And a voice says, “Your little Dutch girl, are you saying? Born in Frankfurt?”

  The Dutch woman—big-voiced, with large squarish front teeth—demands to know why the “witness” with the SS man for a father failed to recognize the fascistic propensities of a man who lived under the same roof. How could she have loved so blindly “the kind of man who would take work in Hell”?

  “No, no, orders only he obeyed!”

  An American cantor, Rabbi Dan, attempts to mediate. Perhaps a child’s love for her loving “dad” comes more naturally than mistrust, he pleads, bestowing a gentle smile of blessing and forgiveness on the gathering. After all, weren’t there many like “this lady’s dad” who got caught up gradually in a great evil, step by fatal step—

  “Goose step by goose step,” Earwig barks. “Millions of goose-stepping Dummkopf dads lending their big pink Christian hands to cold-blooded murder—”

  “Mr. Earwig?” Ben’s admonition is pitched just above the hiss of whispers in the hall.

  For many years, the German woman continues, she ran away from the story of her father, who was sent to fight on the Russian front when still a boy, scarcely sixteen. “He was victim also!” Badly wounded, he was transferred by the SS to guard duty at this Lager. And she’d come here to pray he had not done horrible things, “just maybe he help to hunt some Jewish, maybe put them on trains.” She clasps her hands upon her breast, imploring the silent rows to understand.

  “Poor liddle SS sol-cher poy age of sixteen. He vas victim also!” calls Anders Stern with that loose grin of his, not malevolent nor intentionally unkind, simply uncouth and callous—yet it worries Olin that any sort of jibe at their expense will only further isolate these German people.

  SOME OF THE AMERICAN JEWS, Olin supposes, have come to assuage a secret guilt; some even dare express the hope that in this place they might experience some inkling of the agonies others had endured while they prospered.

  Though her family lost no one in the camps, Awful Miriam, as Anders calls an overdressed American, bemoans her “trauma” on that fateful day when her best friend was “oppressed” by the school bully: he made the “Jew-Jew girl” salute him in his soldier-father’s souvenir regalia, the swastika armband and broad black belt and high-peaked eagle cap. No teacher interfered, she mourns, and one even pretended it was all a joke when those jeering kids marched around her friend making “Heil Hitler” salutes!

  A silence. Earwig rears around to squint at her. “That’s it, lady? Your little classmate got hurt feelings?” He closes his eyes, facing forward again. “You’re wasting our time with stupid stuff like this.”

  “Excuse me? Stupid? It’s the principle—!”

  “The principle?” Not bothering to look at her, Earwig waves away her witness. The principle, he mutters, intending to be heard, is that anti-Semites include “Jew-hating Jews” who bob their noses, change their names, turn their backs on their religion—

  “Hey, wait a minute,” Olin protests. “That’s too easy.”

  “He knows nothing about me!” the woman wails, glaring around her for support. Further outraged when nobody speaks up, she sits down noisily, pops right back up to announce her refusal from now on to eat or even speak with “all these Germans. These people had no right to come! They should be ashamed!”

  “We are ashamed, madame,” Rainer says quietly. “Deeply ashamed. That is why we are here. We are scarred for life a
nd coming here won’t heal that.”

  Earwig points. “How about Ay-rabs, lady? We got one here from Palestine. You also refuse to eat with this nice Se-mite?”

  The formidable Adina rises with an exasperated groan and a backhand flick of long ringed fingers that dismisses both antagonists and their whole disgraceful exchange. Ignoring Miriam as an unworthy foe, she confronts Earwig. “Yes, of course, Mr.—Earwig, is it?—the Arabs are a Semitic-language people, true. But isn’t Jewish hatred inevitable when their leaders deny that the Shoah occurred and are sworn to drive every last Israeli Jew into the sea?”

  And Miriam, not to be ignored, chimes in, “And anyway—come on, people, let’s face it, okay? You’ve seen ’em yourself on the TV. They look like a different kind of a Semitic, right?”

  “More swarthy, perhaps?” A new voice with a soft British inflection.

  In the back row, the young Palestinian, long black hair tied up in a ponytail, has already risen; he is suddenly noticed, standing quiet a few moments in a room full of uneasy shifting. “Good evening,” he murmurs politely. “Greetings from Palestine.”

  “Raghead! Better you should just shut up!” an American-born Israeli hollers, though begged by his wife to sit down and be quiet.

  “You call them raghead, yes?” the young man continues. “Call them coward terrorist, these brave young fools with no future and no hope in life, gone crazy in the desert . . .” Here a deft pause for a twitched smile. Slowly, then, within his well-wrought isolation, he resumes his seat.

  Olin exchanges a wry wince with Anders: so much for ecumenical healing and world peace.

  “A pity our eloquent Muslim friend cannot speak for all his people.” Adina’s stiff smile tests the silence in the hall. “‘In God We Trust,’ you Americans say, but this man’s Allah—or our Hebrew Yahweh, for that matter—serves the purpose just as well.” Monotheism by whatever name has been the rationale for war and genocide forever. And the Unchosen, the inferior Others, are always demonized as an excuse to oppress them, isn’t that true? And with God’s blessing. “Thus”—and her accusing glance sweeps quickly past the Germans—“Gott mit Uns.”

  “Gott mit Uns!” Anders whispers hoarsely. “If Gott vas mit those Nazi Schweinhunds, why didn’t ‘Uns’ win the war?”

  “Nein!” Seeing them grin, a German woman protests, “Gott iss not for funny business in der Lager!”

  “Gott iss not for wisecrackers!” Rainer observes, trying not to laugh.

  (“I never thought Germans had much humor,” Anders comments. “The men guffaw loud enough to crack your ears but there’s no real mirth behind it—” He is checked by his roommate’s grin. “What’s so funny, Olin?”

  “Sorry, but there are exceptions.” He recalls a gravestone epitaph he’d seen one day in a cemetery in Berlin. Fifty years I have perfect health. Now this! And Anders hoots, “Sounds more like a Jew to me.”)

  At the intermission, Adina laments the fading interest in the Shoah among young people in Israel, where any mention of it may be met these days with bored indifference: it is stale history, the new generations say, as wearisome as those dreary old survivors and their nightmares. Even worse, say too many young Israelis, most of those survivors had been sluts or cowards.

  “What? Snot-nose bastards. What do they know about it?”

  “Bravo! Yes! Correct!” A young Zionist kibbutznik, full of himself to bursting: “So who’s not sick of all this shit about the Shoah, right? Okay? So never again no more kvetching, okay? The survivors say, ‘Forgive the unforgivable,’ okay? So we forgive those people.” He points rudely at the Germans. “Let them sit in their old Nazi shit for a thousand years, okay? But in Israel we are home and we are staying, and all those Arabs can go fuck themselves while we move on.”

  If that kid has moved on, Olin is thinking, why is he so angry? Why has he spent good money on this pilgrimage into the past which by the looks of him he can’t afford? He shakes off Anders, who is chuckling into his ear again: “So now we move on, we go ethnic-clean, okay? Croats, maybe? Those Croats might be very nice today.”

  “Some of us can never move on,” intones the melancholy Rabbi Glock, who for a thin man has too much tremble in his chin. And Earwig snarls to no one in particular, “You sucked it up in your mother’s milk, that hate.” Which hate? Olin wonders. For all the sincere good will, there are so many old hates in this hall. Earwig, for instance—who does this guy hate most? Nazis? Catholics? Georgie Earwig? The human species? Who had his mother been, and where?

  Swooping in to tidy up her point, the Israeli professor wishes to register her solidarity with the young kibbutzniks. (Being young at heart herself, is what she means, says Anders.) Yes, it is time to move on. All those wars and massacres, those genocides, those hordes of refugees walking endless dust-choked roads to nowhere, scouring the earth for the last food and water—aren’t these never-ending tragedies of our own time dreadful enough without clinging to the Catastrophe of fifty years ago?

  Dr. Anders Stern, setting levity aside, interrupts his esteemed colleague to protest. The Shoah was different from anything before it, a realm of horror so far exceeding past insanities as to risk escaping human history altogether. In the end, he says, all this race business is meaningless. “Jewish blood? What is it, really?”

  The American Israeli is up again. “After so much, he wants to know what’s Jewish blood?”

  Professor Schreier raises hand and voice. “Understand, Dr. Stern, I don’t mean to exempt Israel from criticism. To judge from our record in Palestine, we have learned very little from our own great tragedy. It’s all very well to observe Holocaust Day and blow that siren; I myself have cried, ‘Never again!’ on the street corner in Tel Aviv—”

  The American Israeli: “So what side are you on, lady? You a real Israeli or just some kind of a jihadnik—?”

  “Hey, let her finish!” calls another man. “Look where we find ourselves these days with our homegrown apartheid!”

  Adina nods and frowns at the same time. “That apartheid analogy is anti-Semitism, too, of course. True, our leaders invite it—”

  “Right on, Prof!” bawls Earwig. “And when your bullet-headed politicians run out of cheap tricks and your swarthy inferiors are still standing in your way, what happens then? The Final Solution to the Ay-rab Question?”

  The audience turns on him in a body, pointing fingers at his face. Who is this guy anyway? Another voice: All you damned Jews in the Diaspora—! Earwig cringes comically in this wave of denunciation, even summons it with the cupped fingers of both outstretched hands, as in Bring it on, you sons-of-bitches, let’s see what you got.

  “Diaspora, my ass-pora,” he jeers. And it is now, in the ensuing uproar, that he turns and enlists Olin with a burlesqued wink of complicity.

  Why you dirty bastard! To compromise someone else so casually—how infuriating! Olin summons up a sort of smile intended to suggest that this guy’s outrages are mere childish provocations, not to be taken seriously. But Earwig won’t help even a little by returning Olin’s smile, for Earwig smiles rarely and never laughs, not ever, despite his chronic air of bitter amusement. The man is dead honest, Olin reminds himself, and he has honor of a kind and no self-pity: he does not hint at some horrific past to excuse his nastiness. But that gullied face, those ravines flanking his nose: Is this attrition what Ben Lama wishes everyone to see? That “G. Earwig, unaffiliated,” hunkered in his seat, could use a little healing, too? Does anyone have any idea where this man comes from, or care?

  Anders is still holding forth as they get ready for bed. As an evolutionary biologist, he questions whether a potential for evil behavior can be called “unnatural” or “inhuman”: if it is latent in our nature, as he believes, it is all too human. Our closest relative, the chimpanzee, can be brutal, murderous, but it is never evil, intentionally doing harm. A male lion may bloodily devour its young. But Homo sapien
s is the only animal that will knowingly torment others, the weaker individuals of its own species perhaps especially. Thus the depraved Nazi trooper is lower than the beast because the beast knows nothing of the joys of cruelty—

  “So the death camp is no aberration, only an extreme sociopathic manifestation of man’s fundamental nature, is that your point? I understand this, Anders, so if you don’t mind, I’m turning off the light.”

  UNABLE TO SLEEP, he rises, dresses, makes his way downstairs and out into the streets, circling the Lager’s outer walls to the liver-colored bourgeois house at 88 Legion Street, just outside the barbed wire on the camp corner—the former habitation of camp Commandant Rudolf Franz Ferdinand Hoess, with its military row of hard tight evergreens and its concrete dog pen of a garden and its view down the perimeter street to the artificial pine knoll camouflaging the munitions bunker that served as the camp’s first gas chamber and crematorium.

  Rudolf Hoess has mainly interested Olin because before his execution he composed a memoir said to be mostly trustworthy. At the end of World War I, age seventeen, he served as the youngest noncommissioned officer in the German army. Joining Hitler’s party in 1922, he soon proved his mettle by committing a political murder for its leaders and enduring six years in prison. In 1934, Hoess was conscripted for the black-booted SS; in official photographs of its high-ranking officers, he is the stocky man seen often at the elbow of his mentor, Minister of the Interior Heinrich Himmler, the tall triple-chinned Minister of the Interior in bottle-bottomed glasses. In May of 1940, after a tour of duty at the Sachsenhausen camp, Hoess was transferred to Oswiecim, bringing with him a squad of thirty condemned criminals to carry out SS orders as the barracks Kapos. By his own account, Hoess took such pride in his efficiency that photographers were invited from Berlin to record his operation for unlucky colleagues who had had no opportunity to visit.