A Brief Stop On the Road From Auschwitz (6 page)

I’d also like to ask him a few things. About language, for instance. About those early words in Polish. Where did he hide them? Are they perching like lost birds in his memory, waiting to be discovered? There’s something about Polish that, much later,
I don’t understand. The body recognizes the language, but the head does not.

Rudyard Kipling says in his autobiography that after eleven years at an English boarding school he returned to Bombay, city of his birth, and started to speak in whole, coherent sentences in a local Indian language he’d forgotten. The only catch was that he himself didn’t understand what he was saying.

Maybe if I hadn’t been in such a hurry to put their world behind me, or if I’d gone back to it sooner, I too would have been able to unearth a forgotten language, or at least a few coherent sentences, not just in Polish but also in Yiddish, and perhaps over time even to understand them.

And not only the languages, but also the worlds that went with them.

But the boy’s far too small to be able to help me with such things and speaks too quietly for me to glean anything from what he says. Not like the twenty-year-old youth in a Jorge Luis Borges story who sits down beside the seventy-year-old Jorge Luis Borges one morning on a park bench outside Harvard and tells him loud and clear what it’s like to be twenty and Jorge Luis Borges.

I’ll have to make do with catching sight of him now and then. One evening in late summer I see him with the other children from our block by the swings at the Köpmansplan playground. He’s not quite six, it’s already starting to get dark, and he’s not allowed to be out this late, but on this one evening all the children are out late and the playground is full of adults standing around talking in groups and smoking and waiting for a film to be shown on the big screen the Social Democrats have put up between the sandpit and the swings. In the film, a man’s driving
his car on fields and meadows instead of on the roads. It looks like hard work and feels a bit menacing and the man gets angry and everything seems to be going wrong. The film is called
Tax-free Andersson
. The boy doesn’t understand what it’s about, but he sees the grown-ups of the Place standing there in front of the screen contemplating the car as it bumps over the fields and sees the glowing ends of their cigarettes leave traces in the gathering darkness and senses how they all worry about having no roads for the cars to drive on, and how they’re all making a silent pact that in the Place where they live, cars will drive on roads and not on fields.

In my fourth school year I move from the yellow wooden house in Baltic to the school in the yellow-brick building in town, and from Miss Bergerman to Mr. Winqvist. It’s a big step and one train stop away. Miss Bergerman cries for us as if we were her lost children.

The boy is now me. Or at least, I can no longer keep him at arm’s length. I see him too clearly and recognize him too well and must take responsibility for the story he tells.

Mr. Winqvist the schoolmaster is gray-haired and extremely red-faced and scatters a few words of German into what he has to say, shouting
Herein!
whenever anybody knocks at the classroom door. For a brief period I’m Mr. Winqvist’s favorite, praised when I answer questions, entrusted with helping a classmate who has reading difficulties, and invited to tea and biscuits in Mr. Winqvist’s cigar-scented apartment, where he gives me a fine old book as a present. One day Mom tells me Mr. Winqvist is dropping in to see us that evening. I understand that this is a big thing, occasioned by the visit of a Polish colleague
who wants to meet some compatriots and speak the language of his homeland.

I don’t believe Mr. Winqvist has understood that my parents are Polish Jews, which is not the same thing as Polish compatriots.

I think he understands after the visit.

After the visit, I am no longer Mr. Winqvist’s favorite. The reprimands and sarcastic remarks start raining down, and the blond twins take my place on the favorites’ stand.

The book Mr. Winqvist has given me I read from cover to cover and like a lot. It’s called
The Swedes and Their Chieftains
and is written by Verner von Heidenstam and smells strongly of cigar.

I want to write about the Place as I see it just then. And just then in this story is the time when a young man and a young woman, who have just got off the train on the road from Auschwitz, are living, working, and dreaming, just here. It’s also the time when I, their first child, see the world for the first time and so see the Place as it will forever appear to me. It’s the Place where the drifting ice floes on the Canal perpetually slip beneath your boots, where the first roach forever lies expiring on the quayside, where the fresh carp bream Mom has bought from the lift-netters on the shore of Lake Maren is still flapping in the newspaper on the draining board, where the first shy blush of shame has burned itself into my cheeks, where Mom and Dad forever press their young bodies into the soft sand of Havsbadet, smoking and talking and touching, and you hear the eternal
thud of bare feet on the creaking wooden piers and trampolines and the shrill sound-carpet of shrieking children and seagulls and the soporific sighing of the waves on the sand and the wind through the pines.

It’s a world in which everyone who exists right then, right there, will always exist, albeit only in disconnected fragments of vivid sensations. What’s seen for the first time has no history, no movement, it doesn’t change, it can’t be changed. The same apartment blocks, the same paved streets, the same barberry hedges, the same railroad bridge, the same station plaza, the same people moving beneath the rowan trees. Though over time open wounds of concrete and tarmac, highway interchanges, and port terminals have scarred the landscape, the fragments still lie there untouched.

Scattered and disconnected, but untouched.

In the lives of the two new arrivals, a place like this no longer exists. A place where they made the world their own, as I did.

Had there been such a place, they would have talked about it, would have given me a sense of its smell, its taste, taken me there, told me about the people who once lived there.

But they tell me nothing.

Where there must once have been a place like this one, there is now only silence.

Silence and shadows.

Whatever fragments of such a place lie hidden somewhere—and no human being lives without such fragments—someone or something has crushed them all too carefully and buried them all too deeply, in too-wide expanses of darkness.

So where did you get on the train? So many stations no one remembers anymore. So many places that no longer exist. So many trains to choose from. So many trains that stop too soon and for good.

So I decide for you.

I decide that you get on the train at Auschwitz.

I know it sounds dramatic, even striking, or in the worst case theatrical.

And I admit that it’s hardly commonplace to get on a train in Auschwitz, since Auschwitz is the place where all the trains stop too soon and for good.

And of course you get on a train
to
Auschwitz as well.

On reflection I think that’s where I’ll have you start your journey, at the railroad station outside the Łódź ghetto at the end of August 1944.

The exact date of your departure is a lost fragment. “
Eingeliefert
[delivered], 26.
VIII
. 1944, Auschwitz,” is what it says on a handwritten list drawn up in the Ravensbrück concentration camp in April 1945. It’s a German list, compiled by the SS, so they must have got the date from somewhere, but what does “delivered” mean? And how many days elapse between departure and delivery?

Can I write that you board one of the last trains from the Łódź ghetto to the selection ramp in Auschwitz-Birkenau?

The decision to liquidate the ghetto is announced on wall posters on August 2, 1944. The posters don’t say that the ghetto is to be
liquidated, but simply that it’s to be moved elsewhere (euphemism is the SS empire’s linguistic specialty), and that five thousand people must report for onward transport every day, each of them permitted to bring with them fifteen to twenty kilos of luggage, and that family members should ensure they all go together, “to avoid family separations.” Those notified of their departure are to assemble at the central jail, situated within the ghetto fence, and will then be escorted to the station at Radogoszcz, just outside. The first transport leaves at 8 a.m. Those traveling are to be at the stated place by 7 a.m. at the latest.

Yes, that’s what it says, in Yiddish and German, on the posters signed by Chaim Rumkowski. He’s the chairman of the Jewish Council, and for the past four years he’s been running the ghetto as a slave-labor factory for the Germans, and now he’s been engaged by those same Germans to make the liquidation of the ghetto a calm and collected affair.

But no one in the ghetto is calm and collected. So many have already been transported onward and never heard from again. So many have been dragged away as if they were already dead. So many have been killed for refusing or for hesitating or for no reason at all, like flies swatted against a wall. So many recognizable clothes have turned up in the ghetto’s textile factories. So many rumors no one’s had enough imagination to believe or enough hope to shrug off.

So most people keep out of the way as long as they can, hiding in attics and cellars, trying to move from one hiding place to another, trying to convince themselves it will soon be over since the Russians have reached Warsaw, with the result that the euphemisms are exchanged for plain talk:
Wer einen Angehörigen bei sich beherbergt, versteckt oder verpflegt,
WIRD MIT DEM TODE BESTRAFT
(Anyone giving shelter, a hiding place, or food to
a relative
WILL BE PUNISHED BY DEATH
). German soldiers are sent into the ghetto, blocking off street after street and surrounding house after house, ordering the officers of the ghetto’s batonwielding Jewish police force to drag the inhabitants out of their hiding places and take them to Radogoszcz. Early one August morning—the sun is low and the shadows are long—about thirty women and children are photographed on their way through the ghetto to the railroad station. I count nine Jewish policemen and one SS man escorting them. There’s much to be said about the Jewish policemen, but the train is waiting for them, too.

No, no one in the ghetto is calm and collected, and once they get to the Radogoszcz station the euphemisms come to an abrupt end. The trains the former ghetto denizens must board are closed, lockable freight cars for the transport of cattle, the minimal openings for air sealed up with planks of wood and barbed wire. Boarding is via makeshift wooden ramps propped on makeshift wooden trestles. The passengers boarding are in their best clothes, as if for a long journey, the women in autumn coats, the girls in white socks and laced boots. August 1944 is an exceptionally hot month, but they have dressed more warmly than usual, just in case. They balance their loose bundles and their pots and pans insecurely on the steep, rickety ramps. You can see only their backs, not their faces, as they’re swallowed one by one. The cattle cars fill up. The doors are bolted.

In one respect, the photograph lies. There’s too much light in it.

You don’t see the darkness. The darkness as they enter the cars and hope is extinguished.

Within twenty days, the seventy thousand remaining inhabitants of the Łódź ghetto have boarded the train at Radogoszcz. A hundred people in each cattle car equals seven hundred carloads,
making thirty-five carloads per day.
Die Deutsche Reichsbahn
has a severe shortage of freight cars in August 1944, and the more people you can squash into every car, the fewer cars you need. If everyone’s packed in tightly, standing, you can get over 150 people into each car. The closed cattle cars of the German national railroad have a floor area of twenty-seven square meters, about 290 square feet. The German railroad authorities compile lists of the exact number of cars and trains they have to run between Łódź and Auschwitz and take payment accordingly, but I have no need to know the exact number, not in your transport nor in any of the others.

On August 28, Chaim Rumkowski boards the train at Radogoszcz without the slightest euphemism to support him.

On August 29, the last train departs from Łódź.

In the language that
delivers
human beings, the ghetto is thereby
liquidated
.

All that is left to clear away are the traces of those who have been
dispatched for delivery
.

The piles of abandoned bundles, the stench of starvation and death, the ruins of hope and of the will to live.