Alex's Wake (44 page)

Ingrid takes a step toward me and takes hold of both my hands.

“My father was a Nazi. It is . . . so hard . . . for me to see that he didn't feel concerned for the destiny of his high school friend when
he needed it so much. Was it just curiosity after the war when he tried to find him at that meeting? Was it also guilt? I will never understand, but I am still asking.”

She looks to the ground, and when she raises her head again, I see that tears have returned to her eyes.

“Martin . . . Amy . . . I am sorry. I am sorry. I am so sorry.”

We embrace, a child of victims and a child of a perpetrator, holding each other in this terrible place, this Silent City that muffles with the decades the deafening cries of the dead. Ingrid's sorrow is not like my sorrow. But it is sorrow, deep and genuine.

“Thank you,” I whisper to her. “Thank you for bringing me here. And thank you for your tears.”

13

Auschwitz

M
ONDAY
, J
UNE
13, 2011. We have been in Europe for over a month. Each time we've begun a new leg of our journey, whether starting out for Sachsenhagen or heading south to Agde, I have contemplated that destination with a combination of moderate trepidation and the eagerness of discovery. Not so today. As we drive east, I am aware of nothing but pure dread coursing through me.

It took the trains from Drancy three days to reach the Polish city of Oswiecim. We will make it in two. Fully cognizant—once more—of the profound differences between our luxurious mode of travel and that endured by Alex and Helmut, I am terrified at the prospect of reaching this final destination. These feelings stem in part from my realization that, unlike all the other places we've visited during the past four and a half weeks, where my relatives always had a future, we are speeding ever closer to the end of their hopes and the end of their lives. But I'm also aware of a large reservoir of irrational fear that I am carrying with me, the terrors birthed in childhood of late-night knocks on the door, of shadowy yet somehow corporeal figures called “Nazis” who meant me harm, who would stop at nothing to do to me what they had done to my grandparents, uncle, aunt, and to millions of other innocent people. It occurs to me with frightful clarity that I have borne these fears all my life, and now here I am driving directly toward the epicenter of that murderous campaign of cruelty, hopelessness, and loss. “No. Stop. Turn
around. Flee.
They're going to kill you, too!
” These and countless other foolish warnings flood my thoughts. But I drive onward, ever onward, toward the East.

There is one saving grace to our journey, which I discover as I look over the map this morning in our Paris hotel. Based on my calculations, it's about fifteen hundred kilometers to Oswiecim, and it should take us about fourteen hours to drive there. Searching for a place to spend tonight, I notice that almost exactly halfway to Oswiecim—about seven hundred fifty kilometers from Paris—lies the town of Eisenach, the birthplace of our favorite composer, Johann Sebastian Bach. It occurs to us both that a pilgrimage to Eisenach would be a good way to cushion the blow that will strike us in Poland. And I reflect, not for the first time, on what seems to me the perfect karmic balance represented by the fact that Germany has brought forth both Bach—not to mention Beethoven, Brahms, Goethe, and Schiller—and the Holocaust.

We are very fortunate that today is Whit Monday, a holiday that reduces Paris traffic considerably. So after squeezing our Meriva through the narrow passageway from the underground garage, nearly shearing off the car's right outside mirror in the process, we escape the maw of the city's fearsome congestion in mere minutes. Mindful of the distance we need to travel these next two days, we stick to expressways.

As we purr along, I attempt to explain to Amy my deep reaction to what Ingrid told us in Drancy on Saturday. I had never before personally met a German citizen with direct ties to the Nazis who had expressed any grief, remorse, or even simple sadness for what happened to my family. Ingrid's tears were a gift.

Then we both note Ingrid's mention of her father's possible feelings of guilt over the loss of his high school acquaintance—whether that young man's name was Alex or Günther—and wonder if Ingrid herself feels a sense of inherited guilt. Here was a paradox . . . she seems to feel guilty because of her father's actions and I feel guilty because of my father's inactions, and yet our families were on opposite sides in the drama that enfolded them. How can we both feel guilty? The only answer we can imagine is that the crimes committed by the Third Reich were so monstrous that both the perpetrators and the victims have
been forever sullied and stained. The two sides are not equal in guilt, of course. But the oceans of tears on both sides are deep and seemingly inexhaustible.

We turn northeast toward Mainz and Wiesbaden and realize, as we circumnavigate Frankfurt, that we traveled this road back on May 11, during the initial part of our journey. We head north, travel northeast again to Bad Hersfeld, and then settle on a due easterly direction on Germany's A4. As the afternoon shadows begin to lengthen, we turn off the expressway and drive slowly and joyfully down a gentle incline into Eisenach, where our hero Johann Sebastian was born on March 21, 1685.

To the south of the city stretch the canopied hills of the Thuringian Forest and, looming over Eisenach from its perch on a twelve-hundred-foot crag, is the legendary Wartburg Castle, the foundations of which were erected in the eleventh century. Martin Luther attended school in Eisenach as a youth and later returned as a heretic. Declared an outlaw by the Holy Roman Emperor in 1521, Luther took shelter in Wartburg Castle, where he translated the New Testament from Greek into vernacular German. Today the house where Luther lived during his school days is a popular tourist attraction.

The prolific composer Georg Philip Telemann also lived in Eisenach, and a house around the corner from the Luther residence bears a plaque in Telemann's honor. But what makes this place a must-see destination for classical music lovers is that Eisenach was the birthplace of Bach, whose music, Goethe observed, “is as if the eternal harmony were communing with itself, as might have happened in God's bosom shortly before the creation of the world.” In 1884, a statue of Bach in his choir robe and wig was unveiled here; twenty-two years later, a Bach museum opened in a six-hundred-year-old house near the site of the Master's birth.

After checking into our hotel, we walk the few blocks to the Bach Haus, a bright yellow building that seems to radiate more than a little of Goethe's “eternal harmony.” It is past 6 p.m. and the museum is closed, but we are content to gaze in awe at the house and grounds and to take pictures of each other at the base of the Bach statue in a little park across
the way. It is a perfect evening, just days from the summer solstice, and we sing the Gloria movement of Bach's prodigious B-Minor Mass as we stroll through the cobblestoned streets of the old city. We come to the central market square, which is dominated by the facade of the Church of St. George and a sixteenth-century gilded fountain also dedicated to St. George, the town's patron and protector. We find an open ice cream shop, and, sitting on a marble bench, we eat our ice cream and listen to the play of the fountain's waters and the sounding of the church's chimes every quarter hour, as darkness slowly falls on a scene of utter peace and tranquility. As I drift off to sleep a few hours later, I hug that image tight, knowing what the immediate future will bring.

Tuesday dawns cloudy; saying little, we pack up the car and return to the autobahn, heading east once more. Our route takes us about fifty miles south of Leipzig, where Bach served as cantor of St. Thomas Church and wrote some of his most glorious music, and just north of Dresden, where Saxon kings collected exquisite porcelain, Friedrich Schiller wrote his “Ode to Joy,” and at least twenty-five thousand civilians were killed during the Allied firebombing of the city in February 1945.

In the early afternoon, we pass the city of Görlitz and shortly thereafter enter Poland. As we cross the frontier, black-and-white images of September 1, 1939, courtesy of too many hours watching the History Channel, come crowding into my imagination. Much faster even than a
Blitzkrieg
tank, we speed east and then southeast past Legnica, Wrocław, and Opole. At Katowice, we leave the expressway as it continues on to Kraków and head south to the city of Tychy. It is now evening and we are only about fifteen kilometers from Oswiecim. Nothing on earth could persuade me to spend a night in that godforsaken town, so we find a hotel in Tychy to await the morrow.

I am nervous, short-tempered, and doubtless bad company. But after sitting silently for ten minutes in the hotel's dining room, waiting for what turns out to be a very flavorful meal known locally as
bigos
, or hunter's stew, my dear wife engages me in a passionate conversation about LeBron James. I am, alas, one of the many pitiable fans of James' spurned team, the Cleveland Cavaliers, whom he abandoned the previous summer so that he could “take his talents to South Beach” and play
for the Miami Heat. But two nights ago Miami was defeated by Dallas in the deciding game of the NBA Finals and we Cleveland fans are overflowing with
schadenfreude
. Forgetting for a while why I am here in this hotel in Tychy, I give Amy the gift of my analysis of LeBron's shortcomings in big games. She knows me well, one of the many reasons I love her. Tonight I appreciate her ploy to the depths of my being.

I sleep better than I expect to, but in the morning I am more unsettled than ever. It is warm and humid, and shortly after 9:00 we start down highway 44, heading southeast. The countryside is flat and green, with few trees. We could almost be in Iowa, I think to myself. But we are not in Iowa. We are in Poland, coming ever nearer to one of the most hideous places on earth. My mouth is dry, my palms are wet, and my heart is racing.
“Turn back, turn back, turn back”
are the words my brain fashions to match the rhythm of our tires on the rough road. But my right foot remains firmly affixed to our little Meriva's gas pedal, and before I am ready for it, we pass through a traffic circle and a black road sign announces that we have arrived in Oswiecim, the end of the line.

I
T SITS AT THE CONFLUENCE OF TWO RIVERS
, the Vistula and the Sola, and on the imaginary border that divides the German and the Slavic peoples. Its history goes back at least as far as 1178, and for most of the intervening years, it has repeatedly switched its allegiances to reflect the ever-changing political and military administration of the region. In the fourteenth century, the town was part of the Holy Roman Empire and its official language was German. A hundred years later, the Hussite wars brought it under Bohemian rule, and its citizens were expected to speak Czech. During the sixteenth century, both its rulers and language were Polish. In the eighteenth century, Oswiecim became one of the Austrian possessions of the Hapsburg Empire; once again its official language was German and its name was changed to Auschwitz. As late as 1918, one of the honorifics of the Hapsburg emperor was “Duke of Auschwitz.” With the collapse of the monarchy, the town reverted to Polish rule and its name to Oswiecim, but the rulers of the new “Thousand Year Reich” in 1933 were determined to reclaim the region
for the revived glory of the German
Volk
. Adolf Hitler had two primary social, ethnic, and military goals: the destruction of the Jewish “race” and the acquisition of
Lebensraum
, or an unfettered space in which to live, in Eastern Europe. Those goals, he hoped, would both be realized in Auschwitz.

The origins of a camp in Oswiecim go back to the time of the
Sachsengänger
, or “people on their way to Saxony.” At the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, a wave of emigration to the west brought workers from Russia and Poland to the German frontier, where they lived until they found employment in Prussia, Saxony, or the other German states. In 1917, a camp consisting of twenty-two brick houses and ninety wooden barracks was built on the outskirts of Oswiecim for the use of these itinerant workers. Twenty-three years later, the Nazis constructed their concentration camp on the site of the
Sachsengänger
facility.

On September 1, 1939, on the first day of the Second World War, the German air force bombed Oswiecim. One week later, the market square was renamed Adolf Hitler Platz and the town's name reverted to Auschwitz. The Nazis intended to achieve
Lebensraum
in Poland through a policy euphemistically identified years later as “ethnic cleansing,” whereby Jews and Poles were to be expelled and people of true German descent were to be imported. Thus, within a few months, Auschwitz was Polish no more, but an essential part of the German Reich.

By the spring of 1940, there were already six concentration camps operating on German soil: Dachau, Sachsenhausen, Buchenwald, Flossenbürg, Mauthausen, and Ravensbrück. But Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS, envisioned a more advanced, more efficient mode of murder and began seeking a suitable site at which to launch his new program. He dispatched inspectors to Auschwitz to render a report. On its debit side was the current condition of the former
Sachsengänger
camp, which was rundown and stood on swampy land that was a breeding ground for malaria-carrying mosquitoes. But on the plus side were two factors: a camp was already in place and the town was a railway junction that could be easily accessed by German trains but also shut off from
the outside world. In April, Auschwitz was selected from among several other possible sites, and construction began immediately to transform the old itinerant workers' camp into what would become the most far-reaching extermination camp of the Third Reich.