Beat the Reaper: A Novel (7 page)

8

In the winter of 1994 the Locanos went skiing again, this time at Beaver Creek or something in Colorado, and invited me to go with them. I said no, and went to Poland instead. But I swear to God I did not go to Poland to kill Władysław Budek, the man who sold my grandparents into Auschwitz.

I went for a far worse reason. I went because I believed there was an entity called “Fate,” and that if I did as little planning as possible, Fate would either place Budek in my sights or not, and thereby show me whether I should become an off-the-books hitman for David Locano. Somebody he could use to take out both Italians and Russians, and also be sort of a bodyguard for Skinflick. And in the meantime I could use one turned-down ski trip to prove to myself I wasn’t closer to the Locanos than I had been to my grandparents.

Speaking medically, the strange thing about my decision to let a fictional, supernatural agency choose the course of my life—as if the universe had some sort of consciousness, or agency—is that it doesn’t qualify me as having been insane. The
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual,
which seeks to sort out the vagaries of psychiatric malfunction to the point where you can bill for them, is clear on this. It says that for a belief to be delusional it must be “based on incorrect inference about external reality that is firmly sustained
despite what almost everyone else believes
and despite what constitutes incontrovertible and obvious proof or evidence to the contrary.” And given the number of people who buy lottery tickets, knock on wood to avoid jinxing themselves, or feel that everything happens for a reason, it’s hard to label
any
mystical belief as pathological.

Of course, the
DSM
doesn’t even attempt to define “stupid.” My own feeling is that there are eleven or so different kinds of intelligence, and at least forty different kinds of stupidity.

Most of which I’ve experienced firsthand.

Since it seemed unlikely I would even be able to find Władysław Budek, I decided to at least see the sights. I made my first destination the primeval forest my grandparents had been hiding in when Budek contacted them. I flew to Warsaw, stayed a night in the ex-Communist
shithotel
in Old Town (it’s literally called Old Town, like it’s the capital of Old Country), ate some weird-shaped tubes of breakfast meat in the restaurant there, then took a train to Lublin. From there I got on a bus with a bunch of zit-faced sixteen-year-old Catholic school girls, who talked about blowjobs the whole trip. My vocabulary in Polish—which was crap, though my pronunciation was okay—picked up a bit.

Meanwhile, every place we passed through was mostly factories and train tracks. If I was Polish, I might try:
“Of course I didn’t know the Holocaust was happening! The whole fucking country looks like a concentration camp!”

Like I would care, if I was Polish.

Finally we reached a town so rural it only had four factories, and I got off the bus. There was a plowed access road that ran out of town and along the front of the woods. I double-checked the return schedule, left my backpack with the woman at the station, and started down the road.

Did I mention how fucking, fucking cold it was in Poland? It was really fucking cold. The kind where your eyes gush water to keep from freezing and your cheeks clench up and pull your lips back, and the only thing keeping you warm is the image of Hitler’s Sixth Army’s hobnailed boots conducting their body heat into the ground. The air was almost too cold to breathe.

I chose a random departure point from the road and climbed up into a snowdrift so deep and soft that moving through it felt like swimming. The surface had a glassy coat of ice that cracked and slid away in tectonic sheets as I pushed my way into the woods.

Fifty yards in, my eyes adapted to the gloom. The noise and wind were gone. Weird giant trees I couldn’t identify (not that I could identify, say, an oak) had branches going out in all directions. The lowest-lying ones snagged my feet beneath the snow.

It took so much attention just to pick my way forward that I didn’t notice the ravens until one dropped to a branch right above and in front of me. Another two stayed higher up and watched me. I lay back against the snow and stared at them. They were the largest wild birds I’d ever seen. After a while they started cleaning themselves like cats.

I breathed the clean sharp air and wondered whether ravens could live as long as parrots, and if so whether these ones had been here during World War II. Or World War I, for that matter. I wondered if my grandparents had ever tried to eat them.

If they hadn’t tried to eat them, what
had
they tried to eat? How did you even get around in a place like this? How did you do laundry, let alone fight off Nazis? The place was like some kind of afterlife.

Eventually one of the ravens screamed, and all three flew away. Shortly after, I heard machine noises.

The obvious thing to do was go back to the road, since the snow was starting to work into my boots. But I was curious—not just about the source of the noise, but about how quickly you could get someplace through these woods if you had someplace you needed to go. So I followed the noise, and went farther into the woods.

As the noise got louder, other mechanical sounds joined it. Soon I could see the tops of cranes. Soon after that I stumbled out through another wall of snow and rolled to my feet in a clearing.

It was a clearing in the sense of “just recently cleared.” The ground was scraped perfectly flat for maybe a hundred acres, and men in parkas and primary-colored hardhats were using giant machinery to clear more trees from the edges, whacking them down and cutting them into lengths that could be lifted onto flatbeds. Black exhaust from half a dozen sources smudged into the otherwise white sky.

I tried to talk to one of the workers. I think he said he was from
Veerk
, the Finnish lumber company, but we didn’t seem to have a common language, so in the end we both just shrugged and laughed, since what the fuck else can you do.

It wasn’t very funny, though. Białowieża is the last remains of a forest that once covered eighty percent of Europe. Seeing another chunk of it mowed down was like watching the navel of the world sanded off. It left one less point of entrance to the past— my grandparents’ or anyone else’s. One less sign that we’d been human to begin with.

And one more piece of history as vapor, in which you could see anything you wanted, or nothing at all.

I backed up to Lublin and headed south for the main event. Took the Iron Curtain Express down to Kraków by sleeper car, something I’d never done before and probably won’t do again, though it wasn’t a bad time. In my upper bunk I ditched the blanket, which appeared to have an inordinate amount of pubic hair woven into it, and lay on the sheets in my overcoat, reading by the bare bulb near my head.

I’d bought a stack of books in Lublin. The Communist-era stuff was funny but shallow.
(“Visitors are invited to inspect the Lenin Steel Works, the Czyżyny cigarette factory, and the Bonarka artificial fertilizer plant!”)
Most of the modern Polish stuff was stupid and hateful, with hundreds of pages on how Lech Wałesa was a saint, and none on how he should be eating shit like the pig-faced bitch that he is.
*
And the stuff that seemed accurate was just depressing.

Jews blamed for fire! Jews blamed for plague! Jews blamed for all of Europe being ruled by Jew-hating fucks!

Jews making up a third of Kraków’s population in 1800, a quarter in 1900, and none at all in 1945.

In the morning, on my way from the train station to my hotel, I stopped and bought my bus ticket to Auschwitz.

I’ll spare you most of it.

Auschwitz when it was up and running was really three different camps: the death camp (Birkenau, also known as “Auschwitz II”); the I. G. Farben factory camp (“Auschwitz III,” or Monowitz) where the slaves worked, and the combination holding and extermination camp that lay between them (“Auschwitz I,” or simply Auschwitz). Since the Germans bombed Birkenau as they fled—proving Plato’s claim that human shame arises solely from the threat of discovery—and then the Poles scavenged the ruins for bricks, the main museum is at Auschwitz I.

To get there you take one of those buses that, through some kind of historical leapfrogging, are more modern than any in the United States. The Poles call the neighborhood
Oświęcim
—you never see a sign that says “Auschwitz.” The area is fully industrialized and occupied, with apartment buildings across the street from the concentration camp entrance, although the tour guide tells you in Polish that they would have been knocked down to build a supermarket by now if it hadn’t been for militant international Jews making too much trouble. You look around to see who’s taking offense at this, but the only people grinding their teeth are the Hasidic family at the back of the bus.

You cross an outer courtyard. The Nazis kept expanding the camp as long as they were able to, so to get to the famous
“Arbeit Macht Frei”
gates you have to go through a building with a snack bar, a film kiosk, and a ticket counter. This was previously the building where the inmates were tattooed and got their heads shaved, and where the Nazis kept the Jewish sex slaves. It smells like sewage because they don’t clean the bathrooms, and in the pictures the tattoos don’t even look like the ones your grandparents had.

Inside the gates themselves, there’s a sixty-foot wooden cross with a bunch of nuns and skinheads around it handing out pamphlets about how hysterical international Jews are trying to forbid Catholic services at Auschwitz, which is in a Catholic country. It makes your hands itch, and you wonder if twisting a skinhead’s neck would satisfy Freud’s dictum that the only thing that can ever make us happy is the fulfillment of childhood desires.

But you do what you’re there to do. You look at the razor-wire bunkhouses, the gallows, the random-death guard towers. The medical experimentation building. The crematoria. You ask yourself the questions: Would I clean out the gas chambers to keep myself alive for one more month? Would I pack the ovens?

You feel fucking awful.

Eventually you start to wonder why there’s a bunkhouse dedicated to the victims of every nationality you’ve ever heard of—Slovenians, for example—but Jews aren’t mentioned anywhere. You ask a guard. He points you across the street.

You find Bunk 37, and realize the guard was half right. It’s a combo bunk, the only one at Auschwitz: Slovakians (the original exhibit; you can tell from the signs) and now also Jews. Though the whole thing is closed, with a chain around the doorknob. Later you find out that this particular bunk has been closed more often than it’s been open, for example not opening once between 1967 and 1978. The Hasidic family from the bus stands looking at the chain forlornly.

Naturally you stomp the fucking padlock off and push the doors open, letting the Hasidic family go first.

Inside, you see a lot of bad shit. So many Jews died at Auschwitz that the things they left behind—the hair, the wooden legs of the veterans who had fought for Poland in the First World War, the children’s shoes, and so on—fill whole glassed-off rooms, in which they rot and stink. Compared to these, the casually evil museum plaques—on which “Polish” has been scratched off “Polish Jews,” and the National Socialists are said to have been “reacting to an overrepresentation of Jews in business and the government”—barely get to you. Even though the “over-representation” line is your favorite Jew-hater stereotype, because every time someone kills off half the Jews on earth, like they did in WWII, the survivors are suddenly twice as “over-represented.”

Eventually you get back on the bus and go to Birkenau, the death camp. (Sorry—
Brzezinka.
In Poland “Birkenau” doesn’t appear in print either.) There, in the vast Roman-bath ruins of the death factory, even the Europeans cry. The sadness over that place is practically something you can hear, a scraping feeling that comes in through your ears.

Finally the tour guide finds each one of you and taps you on the shoulder, and says softly that you’re going back to Kraków.

“But we’re stopping at Monowitz?” you say.

She says she’s not familiar with “Monowitz.”

“Monowice,”
you say. “
Dwory.
The I. G. Farben camp. Auschwitz III.”

“Oh. We do not go there,” she says.

“Why not?” you say. Half the people who survived Auschwitz were enslaved at Monowitz. Not just your grandparents: people like Primo Levi and Eli Wiesel.

“I’m just the tour guide,” she says.

Ultimately you threaten to walk if they won’t drop you off, and she takes you up on it. You find the road and follow it for half an hour. You reach a barbed-wire gate—a new one, with actual guards with machine guns. One of them tells you that visiting is by “special permission only.”

Looking past him, you see why. Monowitz is pumping soot into the sky
right now.
It’s still operating, and has never been shut down.
*

After talking with the laughing guards at the gates, you walk back to Auschwitz to get a cab, with your nails cutting the skin of your palms.

Back in Kraków—
Holy shit! The Smurfs built a medieval village on a hill! And it still looks great, as finely detailed as a clock, because the Nazi governor of Poland lived in the castle and protected the buildings!
—I had dinner in a Kommunist-era Koffee House with a wood-burning stove, then went to the back to read through the giant, ancient phone book.

Every customer in the place seemed to have prehensile lips and a conspicuous lack of teeth, and the ones I could overhear were complaining about things it looked like they had good reason to complain about. I realized with a start that I might have just passed Władysław Budek.

I’d always pictured Budek as an aged Claus von Bülow: a smirking, unrepentant lion with a Luger in the pocket of his smoking jacket. But what if he was just some shuffling dipshit, with his bottom eyelids hanging inside out and a plastic pillbox with the days of the week written on its different compartments? What if he was too deaf and senile to even understand what I’d be accusing him of?