From the Kingdom of Memory (10 page)

A fluke of nature, or was it planned by the torturers? This contrast between God’s creation and human cruelty is to be found wherever the Nazis implemented their Final Solution: Here, as at Treblinka, Maidanek, and Buchenwald, the theoreticians
and technicians of collective horror carried out their work surrounded by beauty, not ugliness.

Only now do I discover the harmony and beauty of Birkenau. Surely, I was not aware of it thirty-five years ago. Then I saw only barbed wire; it bounded the universe. Sky? Birkenau had no sky. Only today do I perceive its blinding and searing light; it consumes memory.

When was this spellbound spot most unreal—in 1944 or today? I look at the watchtowers, the alleyways of the camp, and suddenly, as in a dream, they are filled with people. Once again I am confronting the fearful and faceless creatures of the past; they move in a world apart, a time apart, beyond life and death.

And once again I hear the tumult of the convoy disembarking in the night. Harsh shouting, stifled crying, soft moans and the barking of dogs. The efficient machinery kills thought before it crushes life. Where are we? Where are we going? Auschwitz: never heard of it. Birkenau: never heard of it.

The red flames that lick the sky inspire neither fear nor memory. The barbed wire stretches away into infinity, and the child in me says, “Ah, so that’s what infinity is like!” Transmitted by a thousand lips, a simple order is all it takes to divide the crowd: men to one side, women to the other. Last words, last looks. In the human flood that flows slowly by, I see for the last time a mother and her small daughter, eerily silent
and withdrawn. I see them moving forward, holding hands as if to reassure each other. I will see them that way, walking away from me, to the end of my life.

As in the past, I hear someone reciting the Kaddish. Who can it be? A dead man? A survivor? Have we, since that first night in the death camps, said or done anything but recite the prayer of the dying for the dead? Have we lived other than in their dreams? Then why does the sun shine so brightly? Here, at Birkenau, the sun shines in the middle of the night. Is that why I returned? To make this discovery? No. Survivors do not come back to Birkenau. They have never left.

This is why, for such a long time, I resisted coming back. And then, too, I was afraid. Afraid of the ghosts I would meet—and afraid of not meeting them. Afraid to recognize myself among them, afraid of not recognizing myself. More than anything else, I was afraid of finding myself in a museum.

Someday, I told myself, someday I’ll make the trip. I’ll take my son and his mother, and together we will make this pilgrimage. I will show them the place: look, look well; here mankind’s hopes were transformed into darkness. I will show them the altar of ashes that has laid its curse upon our century. Someday, someday.

The day came both sooner and later—and certainly differently—than I had expected. I would never have imagined that I might one day come to Birkenau
accompanied by reporters and television cameras. Such a trip should be made but once, and alone.

There were forty-four of us in the delegation, sent by the President’s Commission on the Holocaust to visit the former death camps in Poland and the execution sites in Russia. Jews and Christians, young and old, survivors and friends, we had been charged by President Carter with the mission to recommend an appropriate program for remembering the victims of the Holocaust.

We were never alone. And yet each of us had never been so alone. These men and women, these survivors, remembered those they had lost as they stood at the very sites where they had disappeared. One had to be there in order to understand that there are some kinds of loneliness that can never be overcome. Only those who lived through the Event know what it was; the others will never know.

Loneliness is the key word that evokes, that describes the Jewish experience during World War II. Up and down streets and alleys within the Warsaw ghetto six hundred thousand Jews endured hunger and terror before they succumbed.

Why didn’t the Polish population protect them—or at least help them? We tried, Polish officials tell us. They quote facts and figures. A hundred thousand Jews managed to hide.… An underground organization was formed for the sole purpose of rescuing Jews.… Perhaps. But the few who succeeded in
escaping from the
Umschlagplatz
, where the Jews were assembled to be herded into the cattle cars, and from the death trains themselves, were unable to find shelter anywhere; they were forced to return to the ghetto. And the fact remains that when the ghetto—during and after the insurrection—burned for days and nights, many inhabitants of the capital came to enjoy the spectacle of Jewish freedom fighters jumping into the flames. The fact remains that today there are six thousand Jews in Poland. Before the war, there were three million five hundred thousand.

It is only natural, therefore, that a Jew feels out of place in today’s Poland. He looks for his brothers and he fails to find them; even among the dead. A sentence here, a line of verse there, an allusion: not enough to recall their memory to future generations. We all suffered, Polish officials tell us; we lost three million non-Jewish Polish citizens, too.…

High-level meetings, discussions, ceremonies. The scenario is everywhere the same. The hosts refer to victims in general; we speak of Jews. They mention all the victims, of every nationality, of every religion, and they refer to them en masse. We object: of course, they must all be remembered, but why mix them anonymously together? Both Poles and Jews must be remembered, but as Poles
and
as Jews. The Jews were murdered because they were Jews, not because they were Poles. True, they both faced the same enemy; both were victims of the Nazis. But the Jews were
victims of the victims as well. They, and they alone, were destined for total extermination, not because of what they had said or done or possessed, but because of what they
were;
to ignore this distinction, this essential fact about them, is to deny them. And so we told our Polish hosts, If you forget the Jews, you will eventually forget the others.

This problem—how to reconcile the specifically Jewish victims with the universality of all victims—haunted us throughout our pilgrimage. In fact, it had begun long before. The uniqueness of the Holocaust was debated during many commission meetings. What about the Gypsies? And the Slavs? And what about the Armenians? As if one tragedy were exclusive of the other. As if, by speaking of Jews, we were somehow turning our backs on the millions of non-Jews the Nazis slaughtered. Which, of course, is not the case. Quite the contrary: as we evoke the Jewish martyrdom, we also recall the sufferings and deaths of the non-Jewish victims. The universality of the Holocaust must be realized in its uniqueness. Remove the Jews from the Holocaust, and the Event loses its mystery.

As the meetings in Poland went on—with the Minister of Justice, the First Deputy Foreign Minister, high officials of the Ministry for War Veterans—our hosts began to show more and more understanding, and that is to their credit. They understood that many Jews see Poland as one immense and invisible cemetery, the vastest in all history.

On the eve of
Tisha B’av
, the day commemorating the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem, we went to Warsaw’s only remaining synagogue, on Nozyk Street. We were welcomed by a dozen congregants, including two American rabbis. The service was held in a small, dilapidated side room, as the main synagogue was being repaired.

Following custom, we turned the benches upside down and, by candlelight, began to recite the
Eicha
, the Lamentations of Jeremiah: “How doth the city sit solitary, that was full of people?”

As I read aloud the Prophet’s evocation of a desolate Jerusalem, I stole a look at the “Jewish community” of Warsaw: a few haggard old people. And I was struck by the incongruity of the situation: the text was referring to Jerusalem, but it applied to Warsaw, to Jewish Warsaw. In our day, Jerusalem is very much alive, filled with exuberance: its sons and daughters shout their faith and joy to the world. Jeremiah is speaking about Warsaw and its dead or exiled Jews. What is left of Warsaw, its Talmudic schools, its cultural clubs, its Hasidic centers, its political groups, its sages and its princes? A small Jewish theater, a few offices, a Yiddish weekly.

The Jews of Warsaw are no longer in Warsaw; they are in Treblinka, two hours away.

T
HE
J
EWS
of Warsaw are beneath the stones of Treblinka; they are the stones of Treblinka.

There they stand at attention, silently accusing.

Everyone knows about Treblinka. To mislead the victims, their murderers built a fake railroad station with fake signs and a clock set permanently at 6
P.M
. It was all fake. Only death was real, voracious, waiting. When the Jews awoke to the fact that their end was near, it was too late. They were already being herded into the gas chambers; they were already being shoved in together; they were already dying.

The best description of Treblinka comes from Yankiel Wiernik, a carpenter. He knew the camp, he saw what no man can see without losing his mind, and he bore witness. His fifty-page testament, written and published in 1944, still keeps me awake at night.

The victims’ tears, the sneering of their executioners, the funeral pyres, the dead children, the desperate attempts of sick prisoners to look “happy” because the S.S. sergeant loathed unhappy, weak, sick people and sent them off to die.… As I touch the stones of Treblinka, I think of Yankiel Wiernik. I think of him and of his comrades when, in an unprecedented surge of anger and futile bravery, they turned against their killers and fought back. Their armed uprising will remain one of the great events in the history of the war. Most of those who got away perished as “free men” at the hands of the Germans and their Polish accomplices. How can the memory of their struggle be kept alive? Here, the courage of the rebels and the resignation of the masses go hand in hand:
they cannot be separated. All were worthy and equal in the face of death.

The hundreds upon hundreds of stones that cover the length and breadth of Treblinka illustrate this equality: all of them, large and small, are impregnated with the same silence. From afar, in the twilight, they can easily be mistaken for Jews at prayer, wrapped in their ritual shawls.

People come from all over to look at the stones. They come to question them: How was it possible? We shall never understand. Even if we manage somehow to learn every aspect of that insane project, we will never understand it: How could human beings have done
that
to other human beings?

In the midst of the nightmare, Yankiel Wiernik wondered, too: What is the meaning of this slaughter? What brought it about? And why, why is it taking place? He could not understand. Nor can I. I think I must have read all the books—memoirs, documents, scholarly essays and testimonies—written on the subject. I understand it less and less.

I prefer the stones of Treblinka.

A
USCHWITZ
is another matter. It is a kind of museum, and that is how it is listed on our schedule: Auschwitz, a museum. Clean, well-kept, a real museum. There are photographs, maps, arrows on the walls to direct us. The guides explain: This way, ladies and
gentlemen. The gate swings open. Here is the courtyard. Here are the watchtowers, the S.S. barracks, the offices. This way to the bunker, a jail within the jail, this way to the crematorium.… We are led from one block to another, we are taken to visit the recently completed Jewish pavilion, we are shown the wall against which saboteurs and runaways were shot.

The whole place is unreal, less stirring than Treblinka. In order to see anything, I am forced to shut my eyes. Block 17: I was here. This is where I lived. I seek out my father’s friends, my ageless, nameless companions. A shout. They run outdoors and I run after them. Here, everything is done on the double. You run to wash up, to go to bed, to fall out for roll call. Slow, deliberate steps are for the German overlords, not for their slaves. I reopen my eyes. This way to the cafeteria.

Auschwitz souvenirs, Auschwitz postcards.… This tourist attraction has a strange effect on former inmates. It’s the old story: To attract a large public, you have to use a language it can understand. Some concessions are necessary, perhaps even permissible, if the end is a good one—and is there a higher purpose than that of recalling the crimes against the Jewish people and humanity that were committed here? When obscene propagandists are publishing books to “prove” that Treblinka and Auschwitz never existed, what can be more urgent than attracting as many visitors as possible to the place that was Auschwitz,
where every building is still intact, open for examination by the skeptical? So be it then, visit the museum—as long as it remains unaltered, authentic.

And yet … how can one describe the horror of a victim, any victim, at “selection” time, when his or her name may be called? How can hunger be depicted, obsessive hunger; how can it be conveyed? In more general terms: Can the era of Auschwitz be communicated to another era? A hard question. On a factual level, of course, the museum achieves an important result. Visiting it we know at least that there was a time when, in these very barracks, men from different countries and backgrounds were subjected to the same law and confronted the same darkness. In Auschwitz, at least, you know that Auschwitz really existed.

To learn more—to feel more—go to Birkenau.

W
ITHOUT A WORD
being spoken, the survivors of Birkenau withdraw from other members of the delegation and form a separate group. They take each other’s arms and walk slowly to the ramp, they cross the tracks, and they do not stop until they come to the ruins of the gas chambers and the crematorium. (The open pits nearby—where are they? Do I still see the flames?) Standing there, each withdraws into himself to shut out the present.

At that moment, it became important to erase
all the years, all the words, all the images that separated us from this event, from this place; it became essential to rediscover night in all its nakedness and truth; we had to recapture the unknown before it could become known.