The Memory Monster

by Yishai Sarid

  Also by Yishai Sarid

  The Investigation of Captain Erez

  Limassol

  Naomi’s Kindergarten

  The Third

  Contents

  The Memory Monster

  About the Author

  About the Translator

  ‌The Memory Monster

  Dear Chairman of the Board of Yad Vashem,

  The following is a report of what happened there.

  I’ve been informed that you have been expecting this report, and I too am eager to provide it. I appreciate the opportunity to earn your trust.

  At first, I tried to separate myself from the report and convey it in a clean, academic fashion, without bringing in my own personality or my private life, which, in and of themselves, are nothing worthy of discussion. But after writing only a few lines, I realized that was impossible. I was the vessel inside which the story lived. If I widened the cracks until I broke, the story would be lost, too.

  Please know that I have always looked up to you. I have participated in your discussions and consultations, and I’ve been tasked by you with several important assignments, including this final project. I will never forget your moving words at my book launch. I have helped you in every way I could, and I do not remember ever exchanging a mundane word with you. For this I have no grievance. The burden you carry is great. I recall the beautiful view of the Jerusalem Forest from your office window, the smell of the stone walls, and the fine fabric of your clothing. I’ve always seen myself as your loyal emissary. I see before me your wise face and I address you now as the official representative of memory.

  I found myself specializing in Holocaust research out of practical considerations. After being honorably discharged from military service and after the end of the customary traveling and indecision period, I enrolled in a history and international relations program. I yearned to find work as a diplomat. I thought I’d be happier living abroad. I knew international service had lost some of its cachet and was no longer essential in this digital age, but I saw this as an advantage. I envisioned myself sitting at a café in some tropical city in a light-colored suit, spending my days in elegant languidness, living on a modest yet respectable salary paid by the state. I had no aspirations to be a lead player, someone who has streets and squares named after them. I loved reading books about historical figures and events; they soothed me because everything in them was final and complete. Nothing could change. Fictional stories were in the control of a single person’s whims, and made me restless.

  In my second year at university I took the Ministry of Foreign Affairs tests. I was twenty-four years old and passed the first round—the written exam—with ease. In the second round, which I was summoned to attend a few weeks later, the testers had us perform group assignments, all sorts of clever games, and finally one-on-one interviews. As the day wore on, I could feel myself running aground. I didn’t need to wait for the letter to know I had failed.

  For a while, I considered leaving it all and going east, to Thailand. My future was closing in on me. But financial and familial considerations (my father had fallen ill around that time) stopped me from pursuing that notion. Once my dream of diplomatic service died, I quit the international relations program, which I had no real interest in, and majored in history alone.

  I loved studying history: writing papers, doing research, spending hours in the library with old texts, taking a break at the cafeteria, coming back. I moved around calmly and adopted the pretense of gravity. Naturally, I continued on to a master’s degree and lost my anonymity after receiving accolades for a senior thesis I wrote for a class taught by the dean of the university himself. He took me under his wing and offered me a job as one of his teaching assistants. I became a history apprentice and was proud of my new status. The dean discussed future opportunities, studying abroad. I could see myself sitting in front of a fireplace in Oxford or Boston, aging with honor, and was no longer so upset about being rejected by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

  I was fearful of modern history, which reminded me of a terrifying waterfall rumbling with awful ferocity. I was looking for a peaceful life, one that revolved around ancient times whose history was open and shut, which did not awaken any intense emotions in anyone. I considered specializing in the history of the Far East, but for that I had to study Chinese or Japanese, and I didn’t have much of a knack for languages. I wanted to stay far away from the disasters and calamities of our own people, guessing from the start the danger that lay in wait for me there. But when I met Ruth, and knew we were headed toward marriage, I had to start thinking in practical terms. When I thought more about it I realized that, seemingly, I had all of human history laid out before me, but that in fact there were only few open veins available to me. Job openings at universities were rare and quickly occupied by senior professors, and new jobs were given to outside hires—basically subcontractors—at hunger salaries.

  One day, the dean told me that the Intelligence Corps was on the lookout for Iran experts and willing to fund doctoral studies in Persian history for a suitable candidate. The condition, the dean emphasized, was to commit to seven years of standing army service. I knew this kind of service meant sitting in an office at the central military base in Tel Aviv, not in the tanks I manned during mandatory duty, but the thought of being drafted again caused me to lose a few nights of sleep, after which I informed the dean I wasn’t interested. What’s more, this specialization required, once again, learning a difficult foreign language. The dean understood, and said that meant I had one last realistic option for continuing my life as a historian in Israel— getting a PhD in Holocaust Studies.

  I was afraid. I wanted to continue to cruise through life as on a calm lake, clear of worry and turmoil. I made a few barren attempts to evade this burden, and almost succeeded: a fine university in Perth, Australia accepted me to a doctoral program in Medieval European History, offering housing and a teaching position. But Ruth wasn’t thrilled about the idea of moving to Australia, and we already had a wedding date set. Had we gone to those sunny beaches, with pints of beer served from four in the afternoon, our shared fate might have been different.

  I gave in.

  I came to the dean’s office and announced I was prepared to harness myself to the memory chariot. From the moment I did so, almost everything changed for the better. I received a small fellowship, a donation from an American Jewish family, which was sufficient to cover our modest lifestyle. I began to study German, and within a few months was able to read official SS letters. My proficiency remained fairly basic. I never tried to read Heine or Goethe. I gobbled up as many books and studies as I could find. That was my strength—the ability to digest large quantities of written material in a short amount of time. I was drawn to the technical details of annihilation: the mechanism, the manpower, the method. I delved deeper and deeper, until my dissertation topic had formulated and received approval from my advisor. I was on track.

  Unity and Distinction in German Death Camps’ Methods of Actions During World War II. That was the topic of my dissertation. I compared extermination processes in each camp— Chelmno, Belzec, Treblinka, Sobibor, Majdanek, and Auschwitz (of course the latter two were different, being labor camps as well as death camps)—and parsed them out. I took a close-up look at the stages performed at each camp, from the moment prisoners descended from the trains, through undressing, the collection of clothes and luggage, the false presentations given by Germans to keep their victims at ease, the hair shaving, the march to the gas chambers, the structures of gas chambers and the type of gas used, the manner of assembling people inside them, the process of extermination, the pulling of gold teeth and the cavity search, the disposal of bodies, the division of labor
between different stations, and so on and so forth. I searched these for similarities and dissimilarities. Of course, each step was made up of countless small details that also entailed variations of their own. I read hundreds of books and testimonies about life and death in the camps, possibly thousands, and delved as deeply as I could into raw documents in an attempt to clarify equivocal details. There was a plethora of information, and I navigated my way through it with a steady hand. My flow charts branched out, but I never lost control of them. I first organized my facts carefully—Ruth assisted me in creating specialized comparison files—and then investigated the academic question of the variety that existed in methods of action; a surprising deviation from absolute unity, as one might have expected from an organization and a task of this nature.

  At the same time, to make a living, I began working as a tour guide at Yad Vashem. You yourself were the head of the committee that gave me the position. I recall your demeanor and the awe you inspired in me. You asked me why I wanted to be a guide, and if I was aware of the extreme mental burden the work entailed. I answered with a half-truth, explaining that this was an extraordinary opportunity for a historian to make real-life use of his profession, disseminating his knowledge publicly. I didn’t say my wife was pregnant and I had to provide for my growing family. I told you I was in the midst of working on my dissertation, and that I had plenty of detailed information on the techniques of extermination. In my CV, I included my experience teaching a gunnery course at the Armored Corps School, and mentioned that later, at university, I served as a teaching assistant to the dean of the history faculty. You asked me to present you with a truncated version of the story of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, the way I would tell it if you were a school student. I must have made a good impression, because the very next day I got a call informing me the job was mine. I didn’t take your warnings about the emotional strain too seriously because I had never suffered true emotional turmoil in my life, and thought I was immune. I burst into the field like a young bull and began working right away as a guide at the museum, the Garden of the Righteous Among the Nations, and in classrooms. I showered the children with my knowledge. I had a knack for it. I aspired to give them a clear-cut summary of the big picture rather than bombard them with endless details, to take hold of several plotlines. I couldn’t convey every subplot—the kids would get totally lost. Some children from one of the first classes I guided told me that thanks to me they could truly understand, for the very first time, this whole enormous story of the Holocaust.

  I was hardworking and always well-prepared for lectures. I never showed up unprepared. I worked from the assumption that they knew nothing and that I bore the entire responsibility of teaching this memory to them. I explained the roots of anti-Semitism, both traditional and modern, the rise of the Nazis, a bit of Hitler’s biography and the biographies of his first emissaries, the start of the war, the negation of rights, imprisonment in ghettos, banishments, extermination.

  Sometimes I was enchanted by the interesting face of a girl or boy or an intelligent question asked, but mostly classes came and went without leaving any special impression. I remember that once, you dropped in unexpectedly to listen to me give a lecture to high school students from Rehovot or Gedera. You sat in the back and signaled for me to carry on, and I wanted to impress you. There was a blueprint of Treblinka on the screen, and I flowed between stations with ease until I reached the burning of bodies in large decay pits. A few minutes later you nodded and walked out. Then the wing manager came to see me. She said you were impressed by my knowledge, but thought I lacked some emotion and personal attention to victims. I’m a historian, I thought, not a social worker, but I promised I would take that into consideration and try to correct my ways.

  I went to Poland for the first time to write my doctoral dissertation and see the places about which I’d read tens of thousands of pages. My advisor, the Chair of Holocaust Studies at the university, was supposed to go with me. He had some complicated connections there. But he pulled a muscle in his back the night before the flight; might have even slipped a disc. So I went alone. I rented a car at the airport and spent two weeks driving between camps, pouncing at them hungrily, and returning with hundreds of photographs and notebooks filled with sketches.

  Everything fell into place during this visit. I understood exactly what I was seeing, and this understanding brought on a kind of intellectual elation. My dissertation was infinitely improved.

  A few months later I returned to Poland for a delegation guide course. The sites were already familiar to me, and I almost felt at home. After I’d been formally authorized as a tour guide, I started making bookings and traveled to Poland more and more frequently. I made a few thousand shekels for each trip, finally earning a decent living for my little family: Ruth and our child, Ido.

  Before too long, during high school heritage trip season, I would be away from home for a month at a time, sometimes longer, because there wasn’t enough time to come home between trips. Ruth and the baby got used to it. We had no other choice. I don’t know if you’ve ever been on one of those high school delegations: flying with them in the middle of the night, spending seven or eight days with them on the road, standing before them and explaining over and over again what happened in those forests, those ghettos, those camps, trying to carve a path into their expressionless faces, their minds filled with iPhone flickers. I don’t know if you’ve ever tried to illustrate death to them, providing them with data and facts, numbers and names, or had them follow you around, wrapped in flags, singing the national anthem near the gas chambers, saying the Kaddish prayer by the piles of ashes, lighting candles in memory of the children in the pits, performing all sorts of made-up rituals, working so hard to squeeze out a tear. I’ve asked myself so many times whether you’ve ever experienced this first-hand.

  The tour always began at the Warsaw Cemetery. Mr. Chairman, I tell you, it would be best to leave that part out. None of them knows who I. L. Peretz is and why he received such an impressive monument. I suppose he used to be an important author, but I don’t know anyone who’s ever read any of his books. They have no idea what Esperanto is, either, or that a man named Zamenhof was its creator. And they’re right, the whole Esperanto ordeal was a bust. We try to present them with a magnificent culture, but the truth is the Jews who lived in Poland didn’t build cathedrals or write symphonies. Most of them were petty merchants, simple people who ate herring and listened to klezmer music and lived in cabins. Toward the end, some of them were doctors or lawyers—they were among the darker-skinned people who lived in the east, the ones who murdered Jesus. The kids wander among the tombstones, tired after their red-eye flight, unsure whether it’s too early to wrap themselves with an Israeli flag, answering an automatic “Amen” when the teacher says the Kaddish prayer over every important grave. They’re cold, and all they want is to go to the hotel and enjoy a little bit of that “abroad” feeling.

  After the cemetery we take them to the old Jewish quarter, to the dispatch quad at Umschlagplatz, and to the rebels’ bunker on Mila 18. “They were hardly older than you are now,” I tell them, “with almost no weapons at all; only a few Molotov cocktails, some hand grenades, and some guns. And with those measly resources, they were able to block a German military brigade for nearly a month.”

  I stood before them, trying to convey to them the suffering and the heroism, holding strong to all of your messages, never deviating right or left. I was a good boy, doing my best to invade past those jeans and leggings and curls and ponytails and heavy coats, that flat, fast talking, the indifferent eyes, and the phones. To invade their hearts and their minds. I never felt like I truly succeeded, because I didn’t love them enough. I know that now.

  Nights at hotels are a teacher’s worst nightmare. The last thing they want is to see a headline in tomorrow’s newspaper describing Israeli students acting out in Poland, trashing rooms, getting drunk, calling prostitutes. To prevent this kind of behavior, the tea
chers patrol the halls, pressing their ears against doors, threatening the children with terrible punishments, forbidding them from leaving the hotel. When morning comes, their eyes are red with lack of sleep. But usually nothing happens. The kids roam the lobby, at worst ordering a Coke, then shower in their rooms using the hotel shampoo and soap and play sad songs on their guitars, going to sleep like good little children at lights out. True, on occasion we get some disruptive kids—not really kids at all, but rather young pimps with their girls, small loudspeakers blaring Mediterranean music all night long as a revenge against gentiles and Ashkenazi Jews, ordering room service without paying, leaving their rooms filthy. And then, what a commotion ensues! Their teachers summon me to save the day and I come to offer help, though it isn’t part of my job description. I talk to the wild animals, I know how to do that, reach an agreement with the receptionist regarding reasonable compensation, and calm the agitated parents. A weak flicker in my mind tells me that these wild types are capable of murder, but they have a hard time with commands. They know to reject them, evade them, manipulating their way out of them, smuggling little bottles of vodka into their rooms, making noise in the middle of the night, but perhaps on the deciding day they wouldn’t turn in their neighbor, refusing orders, unlike the good kids, who would obey immediately, because for them a law is a law.

  Usually we went to Majdanek on the second day—a long drive east on a road where Krupp tanks used to pass on their way to occupy additional living territory for the German people. Fields sprawled from one horizon to the next, planted with cabbage and turnip. I know what a tank is and am familiar with the magnificent feeling of driving without resistance, without stopping, without hitting the brakes, in the belly of a racing metal beast, living as one of its organs. Twice on the way we stopped at gas stations for food and drink or else the kids got antsy. As we know, the Germans didn’t get a chance to destroy the camp before the Russian invasion, and to this day it remains untouched on the outskirts of Lublin, exposed for all to see from the highway. Majdanek hits you with everything all at once. Two small gas chambers are located just by the gate, on the right. One of them was filled with carbon monoxide through a pipe that emerged from a tank’s motor, while the other was filled with Zyklon B from cans. Between a hundred thousand and two hundred thousand people died there; no one knows the exact number. Compared to other camps, that isn’t much, but everything is still there, the entire operation. Even the crematorium remains whole on a hill, inside a house with a chimney, German ovens in mint condition. Beside the house were the killing pits into which 20,000 Jews were shot on one day during the harvest festivities, when the Germans wanted a good time. For some reason, in Majdanek, of all places, on the few hundred meters’ walk from the gas chambers to the dirt monument and the crematoriums, I heard them talking about Arabs, wrapped in their flags and whispering, The Arabs, that’s what we should do to the Arabs. Not always, not in all groups, but often enough for me to remember it. I pretended I didn’t hear them; it was none of my business, let the teachers handle it. But I heard it, Mr. Chairman, I can’t lie. When they see this simple killing mechanism, which can be easily recreated in any place and at any time, it inspires practical thinking. And they’re still children, it’s natural, they find it hard to stop. Adults think the same things, but they keep it to themselves. Toward the end, on my last few trips, I gave my little speech outside the crematorium rather than join them inside. I didn’t want to hear what they were saying in there.