by Yishai Sarid
Wherever we went, they sang the anthem. In Treblinka in front of the monument. In Auschwitz on the platform, in the forest death sites, at the Annilevitz bunker at Ulica Miła 18. They spent most of their time in Poland cloaked in flags, singing.
I talked to a teacher who had organized one of the delegations and asked her gently if we could cut down a bit. It sort of cheapens the anthem when you sing it two, three times a day, dozens of times a week.
She looked at me, puzzled. “That’s what comforts them,” she said. “It’s our victory song. Without it, what do we have left? Despair. We don’t want them coming home in despair. We want to fill them with hope.”
I didn’t want to argue with that. I could have, but there was no point. She was right.
They didn’t hate the Germans, the kids in my groups; not at all, not even close. The murderers barely registered in the narrative they created for themselves. They sang sad songs, wrapped themselves in flags, and said prayers for the ascent of the souls of the victims, as if their death had been a divine decree, but never pointed an accusing finger at the perpetrators. They hated the Polish much more. When we walked around the streets in cities and villages, whenever we met the local population, they would mutter words of hatred at them, about the pogroms they had committed, their collaboration, their anti-Semitism. But it’s hard for us to hate people like the Germans. Look at photos from the war. Let’s call a spade a spade: they looked totally cool in those uniforms, on their bikes, at ease, like male models on billboards. We’ll never forgive the Arabs for the way they look, with their stubble and their brown pants that go wide at the bottom, their houses without whitewash and the open sewers on the streets, the kids with pink-eye. But that fair, clean, European look makes you want to emulate them. That’s one part of it.
The other part, intentionally and successfully planned by the Germans, was the fact that they committed their murder spree on Polish soil so they could keep Germany beautiful, clean, and well-organized. They kicked all the trash over to the east, to remote organic waste sites, where the stink wouldn’t disrupt culture and progress. Sophisticated tourists can visit Dachau or the formation grounds in Nuremberg or even the Olympic stadium in Berlin, but the real, appealing, sadistic stuff is in the east, where a tourist with an eye for detail can still recognize a bone peeking from the dirt when it rains. In the Black Forest, where Israelis go for some R & R on family vacations, the soil is pure. That’s how the Germans planned it. And what can I say? It worked.
The third element is of course the big money they paid the State of Israel and the other perks that help us forget.
And one last thing, which has slowly permeated me over the years, is the invisible admiration of the murder; the decisiveness and ruthlessness, the audacity, the final, focused, and cruel act, after which there is nothing but silence.
Please, don’t take this to mean I hated these kids. In them, I saw my exposed reflection. I attributed to them everything that had gone through my head, tormenting me. I tried to make up for this with my knowledge. Each group had a few members with wise, sensitive eyes, whom I tried to enrich. I told them over the microphone about the German yearning for the green landscape seen through the windows of the bus, about their longing for the glory days of Teutonic knights in Eastern Europe, and their desire to return to the cities those knights had founded, to regain their status as a nation of peasants and warriors, a nation of strong, maternal, fertile women.
Most of them were too loud to hear me. Their faces were glued to their phones, busy texting and playing flashing games. Only a few listened.
“Have a seat, relax,” a school principal once told me, seeing how hard I was working and taking pity on me. “That’s more than they need to know.”
According to procedure, I was supposed to have heart-to-hearts with them at the hotel every evening, processing the difficult experiences of the day together. They were exhausted and craved some free time, and the only thing keeping them from skipping these sit-downs was their fear of the teachers and the gravity of the topic at hand. It was usually the girls who spoke during those talks, about their feelings, the sadness they’d felt during the day, while the boys said nothing, fixing their eyes on the floor, waiting for it to be over. I have to admit, I wasn’t up for the task. I pretended to contain their emotions, nodded gravely, but in truth I was yearning to be at that dark corner of the bar, wrapping up my day.
I didn’t believe what the children said in these public emotional inquiries. My ears were pricked to their secret conversations, in the backstage of ceremonies, between the seats of the bus, on footpaths, around the table during meals. That’s where different thoughts, a different agenda, just grazing the surface, flowed from the back of the mind to the front of the mouth, between the teeth that sprayed out syllables. Ashkenazis, I heard them saying on more than one occasion, are the forefathers of left-wingers. They weren’t able to protect their wives and children, collaborated with the murderers, they weren’t real men, didn’t know how to hit back, cowards, softies, letting the Arabs have their way. I could hear their gloating, and I could hear them telling each other in private that the Ashkenazis were not innocent victims. There was a reason they were killed, just look at what they did to the Mizrahi Jews, nobody likes a snake. Yes, I heard that kind of talk too, Mr. Chairman, I cannot lie. Someone needs to investigate this phenomenon. I let myself off the hook with an academic interpretation and moved on. I myself am only a quarter Ashkenazi, so no offense taken here. According to them I’m three-quarters man. But where did this loathing come from?
Only a few years later did I learn that hateful places breed hate. On a tour of Auschwitz- Birkenau, this one fat student with mean eyes, cheeks purple with cold, began to scratch the words “Death to left-wingers” onto a wooden wall in the women’s camp. An alert teacher intervened and didn’t let him finish. His friends consoled him, promising to complete the work when they got back to Israel. They were cloaked with the national flag, wearing yarmulkes, walking among the sheds, filled with hatred—not for the murderers, but for the victims. It was hard to fathom. These kids kept quiet during the heart-to-hearts, but I still got to know them completely, fully, totally.
In the meantime, my career progressed nicely. I was almost a doctor. I had some good recommendations from school principals, had a good handle on death camp floor plans; a loyal, industrious agent of memory. I guided an endless string of tours and rarely came back to Israel. Ruth got used to it, raising our child alone until we were in the black. We were so scared of dropping beneath the poverty line, and these trips filled our bank account.
After proving myself as a guide for high school students, I successfully passed the admissions board to guide military and security forces groups. They were much easier to work with. They showed up in uniform, obedient, never interrupting, listening quietly to my explanations. When I eavesdropped on them, I heard nothing of interest. I missed the kids’ subversive chatter. At the beautiful, old synagogue in Tykocin, whose Jews were felled by gunshot in a nearby forest, they put their army berets on their heads and said a prayer for the safety of Israel. Our Holy Father, stronghold and redeemer of Israel, bless the State of Israel, the source of our redemption. It was beautiful. I wanted to join in and surrender to Him, but God wasn’t there, of that I was sure, and if He was, then He was a shit God, our Shitty Father, a great big shit, and I answered along with them: Amen.
At the entrance to the Children’s Forest on the outskirts of Tarnow, a man from the military band blew the trumpet in front of three marching rows. That’s where the Germans shot ten thousand people, mostly Jews and a few Polish scholars, including eight hundred little children from the Jewish orphanage. I explained to them about how the killing was performed in this place, before organized murders in the camps. It was not pretty. Blood sprayed, bodies twitched, evidence piled up. The contact was too intimate; lots of ammunition was wasted. This served as motivation to build the camps, where the process was more like fumigating
for ants or mice, and where Jewish slaves could be used to perform the dirty work. The trumpet player played a pretty, sad tune. A military cantor read the “El Male Rahamim” prayer, they sang the anthem, and female officers placed small teddy bears on the ground, for the children.
These officers had no hatred for the Germans either. In their speeches, the murderers had no image or language. They’d just dropped out of heaven. We did not come for revenge, the commanders said in their recurring speeches, standing before silent soldiers in formal uniform, arranged in groups of three.
If you had been serving in the German military at the time, say in the armored corps or in airplane maintenance or in personnel management or in the electronic intelligence bunker, and your beloved homeland was at war with its enemies on all borders, would you have defected if you’d found out that somewhere far off, in the east, people were doing this kind of dirty work? I guess not. I know I wouldn’t.
Once, in Birkenau, on an especially hot summer day, after I’d already guided many military delegations, after too much sun and not enough water, I started seeing flashes. I stood in front of the soldiers among the concrete ruins of the death wing, and the questions in the back of my mind punched their way out: “Who among you would have defected?” I blurted.
No hands were raised. Their expressions were embarrassed. The pretty junior officers looked at each other, like, What does this guy want?
Then I couldn’t resist and asked them another question: “If you knew that one morning you were going to wake up to find out that your eternal, most hated enemies had been wiped off the face of the earth without any blood on your hands and without having to see a single corpse, how many of you would feel sad about it?”
No hands were raised.
The commander of the delegation, a colonel, walked over and whispered in my ear, “They don’t understand your question. You’re confusing them. What you’re doing is inappropriate.”
The entire camp was spinning, the treetops, the small buildings, the concrete. What am I doing. What am I doing. I didn’t mean to lead them to this alley of nightmares. I was sentenced to be here alone.
After dinner at the hotel, during the end-of-day wrap-up talk, I apologized for what I’d said. I explained that I had suffered from heatstroke, I got carried away, I was feeling ambivalent. “I’m a weak person,” I told them, and I meant it. I wanted to appease them. I was scared to death to be left without them. I got so carried away with apologizing that finally the commander came over, patted my back, and said, “All right, it’s behind us, bygones.” As far as I know he never reported the incident.
You might remember that right after I received my doctorate, you summoned me to your pleasant office in that stone building. You said you’d read my dissertation and was impressed, that it was precise, that I’d evaded the curse of sentimentality, that I’d forged an interesting path toward a practical understanding of the annihilation process. You said you’d love to publish my dissertation as a book. That it would require some editing, of course, to make it suitable for a wider audience. I sat before you, proud and grateful. We spoke for quite a while. You asked to hear my opinion on several matters, explaining that you were trying to get some new blood into the field, that there were many subjects just waiting for the right person, but that unfortunately you had no available slots left and could not offer me a full-time job. But, you said, you’d love to use my help on a regular basis for some special tasks, because you were looking for someone just like me, who was able to go deep and had a good familiarity with the territory.
I left your office feeling dizzy. The next day I had to fly back to Poland to guide a group, but I managed to get home in time to go with Ruth to pick up Ido from kindergarten. We sat at a café. I remember every minute of that day. Ruth said: “I’ve never seen you this happy before.”
A few weeks after our meeting you asked me, through one of your department heads, to go visit an archaeological dig at the Sobibor Extermination Camp. You coordinated a visit for me with the Israeli archaeologist who was the head of the dig as part of an international project. He asked for some clarification. No one likes their toes to be stepped on. He wanted to make sure I didn’t publish any findings without his explicit permission. I went there the first chance I got, between tours, in a car I rented in Warsaw. I was used to going there by tour bus, with a driver, but this time I drove there myself, and I was enjoying it. East of Lublin, the landscape changed. The villages and farms dwindled, and the fertile meadows were replaced with swamps. All around the ancient forests of Europe thickened, the high treetops darkening the road. I turned right at a sign that said Sobibor and drove longer than I remembered from previous visits.
I arrived at a village with single-story homes, chickens and pigs wandering the yards. There wasn’t a soul outside, even though it was a weekday. I was almost an hour late to meet the archaeologist, and I’m never late for anything. The road ended at the edge of the village, replaced by a narrow dirt path. This wasn’t the road I remembered.
I turned on the GPS, which insisted that I keep going. I stopped the car, got out, and tried to figure out where I was. Suddenly, a door opened, and a man stepped out of a nearby house and into his yard. He had a typical Polish face, tanned from working in the sun, wore wide pants, and looked as if he’d just woken up.
“Sobibor?” I asked.
He said, “Museum?”
His wife stepped outside in a floral dress and stared at me.
It started to rain. The Pole signaled to me to continue down the dirt path. I thanked him and drove on.
The road was bad, full of potholes. If this was the road, then it hadn’t been fixed since the war, and it wasn’t built for small cars like the one I’d rented. During the Holocaust the Germans closed the roads around the camps, taking a wide berth. Who ever went there by car? Only SS people returning from leave, or reporting to the camp for the first time in their appointment. All the others—the victims—arrived by train. The Ukrainian guards never went anywhere. In their free time, they lit bonfires and got drunk in the woods. This could be the way, I tried to convince myself. Maybe I just couldn’t feel the potholes on the bus the way I could now in the car. My phone lost its signal, showing no antennas anywhere around. A fox ran across the road right in front of my car.
Then I crossed a small bridge and finally saw the train tracks. I sighed with relief. The road continued along the tracks for a few hundred meters, and finally I reached the Sobibor train station, which I knew well. A little further after the station, on the other side of the tracks, was the ramp.
I parked the car and opened my umbrella. There was no one around. I walked down the path into the camp, which was nothing like Auschwitz or Majdanek. No barbed wire, no ruins, just the lovely smell of pines in the rain. Everything that happened here is buried deep underground. The Germans had trashed the camp, plowing the earth thoroughly. But my eyes knew where to place the structures in the open space: there was the shed where they were told to remove their clothes, and there was the gate where their heads were shaved. Over there is where people stored the luggage, and this is where the Himmelstrasse—the road to heaven—began, where the naked prisoners were urged to run into the gas chambers.
A few Polish workers were standing there now, wrapped in rain ponchos, smoking beside their work tools—shovels, wheelbarrows, and handheld sifters. The archaeologist stood at a distance, bearded and extremely grave. I liked him immediately. I greeted him in Hebrew with relief.
He answered briefly that he was glad to see me, but that they’d been waiting for me in the rain for a long time, and now we had to hurry.
I apologized and described the bad road.
The archaeologist paced in front of me in his work boots and showed me the area that was being uncovered between the trees—a large rectangle, at the bottom of which were the foundations of walls, only a few centimeters high. Judging by their location, the materials, and the laboratory findings, these were the walls of the
gas chambers. This finding was startling, especially for people in the field, like us, and clarified the structure of the camp for the first time in history. It was no coincidence you’d sent me there. This used to be the last stop: women and children in one room, men in the other. The door closed, and an engine was started, flowing carbon monoxide into the rooms. I had so many questions, but it was raining harder now, and the Polish workers were impatient, smoking and asking to get into the van that was already waiting for them.
“I’m sorry we don’t have more time,” said the archaeologist. “But as you can see, they’re done for the day. We waited a long time for you. We can continue this over the phone. I’m leaving the country soon, but I’ll be back in the spring. It’s impossible to work here in winter.”
The workers got into the van.
“I’m heading out with them,” said the archaeologist. “Are you going to be all right? Do you have a way to get back?”
I thanked him. The van left. I wondered how they could just leave their dig site without any guards, but really, who would come here in the rain? And what was there to steal, anyway?
Now it was just me and the forest and the memory. I’m singing in the rain! I felt like dancing all of a sudden, probably because I was gripped with fear. The rain was turning the dirt. I quickened my steps to the car so I could get out of there. I hoped I’d be able to find the road I remembered this time and not have to drive back on that broken road, but that was the only way I found.
I turned on my high beams. The last remains of daylight were barely visible around the treetops. The car was jostled by the potholes. The radio played nothing but static, and I imagined I could hear the Ukrainians singing in the woods, grilling meat and getting drunk, celebrating that day’s crop of murders. Soon, an SS car would drive by, a Mercedes or an Opel, stopping me and asking to see my papers, sending me back there. I should have asked the archaeologist to wait for me. It’s bad news, being in this forest alone. Only when I reached the paved road again and saw the sign that read Lublin did I begin breathing normally again. But I still didn’t feel safe. Not at all.