by Yishai Sarid
The next day I sent you a brief report of my visit, an initial report is what I called it, and pointed out that there would be more to come. I was on my way to the top.
The Yad Vashem editor proposed we include some photographs. We put quite a bit of work into editing my dissertation, which was very detailed and full of footnotes, into a format more suitable for a wider audience. People love to take a break with some pictures when they read nonfiction, he explained, and they like to see things with their own eyes, to know who they are reading about. There were lots of pictures from the period after the German defeat, when the camps were occupied. Pictures of piles of corpses and of liberated, skeletal prisoners and so on and so forth. But that wasn’t what my editor and I had in mind. We wanted pictures taken while the camps were active, and those were hard to find. From Belzec, for instance, where over a period of ten months 500,000 Jews were murdered on their day of arrival, there were a few odd images, which I had spent hours looking at through a magnifying glass and of which I knew every single detail. In one of them, SS man Rudolf Cam is seen in full uniform with crossed arms, his head balding and his eyes blinking at the sun, standing before a row of wooden sheds. Judging by his short, dark shadow, it seems to be early afternoon on a bright day. About ten meters behind him, a woman in a dark dress and a coif—the customary outfit of Orthodox women—is looking straight into the camera. She is wearing clogs, her feet and calves exposed. She does not look scared. Nearby, in the doorway of a shed, is a man in civilian clothing—slacks, a jacket, and a beret—also looking into the camera. A kind of triangle is formed in this image, but the relationship between the three is unclear, and no one knows whether the Nazi agreed to have the other two included in the picture, though the photographer certainly noticed they were there. Why did he not ask them to move? Why did he choose to commemorate them, too? The matter becomes a bit clearer in another image, taken from the doorway of a wooden shed that housed the Belzec camp staff, showing five figures, probably Jews, arms crossed, well-dressed, as if caught in the midst of a Saturday stroll. These were likely Sonderkommandos on a break, or at least that is the interpretation the picture has gained through the years. It is inconceivable and questionable to me, because they look so relaxed, standing almost languidly before the camera, but it is in line with the testimonies of Sonderkommando survivors from other camps, teaching us that this, to them, had become the world, and they had to serve in it and adjust to its new laws, which were not to be questioned or altered. Still, I hesitated to send these to the editor, and when I did, I pointed out to him that I did not know for certain who the men pictured were, in spite of all my research.
From Majdanek, I sent him some pictures of hard labor: prisoners pushing carts loaded with rocks, their expressions imperceptible in the distance. I also added a few famous images from the Auschwitz Album, taken by SS photographers for unknown purposes, documenting the history of a single transport from Hungary, from the moment they descended the train, through selection and waiting by the gas chambers. I spent hours on end examining these pictures as well, looking through a magnifying glass at the clothing, the paths, the fences, and the faces. Pretty children walking or carried, women wearing coifs and men donning hats. I tried to determine the location and number of SS people and of Jewish slaves awaiting the transport in order to load it onto trucks headed to Kanada Warehouse. I checked how many people were turned left toward labor and how many were turned right toward immediate death. I couldn’t get enough of the innocent appearance of the thatch-roofed house where the murders took place, the yard, the windows, and the chimney. One by one, I scanned the faces of the people waiting their turn outside the house on the backdrop of the forest, reading their expressions for clues: did they know what was waiting for them inside or did they believe the lies about showers, food, work? I marked the tiniest details with color and graphics that I labored over on my computer, adding interpretations for each. There are sixty photos in the Auschwitz Album, and I knew each of them by heart, as if I had stood in the very spot where they’d been taken. I chose the most important ones to include in the book.
I was especially mesmerized by photos of the camp staff during free time, like that picture of the SS staff in Sobibor—I knew all of their names—posing casually for the camera, smiling, guns and grenades in their holsters, wearing that elegant Hugo Boss uniform, good-looking people, fine men. Compared to the Sobibor staff, the Belzec staff look like an odd collection of weirdos and psychopaths. Perhaps it is the photographer’s fault, or the angle. They are pictured on the backdrop of the camp commander’s house, officers in front and soldiers in back, all wearing light-colored coats except for one, in a black coat, recognized as the commander’s driver, a bicycle leaning against the wall behind. I know all their names, too.
I hadn’t been able to find any significant differences between the resumes and skills of the staff in Sobibor and Belzec, so I have to assume the difference between the photographs has to do with the professionalism of the photographers or their intention of flattering their subjects.
I also sent the editor some rare photos from the Auschwitz satellite camps—Jewish slaves in striped uniforms—and emphasized one image I was especially riveted by, from the Siemens electric component factory near Auschwitz, showing Jews standing at the assembly line, some of them consulting about some technical issue. If it hadn’t been for their shorn heads and the extreme skinniness apparent beneath their stained uniforms, you might think it was just a normal day at work. The slaves are all pictured from behind, their faces unseen, but the German work manager is seen from the front, standing at the end of the hall in suit and tie, talking to one of the men in stripes, hands linked behind his back, as if the Jew were asking him for a raise or time off.
I tried to find out the German’s name and what happened to him after the war, but came out empty-handed. He must have climbed up the corporation’s career ladder.
I also sent the editor a series of pictures of another kind that had drawn me. They showed the command chain of the Final Solution in official and social gatherings. For instance, Hans Frank, Governor-general of Poland, an attorney by profession, hosting Heinrich Himmler at Wawel Castle in Krakow, the historical seat of Polish kings. Both in uniform, they sit at a table covered with china cups, small liquor glasses, silver spoons, and a trapeze-shaped box—probably chocolates Himmler had brought as a gift. They are enjoying a brief respite together. I also had lots of pictures of Himmler visiting different sites over his empire in a convertible, a small smile on his mousy face. Rumor has it that neither he nor Adolf Hitler liked spending much time at the office. They both preferred to be out in the field, in the open air. I was addicted to these images, from the great leader making speeches to the small man whipping victims on their way to death, because in these images these men looked free and relaxed, comfortable and confident in their skin.
“Thirty Germans, including those who were on vacation, one hundred and fifty Ukrainians, six hundred Jews—that was the staff that carried out the extermination at Treblinka,” I explained to my groups. “That was the scale of the operation in other camps, too.”
I was prepared for the astounded expressions on their faces. Had the Jews rebelled right away, refusing to cooperate, the operation would not have been carried out so easily, I told them. The Germans would have had to allocate a lot more manpower for the job and things might have been postponed, but no one could say for sure. I read to these students and soldiers the letter sent to Himmler from Odilo Globocnik, who ruled Operation Reinhard camps from Lublin, right after he finished murdering over two million Jews. In the letter, he brags about having completed the task with such small German manpower, and pointed out that some famous industry factories had taken an interest in his efficient work method. I explained the paralyzing fear and the negation of willpower, as well as the fact that the millions of trained Soviet soldiers that had been taken prisoner hardly rebelled. It was the animalistic urge to survive at any cost that kept
the machine moving, as well as man’s submissiveness in the face of unstoppable power. That was what the German method relied on. “I would have done the same,” I told them, “and you probably would have, too. We would have all carried bodies from the gas chambers to the crematorium, pulling gold teeth from their mouths, shearing their hair to feed it into the fire if it meant staying alive one more day, one more hour, one more minute.”
We mustn’t use the expression “like lambs to the slaughter”—that’s what you kept telling us at the guide course. It’s equally forbidden at the university. I was always obedient, never using it. But the truth is, we both know that expression is too delicate and merciful: lambs are not killed with poison. They are slaughtered, the flesh and wool spared. The lambs are loved, caressed, fed fresh grass, while the Jews were poisoned with insecticide and rodenticide. I should have told them that, breaking their meaningless melancholy, putting an end to the playing of bland songs on their guitars. The Kaddish, the tears, the candles, all that feel-good nonsense.
I sketched a complete picture of the murderers and their assistants for myself—their customs and agenda, their tools, and the rules within which they operated. But I didn’t know the victims. It was impossible in terms of quantity, and was beyond the bounds of my research. Standing before these groups, I listed the names of the countries from which transports arrived at each camp, as well as the number of victims, but I didn’t say their names. They were so many, where would I even begin? And they were all treated the same way, like dog food ingredients. I brought the students to the display cases at the Auschwitz Museum, filled with hair, suitcases, prostheses, shoes, and said, “These were people.” I wanted them to think about their younger siblings, their parents, their children, and themselves. I couldn’t carry that burden myself.
And I succeeded. I was booked for more and more trips, and sometimes stayed out of the country for two months at a time. So I rented a small apartment in Warsaw, near the old ghetto, on a high floor of a large concrete housing project built during the Communist era, the next street over from where Janusz Korczak’s orphanage used to be, and where now there is just a regular Polish school. You helped me with the rent check because you appreciated my work and enjoyed its fruits. In the center of the housing project was a large lawn with a jungle gym. I liked to sit on a bench when the weather was nice, watching children and birds and Polish mothers. I invited Ruth to bring Ido and come live with me there several times, just for now, until we got our act together. She didn’t say no, but we never executed the plan. I knew this place once swarmed with Jewish life, but it was very hard to see it now. My imagination wasn’t strong enough. In the evening, I would watch the lights go on in the buildings across the way. Small families sat down to dinner—mother, father, child, two children, tops. Sometimes no child at all. They barely had children here, as if the lack of Jews had canceled out the need for procreation. I strolled on foot a lot, walking to the old city and along the river, but on very cold winter days I stayed in, listening to music. I liked listening to Bach.
One night I imagined I was a klezmer player in Poland three hundred years ago, playing the violin at weddings, brises, and the celebrations of righteous men, and that I’d heard of some musical genius in Germany, let’s say Leipzig, whose music shot up into the heavens, and decided to leave everything behind and travel west to see him. Would he have accepted me as a student, a player, an apprentice? Of course, if I had shown up with yarmulke and fringes he would have refused to have me, that’s understandable—I couldn’t walk into the church where he worked dressed like that. But what if I’d agreed to dress like a gentile? Would he still have turned me away? In short, I insisted, was Bach an anti-Semite? Did the sight of a Jew, his smell, the way he talked, disgust him? I wanted so badly for the answer to be no. I tried to put the thought out of my mind for a day or two. I went out to guide another tour, and when I returned I listened to the Cello Suites, but my pure pleasure had been hindered. I could no longer listen to the music without obsessing over that question.
Bach and Jews, I typed into the search engine. I found many articles, most of them dealing with the St. John Passion, which Bach had composed for Martin Luther’s newly established Protestant church, according to Luther’s lyrics. I listened to the piece carefully. A choir of women poured into me, heavenly voices. Then the men appeared, baritones and tenors, a duet in German (I understood most of it), until the women’s voices returned to soothe me. Then the tenor sang about the Juden, then again about the Juden and sweet Jesus, and what the Juden had done to him. I could smell the singer’s bad breath. I paused the music. It made me feel sick. Don’t go there, I told my inner klezmer, playing without sheet music, dancing on the bride and groom’s table with his torn shoes, among the plates of chopped liver and challah and herring, carried on the aromas of garlic and onion. He won’t take you.
On the way to Krakow, I introduced them to the Righteous Among the Nations Anna R., an old woman who had remained in her small village her entire life. These days, her grandchildren work her farm with an old tractor and a donkey. I liked her. Her kindness melted my heart, and I think she liked me too. She always seemed happy to see me. On nice days she would come out to meet us in the yard, and on rainy days we would crowd inside her small house. She spoke Polish, and one of her granddaughters translated her words into broken English. Then I told them the story in Hebrew: one night during the war she and her late husband heard a knock on the door. A boy was standing in their doorway, filthy, covered with lice, and starving. Without giving the matter a second thought, they let him in. He told them he’d fled from the Germans and the Polish police, that his hometown had been surrounded, the Jews pillaged, beaten. Those who tried to run were killed, and the others were taken by train to an unknown destination. The boy’s entire family was put on the train, while he’d managed to run to the woods and survive for a few weeks eating food he’d stolen from farms. By the time he came knocking on their door he was prepared to die of hunger, cold, and grief.
Anna took pity on him, bathing him, feeding him, and washing his clothes. He spent that night in their home, and when he awakened the next day they asked him to leave, fearing for themselves and for their children. “But the sun shone,” she said, always smiling when she reached this part, “and the boy decided he wanted to live and begged to stay. I wanted to send him away,” Anna confessed. “I knew what the Germans were capable of, but my husband said, ‘We’ve got no choice, we’ve got to let him stay.’” She agreed.
They set up a hiding place for him in the barn, tasking their eldest daughter, who was twelve years old at the time, with serving his meals. Sometimes, under cover of dark, they invited him into their home to dine with them or warm himself at the fireplace. Her face lit up when she described it. A few months later, they heard the Germans had burned down the house of a family who had harbored Jews in a nearby village. Hearing this, the boy said he would return to the woods, though they didn’t ask him to. But they remained in touch with him. Twice a week they would hide food and clothes for him in a secret spot on the outskirts of the forest. “Srulik,” Anna said in conclusion, putting her hands together, “that was his name, and he lived, he lived, he stayed alive!”
“Applaud her,” I commanded them, “applause, right now, as loud as you can.”
“Who among you would have rescued a strange, filthy boy who knocked on your door at night, putting your own life and the lives of your children at risk?” I asked them in our nightly session at the hotel.
Silence. Then whispering. Their brains ground through the options. How to get out of this?
“He isn’t one of your people,” I reminded them. “He’s of a different faith. You don’t even know him. You have no obligation toward him, other than being humans.”
A few raised their hands.
“Would you die for him?” I persisted. “Would you risk having your home set on fire with you and your children inside?”
At this point the hands usu
ally came down.
“There are no specific characteristics that define the Righteous Among the Nations,” I told them. “You’ll find hardly any famous, successful, genius, or exceptionally intellectual people on the list. Most of them were just regular people, like Miss Anna, whom we visited today. I have no idea how many books she’s read in her lifetime. She didn’t attend high school, that’s for sure. She spent her entire life working in the field and on tending to the pigs on her farm and raising children. But she has a good heart. She took him in. There were plenty of other people—murderers, cowards, who burned Jews alive, who turned them in, but there were also people like her.
“I ask myself,” I told them, “what would I have done in her place? I don’t know. I would probably be too afraid to take the risk, and it’s killing me, it won’t let me go, because that’s the only question we can ask ourselves as human beings.”
The teachers fidgeted uncomfortably in the first row.
With time, I took less care with my words. The dilemma raced across the children’s faces. Common sense intervened. They had been taught to use certain criteria—they oughtn’t open the door to just anyone, it depended who the person was and where they had come from. They would check carefully, in the meantime closing the door in the person’s face. The more philosophical of the group would have rescued no one. Only the modest, the simple, the kind, would. I am not one of them, I told myself, and it made it difficult for me to carry on the conversation. I cannot even manage to love these children, who are my people and have done nothing wrong. I attribute them with malice based merely on their expressions and bits of dialogue. How would I ever take a strange boy in?
In Treblinka I explained, against the backdrop of forest birdsong, that this camp had no labor component, only extermination. Each time a transport arrived, the famously simple process began: passengers disembarked, stunned, urged on with beatings and shouting, ordered to put down their things and undress quickly. The naked women’s hair was cut off before they were led down a narrow path to the bathrooms. Signs in Germans pointed the way, and those who dawdled were whipped, but rather than a bathroom, the Germans pushed them into the gas chamber. Thirty minutes later, Jewish slaves removed twisted, bloated bodies from the room, wrapped around each other. They pulled gold teeth from the corpses’ mouths and tossed the bodies into pits. Every few days the piles would be set on fire under the open sky.