by Yishai Sarid
I’m still not completely clear on the “access” column. The military could easily open a map or look at some satellite images. But I wrote down that all the camps were accessible by car, and some of them by train lines that were still active. I also included distance from Warsaw, Krakow, and Lublin.
The very next day I received a grateful response from the military and was told that the information I had provided was very helpful as a starting point for their research. Soon, they said, I would be receiving further instructions.
Late summer, at the foot of the monument commemorating the heroes of the Warsaw Ghetto, cast in bronze on a large marble plaque. The back part, facing the old Judenrat Headquarters, features an image of hunched-over Jews walking toward their death. In the front are the heroes of the uprising—young, handsome, and armed. In the copy at Yad Vashem the bare breasts of the female fighter have been covered. That was the right choice. It was disrespectful and a bad impression of French art.
I stood before a group of Ministry of Energy officials, blinking at the sun. “How many Germans were killed during the uprising?” I asked them. They provided estimates anywhere between a hundred and a thousand.
“By most reports, no more than twenty,” I corrected them.
They were flummoxed. All this for fewer than twenty dead Germans?
“I have no intention of shattering the myth, only of setting the record straight,” I said. “Besides,” I added in a mumble, “let’s see you do that, little heroes.” I’m not sure they didn’t hear me. That was around the time that private thoughts began falling out of my mouth.
A few of the participants whispered in the back. I asked if there was a problem.
“Why don’t you say anything about the Polish?” an official in a plaid shirt asked. “Why don’t you mention their atrocities? Is this a political choice? Are we cutting them slack?”
All around him people nodded, even patted his back. He was pleased with himself.
“The Polish did not carry out the Holocaust,” I told him. “The Germans did. The Poles just took the opportunity to perform their pogroms, just as they had done throughout history, as part of their national pastime. They hated the Jews for crucifying Jesus, for collecting taxes for the nobles, and for being literate. Jewish women were clean because they went to the mikveh once a week, unlike Polish women. Jewish men served them strong booze at the pub, getting them nice and hammered, then charging them for it, but never drinking with them, neither laughing with them in their impoverished joy nor crying with them when they mourned. The Jews’ faces remained alert as the Poles sunk into a drunken stupor, and whenever they had a free moment they put their nose in a book, reading those enchanted words, while the Poles couldn’t read at all. So out of envy and stupidity, every few years they paid the Jews home visits in the middle of the night, ripping their sheets and breaking their furniture, raping their wives and daughters, sometimes even going so far as to chop off the men’s limbs one by one, until that smug expression melted off their faces. Then they went out to drink. But those drunk idiots never considered murdering all Jews. That was beyond their powers of imagination or execution. The Germans were made for this historical mission. The Germans, with their determination and ingenuity, sober, scientific. To them, the Poles were also subhuman, just a step above Jews, who were not considered human at all.”
“But what about the pogroms?” the man in the back insisted.
I confirmed that there had indeed been pogroms, but to compare the responsibility of the Germans to the responsibility of the Polish was a distortion of history. “Can I ask you something?” I asked him.
He nodded, surprised.
“Why is it so difficult for you to hate the Germans?” I asked. “That’s what I want to know.”
The man looked at his colleagues as if something was wrong with me.
We continued our tour, heading to Umschlagplatz. I could tell they were still unsatisfied with me. At some point, my chemistry with other human beings had gone awry.
For some reason, the book’s publishing date was postponed, to my great chagrin. The book was based on a doctoral dissertation that had been approved and praised, and I couldn’t understand why the editor was torturing me with more and more questions. This time, he wanted to know if we could cut down part of the chapter about music in extermination camps, which he thought was too long and detailed. He even added a very unkind comment, arguing that readers might get the wrong idea about life in the camps. He was specifically addressing the anecdote about Artur Gold’s Treblinka orchestra. Gold was a renowned violinist and composer in Warsaw. When he descended the train at Treblinka the Germans recognized him and decided to spare his life for a few months so that he could start an orchestra. The orchestra played by the SS barracks and sometimes outside gas chambers. There were testimonies to that effect from Sonderkommandos who had fled during the uprising. What bothered the editor was that I gave a very extensive description of the orchestra’s composition, as well as its repertoire, which included both famous tunes and original pieces created especially by Gold, including the Treblinka Anthem, which the Sonderkommando people sang every day: “Looking free into the world / in rows we walk to our labor / Today Treblinka is all we have / it is our fate.” All the players, including Gold—the conductor—were dressed as clowns. They were all murdered in the camp’s final weeks of existence, before the Germans abandoned it and plowed the land.
In my research, I examined the differences between the repertoire the Treblinka Orchestra played on the path to the gas chambers, which included some Jewish folk songs, and the purely German repertoire the orchestras of Auschwitz played, by order of the Germans. I also wrote about the Belzec Orchestra, basing my information on the testimonies of Polish neighbors and of Rudolf Reder. At Belzec, the orchestra welcomed Jews at the train station and accompanied them throughout the extermination process, which was short and matter-of-fact. The orchestra also played on Sundays during the drunken revels of German and Ukrainian staff members. We know this orchestra had six members, including an accordion player, a flutist, and a violinist, and that the members had probably changed a few times during the camp’s lifetime, after some of its members were executed. Rudolf Reder reported that the orchestra had accompanied the torturous execution of the head of the Zamosc Judenrat in front of his entire community, and that immediately after that all the city’s Jews were led into the gas chamber. The song played on this occasion was a big hit at the time, and its refrain was, “Everything passes, everything ends.”
The editor thought this was all too broad and unnecessary, but I insisted that we leave it all in. When I wrote that chapter I was so close to seeing it, I was almost there, among them. I thought I could finally perceive the mental distortion of the Germans and the hatred of the world that was imbued in them.
The military asked me to expand on my initial report. The additional question was, Please clarify briefly what educational and historical message pertains to each extermination camp, and if there are distinctions. I could tell that some thought had been put into the phrasing. I took my time with a response, because I found the question interesting. The demand that I answer briefly forced me to focus my thinking. I could see the camps before my eyes, smell the forests all around them, the heavy dirt. I circled their area with my mind, experienced their remains with my senses.
I wrote that Chelmno featured precedence, improvisation, mobility, murder on wheels. The victims were taken to the train station in town, and led from there in trucks to a large mansion, where they spent the night. The next day, they were instructed to undress in order to be disinfected and receive fresh work clothes. Up until that point, they were treated rather cordially. The mansion was even heated. The Germans maintained the ruse until the very last moment to prevent any resistance. Then, when they were in their underwear, they were pointed toward a door, beyond which the trunk of the truck awaited. At this point they were shoved in with beatings and whippings. The trunk was closed and
locked, and the exhaust pipe was inserted into the trunk so that the Jews were poisoned during the drive to the forest. When the truck arrived, the Jews were buried in pits by Sonderkommandos. The experts who killed tens of thousands of mental patients in Germany executed the operation in Chelmno. What was the message of the murders in Chelmno? I asked myself. I searched for a distinction. Most of the victims came from the Lodz Ghetto, where the head of the Judenrat, Rumkowski, rode in a decorated horse-drawn carriage. I erased this bit of information. What would the military do with it?
There was something compelling about the freshness of the Chelmno story—the boldness of misleading, the mansion that becomes a house of horrors, the Hansel and Gretel tale, the trucks riding to the meadows while their living cargo suffocates in the back. Eichmann himself came to see a demonstration there. I was so transfixed that I became disgusted with myself.
Things were much simpler when it came to Auschwitz. Many better men have written about it before me. To make my life easier and make an impression on my people in the military, I quoted a few key sayings by Primo Levi and Hannah Arendt. I also noted Giorgio Agamben but then deleted the reference, lest I appear too intellectual. In Agamben’s place, I made a drawing of the burning flame at the edge of the camp, which I’d seen through the eyes of Yohanan the survivor. Auschwitz was part murder enterprise and part financial enterprise founded on slavery till death, all in one site, I wrote. I was pleased with this phrasing.
I wrote that Treblinka was a site for the suffocation and cremation of human flesh, a human waste removal site of enormous magnitude. Then I deleted what I’d written and refined my wording, knowing I’d been too blunt. I didn’t want to lose this client. About Sobibor I initially wrote: the edge of Europe, the end of the world, among ancient forests, the end of humanity. Then I rephrased that too, to sound more practical.
Who was I writing to, I wondered. I searched for clues in the email addresses and the short messages, trying to figure out exactly how much these people knew and what exactly they were looking for. Why did they need all this information?
I wrote that almost nobody knew about Belzec, in spite of the fact that half a million people were murdered there. Belzec represents the apex of efficiency, I wrote in bold. Its operation was so successful that after less than a year it was deemed no longer necessary. The entire target population was annihilated, with barely any exceptions. I wrote that Majdanek was a concentration and death camp operating adjacent to a large city, exposed to anyone who drove east from Lublin on the highway—an objective presentation of Fascism. I deleted and rewrote several times, and what I ended up sending them was significantly different than what I’d initially planned to write.
I grew a dark beard during a break between tour groups. It started when I hadn’t shaved for a few days, and when I looked at the mirror I seemed like a different person and decided to leave the beard. At an old clothing store near my apartment, which hadn’t changed since Communist rule, I bought a dusty flat cap I saw in the window. There was a purpose to my new look: it frightened the young boys and girls, who listened more intently, and attracted teachers. In winter, I wore a heavy black coat that used to belong to my father. My mother had given it to me as a gift. When I ran into my old neighbor in the hallway she stopped and stared. She didn’t recognize me, and said something in Polish.
I’m not a good neighbor, I thought. I still considered myself a tourist, when really I spent more time in Poland than in Israel. Perhaps I ought to invite her over for some tea and try to get her talking about her life, which was probably interesting, or at least had overlapped with some interesting events. About the Jews she must have known. I could ask her if she missed them. I could ask her what I looked like to her. I could pick her brain to figure out what she felt about Jews. Did she hate them? I could use her to run a psychopathological study, delving to the bottom of her old, Polish soul.
I said good morning in Polish and asked her if she wanted some tea, but she turned her back to me and rattled her keys, fleeing into her apartment, as if she thought I wanted to end her.
Talking began to weigh on me. Too many words. When I lectured, I listened to my own voice as if from the outside, like a person listening to themselves in a recording. It was grating. I had to keep my explanations short. I had to let them figure things out from the land, the forest, the silence. I read to them from Uri Zvi Greenberg’s River Streets, as well as some chapters from Primo Levi and from Emanuel Ringelblum’s ghetto journal. This was the first time they’d heard any of those. I barely looked up from the page, barely looked into their eyes. I grew more and more distant. I stood on the sidelines while they conducted their flag and candle rituals, saying the Kaddish and singing sad songs with guitar accompaniment. I tried not to listen to their conversations. I read them this poem, by Dan Pagis:
Here in this carload
I am Eve
With Abel my son
If you see my other son
Cain son of man
Tell him that I
That was the only way to talk. Sometimes I mustered up my strength, shook myself awake, wore an amiable expression, searched for a way in, loosened my tongue. But they closed themselves to me, refusing to accept me. Their young faces looked like a minefield to me. I sat alone in the front seat of the bus, like an unpopular child, doing my job like a robot at the different stops, which became more and more difficult. I gave them the facts, no longer thinking about education or messages. “Go,” I told the driver, “keep going, we’re on a schedule.”
In the playground between housing projects a quick cat had hunted down a pigeon. Blond Polish children paused to watch. The pigeon twitched, fled for a moment, but the cat had already broken its wing. It dragged itself on the ground in a diagonal line while the cat trotted around it, slapping it with its paw. Feathers scattered along the path of failed escape. The mothers watched me. I was the only man there. Why wasn’t I doing anything? I got up from my bench. The cat wasn’t impressed with my presence, continuing to stomp its feet. Now it was biting, too. It managed to rip off the bird’s head, holding it in its teeth. One boy screamed. The rest stood around, stunned. The mothers said something with a tone of complaint. I spread my arms in submission and went upstairs to my apartment.
In a response to my notes, the gaming company sent me a more advanced version of their graphic imaging. I tried it out. I played the part of a Jew, then of a German, and took some notes. The graphics were impressive. The characters were almost three-dimensional. I had wondered if they’d sent you that version too, if you had also loaded corpses into the crematorium. The flame wouldn’t light before it was fed with enough human fat—that was a tip I gave them. Jews could temporarily evade death through a few options in the operating software, for instance if they’d been chosen for hard labor or a medical experiment, or if they hid in a remote corner of the camp.
The latter option did not exist in real life. I made an angry note to inform them of this. But all said, I was pleasantly surprised by their thoroughness: the game had all the components of the camp I’d described to them. They even remembered small details like gallows that had been positioned near the prisoners’ sheds. I clicked my way into the latrines, which were flooded to knee height. The soundtrack played the waltzes and marches the orchestras performed each morning as the prisoners went out to work and every evening as they returned. In the undressing hall near the gas chambers, players could hear the Sonderkommandos’ reassuring words and the victims mumbling in a jumble of languages. I pulled a gold tooth from the mouth of a corpse and placed it in a box. Then I switched to being German and whipped a Jew. Then I was a kapo and ladled out soup. I couldn’t stop—their game was so wonderfully terrible.
On the way back from Lublin we stopped at the Izbica train station and went to see the large quad where the Germans had gathered tens of thousands of Jews in a makeshift, short-term concentration camp under the open sky before they were sent to be murdered in Belzec and Sobibor.
I told the children about Jan Karski of the Polish resistance, a handsome, elegant, blue-eyed man who had managed to sneak into the train station disguised as a Ukrainian guard, and had reported that the Jews were deprived of food and drink and forced to sleep outside. They were beaten to death and lay around on the ground, exhausted and starving, covered in their own excrement. He saw people running amok between the barbed wire fences, their malnourished children in their arms, until a train finally arrived and they were loaded into the cars with whip lashings, spear stabs, and gunshots. The train cars were filled to capacity. The Germans and Ukrainians tossed babies over adults’ heads as if they were hand luggage on an airplane.
I read to the delegation from Jan Karski’s report to the British and American governments, who did not see fit to bomb the train tracks leading to the camps even once they knew for certain what took place there. It wasn’t their priority. People can think what they want, but it’s possible they weren’t too crazy about the Jews either.
In the midst of this stream of facts, someone in the group cried out. A girl said her stomach hurt. Her friends gathered around her, laying her down on the ground. They called for the delegation doctor, but he had gone ahead on a different bus. I ran over and kneeled beside her. She said she’d had pain since the previous day, but now it hurt really badly. The school principal called the other bus to give the instruction for it to return immediately with the doctor. Her friends gave her some water and washed her face. She writhed with pain, her brown curly hair spreading on the ground. Her friends rubbed her head. “It’s inside,” she said, “something bad is happening to me inside. Take care of me, don’t leave me here.”