The Memory Monster

by Yishai Sarid

  I was grateful. I felt as if he wanted to save me. I told the driver we were heading back to Warsaw.

  I said goodbye to the group in the late afternoon. They lumbered out of the van, exhausted from the long trip, and tipped me and the driver.

  “Hang in there,” they said in parting. “Buy yourself some new shoes.” Then they walked cheerfully into the hotel to prepare for their evening outing. After that I guided a few more day-trip groups, but they dwindled. The travel agency said demand was low, that it was an unsuccessful hybrid.

  I prepared to go home, but before I did I wanted to make one last visit to each camp, alone, just as I had done on my first trip, years ago. I had a specific plan for this final tour. I wanted to commemorate it in photos, and I knew just where and how I wanted to say goodbye.

  But then I received your personal letter, the one you wrote yourself. I was so excited, my confidence returning with gusto, all my humiliations nearly forgotten. You wrote that you’d been approached by an important German director who was making a movie about the camps. He wanted a recommendation for a guide to Poland for research purposes, and wanted it to be someone working on behalf of Yad Vashem. I came to mind immediately, and the director would get in touch. Sincerely …

  I jumped for joy. I wanted to kiss your signature. From that point on, things moved fast. The director’s personal assistant scheduled a date for the tour, the price—a handsome price, at that—was settled, and I received a list of sites he wanted to visit, all within my area of expertise. I hadn’t heard of him, but found plenty of essays and reviews of his work online, mostly in German. He was sixty-two years old, from a working-class family. His father worked at a steel mill, and he himself had begun his career as assistant to Wim Wenders in the 1970s before beginning to direct by himself. I found two of his old films online. Very artistic, beautiful. One took place in Hamburg and depicted the story of a merchant sailor, and the other was about a young woman from a small town who goes to the divided Berlin to study art. The films had tenderness and cruelty. The dialogue was sparse, and the story was mostly told through images. People said about him that he didn’t often give interviews and refrained from revealing his private life, because he wanted to be judged for his work, not his personal biography. Still, I found out he was married to a big German theater star, who had died of a disease a few years ago, and that they had one son. I found a picture of his deceased wife. She looked like a fine woman on whose lap to rest.

  I was glad to take on this mission and finally guide a man after my own heart. I told Ruth about it and showed her myself on the phone camera after having bathed, shaved, and put on a new shirt.

  “You’re happy,” said Ruth. “I love seeing you like this.”

  We met at a hotel in Krakow, a very elegant one, not the vulgar kind where I stayed with my Israeli groups. The director was more handsome in real life—tall, with a bold and sensitive face. I wanted him to like me instantly. I waited for him at the hotel lobby, and he appeared right on time, with a quick step and his assistant by his side. I felt ashamed of my simple clothing, seeing as how their own clothes were made of soft, quality fabrics.

  His production company ordered a car for him, a cushy Mercedes jeep, equipped with an English-speaking Polish driver. Everything had been carefully arranged for him. The car had the pleasant aroma of leather, and the director and his assistant smelled good too. They each had their distinct fabric and perfume scent, so that I could know who was coming over just by smell alone.

  The three of us sat in the back seat, the director by one window and me by the other. His assistant sat in the middle. She was very tall, thin, erect. Something about her build wasn’t completely proportionate, but she had a wonderful face and transparent skin underlined by a web of blood vessels.

  “So, you’re the doctor,” the director said in English. I don’t know if anyone had told him I understood German too. “We’re going to have an interesting trip together.”

  I asked if this was his first time in Poland.

  The director said he’d been there before, and left it at that.

  I normally addressed my passengers by their first name, with the exception of the minister, whom I referred to as “Sir.” But I didn’t call the director by his name, because he didn’t give me the option. I called his assistant by name—Liza.

  He sprawled back in his seat, curled into a long, soft coat, and watched the road with bright artist’s eyes. There was a kind of looseness about him, while I was sitting tensely on the other side of the backseat. He asked whereabouts in Israel I was from, then told me he’d been to Israel a few times and had some friends there, artists and intellectuals, whom he also sometimes met in Berlin.

  “It’s an interesting country,” he said. He had a way of ending his statements without detail and with a small smile, as if there were hidden meaning there.

  We drove out of Krakow, toward Auschwitz. That was the first stop he’d requested. Liza sat between us, watching the landscape with a far-off gaze. The heating was on in the car, so she took off her scarf. They were both very good-looking.

  I started my introductions with hesitation. He listened. When I described the Germans’ desire to move eastwards, he smiled for a moment. Germans, I always said, not Nazis. When I mentioned the Jews’ forced cooperation with their murderers, simplifying the extermination process, he looked into my eyes.

  By the time I finished my lecture we were almost there. He asked to stop by the civilian train station of the town of Auschwitz, a few kilometers away from the camp, stepped out of the car, and took pictures of the facade, the ads, and the people waiting on the platform. I stood beside him, trying to guess the theme of the film. I was very curious.

  Just before we arrived at the camp, he turned to me and said, “Before we begin, I’d like to thank you for accompanying us. I know how sensitive this situation is.”

  I lowered my head in gratitude. It’s so easy to fall into submission, like a mouse slipping into a greased trap.

  The man was very thorough. I’d never had such a knowledgeable client before. Our visit at Auschwitz went on and on. We lingered at every stop: the prisoners’ sheds, the dungeons, the German guards’ barracks, the kapo stations, the infirmary, and the execution wall. Sporadically, he asked short and specific questions, but most of the time he observed and photographed, both stills and video.

  The woman hardly spoke. She walked a little behind us, head lowered, showing no interest, as if she were already familiar with the place.

  The director stopped by the torture cells in Block 11, took a close look at the cell where prisoners had stood flush up against each other without being able to sit for days, until finally they died of exhaustion, and at the other cell, where they were chained to an iron rod and beaten. I didn’t have to explain the whole story to him. He seemed to have conducted rather thorough research before he came. As Liza explained, this was the final stop before production started.

  We paused for a long time in the hallway, looking at the prisoners’ photographs that were hung there. He stopped in front of each one in turn, looking at the subjects’ faces. I walked behind him, also riveted by those faces. I told him that in the early days of the camp’s activity, the Germans still bothered to take pictures of the prisoners—mostly Poles at the time—but when Jews came to be murdered they stopped, due to practical reasons. There were a few exceptions: when they documented people with characteristically Semitic features—mostly long noses—for propaganda purposes. Most of the Jews were murdered anonymously, not even registered by name, like cattle sent to a slaughterhouse, no one thinking to document them individually beforehand.

  “But cattle is eaten,” the director said. “Someone puts thought into their meat, seasoning them. It’s a kind of homage.” Then he returned to look at the images.

  Liza paused far away from us, at the entrance to the hallway. The director pulled himself away from the exhibition and walked over to her. He asked her, in a German I could more
or less decipher, why she wasn’t walking with him, helping him. She said this was an awful place and she was having trouble being here.

  “But this is the film,” he said. “These are the materials; this is the job.” He closed his hand into a fist.

  She raised her head and closed the gap between us with long strides. Her legs were endless.

  We walked into Block 10, the medical experimentation wing, and I described the medical trials held by Doctor Carl Clauberg and Doctor Horst Schumann, utilizing new methods of sterilization through injections for women and X-rays of men’s testicles, corrupting muscles and tissues for the purposes of anatomical research, studying lethal viruses by injecting them into the bodies of prisoners.

  I could tell the assistant’s stomach was turning, but the director held strong. “Where did Doctor Mengele work?” he asked. Something about the picture of the camp didn’t make sense to him; I could tell he was concerned.

  I explained that Mengele conducted most of his studies at Birkenau, and he asked me to remember to show him those sheds when we went there.

  “Some Jewish doctors worked here too, right?” he asked. He had a notepad he consulted every so often.

  “Right,” I said. Then I mentioned some of their names. “The Germans forced them to do it.”

  He nodded with a kind of satisfaction.

  By the time we left Auschwitz I, I was tired. The director had picked on details like no one else I’d ever seen except for myself. I assumed he would delve just as deep at Birkenau. But our schedule was busy and we had to move on. It was already lunchtime, and I was hungry. The delegations usually came with a packed sandwich lunch, in which they always let me partake, but this time there was nothing to eat. I hated buying anything at the snack bars near the exit, but I had no choice. I bought a little snack and some juice and offered them something too, but they said they were fine with just their water bottles. They’d wait for dinner.

  “We’d better hurry,” said the director.

  I didn’t like him pushing me, but I said nothing. At the gates of Birkenau I started to feel the world spinning again. I took a deep breath, a sip of juice, and told myself to be professional. I kept reminding myself that you’d sent me; that I was representing you, and that I couldn’t disappoint this time.

  “There, this is the famous spot,” the director announced, looking ahead to the end of the tracks as if through the lens of a camera. I thought back to my first visits, standing tall and eager, performing my job flawlessly. Rather than grow accustomed to it, my nerves had only grown more exposed with the years, and they were now virtually defenseless.

  The German had prepared in advance a tidy list of the parts of the camps he wanted to see: the selection ramp and the ruins of the extermination structures, the men’s camp and the women’s camp, the family camp, the gypsy camp, the latrine, the infirmary, the twins’ shed, Gas Chamber and Crematorium 2 (Gas Chamber and Crematorium 1 were in the main camp, which we had already visited), Gas Chamber and Crematorium 3, Kanada Warehouse, where the loot was sorted, and the more remote Gas Chambers and Crematoriums 4 and 5. He also wanted me to show him where the orchestras had stood as they accompanied the prisoners’ morning routine with music, the places where gallows had been installed, the exact path the Jews followed according to the outcome of their selection, and more and more. We visited each of his stops. It was like an exhausting final exam. He took pictures and asked short, focused questions. I noticed him taking some pictures of me, too, but I didn’t pay any mind to it. I was even flattered to think he saw me as a worthy subject. He challenged me as no visitor ever had with the depth of his questions and the scope of his knowledge. But there wasn’t a single question he asked that I couldn’t answer, and that made me proud.

  Once again, Liza dragged her feet behind us with an inscrutable expression. Every so often, the director asked her to come closer, and she quickened her long steps, closing the gap. The director and I worked well together there, at a pleasing pace. I pushed away the shadows of victims and their desperate chatter. I didn’t want them getting in the way.

  On our way to the ruins of the more remote gas chambers, those erected during the busy period of the extermination of Hungarian Jews, he noticed, just like me, the peculiar beauty of the surrounding nature, the unique birds, the flower-ringed ponds. He took some pictures. Suddenly he paused, switched his camera to video mode, and began shooting me. I walked across the grass. The sky was cloudy, and he shot me from the front. Now I was the subject.

  What are you doing? I wanted to ask, but I said nothing.

  “Don’t worry,” he said in his laborious, precise English. He must have recognized my discomfort. “I’ll only use this if you allow me to.”

  He continued to shoot when we were standing near the ruins of the remote killing buildings and I explained how they’d operated at full capacity during the final months of the camp’s existence, when the Germans tried to complete the task before their downfall. We were completely alone. No one else had gone this far. The assistant circled us slowly as he and I discussed the minutiae of the process. We were professionals.

  “I want to understand everything,” said the director. “Where everything was located. I want to be able to see it with my own eyes.”

  I felt like he was trying to steal away the only thing I had. He bent down, picked up a lump of dirt, and felt it in his hand, rolling it between his fingers. It looked odd, but I did the same thing every time I visited.

  By the time we’d hit all the stops the place was about to close. The Mercedes waited at the exit. I could see in the director’s face that he was satisfied, and so was I. I’d given him what he’d come for.

  They returned to their elegant little hotel in Krakow, at the foot of the turret-laden king’s fortress, and I went to the cheaper business hotel across the river, where the delegations always stayed.

  Early the next morning we hit the road again, Liza sitting between us again, refreshed and kind-looking. She greeted me with a polite “good morning” and a warm smile. I was curious to talk to her more, but the director’s presence did not allow it. He smoked through the open window of the car, in spite of the cold, and appeared preoccupied.

  “Tell me,” he suddenly said after we’d been driving for a while, “can you explain why people weren’t driven from the ramps to the gas chambers? Why did they have to walk for over a kilometer?”

  It was a fair question, one that I’d also considered when writing my dissertation. But the answer was simple. I explained that the elderly and the ill, those who could not work, were taken by trucks, but that the others walked because they had just gotten off the freight trains, and the Germans wanted to convince them they’d arrived at their final destination, where they would be receiving food and housing. Had they been put back in cars, they would have realized they’d been irrevocably separated from their relatives who’d been pointed the other way during selection, and hysteria would have ensued.

  He nodded. My answer had satisfied him. “That makes sense,” he said. Then he muttered to Liza in German, “Smart Jew.”

  She glanced at me, panicked. I pretended not to have heard or understood.

  We drove to Belzec. There’s a point on the way there when the plane turns into the Galician hills and the beauty of nature is heartbreaking. I asked the director if he’d ever heard of S. Y. Agnon, and he shook his head. “He won a Nobel Prize,” I boasted.

  He said, “I haven’t read his work. A man can’t read it all in one lifetime. I’m still stuck on von Kleist.”

  When we reached the town of Belzec, on the outskirts of which lies the camp, the director asked the driver to stop and took a little stroll down the main drag, along the small shops and low facades, photographing.

  I used the moments when he walked ahead of us to ask Liza, “What is he taking these pictures for? What is this film about?”

  She whispered with trepidation, “I don’t know exactly. He doesn’t tell me everything.” Her hips w
ere wide in proportion to her height and small breasts. That was the source of the discrepancy. But it took nothing away from her beauty.

  The director signaled to the driver to follow us, and we continued on foot to the camp along the train tracks. He raised his face into the sun with pleasure, letting it glint in his dark sunglasses and his hair.

  We reached the thatch-roofed train station. A freight train headed to Ukraine was parked there, the driver smoking a cigarette on the platform, enjoying the sun.

  The director asked Liza to pull something up on her small laptop and show me. She presented me with the picture of the German staff in their long overcoats—the same picture that was included in my book.

  I smiled.

  “What is it?” he asked.

  I told him I’d spent a lot of time looking at that picture, too.

  “We’re real partners,” he said in German, then asked me to lead him to the exact spot where that picture had been taken.

  Not a problem. We crossed the train tracks to the small structure where the camp commander used to live. “It was here,” I said.

  “Stand there,” said the director. He took a picture of me. I covered my face. I didn’t want it.

  “Stand up straight,” he said. “This is important.” He took another shot.

  I decided I would discuss it all with him later, asking what he planned to do with the pictures.

  Just like in Auschwitz, he asked me to show him the exact route the Jews took from the moment they were taken off the trains until the moment their bodies were tossed into pits, the very same day. But it’s difficult to follow the path in Belzec. The camp had been plowed and strewn with black memorial rocks. We stood at the entrance, trying to reconstruct through hand gestures where everything used to be. These were my favorite moments to be near him. I felt us working like a team of pros. I told them about Rudolf Reder, who managed to escape, and about his testimony. Mommy, I was a good boy, it’s dark, it’s dark. That’s what Reder heard a child yelling from inside the gas chamber.