“Kigali?”
“Yes, Kigali. Rwanda.”
“There’s a Holocaust Museum in Rwanda?” Blake asked.
“Apparently a very good one.” Johnny pointed to another area in the far corner of the field. “After the Jews got off at the fake transit station, always accompanied by jaunty, uplifting music from a live orchestra, just like in Birkenau, they shuffled to the undressing square. There was no selection process here as at Auschwitz. Everyone went to the same place—the flowerpot. But to get to it, the Jews had to walk the last distance naked down a narrow walkway called The Tube. It was about four meters wide and eighty meters long, hidden by the pine branch fences. The Germans called The Tube Himmelfahrtstrasse. The Road to Heaven. Chloe, let’s put your flowers down. Do you want to? You’re holding on to them as if you don’t. Maybe Blake can take a picture for your grandmother.”
Blake resentfully lifted the Olympus to his face. Chloe could see he didn’t want to be told what to do, by Johnny of all people.
“Or I’d be glad to do it,” Johnny said.
“I’ll do it,” Blake snapped. Carefully, Chloe placed her roses on the ground near the mushroom stone, next to a menorah and the star of David, alongside other dried and wilted flowers. Chloe knew all too well how long graves can remain unquiet, singly or collectively.
After a few minutes of silence, they left the monument and walked away to explore. Chloe kept hoping for other people to come join them, so the place wouldn’t feel so eerie, so tremblingly spooky.
“How long was the camp running, Johnny?” Chloe asked him.
“Treblinka opened on July 22, 1942. The first train arrived the next day, July 23. During the first few months, it took the Germans with their disorganized Ukrainian workers about four hours to kill half the people on the train. But as they expanded the gas chambers, they reduced the time between arrival and excavation pit to ninety minutes. After they became a model of efficiency, they were able to liquidate the entire twenty-car train in four hours. While the last of the Jews were being gassed and burned, another fifty Jews washed down and cleared the train, which then left Treblinka to make space for the next one already waiting.”
“Why did it close so much earlier than Majdanek?” Denise asked. “Yesterday you told us the Germans barely cleared out of Majdanek before the Soviets arrived.”
“Yes, Treblinka closed nine months earlier, in October 1943.”
“Why?”
Johnny shrugged. His guitar case rose and fell. “All the Jews were dead. The job was done. So they mined everything, leveled it to the ground, filled in the pits, razed the buildings, carted away the rubble. The fence was gone, the station gone. They planted some new trees, built a fake farm, right over the fake station, planted some fake crops, and hired a real Ukrainian to live here and keep the locals away.
“As it turned out,” he continued, “not far enough away. Because with the war still raging, the residents started digging up the surrounding areas in search of valuables possibly left on the bodies. They found only a few jewels, but they did exhume quite a large number of bodies, which, despite Himmler’s orders, had remained in the earth. Presented with this evidence after the war, the Germans said bodies, what bodies? We don’t know what you’re talking about. Ask the damn Ukrainians. We know the place as a sand quarry. Poles and Jews worked in the quarry for our war effort. The rest we have no idea about. That’s what they continued to say for many years, and some people believed it, even though the Soviets who had marched through here in July 1944 and the war correspondents who accompanied them wrote unbelievable things about what they had found in the earth. Most of these writings have not been translated into English.”
“So how do you know this?” Blake asked.
“A few bilinguals with classified clearance translated many documents to get to the truth.”
“But how do you know this?”
The guitar rose and fell on Johnny’s shoulders. “I know some of the translators.”
Before Chloe had a chance to zero in on Johnny, to hone in on his face and the words he had uttered, Hannah spoke. “I don’t want to be here anymore,” she said. “I’m going to be sick.” And then she bent and was promptly sick on the sandy earth.
Everyone looked away.
Shortly afterward, they left.
“Wait,” said Yvette. “Johnny, can you take a picture of the five of us with Artie’s camera? Guys, wait, come back!” she called to Brett, Denise, Dennis and Artie. “Okay, Johnny? Otherwise, honest to God, no one will ever believe we were here.”
The four-kilometer walk back was interminable, but not quiet. Chloe and Mason and Hannah and Blake were quiet. But Brett and Yvette, Dennis and Denise and Artie clucked and chatted non-stop about the fake clock and the fake directions to fake cities, about the pairs of shoes tied together by laces to make them easier to sort for the Germans, and about Artur Gold conducting his orchestral trio through one happy tune after another at the end of the long barrel of a German rifle. Artur Gold, who fiddled until he was gassed in 1943, a few months before Treblinka had shut its doors. They talked about the trains arriving from as far as Holland, France, Italy. To stop them from talking, a tired-looking Johnny told them stories about the trains in a soft voice.
“Denise, Yvette, listen to me, girls. The trains were very important. Without the trains, there is no question, there would’ve been fewer dead. The Germans knew this—they had been planning the final solution for years—which is why very early on, 1939 and the start of 1940, they moved all the Jews into ghettos near a robust rail system. Krakow, Warsaw, of course. Lublin. They exported them to the camps from as far as Greece and yes, Italy. The trains were all either freight wagons or cattle cars. They weren’t the luxury passenger liners Chloe and I rode from Vilnius to Warsaw.” He almost smiled, but not really. “Sometimes the trains had ten wagons, sometimes sixty. It’s because of the trains I mention so often,” Johnny said, “that we know how many millions died in the camps. Because the Germans, as it turned out, didn’t keep accurate record books on the deaths of the Jews.”
“Go figure,” Blake said.
“Yes!” As if Blake and Johnny had shared a secret joke. “Of all the things they liked to record, how many people they gassed was far down the list. But the Polish State Railway kept records. About sixteen hundred trains were commandeered by the Germans, who ran the Polish railroad from 1941 to the end of 1944. Sixteen hundred trains in about eleven hundred days. That’s how they counted them. The trains had to be filled to capacity. There was no point in bringing only a half-full train to Treblinka. So sometimes the trains sat in the rail yards, waiting for more ‘shipment,’ as they called it, to be loaded on. With minimal food and water, many people died on the trains before they got to the camps—and that was also the point. Anyone whom the ghettos and the trains didn’t kill, the death camps finished. The shortest train travel was from Bialystok, fifty kilometers away. The longest was from Korfu in Greece. It took eighteen days. By the time the doors on the train from Korfu opened in Belzec, all seven thousand people on that train were dead.” Johnny stared at Chloe with ineffable emotion. “That’s why I like riding the trains today,” he said. “Despite all the inconveniences. I remind myself of what it means to be alive and ride the train, ride it to life, to Barcelona, to Paris, to Trieste, instead of to Lublin, to Auschwitz, to Lodz.”
He fell quiet. Mason took Chloe’s hand. Blake had his arm around exhausted Hannah. Denise and Yvette started arguing about how much was sixteen hundred trains times three thousand people times eleven hundred days. Brett and Dennis joined in, helping them multiply.
“Oh my God,” Blake said. “Will they never shut up?”
“Not yesterday,” Johnny said. “Not today. So I’m thinking no.”
He turned to them all and walked backwards.
“You’re right, Denise, to keep multiplying the numbers,” Johnny said. “You’re trying to find a mathematical explanation for the thing that’s impossible
to think about and impossible not to think about. But you won’t. Nothing in math or history equals it. Nothing comes close. You can’t even really talk about it without reducing it with pale words and woeful arithmetic. Both are inadequate. If you’re an atheist, it almost makes sense what happened. This is just the way it is, the unbelievers reason. Such is the merciless barbarity of the world. But if you believe in God, the slaughter of innocents, young and old, is harder to rationalize. What words do you use to reconcile an all loving, all powerful God with the burning pits and the gas chambers and the trains? It’s almost enough proof for the doubters that God indeed may be powerless, or indifferent, or non-existent.” Johnny waved his hand to the hidden field, to the gathering pines. “Love isn’t at the heart of it. The absence of love, the absence of God is at the heart of it. But even so, it remains an unanswerable mystery. Sometimes there is just no explaining the devastating things that happen.”
Chloe knew this firsthand to be true, her own small house still recovering from the holocaust of just one extinguished life.
Denise and Yvette clucked in solemn agreement with Johnny, and then resumed multiplying the parenthetical before adding it to the next algebraic equation. To force them to fall quiet, Johnny took the guitar off his shoulders and handed the black case to Chloe to carry. He started strumming and singing a lilting waltz melody. It was so beautiful that Chloe couldn’t help herself, she started to cry.
“What song is that?” she asked, surreptitiously wiping her face, hoping no one would see, not even Mason walking next to her.
“The ‘Polish Tango,’” Johnny replied. “Do you like it?”
“It’s by Artur Gold!” Yvette exclaimed, rushing up to them. “Johnny, that’s wonderful. How do you know this song? It’s one of his most famous, most beautiful melodies. We were just talking about him.”
“Yes, Yvette, I know.”
“Can you play any of his others? He had so many.”
They surrounded Johnny. “Can you play ‘Chodz na Prage’?” Artie asked. “It means ‘Come to Prague.’ The melody is played as a trumpet call in the Prague section of Warsaw every day at noon, to this day.” He smiled tearfully. “My Arlene knew a lot about Artur Gold. She liked that he and I shared a name.”
Johnny nodded, continuing to strum. One two and three. One two and three. All Chloe wanted was to hear him sing. That’s what she told herself was all she wanted.
“Yes, the Germans took their music very seriously.” He spoke in a lilting voice, almost like singing. “And Kurt Franz, the camp commander, ordered that the entire orchestra, which later included dancers and singers, be in full dress, as if at a ball. The men wore starched long white frock coats with blue collars and blue lapels. They put on white shirts, patent leather shoes, and dark pressed pants. After supper, the Germans liked to hear German songs, but during the day when the sky was smoky black and the wind carried the smell of charred and rotting flesh, Artur played well-known Polish evergreens by the fake train station. He played the song I just sang, the ‘Polish Tango,’ which is my favorite. It’s also called, ‘It’s Not Your Fault That My Heart Is Asleep.’” Johnny paused as he strummed the chorus, walking on one side of Chloe, while Mason flanked her on the other. From the periphery Chloe glimpsed a small smile on Johnny’s somber face. Then he stopped smiling. “At the bequest of the commander, Artur Gold also composed ‘The Treblinka Song,’” Johnny said. “That one has never been recorded, but thanks to a helpful former Gestapo officer who had served here and was interviewed in secret for the documentary Shoah, we have the rousing melody and lyrics of that song permanently on record.” He began to sing in march time, a Germanic ONEandtwo:
“Wir wollen weiter, weiter leisten
bis dass das kleine Glück uns einmal winkt.
Hurrah!”
“What does it mean?” Chloe asked.
“We want to work, more, more, MORE until the little fortune finally greets us, hurrah!”
The professional tourists fell back, continuing to debrief and assess. They walked in non-stop babble, while Johnny dolorously sang the tango in another tongue, his voice tearing Chloe up and binding her back together.
“Ty ne winna chto me serce spi.”
It’s not your fault that my heart is asleep.
Nothing was asleep on Chloe and it was all Johnny’s fault. Johnny, you make all things, even the unbearable ones, a little bit better.
Oh my God, I love him, she thought, clutching his guitar case because she no longer carried the roses he had given her. I love him. What am I going to do?
After four kilometers of black railroad ties and acoustic intimacy, they finally walked out of the woods to the Treblinka train station sign, placed there as a historic marker of the unquiet mass grave to which they had just borne witness. That’s where they had left Emil and his van. By the sign.
The sign was there. Neither Emil nor his van was there.
That’s when Brett and Yvette and Dennis and Denise and Artie finally shut up.
27
Emil
FOR A FEW SECONDS, THEY STOOD MUTE LIKE DOLLS, TRYING to process. No one could infer the immediate meaning of Emil’s stark absence. Chloe certainly couldn’t. So she rejected meaning in favor of facile explanations of others.
“Maybe he went to get some food.”
Vigorously, she nodded.
“He must have been hungry, poor guy,” Denise said. “He’s been sitting waiting for us for nearly four hours.”
Nodded, nodded.
“Or he really needed to use the bathroom,” said Hannah. “I know how he feels.”
Yes, that was certainly true, nodded Chloe.
“He went to find a phone.”
Assent.
“He went to get gas.”
Possibly.
“Maybe he had told us to meet him somewhere else, and we forgot?”
Not likely, but not impossible.
“He’ll be right back.”
Of course he will.
They waited.
Eventually Hannah wailed in frustration. “I need to sit down,” she said. “I’m not feeling well.” Blake propped her up on a broken stump, a remnant from an old rotted fence. Artie and Brett and Dennis paced, away from the women, talking quietly. Chloe would’ve liked to know what they were saying. They looked a bit grim. Mason put his arm around Chloe. “You all right?”
She thought he meant about the current situation they found themselves in, but Mason waved to the far and nebulous forest, as if nothing concerned him but what they had just seen.
After a few seconds of inarticulate nodding, Chloe spun around in a perplexed carousel to look for the answers in Johnny. Weren’t in him the answers to all things? What was he doing? Maybe his actions could tell her where Emil was.
He stood some distance away from them. He didn’t look down the road, or at the four young people or at the five older people. Cigarette dangling from his mouth, guitar dangling on his back, Johnny was engrossed in the train schedule.
“What do you think?” Chloe said to Mason, pointing at Johnny. On her back was his black guitar case. “Should we be worried?”
“Nah,” Mason said. “We don’t know what he’s looking up.” He kissed her cheek. “Could be the schedule of his trains to Italy. Isn’t that where he’s going next? Let’s not draw any conclusions.”
“Really? None?”
“Chloe, Emil wouldn’t just leave us here,” Mason said. “Why would he do that? Besides, all of our stuff is on his bus.” He stopped speaking for emphasis. Or maybe he just stopped speaking. He paled slightly.
They were on an empty stretch of land in the middle of a desolate plain of pines and brush, a hasty escape away from the glade filled with a million murdered souls, and Emil was nowhere to be found. A shivering Chloe, no matter how much she didn’t want to, began to draw some conclusions.
There was an unreal feel to it. The excuses waned. The gazes fell to the ground.
Johnny put away his tim
etable book and approached them. “There’s a six o’clock train out of Malkinia Gorna,” he said. “It’s three kilometers down the road. It’s not even five yet. If we hurry, we can make it. We will make it. Because if we miss it, the next train is not until nine, and we don’t want to be stuck here for three hours. There’s nothing to do and nowhere to eat. And it’s going to get dark.” He said the last thing with a stress that Chloe didn’t need pointed out to her. There were no streetlamps, no houses, no roadside markets. When it got dark, it would get dark. And they were a cry away from the killing field. When Hannah cried out, Chloe thought it was because Hannah understood the urgency.
“I can’t walk another three miles!” Hannah cried. “I just can’t.”
“It’s not three miles,” said Johnny. “It’s three kilometers.”
“Yeah, yeah. Why can’t we just wait for Emil? How far could he have gone?”
Johnny didn’t say.
“Let’s wait,” Hannah said, not budging. “He’ll be back, won’t he?”
Johnny wouldn’t say.
But now the older group got vocal.
“You’re not answering, Johnny.”
“Where’s Emil, Johnny?”
“What kind of driver splits at precisely the time he’s supposed to stay put?”
“You did tell him three hours. Why isn’t he here?”
Lone Star Page 39