In that spirit an Australian artist took her father, an eighty-nine-year-old survivor, to Auschwitz, where they danced to Gloria Gaynor’s “I Will Survive”. The old guy also danced in his “Survivor”T-shirt at other sites, including Hitler’s intended “Museum of an Extinct Race” in Prague, with grandchildren the entire might of the Third Reich tried to prevent being born. That stubborn DNA. The clip is on YouTube. I watched with my daughter. “Mum,” she said, “stop crying.”
Some people were outraged by what they saw as dancing on graves. Yet if you were to avoid dancing where people have been murdered, there would be little dancing in Poland and many other places. As one YouTube commentator said, “Yeah, screw you, Adolf, with a gay anthem made famous by a black woman. Respect comes in many forms.”
IN LILY BRETT’S NOVEL Too Many Men, Ruth takes her survivor father Edek back to Poland. “There is nothing there,” Edek says. “We are visiting one nothing after another.” I think of that as, back in Warsaw, we tramp over kilometres of the city, trying to trace the remains of the ghetto. It is easy to miss a stone here, a marking on the pavement there. The ghetto was destroyed after the 1943 uprising, during which the starving remnants of Warsaw’s Jewish population held off the Germans for more than a month. We pay our respects at Nathan Rapoport’s bleak monument Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, unveiled in 1948. Heroes of the uprising stand staunchly on one side. Around the back a line of victims, mostly women and children, walk to their deaths. One child, holding the hand of an elderly woman, turns to meet the eye of the viewer. There is a stall selling memorabilia. Desperate for something tangible to hold on to out of this tour of gaps and absences I buy a book, which the seller stamps with place and date.
The ghetto took most of 1940 to be built. It was sealed off on November 16. From July 22 to September 21, 1942, 300,000 Jews were deported, my family among them. Sixty thousand remained. In January 1943 there was a second wave of deportations. In April, as the final liquidation of the ghetto began, so did the uprising. A month later the liquidation was complete.
Władislaw Szpilman, whose book about his survival in Warsaw became Roman Polanski’s movie The Pianist, writes of meeting a friend just before an “action” in the ghetto to take people for deportation. His friend says, ‘“You wait, it’ll all be over some fine day, because’... and he waved his arms about... ‘because there isn’t any sense in it, is there?’”
It’s impossible to imagine it, presumptuous to try.
But there are echoes. My father’s memory: “You would wake up and the person next to you is dead.” My Great-aunt Faiga’s last desperate message. Szpilman’s observations of the Lithuanian and Ukrainian fascists brought in to help deport Jews from the ghetto: “They liked killing anyway... They killed children before their mothers’ eyes and found the women’s despair amusing.”
I remember my father talking about the cruelty of the Ukrainians. “They were worse than the Germans,” he said. These fragments he shared were coded messages I’m still trying to crack years later through reading the accounts of other survivors and the diaries of those who didn’t survive. Oh, I think, so that’s what he was trying to tell me about. That’s what he saw. That is what he lived through.
We go to the Umschlagplatz, the holding area at the northern edge of the ghetto from which Jews were sent to Treblinka. In his diary for September 5, 1942, Abraham Lewin recorded the scenes as people were concentrated into ever smaller areas to await deportation. “A sight that I will never forget as long as I live. Five tiny children, two- and three-year-olds, sit on a camp bed in the open from Monday to Tuesday and cry and cry and scream without stopping—’Mummy mummy I want to eat.’The soldiers are shooting continually and the shots silence the children for a moment. The children lay there for 24 hours, sobbing and screaming,’Mummy, mummy.’Tuesday afternoon a middle-aged man, aged about 50, went up to them, broke down into a continual, choking sobbing and gave the children a little something to eat. Earlier, women had come up and given them food. Our hearts have turned to stone and there was no way to save them. What are we saving them for if we are all sentenced to die?”
Umschlagplatz, the holding area next to the railway station in Warsaw from which more than 300,000 Jews were sent to their deaths in the Treblinka camp from 1942–43.
Lewin’s wife Luba has already been deported. He is sent to Treblinka with his fifteen-year-old daughter Ora.
At the Umschlagplatz we have to negotiate our way around an Israeli tour group that has taken over the monument. I feel irrationally annoyed. At most other places, like the fragment of ghetto wall we had to creep through private property to get to, we have been alone. We could have taken a tour but, after the organisation of Auschwitz, visiting the Umschlagplatz was something we wanted to do—in our bumbling shell-shocked way—on our own.
Women and children being deported to Treblinka from the Siedlice Ghetto, ninety miles from Warsaw.
POLAND, 1942/43. Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, starting the war in Europe. On September 17 the Soviet Union invaded from the east. Warsaw surrendered on September 27 and the Polish government fled into exile through Romania. Germany and the Soviet Union then divided the country between them, but in the summer of 1941 the Soviet forces were driven out by the Germans’ Operation Barbarossa. General Government was the German administrative centre.
WE HAVE FURTHER OCCASION TO RETHINK this independent strategy while driving to Treblinka. Getting lost aside, the trip has become increasingly grim. The road goes for miles through ancient forest where Polish and Jewish partisans hid, the sort of place where my father must have hidden.
There are two camps. Treblinka I is the work camp, which we won’t have time to visit. We arrive at Treblinka II, the extermination camp. It is not one of the well-known camps. No one was liberated here. My father once said there were worse places than Auschwitz. This is the place he meant.
Treblinka, built in 1942 and one of the Operation Reinhard camps, along with Bełżec and Sobibór, was designed solely for the killing of Jews. People were dragged half dead from the boxcars, made to undress, driven with whips down the “Himmelstrasse” (“Road to Heaven”) and thrown into gas chambers, often within two hours. Guards were allowed to grab babies and smash their heads on the boxcars. The sick were taken to the Lazarette (infirmary) and shot at the edge of a pit. According to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, from July 1942 through November 1943, between 870,000 and 925,000 Jews were murdered at Treblinka.
In Claude Lanzmann’s nine-and-a-half-hour film Shoah he covertly interviews Franz Suchomel, who was an SS officer at Treblinka. No one who has seen the film can forget seeing Suchomel sing the Treblinka song. Lanzmann ensures this by making him sing it twice, “But loud!”
All that matters now is Treblinka.
It is our destiny.
That’s why we’ve become one with Treblinka
in no time at all.
Memorial of granite rocks at the site of the Treblinka camp. It’s been estimated as many as 900,000 Jews were murdered here between July 1942 and August 1943.
Suchomel describes the arrival of trains like the one my father jumped from. “The windows were closed off with barbed wire so no one could get out. On the roofs were the ‘hellhounds’, the Ukrainians or Latvians...”My father, who knew by then that the only choice for a Jew in Poland was different varieties of dead, said, “I rolled down the bank and waited to be shot.”
Samuel Rajzman, the only survivor to testify about Treblinka at the Nuremberg trials, outlined the process. “All those who were driven from the cars were divided into groups—men, children, and women, all separate. They were all forced to strip immediately, and this procedure continued under the lashes of the German guards’ whips. Workers who were employed in this operation immediately picked up all the clothes and carried them away to barracks. Then the people were obliged to walk naked through the street to the gas chambers.”
Treblinka was so busy that sometimes victims ha
d to wait for a day or two before they were gassed. “Many knew,” Suchomel says. “The men were killed first. The women had to wait ... sixty women with children ... Naked! In summer and winter.”There were women who slashed their daughters’ wrists at night, then cut their own. Others poisoned themselves.
There is much worse in this man’s avid account than I can bring myself to write down. It’s not for me to put such nightmares in anyone else’s head. Suchomel insisted that Lanzmann preserve his anonymity. Lanzmann agreed. He lied.
The Germans had enough awareness to realise they might not be applauded for this work. From the mass graves of the Einsatzgruppen death squads in the Soviet Union and the Baltic states, where the ground was sometimes reported to heave for days with the movements of those buried alive, to the misery and disease of the ghettos, to the bodies piled up like cord wood in the concentration camps, the more they tried to pursue their mad ideology of racial purity the more hideous a mess they made.
When SS leader Heinrich Himmler visited Treblinka in early 1943 he ordered the putrefying bodies in mass graves to be dug up and burned on grates to get rid of the evidence. Everything here now is symbolic: symbolic entrance; symbolic railway tracks; symbolic ramp to mark where victims, those still alive, disembarked. Designers have also been set the task of creating a symbolic pit, a surreal blackened river of melted basalt where the cremation pyres once burned.
The day we visit, the scene is serene and full of birdsong. There are no crowds until buses of Israeli Defense Forces personnel arrive and take over the central monument for a service. My family was here, I want to say. But I don’t. Few of these young soldiers would have families untouched by what went on at places like this.
Here you can confront the how, but there are still no answers as to the why. In 1970 journalist Gitta Sereny interviewed Franz Stangl in prison. He was commandant of the Treblinka extermination camp in 1942. She pressed him on how he saw his victims.
Photographs of Polish Jews before the Holocaust, displayed on buildings in Prózna Street, Warsaw, part of an art project And I Still See Their Faces, begun in 1996.
“You didn’t think they were human beings?”
“Cargo,” he said tonelessly. “They were cargo.”
As late as 1957 sun-bleached bones and skulls poked through the ground. Apparently bone fragments can still be seen, especially after rain, but the site seems to have been tamed.
As with many Holocaust memorials we see, it’s about rocks, chunks of granite that can be read like headstones but are jagged and elemental. I seek out the stone marked “Polska”. “They destroyed this beautiful family, beautiful people,” Joe had said. “You go to Treblinka, there are no graves. There are symbols of stone but they simply represent the dust. That’s what the Germans accomplished.”
Some children of survivors will not allow their feet to touch the ground here, but I have to fight a primitive urge to lie down and get as close as possible to the dust of the dead. These places make you a little crazy. There is almost no record of my family who died in Poland but at least at Treblinka, in the visitors’ book in the little museum, I can write: “In memory of the Wichtel and Jonisz families who were murdered here.” Outside, we place stones in the Jewish tradition, and on a memorial I leave a piece of paper listing our family’s names. The rain will soon wash them away.
IN WARSAW, AT THE END OF OUR DAY walking around what was once the ghetto, we nearly don’t make it to the last street, Próżna. Time is running out but the decaying tenements are easy to spot by the huge, unbearably poignant photographs on the walls of the people who once lived there and throughout Poland: families, children, old people, babies in prams. The photographs are part of a project, And I Still See Their Faces, created by Gołda Tencer, a Polish actress with Jewish origins. By the time we return in 2015, the area will have been tidied up and the photographs removed so the buildings can be restored, but in 2010 the buildings are still as they were when my father was here. We peer through broken windows and into eerie inner courtyards, unable to stop looking for ghosts.
At street level a small bar tunnels into a near-ruined building, the weight of history bearing down upon it. Outside, a young Jewish guy in a yarmulke sits drinking with friends. He looks like he feels at home. I’m not sure how at home I can ever feel in Poland but it’s the place where fragments of my family remain, and where the history of what happened to them is still being debated, evaded, prodded and played out. Even the slippage and the evasion are testament to the power of what happened here—an answer to those who say these events never happened and I just somehow mislaid more than a hundred members of my extended family. Poland is as close as I’m going to get to them. Before we leave, I will know I want to come back.
Meanwhile, we badly need a drink. The girl at the bar in Próżna Street casts a cool eye over two tired and dusty dark tourists.
“Yes?”
“Do you have wine?”
“No.”
We have vodka.
CHAPTER 13
Stolpersteine and stelae
To forget the dead would be akin to killing them a second time.
Elie Wiesel in Night
BERLIN IS MODERN, DIVERSE, and seems to be meeting its history headon, at least on the level of the built environment. It’s unnerving, in 2010, to feel more comfortable here than in Poland. My father always had German friends, something my mother could never understand.
In a city of memorials, you walk alongside the dead. One of the most moving of these memorials, a project initiated by German artist Gunter Demnig, requires you to keep your eyes open and look down not up. The Stolpersteine (stumbling stones) are small brass plaques set into the pavement and inscribed with the names of individual victims of the Nazis at the site of their last place of residence: history designed to trip you up. The inscriptions we find outside a building near our hotel tell us that here lived Herman and Jenny Schneebaum and their children Thea, 12, and Victor, 2. They were deported to Auschwitz in 1943. “Ermordet”: murdered.
The project has spread to other countries. In Poland permission was given, then withdrawn. By 2016 a few Stolpersteine will have been allowed in some towns. Maybe one day we will place one in Praga.
Berlin’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe is easier to find. You can’t miss it. A city block is covered with 2,711 concrete slabs, or stelae, arranged in a grid pattern but slightly askew. Walking through them on the undulating ground in single file, as you must, you feel you could be swallowed up. The young, unable to resist the challenge, ignore the sign forbidding jumping from stone to stone.
Designed by New York architect Peter Eisenman, the memorial, approved in 1999 after much controversy, opened in 2004. There were objections not just to Eisenman’s abstract and enigmatic design but to the idea of a memorial at all. Martin Waiser, a novelist, demanded to know in what other country in the world there was “a memorial of national ignominy” smack in the middle of a capital city. Björn Höcke, a senior member of the populist Alternative for Germany Party, has recently echoed this, pronouncing: “Germans are the only people in the world who plant a monument of shame in the heart of the capital.”
Others have objected that the monument is too discreet. There’s no sign to tell you what it is. The words “Holocaust” or “Shoah” don’t appear in the name. The entrance to the information centre, which presents the histories of lost families, their names and their words, is not immediately obvious. It’s architecture that forces you to ask questions.
Entering this subterranean centre will see a low point in our careers as dark tourists. It begins when we visit Checkpoint Charlie, site of the Cold War border crossing between East and West Germany. Just as Poland has its unnerving nostalgia for the Jews, in Germany there’s a yearning for the culture associated with the German Democratic Republic that vanished with the fall of the wall in 1989.
There is an element of high kitsch about GDR-themed Berlin tourist attractions. At Checkpoint Charlie, Chris,
who almost never buys mementos, is drawn to a souvenir gas mask. Go on, I say magnanimously.
He buys the gas mask and puts it his backpack. We forget all about it until we walk down the stairs to the information centre. Coming from our part of the world we have forgotten that, as in many public places in Europe—and just about all public places where things Jewish are involved—our bags will be X-rayed. We’ve handed them over before we realise we are bringing a gas mask into a Holocaust museum. It’s too late to grab back the bag and run out.
Events seem to unfold in slow motion.
“What,” the guard says, holding the offending object between thumb and index finger, “is this?”
“A souvenir gas mask?” Chris quavers.
The guard rolls his eyes. The gas mask is confiscated. When we leave, the guard hands it back with a withering look. It occurs to us how many airport X-ray machines there are between us and home. Chris bins the mask. This is the nearest we get to an inadvertent Holocaust joke.
Jews have reserved the right to be funny about the Holocaust. It was a revelation in the ’90s to see New Zealand comedian Deb Filler’s one-woman show Punch Me in the Stomach, about her survivor father Saul Filler. My father had uttered the same words. Were all survivor fathers proud of their abs?
Deb accompanies her father on a tour of the death camps of Eastern Europe. At Auschwitz she needs to go to the toilet. “Well, don’t be too long,” Saul says. “I got locked in here once before. I don’t want to get locked in again.”
Driving to Treblinka Page 13