My Holocaust

by Tova Reich

  They proceeded along the level path to the reconstructed Crematorium I, including model gas chamber, furnace room, and re-created chimney, with the earth banked up to the roof on either side giving off a constricting feeling of irreversible descent. Squeezing the maximum out of their short walk, Krystyna used it to give them a concise briefing about the space they would enter first, which between 1941 and 1943 had variously served as a mortuary, an execution site, and also as a gas chamber until the vortex of the liquidation was moved to the larger and more efficient killing center at Birkenau three kilometers away, and this facility was converted into a bomb shelter for Nazi staff. It was a lucky thing too that she had had the foresight to administer their information dose in advance, because they would not have heard a single word she was saying had she waited until they got inside. The screams of maybe two dozen teenagers were crashing off the stuccoed walls with its black patches and the brick showing through. Not one of the juvenile delinquents in that gas chamber displayed any interest whatsoever in the contingent of adults that had just made its entrance. Maurice was furious. Once again they were not alone; he would murder Madame Jadwiga Switon for this later, you could depend on it. Most of the kids were in a primitive clot, howling rock songs and gyrating in what appeared to be a drugged state; a few were grabbing their throats, grimacing like gargoyles, and emitting mock agonized gagging noises inspired by the surroundings; in the corner a boy and girl were groping each other down the slippery slope to the next stage; another girl was absorbed in scratching a graffiti haiku into the wall; two kids were methodically cracking sunflower seeds with their teeth and spitting the shells out at a bull’s-eye they had marked off; a gang of hooligans were rolling on top of each other, lustily pummeling and pounding; a grown-up, ostensibly mature, ruggedly handsome man with a shaved head and a gold hoop in one ear, their chaperon no doubt, was sitting on the floor with his arms encircling his drawn-up knees, leaning against the wall, smoking placidly; and in the center of the room, two boys in eyeglasses who must have been twins, smaller than the others, the designated class scapegoats and objects of ridicule, most probably, were running around in circles yelling over and over at the tops of their lungs in their puberty-stricken voices, “Ayn mah lir’ot poh! Ayn mah lir’ot poh!”

  Even though Norman understood Hebrew, the three women and also his own father wounded him deeply by turning automatically to Monty for the translation. Monty was a rabbi, they knew, having received his ordination, as Norman could have told them, in 1968, after undergoing a grand total of two months of training on a chicken farm in New Jersey in the ritual slaughtering and koshering of poultry to avoid being drafted in the Vietnam War. As it happened, he also had a doctorate, from the Reverend Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia, with its flexible, user-friendly programs and forgiving correspondence courses, for which, as Honey in a fit of vindictiveness had once informed Norman, she had ghost-written his dissertation on Simon Wiesenthal, the Nazi hunter and Nobel Prize loser. These two advanced degrees inspired Maurice on numerous occasions to introduce him proudly as “Rabbi Dr. Monty Pincus, mine outstanding academic director and spiritual mentor.” His status as an expert was something that Monty cultivated and prized, and was touchy about, so he was quietly relieved that his reputation would not be assaulted this time by the spectacle of Norman jumping in to correct him, since the short simple sentence of the two demented kids running around in circles over there was manageable even with his botched Hebrew. He shook his head sagely, as befitted the somberness of the occasion, like Virgil leading Dante and company in this case through the circles of the Inferno, another unread work he could adorn himself with like an accessory. “Believe it or not,” Monty struggled to be heard over the crazed kids, “they’re saying that there’s nothing worth seeing here.” He glared at the lunatic twins as if he were about to spit. “Mengele material!” he muttered.

  Maurice marched right up to the adult sitting there smoking tranquilly against the wall presumably in charge, and planted himself in front of him with his hands on his hips. “What’s going on here?” he yelled. “You the teacher? This is a sacrilege!” Without getting up, the teacher took his time stubbing out his cigarette on the concrete floor of the long, narrow gas chamber and then stuffed the flattened butt into the pocket of his army camouflage pants. He folded his ear over like a crepe to mime his interest in hearing Maurice more clearly. “Eh?” he asked, looking up at the old man. “A sacrilege, I said, a sacrilege!” Maurice shouted. The teacher leapt up nimbly, stuck two fingers in his mouth, and let out a shrill whistle that jolted Maurice like a thunderclap, but it also had the effect of quieting the kids down to an almost tolerable degree for a blessed respite. The begoggled twin dervishes in the center of the room, however, carried on as maniacally as ever, until the teacher megaphoned his hands and barked out like a drill sergeant, “Eldad! Medad! Shut up!”—when they froze in their tracks as if bewitched.

  The teacher then extended his hand so genially that Maurice took it before he could think of checking himself. “Shalom, shalom. Eh, I am Shimshon ben-Yishai from Kibbutz Beit Hamita,” he said in a testosterone-timbred voice with that ponderous Israeli accent as, with his mighty grip, he took Maurice’s measure. “Eh, and this is our youth and the hope of our future”—his conspicuously blue-veined muscled arm took in the adolescents in their frenzy—“fulfilling the final unit of the eleventh grade Shoah curriculum.” He gave Maurice a sweet, wry grin. “Eh, so what were you trying to say to me a minute ago?” he inquired.

  “I was saying,” Maurice replied, oddly subdued by this disorientingly physical phenomenon of a Jew, “that how these youngsters are behaving here in this place where so many from our people were shlaughtered is—inappropriate!”

  “Eh, inappropriate? How—inappropriate?”

  “Look, Shimshon,” Monty stepped in, riding again to the rescue of Maurice’s dignity, “this is the Honorable Maurice Messer you’re talking to—Maurice, give him one of your cards!—chairman of the governing council of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the premier institution in the capital city of the most powerful nation on earth dedicated to the memory of the eleven million victims—six million Jews and five million others—some of whom perished in this very room in which your kids are going bonkers. So stop being cute. You know perfectly well what he means by inappropriate behavior.”

  “Eh, no—not really. Inappropriate for teenagers?”

  “Look here, Shimshon,” Monty made a second attempt, even risking appearing pathetically absurd for Maurice’s sake by drawing his own woefully out-of-shape, shorter-than-average Diaspora body pugnaciously up to the hunk. “The mission of our museum is not only remembrance, it is also education. You’re an educator. In fact, by your own admission, you teach a course on the Holocaust—right? So the way I see it, you’re just being a pain in the butt. Otherwise, how can you justify dragging a bunch of teeny-boppers all the way to Auschwitz?”

  “Eh, well, since you ask me so nicely, I will tell you. I am fulfilling the mandate from the Israel Ministry of Education for a course in Shoah history culminating in an on-site heritage tour. Personally, I do not believe we need such a course. But I teach it because it is my job, because it is required for high school graduation, because pah-pah-pah. Maybe you need the Holocaust in the Diaspora, in America, but as far as I am concerned, we Israelis have no trouble maintaining our Jewish identity without it, thank you very much. To be absolutely honest, all of this emphasis on the Shoah is, eh, if you will excuse me, overkill. What you see here today in the inappropriate behavior, as you call it, of my kids is, I am very sorry to say, a terminal case of Shoah backlash.” He would soon get them out of this graveyard, Shimshon was thinking as he spoke. He would take them back to the hostel to cool down. And then tonight they would all go to that convenient little shopping center that that thoughtful and enterprising Polish developer had had the brilliant idea of building within a stone’s throw of this death camp theme park—
to bring a measure of normalcy to this miserable tourist town with mass murder as its main and sole attraction. They would eat cheeseburgers and fries at the fast-food restaurant, and after that they would sweat all of this sick stuff out of their systems at Disco Auschwitz, dancing until daybreak in defiance of mortality.

  “I’ll tell you what I think is inappropriate,” Bunny piped up now, summoning every fiber of her inner resolve to take on this uncontrollable male. “I really really think smoking is inappropriate in this sacred place.” She jutted out her lower lip and blew her bangs apart like a curtain. “In my opinion,” she added, “Auschwitz should remain a smoke-free zone.”

  The twins, Eldad and Medad, were running in mad circles again, screaming, “Yallah! Yallah! Kadimah! Let’s go! Let’s get out of here!” Shimshon unhurriedly lit another cigarette, getting double service from the flame by absentmindedly igniting the corner of Maurice’s card and letting it burn closer and closer to his fingertips until it curled up into a cinder and dropped to the gas-chamber floor. Rounding up his mad flock at the same time, he turned casually to Monty as he went about his job and inquired almost as an afterthought, “Eh, these ‘others’ you mentioned—five million others? Who are they, if I may know?”

  “Holocaust-victim wannabes.” Norman managed by some miracle to beat Monty out with the answer. “You have no idea how many of them there are out there. Poles, Gypsies—pardon me, Roma and Sinti—Russians, Catholics, et cetera and so forth, you name it. Everyone and his cousin wants to get into the act, everyone wants a piece of the Holocaust pie.”

  “Eh, but five million? Where did you get that number?”

  “Oh, we just made it up,” Norman explained blithely. “It was a political necessity—to justify a Jewish museum on the National Mall. It was kind of a victim inclusiveness gesture—you know what I mean?—sort of like sharing the Shoah wealth. The main thing, though,” he added confidingly, “was that, after all the political bloodletting, when all the smoke had cleared, so to speak, we were still ahead by a million.”

  “Great, yofi, kol hakavod, congratulations, mazal tov,” Shimshon boomed. “But, eh, if you don’t mind, me and my kids—we would like to resign from your victims’ club.” And with his sultry cigarette dangling flaccidly from the corner of his lips and his two gorgeously toned Zionist pioneer arms spread wide, he skillfully herded the frenetic teenagers out of the gas chamber, which, as Gloria was now breathlessly remarking, she had recognized immediately. It was an exact replica of that truly creepy gas chamber she had seen that you could actually walk into at the Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, the Museum of Tolerance, where she and her late husband, Mel Bacon, had been given a really private tour by the executive director. “I guess this one is sort of the original though,” Gloria added stupidly, but she couldn’t stop herself, she had flipped automatically into her long-playing role of a woman programmed to charm and amuse as they were led by Monty into the adjacent crematorium, where, shaken for a moment out of character by the rawness of the ovens, she cried, “Oh, they’re just like altars!”

  There were two red brick furnaces in the room, reconstructed out of original parts after the war, with black metal doors through which corpses on gurneys riding on tracks could be shoved. When this facility was in operation, Krystyna told them, there had actually been three ovens, with a capacity to incinerate three hundred and forty bodies over a twenty-four hour period with accompanying side effects, including smells and sights and sounds potentially so counterproductive to discipline and order in the Auschwitz I work camp so close by that it became yet another efficiency-driven reason to relocate the entire killing operation to Auschwitz II, or Birkenau, or Brzezinka in Polish—Krystyna’s hometown, as it happened, she added defiantly. She snapped open the capacious faux-alligator-skin tote bag she was lugging and rummaged around inside, extracting and setting out one by one the supplies for the ritual she knew from experience Maurice would conduct at this point: memorial candles in small glasses; a book of matches she had picked up, this one, as it happened, with a drawing on the cover of naked figures in chains and the legend “Hades, Krakow”; white synthetic lace doilies with bobby pins attached for the ladies to pancake on their heads; cardboard skullcaps like tepees in a school project for the men; a gleaming white plastic hard hat for Maurice to use in lieu of a yarmulke, imprinted with an American eagle seal with a star of David in a halo over its head, and below it the slogan, “A Campaign to Remember, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum”; two small bouquets of shriveled red carnations and rusted ferns wrapped in soggy newspaper; and scented tissues in a gilded box pinched from the Grand Hotel’s ladies’ lounge. She lined up the candles on one of the cast-iron corpse-conveyor trolleys. “Pop?” Norman whispered desperately to Maurice. “You’re not going to do your din Torah number again—are you?” Maurice wasted no time retaliating. “Are you telling me how to run mine business? Maybe you seen it before already, but for the ladies it’s news. They will love it. It’s a very moving ceremony, for your information. Just watch me. I’ll have them crying into their borscht in two minutes flat. And when they cry, Mr. Hotshot Businessman, they buy.” Then, while the mother and daughter were adjusting their doilies to avoid disturbing their hairdos and as the men donned their headgear, Maurice sidled over to Krystyna and hissed into her ear, “Such crappy flowers you bring for mine donors? What happened mit all the money what I gave to you? How many times do I have to tell you? The Washington museum is a Tiffany operation! What? Don’t tell me! You never heard from Tiffany’s in Brzezinka?”

  Having manfully voiced his dissatisfaction to the subordinate, Maurice now strode proprietarily up to the open door of one of the ovens, basking in his position and prestige, like a minister making his way to the front of the congregation. Solemnly and ceremoniously, he lowered the hard hat over his pate with both hands, the liner inside preadjusted to his dimensions, crowning himself like Napoleon. Indicating the slogan on the front of the hat with the tapping of a manicured fingernail, Maurice smiled at Gloria and said, “A Campaign to Remember—get it? Mine Monty—such a genius!” Suddenly, he thrust his arms so abruptly upward to the blackened wooden beams of the ceiling of the crematorium that the women gasped and slammed their hands in fright flat over their hearts. “God, Creator of the Universe!” Maurice cried out in a thundering voice, “I, the Honorable Maurice Messer, Chairman from the United States Holocaust Memorial Council, the presidentially appointed governing board from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, hereby summon You mit all the powers invested in me to this holy court in the crematorium from the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp where so many from our sisters and brothers were annihilated. I am subpoenaing You, Lord Almighty, to this awful place where the cries from the dead can still be heard—to stand trial on the charge of abandoning Your children. I accuse You, God, of remaining a silent bystander while Your people, Your holy and pure martyrs, were murdered, shlaughtered, burned, drowned, and shtrangled for the sanctification of Your name at the hands of the German perpetrators and their collaborators, the evil ones, may their name and memory be blotted out! Where were You, God, when mine sainted mama, Shprintza Chaya Messer the guerrilla fighter, was shot down in the streets of Wieliczka screaming, ‘Fight, Yidalech, fight!’? I demand an answer, Lord! How could You have remained silent?”

  Gloria and Bunny were clutching each other, staring at Maurice, stunned, obviously drained and overcome, one of Gloria’s arms invoking the One Above, too, by pointing urgently and heartbreakingly to the heavens. He took note. Of course they’re moved; he had even successfully moved himself to a degree, it was a kind of autoeroticism. Though he had performed this ritualized trial of God many times before for the benefit of so many other prospective contributors, it touched him now to be reminded yet again through the visible effect of his own words on these blank slates of how real the tragedy he was selling truly was. “Where were You, God,” he pushed on now even more ardently, aroused to even greater heights by the undeniable emotio
nal response he was getting, “when mine tateh, Kalman Zissel of blessed memory, mine sisters the twins Manya and Fanya, mine brothers Zelig and Berel, together mit their entire families were turned into ash here in this godforsaken—yes, God forsaken!—place, this death factory, this cursed universe called Auschwitz? How could You have forsaken Your children, God? Why did You hide Your face? Why did You remain silent? Why do You remain silent still? Answer me, Lord! Let me hear Your voice—now!”