My Holocaust

by Tova Reich

  From somewhere behind him, a nun with lowered head under her brown veil appeared without a sound and breathed softly for a moment at his side. His hand brushed lightly against hers as she gave him back his helmet. He longed to pull out his gift of the Jude armband and slip it to her like a secret message, like a password, but she flew off far too quickly, his Nechama—because she was Nechama, he believed this with full faith. He lifted his eyes to the mother superior. “I’ll take care of her,” he said. Then he corrected himself. “I beg your pardon, Sister. It—I meant it—your movie. I’ll take care of it. Consider it done.”

  4

  THE LOVELY JUNE WEATHER, one of the first warm and clear days after weeks of bleak spring rain, brought out the pensioners from the nearby towns of Oswiecim and Brzezinka for an afternoon of recreation in the Field of Ashes at the far end of the Birkenau killing center. Stocky men in straw hats chewing the stems of rustic pipes that hung from under the eaves of their mustaches, wearing only black vests over their open-collared shirts with sleeves rolled up, strolled about among the large white wooden crosses and Stars of David that had been stuck by Polish scouts in a touching gesture of shared victimhood into the ashes of Jews who had been burned in open roasting pits fueled by their own fat when the four working crematoria with an official capacity to incinerate one hundred and thirty-two thousand corpses per month could no longer handle the load. In their rubber galoshes, the old men traipsed through the marshy acres of meadow overgrown with weeds, brush, and still unmowed grass rising out of the thick bed of gray ashes, ambling at a leisurely pace over occasional low hillocks of ashes, sloshing playfully through depressions of ash pools filmed with algae. Instead of their usual picturesque gnarled walking sticks, they wielded in their rough peasant hands their rusted old metal detectors, poking them down into the ash piles in front of them as they rambled about, though it is true that for a long time now it had been very seldom indeed for these newfangled devices that their children had sent to them as clever gifts from the Radio Shacks of Chicago to emit any signal at all. There was a time, though, when it was still possible to find gold or precious jewels or rare coins that the Sonderkommando teams of prisoners had overlooked while inspecting the orifices of the gassed Jewish bodies prior to shoving them into the ovens, but that was in the old days, long ago. Since then, the place had been effectively ransacked, pillaged, stripped bare by hooligans, and nothing remained for the respectable citizens except an occasional worthless twisted fork or a hollow pair of spectacles or a hinge from a prosthetic limb or a metal photo frame sometimes even with a faded picture still inside of a chubby naked baby stretched out contentedly on a warm quilt. Still, it was a very pleasant and peaceful way to pass a spring afternoon sauntering about in the Field of Ashes park, and their old women too seemed to be enjoying themselves as they wandered with a basket over their arms among the long grass in their flowered housecoats and colorful babushkas and their oversize men’s black rubber boots, gathering the mushrooms that were in season to be fried with onions that night and ladled onto their plates with kasha and slabs of ham on the side. Everywhere you turned there were signs of industry and activity—hayricks set up to dry the grass that grew so abundantly out of the ashes, workers shoveling ashes into wheelbarrows to be spread as fertilizer and on the winter-ravaged roads. Birkenau, with its ash pits, had justifiably come to be valued and appreciated as the main natural resource of the area. Nearby, sailboats skimmed peacefully under the blue sky on the Vistula River, into whose waters tubs of ashes had also been dumped, upon whose banks men now sat dreamily holding their rods, lazily anticipating the tug of their supper of ash-fattened jewfish.

  Shimshon’s teenagers were also making the most of that perfect June afternoon, exploring the Field of Ashes as if under an enchantment, meandering in small clusters of twos or threes among the wooden crosses and Stars of David with their Israel scout knapsacks on their backs in which they were stowing the ash-coated pieces of white human bone that they were collecting—bone chips of varying sizes mostly, but also an occasional recognizable section of jawbone, or a part of a collarbone, a bit of femur, and once, an almost-complete skull, which inspired great brays of boasting and thumbs-up signals and flurries of triumphant fists pumping the air and chest-pounding from the lucky finders. As he turned off the back road running behind the camp, with the smell of wet ashes rising from the ground like the residue of an apocalyptic campfire infusing every pore in his nostrils, Shimshon spotted his kids immediately. He scooted through an opening in the formerly electrified fence, made his way past the marker with the hermaphroditic symbol of a Star of David affixed to a cross indicating the ruins of the peasant cottage that in 1942 had served as a primitive gas chamber in which Saint Edith Stein and other Jews were exterminated, coming to rest finally at what was for him the most amusing spot in all of Birkenau—the white sign on a post stuck straight into the ashes, a depiction of a smoldering cigarette with a thin wisp of smoke rising from it crossed out by a no-no diagonal red line inside an arresting red warning circle. Leaning against this sustaining piece of comic relief, Shimshon lit up and surveyed the scene.

  In the distance, he could make out on that extraordinarily clear day what had always been for him the emblematic moonscape of Birkenau—the forest of tall red brick chimneys brooding like the eerie tombstones of a devastated primitive civilization, all that remained of the wooden barracks of the men’s camp. Closer to the no-smoking sign against which he was propping himself up, on the western boundary of the camp, he could see the stately red brick Sauna, which had served as a processing center for incoming transports of prisoners, including a women’s shower room unforgettably packed in the mega-hit Schindler’s List with luscious young nude Jewesses who miraculously actually got a real shower—a bevy of beauties unquestionably worth rescuing. From there his eyes moved to the spot where the ruins of Crematorium IV, always his favorite by virtue of having been blown up by Jewish inmates in October of 1944, and Crematorium V had been located, expecting to see nothing at all since, like Crematoria II and III, all of them had been blasted to rubble and collapse by the Nazis in the final days of the war to eradicate the evidence. This time, though, as he gazed casually in that direction, he was confronted, as in a mirage or a dream or a hallucination, by the full presence of Crematorium IV rising in front of his eyes in a place where it should no longer have been, complete with the gas-chamber wing and the two tall redbrick chimneys of the furnaces. Again and again it happens like this, Shimshon reflected; their death factories designed according to the most advanced technological standards to delete every trace of the killing project festering just below the surface, heaving up the evidence, ashes here, bones there, and now Crematorium IV come back to haunt them again. That’s not supposed to be there, Shimshon told himself. It was only then, as that bizarre reality swirled into focus and made itself manifest in all of its perceptible urgency, that he came to his senses, remembering everything that he had to do; he could not afford to waste another minute.

  Stubbing his cigarette out in the Coke bottle cap he carried around and used selectively as an environment-friendly portable ashtray, which came in handy now in preventing the mingling of ashes, and stuffing the entire mess into the pocket of his army camouflage pants, he set out decisively across the field toward the irrefutably solid edifice of the resurrected Crematorium IV. The ground upon which he trod seemed to give way as he advanced, his feet in their Old Testament sandals sinking disconcertingly into the muck of the ash bed. Now as always when he crossed this woeful place, he had the unnerving sensation that he was walking on something alive and palpitating, a great cushiony maternal breast and womb that would endure eternal abuse with martyred Jewish resignation. He was thinking about this weird phenomenon as he moved forward, and thinking about seeing Leyla, and thinking also that he must rally his troops to carry out Operation Ben-Zeruya, for which they had trained so carefully and so hard, in just a little more than an hour from now, when he idly pulled a tall weed o
ut from the ground he was traversing. It came up with alarming ease, as if from the scum of a viscous swamp, trailing a long forked root thickly breaded with ashes, looking as he held it up before him like a homunculus, a witch’s mandrake, a humanoid monster. Discarding this mutant with a shudder, he surged ahead now even more briskly, strewing as he went along upon the old peasant men and women searching for treasure and fungi muttered curses in five languages—chara, zift, dreck, shit, gownó—stimulating one or two of the less dull-witted among them to swivel around stunned, but he was already gone before they could retaliate for what had been dropped on them. To each of his bone-collecting kids he offered encouragement and motivation as he passed—a comradely slap on the back, a playful punch in the gut, an affectionate mussing of the hair, a hug, an embrace, as well as a word or two to remind them to prepare their minds and hearts for the difficult task that lay before them. When he came to Eldad and Medad, their glasses steamy from the intensity of their concentration on the bone hunt, their cheeks roseate and their breathing congested from allergy to the entire heaving organic cosmos underneath them, he paused for a brief conference. “Eh, Operation Ben-Zeruya will commence in one hour exactly,” Shimshon advised, glancing at his indestructible Israeli elite air force pilot’s watch. “It is now T minus sixty. You are my lieutenants. You must order the troops to start loosening and digging out the pah-pah-pahs. Act like you’re playing a game. If any of these old farts here try to stop you, pretend you don’t understand what they’re talking about, cross your eyes and stick out your tongue and blow out your snot and drool and go spastic like you’re insane. I have some business to take care of, but at T minus ten I shall return to give the signal for the final countdown.”

  Touching his crotch, breast, and head in quick succession with both hands, Shimshon then spread his arms and swiftly repeated this sequence with one hand on the same points of the bodies of each of the twins, intoning as he did so, “Remember—Jewish balls, Jewish heart, Jewish brain,” like a revered lord enacting a mystical rite by passing on a portion of his powers to his knights before their entry into battle. The ceremony completed, he pivoted sharply without another word and set off at once, jogging at a hearty clip to Crematorium IV, skirting the resurrected gas chamber/furnace room that had shocked him from the distance of the ash field, heading directly into the annex behind it that had not been visible from that perspective—an exact replica of the SS commandant’s headquarters with special creative attention devoted to the authenticity of the room and all of its paraphernalia in which the Jewish women were raped, which, unfortunately, had to be reproduced at considerable expense since the real building in which this took place, though still standing intact right at the edge of the camp and perfectly usable, was unavailable due to the fact that it had been converted into a church.

  From this facsimile of the Kommandantur, Shimshon made his way into an uncannily faithful re-creation of the dark interior of the horse-stable prisoners’ barracks complete with three tiers of wide-planked bunks, the lowest set right on the dirt floor and the highest directly under the rough wooden rafters. On this lovely June afternoon, each of these tiers, but the middle one especially because it was squarely within the camera’s range, was packed with more than thirty female extras recruited in the Polish countryside from as far away as Rzeszow and Kolbuszowa, their large black Jewish-issue eyes made up to express the extreme limits of gauntness and soulfulness, turned with depleted curiosity upon the three actresses in tattered and soiled striped prisoner uniforms shooting a scene by the furnace in the center of the room.

  Shimshon stood some distance away and watched as his friend, the Palestinian beauty Leyla Salmani, played Yael, the SS commandant’s favorite Jewess, the one who, in the sensational climactic scenes of the movie, would get the decadently handsome Nazi warrior and rapist slobbering drunk, drive a nail through his skull with a rock, and then triumphantly dash out to lead the revolt that would blow up the multimillion dollar Hollywood reproduction of Crematorium IV. In the episode they were filming on that day, however, Yael, to establish her leadership credentials, was struggling to break up a fight between two starving fellow inmates who were clawing savagely at each other over possession of a dried-out crust of bread, pulling instinctively at one another’s shaved head as if the hair were still growing from it. Over and over again, because the director’s personal unique vision of this original idea was never quite satisfied, Leyla had to reenact this scene, repeating the words, “Sisters, it’s okay to be angry, but let us manage our anger to direct it against the enemy,” until they came out like chopped meat worming through the holes of a grinder. This director, who was also the screenwriter, a soft-hearted Jewish boy from Los Angeles named R. C. Hammer, wearing a backward baseball cap over his receding hairline, had been particularly thrilled and gratified to cast an Arab woman in the role of Yael, and especially one of such distinguished lineage, the Oxford-educated daughter of the moderate Palestinian hero Abu Salman of Hebron, who had been crippled by a bomb planted by the Jewish underground led by the fanatical settlement firebrand Yehudi HaGoel. This amazing trivia morsel, this fusing of opposites, of classic enemies, Jew and Arab united in the service of high art, would be a super marketing feature when the film was released, a truly inspirational selling point in the trailer with the appropriate background music, there was no question about it. When Leyla had learned that she had gotten the lead part of Yael in The Triumph of the Traumatized, she sat Shimshon down on the ancient mosaic-tiled floor of her apartment on Omari Street in the Muslim Quarter of the Old City of Jerusalem with its ravishing view of the golden Dome of the Rock through the tall windows, and they shaved off each other’s hair. Thick black glossy waist-length tresses tumbled equally from both of their heads in massive hanks, piling up around them like the softest, the most voluptuous, the most tempting and treacherous of nests.

  Finally, R. C. Hammer came out with his definitive “Cut!” Immediately, Leyla snapped out of character and began walking toward Shimshon, inserting into her earlobe the matching gold hoop to his, which together made a pair. He anticipated her approach in a squatting position so that she could promptly climb upon his back. He carried her off the set, out of the prisoners’ barracks and commandant’s headquarters annex, behind the replica of Crematorium IV, into one of the birch groves that gave Birkenau its name, where incoming transports of prisoners would undress—men, women, and children, old and young, grandparents and parents stripped naked in front of their children and grandchildren amid the meager screening of the mottled slender trees in those final moments before filing in assembly lines into the waiting gas chambers. Roaming in and out in the sun-dappled shade of the birches, avoiding the ash pit that had been dug to accommodate the overflow corpses during the operationally challenging Hungarian transports of 1944, Shimshon wordlessly slipped a hand under Leyla’s prison trousers and caressed the shapely leg that was draped over his shoulders, while she absentmindedly played a tune with her fingers on his shaven head, staring down at the pulsing veins, marveling at the strange desire welling gradually up in her, like a newfound power, to squeeze the life out of this man of whom she was after all rather fond, a feeling that was in some ways similar to the not altogether unpleasant constriction in her loins that she would experience while standing on a ledge at a great height that seemed to call out to her to jump, to throw herself away, pulling her over, drawing her inevitably downward, when she really had as far as she knew no wish at all to end her life just then. Her heart pumping violently, she went on drumming on Shimshon’s exposed head and pondered the source of this unforeseen feeling. The next moment, though, unexpectedly overcome by a wild panic that this giant Jew might at any second drop her into the ash pit from his not inconsequential height of well over six feet, might even deliberately hurl her over, the acknowledged enemy, with all the force of his superior strength, she began to beat rhythmically on his shoulders, in thinly concealed desperation, with her two little fists, insisting that he let her down
at once. “You must trust,” Shimshon admonished, cuffing her ankles firmly in place. “Let me down, let me down, you Zionist Nazi!” she cried, emitting high-pitched gulps that resembled laughter to demonstrate that she was only joking in calling him by that name as she went on hammering, now on the unprotected crown of his head. Shimshon crouched on the ground to allow her to dismount. “You should have had faith that I would take care of you,” he commented mournfully. Leyla stiffened. “Take care of your own,” she responded. “We can take care of ourselves.” Shimshon took her two hands and held them. “Leyla, Leyla,” he said. “It was so good between us for a little while there among the birches—what happened?” He rummaged deep inside the pocket of his army pants. “Here,” he went on soothingly, handing her a small white envelope, “I brought you a little present—premium grade, direct from Tommy Mashiach. It will improve your mood. Eh, take two before bedtime—but only if I’m the guy who’s with you.”

  She emptied the little pink pills, some stamped with a Star of David, others hatched with the letter x, into the small embroidered Bedouin pouch attached to a thin string of yarn around her neck and resting under her costume low between her breasts. Then, returning the envelope to him, she said, “Here, you can use this to write me a letter from jail when you’re arrested with your kids.” Shimshon gave her a sly smile. “Eh, arrested for what?” he asked, though he knew very well to what she was alluding—Operation Ben-Zeruya, about which she happened to possess privileged information, and had already expressed her passionate disapproval. Then, he added, “Eh, who knows? Maybe you will be sitting in jail with me. Wouldn’t that be cozy?”—which was meant as a pointed reminder, to put her on notice that he also had her by the balls, so to speak, literally by the kadurim, by virtue of the pills, the Ecstasy that was between them.