My Holocaust

by Tova Reich

  Still, even with all of her heartless belligerence, he was madly drawn to her. She was irresistible, a goddess, the most bewitchingly mysterious and unknowable woman he had ever known. In the early days even a glimpse of her from a distance would so overcome him he felt he would collapse; once, even, he had been obliged to turn away to throw up, as if in a fever. They battled over every centimeter, all of his friends warned she would destroy him. Most recently she had threatened to organize her own competing scout pilgrimage to Auschwitz-Birkenau, of veteran West Bank stone-throwing shabab youth, to add the crescent of Islam to the stars and crosses in the ash field in commemoration of the Palestinian Holocaust. She could not understand why he objected even to the Stars of David stuck into the mortal remains of the dead Jews; it was just too precious, too manipulative and calculating of him, she insisted, the way he rejected all concessions so that none would have to be extended in return. She insisted that the idea of having his kids collect bones for burial in Israel was morbid and sentimental child exploitation, that the rabbis, though in most instances insufferable thugs, were absolutely justified in this case in refusing to permit interment in hallowed ground even if their reasons were plainly racist, to prevent possible pollution by non-Jewish remains. Go ahead, she declared, stick your bags of bones into the mud of your kibbutz and cover them up with your manure and chant your mumbo jumbo and dance your “Am Yisrael Chai” hora over them if that deludes you into believing that you’re still alive, that you’ve escaped annihilation once and for all. Yet even without a single hair on her head, even in her shapeless inmate’s uniform, Leyla was luminous, she was magnificent, it was exquisitely painful to let her go, excruciatingly difficult to part from her even now when she was being so cold, so cruel, so impossible, just the thought that he must now leave her aroused in his soul an aching longing, every molecule in him was already missing her fearfully in advance, it was like giving up light, intensity, the rush of feeling alive. But his kids were drawing him away, he could not fail them, it was his duty to transform this trip from passive ghetto mourning to hopeful Zionist defiance, so he turned to Leyla and said, “Eh, if I stay with you one minute longer, I will lose all my strength and become like any other man,” and with no other farewell, he turned and hurried away.

  When he arrived at the ash field with only ten minutes remaining until blastoff, they were standing at their assigned posts, just as he had ordered, regarding him with the unforgiving judgmental scrutiny of children, testing to see how he would react now to the unanticipated obstacle that had arisen in the form of the vehicles, two gleaming limousines and a jeep parked at the edge of the field, and their passengers—that little nudnik of a museum chairman he had met the day before in Auschwitz in the gas chamber of Crematorium I, a trim all American camera-ready type he did not recognize, and an Auschwitz-Birkenau official decked out in the uniform of a park ranger with a coiled wire trailing down behind one ear like a bionic creature plugged into central control. The two dignitaries were strutting around the expanse of the ash field like lords surveying their rightful domain, followed a few paces behind by the proprietary bailiff explaining the improvements and amenities, all of them ignoring for the moment as beneath their notice the underage interlopers stationed at the crosses and the stars, and the peasant poachers. The kids had their eyes mercilessly upon Shimshon. Would he abort the mission? Would he remain true to them, or would he go over to the enemy?

  As he approached the trio in order to better assess the situation and what adjustments in their tactics might be required, he could hear the old man lapping his tongue like a shtadlan, groveling like a caricature of a court Jew; everything that had always disgusted Shimshon about the pathology of the Diaspora was confirmed for him once again. “Congressman,” Maurice Messer was holding forth to the camera-ready specimen, “I want you should know I left before the dessert today a lunch in a five-star restaurant from Krakow mit a top-notch ten-star Polish diplomat who was mine personal guest. Why? Because it was more important to me to be mit you here by the ashes—mit you, Representative Jedediah Jaspers, chairman from the House Appropriations Committee, so that I can show to you mit mine own eyes why our museum must always get the maximum plus in government funding from your appropriations committee, not one penny less. Every time you sit down mit your gavel to hock your committee to order, you must remember these ashes, J. J., you must never forget what I am showing to you here today. What are the ashes from the six million worth in dollars and cents? That’s the question you must ask to yourself, and that’s the question you must answer mit your heart and mit your conscience and mit the whole complete allocation from the annual federal budget. I’m talking to you now not like one human being to another, not even like one American-success-story Jew to another American-success-story Mormon, but more important, I am appealing to you today here on these sacred ashes—chairman to chairman.”

  Maurice looked up sharply, suddenly distracted from his performance, recognizing Shimshon. “Uh-oh,” he said, tugging the congressman’s jacket sleeve, as if to pull him out of the path of an oncoming locomotive, “watch out, J. J., this fella’s a major uch and a vey, a big troublemaker, no respect whatsoever.”

  The guard in his uniform boldly stepped up to Shimshon, standing too close, like a boot-camp commander. “Can I help, sir?” he demanded with a spray of sausage-scented saliva. “Eh, thank you, as a matter of fact, yes,” Shimshon answered, gazing down at him benignly. “Eh, I was wondering if the distinguished chairman of the Holocaust Museum is the one who hired that Nazi car over there?” He pointed to the Mercedes limo idling at the perimeter of the field. “Because, eh, if you will excuse me, there is no ethical difference in my opinion between driving in a Nazi car and using the data from Nazi medical experiments. Eh, personally, even if I were stranded in Death Valley and Steven Spielberg’s Shoah Foundation Nazi car from Raiders of the Lost Ark happened to stop to pick me up, I would refuse to get in, I would not accept the ride.”

  “Take advice, Mac,” the guard warned confidentially, with a kind of menacing solicitude in masterful film-and-television-acquired albeit Slavic-stamped English, “do not attempt comical business—which applies to minors too, I must add.” He illustrated by glancing in the direction of the kids scattered through the field. “Is it clear as mud? Good. So it covers ground. Do not believe one minute even you will exit premises with loot. We have you below surveillance—do you comprehend? Every bone and ash flake hooligans stuff into rucksacks, I beg to remind, is legal property of Auschwitz State Museum and citizens of Poland.” He raised his wrist to his lips, and in staccato Polish he communicated harshly and rapidly into a tiny radio embedded near his watch.

  But the congressman was forging ahead, oblivious to these developments. “My friend,” he said in his sonorous tones, laying his right hand on Maurice’s shoulder but gazing well over his head, at a constituency of ashes, “nobody loves the Jewish people, dead or alive, more than I do. And I say this without any self-interest, since only a minuscule percentage of the voters in the great state of Utah are Jews, and at present, I am planning to spend more time with my family and have no intention of running for president. But I say to you here and now on these sacred ashes, the Jewish people will never have a better friend in the United States Congress than Jed Jaspers—and that’s a promise. As a Saint in the lineage of Ephraim, one of the ten lost tribes of Zion, deep in my heart I feel a special kinship to you and to your Holocaust and to your great state of Israel.” With the same hand with which he had singled out Maurice for his beneficence he now struck his left breast in an ardent pledge of allegiance.

  “I never doubted it for one minute, J. J.,” Maurice responded. “And speaking in the name from the Jewish people, I can tell you that when it comes to you Mormons and to all of your wives and to your Tabernacle Choir, the feeling is one hundred percent mutual.”

  “Yes, we members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints feel a special bond with our Jewish brethren. We have both
suffered persecution and attempts at extermination, and we have both been blessed by the Lord with a special gift for survival and finance. And that is why our elders have decided to tap our great genealogical index—the largest and most complete genealogical database in the world, I might add—to baptize by proxy our deceased Jewish brothers and sisters whom we love so much, in order to bestow upon their dead souls in the afterlife eternal salvation, as well as all of the privileges and blessings of our great faith. I am happy to report to you that, to date, among the late Jews who have been privileged to receive posthumous conversion into the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints we are proud to count Brother Israel Ba’al Shem Tov, founder of Hasidism, Brother David Ben-Gurion, first prime minister of the state of Israel, Brother Sigmund Freud, father of psychoanalysis, and every single victim of the Holocaust whose name is in our genealogical records—and you can bet your life that there are plenty of names on our charts, we’re targeting all six million or however many you’ve got—including that beautiful and spirited little gal that everyone has such a great big crush on, Sister Annie Frank, who, I might add, no longer belongs to you alone but to all of us, to all of mankind, to the entire universe.”

  “How can we ever express our gratitude to you for your generosity?” Maurice said. “I’m telling you, Congressman, if we could reciprocate by making an after-death circumcision for Reb Brigham Young, we would not hesitate for one minute—mit a top-of-the-line catering affair! To live as a Jew, to die as a Jew, and then to wake up in the next life as a Mormon LSD, mit out even having to go to the trouble of applying for admission—what could be better, especially mit your multiple-wives package deal? But you know something, J. J., I just have to tell you, so you shouldn’t be blindsided or God forbid caught off guard—sometimes mit the Jews, it just so happens that the baptism doesn’t take.”

  “Oh, it will take all right—as long as I’m chairman of appropriations holding the purse strings for federal funding of the Holocaust, it will take. What person in his right mind would ever turn down such a generous gift as free membership in our glorious Church, when it is offered with such sincere and unselfish goodwill? Why shouldn’t you Jews appreciate the great benefits of belonging to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints when I myself am not one bit ashamed to consider myself an honorary member of the Jewish faith—and to bear its mark upon my body?” Maurice’s eyes popped wide open, alarmed for an instant that Jaspers was about to drop his pants then and there by way of demonstration of his Jewish membership. Instead, the congressman pulled a gold Star of David out from under his shirt and held it up under Maurice’s nose for inspection. “You see what it says there, my friend?” he pressed on. “Zion—as in Zion National Park, in the great state of Utah—inside a Jewish star, like these terrific Stars of David here, set down among these terrific crosses on this sacred sea of ashes to honor the union of the Jewish and Christian faiths and their equal and shared suffering. I’m telling you, my friend, I love it. It touches my heart real deep. God bless you and God bless America. These crosses and stars send a great big chill right down my spine.”

  “Yes,” Maurice said, “the crosses mit the stars. A very nice decorative touch, like mine wife Blanche would say, a bit of white in the gray, it cheers things up—a very thoughtful gesture on the part from the Polish scouts.”

  “The Polish scouts put them in,” Shimshon cried, “and the Jewish scouts will take them out!” Inserting two fingers between his lips, he let out a piercing whistle. “Operation Ben-Zeruya has begun!” he shouted. “Let’s go, chevra—comrades, kadimah!”

  At this signal, the kids at their assigned stations pulled the loosened posts out of the ash-glutinous earth and began running across the dolorous field bearing the white wooden crosses and the stars on their backs just as the three police cars and the paddy wagon drew up with sirens blaring. When Shimshon realized that the officers spilling out of the cars charging toward them were armed with pistols and truncheons, he yelled, “They’re prepared to murder Jews again in Auschwitz!” and he ordered his troops to drop their burdens at once and to surrender. Eldad and Medad smashed the crosses they were carrying against one another like swords, shattering them to pieces, provoking a zealous avenger of a guard to throw each boy over a shoulder like a bundle of rags for the heretic’s pyre, sending their glasses sinking into a dark pool in the ash marsh, hustling them to the paddy wagon flailing and screaming in hopeless Hebrew, “Help, I can’t see! I can’t see—help!”

  “Chevra, do not lose heart!” Shimshon cried out. “We have prevailed! Symbolically, we are victorious!”

  The old peasant pensioners scuttled forward, abandoning their metal detectors and mushroom baskets, to pick up the remaining crosses and replant them in the ashes with extravagant kisses and mumbled prayers and tears rolling down their leathery cheeks. The stars they left where they had fallen. Maurice Messer turned to the congressman. “This fella is a fringe character,” he said, pointing contemptuously at Shimshon being herded into a police car along with his children’s crusade. “I hope the Poles teach him mit his juvenile delinquents a good lesson once and for all. You don’t have to worry about him. He has nothing to do mit us. He does not represent our Holocaust.”

  The fact is, Maurice Messer was stretching the truth a bit when he told Congressman Jedediah Jaspers that he had left the five-star Krakow restaurant without having had his dessert, though in his defense it ought to be noted that he permitted himself this harmless fib in his devotion to the cause, to impress upon the appropriations chairman the gravity, the urgency, the sacrificial nature of his responsibility with respect to full funding for the museum. Not to begrudge him, but just for the record, the real story is that he had had a very nice crème brûlée with raspberries along with what he called a kichel, though Gloria had described it as a chocolate hazelnut madeleine, to accompany his coffee, followed by an excellent brandy compliments of the house, after which he had corralled them all into the limousine for the ride to Birkenau, dropping them off at the imposing watchtower entrance now functioning as an administration center—the arched gateway through which, by war’s end, trains pulling cattle cars packed with human freight rode efficiently through straight to the gas chamber terminus—and then giving the order to the chauffeur to drive him on to the ash field to catch up with the congressman. As Krystyna detained her charges at the gateway in order to prep them with the stats—the killing center’s size when in operation, four hundred and twenty-three acres with three hundred buildings housing two hundred and fifty thousand prisoners at its height, gassing an average of thirty-four thousand people a month between March of 1942 and November of 1944 for a grand total of one million one hundred thousand exterminated, ninety-five percent of them Jews—Gloria noticed off to the right on the perimeter of the camp, in front of what looked like a church with a huge cross on top looming over the two-hundred-and-twenty-volt-capacity electrified barbed-wire fence, a small souvenir kiosk that caught her eye thanks to its cheerful red-and-white plastic fringe bunting rustling lightly in the warm breeze. Declaring that she absolutely could not return home the next day without all of the gifts that she still needed to buy for her maids, her cook, her hairdresser, her personal trainer, her dog walker, her chauffeur, Bunny’s shrink, her doorman, and so on and so forth, she led the way to this roadside attraction with the others following submissively behind, resigned to the whims of this consort of millionaires.

  That is how they found themselves in front of the SS commandant’s headquarters in which the Jewish women had been raped, now transformed into the parish church of Brzezinka with, in addition to the imposing crucifix on its roof, another one in front, and Polish women dressed in black crossing themselves as they made their way unmolested to and from confession—at Tommy Messiah’s stand, when he got that call on his mobile phone from Shimshon in the Oswiecim county jail. Though Tommy Messiah was speaking in rapid-fire Hebrew, both Norman and Monty could make out the gist of what had happened—basica
lly, what it came down to was that there had been an arrest of some sort over some kind of cross-related protest action—and then something further about the need for posting bond, or bail, or whatever, at which point Monty lost interest, thank God, and went off to fool around with Krystyna, while Norman’s ears truly perked up especially sharply when he caught a reference to a check for five thousand dollars that Tommy Messiah ebulliently declared he would sign over to the Polish authorities immediately since, as luck would have it, this was exactly the amount they were holding out for. Of course they would take this check, ayn ba’ayah, no problem, it was an official United States government check, from the Holocaust Museum of Washington, D.C., for Christ’s sake, made out by the son of the chairman no less, a kind of scalper’s fee, you might call it, or a consultant’s commission, for helping the poor schlimazel gain admission to the Carmelite convent, believe it or not, which any schmuck could get into simply by knocking on the door—this check was one-hundred-percent certified, as good as gold from Fort Knox, don’t worry, hakol beseder, everything is okey-dokey, I’ll be there in less than an hour. Norman was nearly choking with anxiety and agitation, trying desperately to figure out how to intervene and prevent this catastrophe as Tommy Messiah clicked off his phone, stuck it into the back pocket of his jeans, and announced, “Closing time, friends, special bargain prices, every item on the table—three for a dollar,” and began moving things along at a nice clip with the charade of placing his goods out of reach, rendering them thereby irresistibly appealing, ostentatiously stuffing them piece by piece into his worn garbage bags, swatting away like an annoying gnat the frantic entreaties with which Norman was seeking to get his attention, albeit as inconspicuously as possible to avoid arousing the suspicions of Monty and all of his other latent enemies lurking in readiness.