by Tova Reich
As Tommy Messiah rushed off, rolling his cart to his broken-down van parked in the Birkenau lot in front of the Gate of Death alongside a sparkling yellow Volkswagen tour bus from Munich, and as Krystyna, hauling Gloria’s purchases in two used and wrinkled “Auschwitz Gift Shop” shopping bags courtesy of Tommy Messiah, led the group through the arched entryway under the watchtower into the killing center, Norman was thinking despairingly that he would just run ahead straight to the massive stone and granite monument at the end of the rail spur, between the ruins of Crematoria II and III, light a memorial candle, and beseech God to save him from imminent scandal and disgrace. Maybe he would even scribble a little note and insert it between the stones, the way petitioners did at the Western Wall in Jerusalem—“Dear God,” he would write, “For the sake of Your Holocaust, don’t let me get fucked over again. Love, Norman.” This was not idolatry, he told himself, it was an emergency stopgap measure, it was crisis intervention. To add to his problems, he was still lugging around that Nazi helmet, which he could not figure out what to do with. He had thought of simply abandoning it on the roadside, or in the taxi as he rode from the convent to meet the group at Birkenau, but then reconsidered—it might really have some value, what did a peddler like Tommy Messiah know? Maybe, though, he would leave it after all, like an offering, near the stone slabs at the international memorial here in Birkenau with the inscriptions in all those languages—at the German slab perhaps. He could fill it with flowers that other visitors had left, they would never miss them, with a note inside, “From a repentant Storm Trooper, we Germans are a new people,” or, more realistically, “Remember Dresden! Remember the German Holocaust!” or, better still, “The Holocaust Is a Hoax, Neo-Nazis Unite!” No, that was too incendiary. And what if they traced it back to him? Then the federal government Holocaust Museum check he had made out to a small-time crook and hustler for personal, non-business-related access to the notorious Auschwitz-defiling Carmelite convent that had ended up in the hands of Polish police to bail out a gang of Zionist hoodlums who had uprooted the crosses and vandalized Polish national property would look like peanuts by comparison. And of course, for the sake of authenticity, for verisimilitude, he would need to write whichever note he decided to leave inside the Nazi helmet in German. That was a problem. His German, he had to admit, if only to himself, was essentially little more than his kitchen Yiddish tarted up, spiked with a sharper edge.
Krystyna, for her part, as she entered Birkenau at the head of her charges, was, as always when she arrived at this place, bitterly reminded of the stories her mother used to tell her of how the invading German forces had marched Soviet prisoners of war into their town of Brzezinka to raze and demolish their homes in order to carry off the used bricks to build the barracks of the women’s camp, which were still standing to the left of the tracks alongside which they were walking. Of course, after the war, to rebuild their homes, some of the citizens, her mother had told her, had understandably taken part in the dismantling of the wooden barracks to the right of the tracks, leaving only the haunting desolation of the brick chimneys within those stone rubble outlines of the rectangular foundations. But, as every child to whom the cautionary universal tale of the three little pigs had ever been whispered in the darkness of bedtime could attest, a wooden house could never make up for the loss of the solidity and the security of brick, and, in any case, the main point, as far as Krystyna was concerned, was the utter absence of any sympathy at all for the suffering and the besmirching of their good name that the Polish locals had endured as a result of the Nazi occupation and the proximity of the camps. Why didn’t anyone ever consider their feelings? What kind of obscene blasphemy was it to insinuate that the Poles were worse even than the German barbarians, that the Poles hurled themselves upon their Jewish neighbors with pitchforks and scythes and flaming torches to do the Germans’ dirty work, that the Poles were common collaborationists like your maniacal Croat killer, your debauched Ukrainian peasant? Jesus Christ, the Poles were victims too—martyrs, Christians. Why was all the attention focused only on the Jews? That’s all anyone ever heard—Jews, Jews, Jews. In places like China with over a billion population, they must be stunned when they discover one fine morning that there are after all so few Jews in the world, given all the noise and trouble these Jews stir up and the landfills of verbiage they generate. Even the inscription on the granite slabs of the memorial here in Birkenau, which had once so equitably and inclusively acknowledged everyone who had suffered and perished without singling out any particular group for the victim’s prize, even that innocent inscription had to be revised to give center stage to the Jews. Krystyna shuddered as she pictured the merciless squeeze that must have been applied to bring about this change. She dealt with these Jews all the time, she knew what ruthlessness they were capable of. They were the world-class memorialists, they made their memories their religion, they worshipped their memories like an idol, they made their memories everyone else’s memories, they had the corner on the memory market.
She would have liked to talk to Bunny about this. Bunny was open to suffering diversity, Bunny was not a genocide xenophobe, Bunny was not a Holocaust hog, but Bunny had been ignoring her rather coldly since last night, avoiding looking into her eyes, hovering like a traumatized child with her thumb stuck in her mouth close to the designer skirts of her champion shopper mother, whose bags she, Krystyna, was now schlepping like some kind of coolie, like a Slavic serf as they walked along the tracks deeper into the vastness of the camp. There was no one on whom she could rely, no one she could trust, no one who would not in the end abandon or betray her. Monty over there had detached himself pointedly from the group and was behaving, as usual, as if there were nothing he could possibly learn from her of all people, giving off signals that all of the information she was spoon-feeding them with was special sugarcoated watered-down tourist packets utterly beneath him. He was kicking the pebbles across the rails with his signature macho cockiness and his jaunty strut, though she could tell of course that something was bothering him, she knew him too intimately, as much as it mattered to him that the whole world regard him as immune to worrying, she knew he was beset. Up ahead she could see Norman surging in the direction of the monument like some sort of wreck gasping on its last cylinder, evidently panic-stricken by his latest crisis, whatever that was, totally useless as usual. And as for her boss, the Honorable Maurice, king of the Holocaust, any minute now, if he hadn’t finally keeled over with a hemorrhage from perpetual overexcitement, he would be charging back from turning the screws on that dumb cowboy congressman from some state in the American Wild West, expecting her to have already delivered his audience to the monument at the end of the tracks so that he could do his routine of the Kaddish and the candles and the canned speech with the corrupt tears.
Krystyna made up her mind to give them the quick tour—they had all, herself not least among them, had it up to the kazoo with this lousy Holocaust. She would point out to them the major sites along the way, the blocks of barracks, some still standing, most in ruins, the rows of vertical columns like a chorus of witnesses with bowed heads between which the electrified barbed wire had been strung, the guard towers lining the tracks, the unloading ramp, the remains of Crematoria II and III, et cetera et cetera—and that’s as far as they would go. They would skip the rubble of the other two crematoria and the ash field. She would bring them directly up to the monument, she decided, discreetly sweep away whatever memento might have been left this time by some visiting joker, a tampon in a condom, for example, a standard favorite, and park them there to await the advent of Maurice.
They continued walking along the railway spur, drawing closer to the end of the line, arriving at the unloading ramp where, as she explained to them, selections had taken place, conducted personally, most memorably, by Mengele M.D. himself—the prisoners dragged out of the cattle cars marched straight to the gas chambers, with a few of the more able-bodied and unencumbered spared for the interim, singled
out to die more slowly from slave labor and starvation and despair and disease. As they came closer to the unloading ramp, however, there seemed to suddenly materialize, like a supernatural vision in a clearing mist, a large circle of human beings frozen in a sitting posture on the muddy ground around the railway track, with that bushy-bearded guru robed from head to foot in celestial white presiding from the elevation of his wheelchair, like a benevolent godfather officiating at the last supper.
He strummed a few chords on the guitar resting in his lap to rivet their attention as Krystyna and her charges approached. “Welcome, oh welcome, my sweetest friends and welcome to you, holy holy Jiriki,” he chanted in a minor key with a husky catch in his voice, while plucking the strings of his guitar, serenading Gloria almost exclusively. “You are so so special, Jiriki, we believe in you so much. How we have waited for you, holy holy Jiriki, how we have longed only for you. Come rest from your spiritual journey here on the healing soil of Birkenau filled with such great knowing and such holiness. Come cry with us, come laugh with us, come meditate with us. The holy holy souls of the dead and of those of us living in our present lives will open up and make room for you in our circle. Sit down beside our good friend Marano carrying her Rumi. It is the sitting place in our circle of samsara that has been held for you since the beginning of time.” All of this he sang to the accompaniment of his guitar in a kind of improvised lamentation melody that combined the chanting of Tibetan monks with the cantillation of the synagogue.
Gloria clapped her hands. “Oh, let’s,” she cried. “It would be so much fun! And I’m so tired anyway from all that shopping—I’m just dying. I’ve got to rest, my feet are killing me, I’ve got to slip off my heels, I’ve got to sit down, so I might as well meditate while I’m at it—even though I have no idea how,” she added with a giggle.
“Oh, it’s just an old Chanel anyway,” she went on distractedly, brushing her skirt as if it were a rag not worth paying any attention to as the redhead whom Norman had met that morning behind the Auschwitz gate, now covered chastely by a long batik poncho, came softly forward on bare feet and slipped a cushion under her. Gloria sat down on the ground next to Marano, greeting her with a cordial smile, like a well-bred dinner party guest taking her assigned place at the table. “I think Rumi is a very nice name for a baby, honey,” she said sociably. “Is it short for something, like Abrumi—which is short for Abraham? Because I had a cousin named Abraham, Abraham Mitnik, but we called him Abrumi. He was a dentist.” The others in their group, seeing Gloria settling in for a stretch of time to be arbitrarily dictated by herself alone, bowed to their fates and found places for themselves in the circle as well.
Mickey Fisher-roshi played a rippling chord on his guitar to scatter the distractions. “You know, my beautiful friends,” he began again, continuing with his chant like an ancient storytelling minstrel around a fire, “I want to tell you something very very deep. We are in a concentration camp. A concentration camp blesses you with concentration, so my holy holy friends, concentrate your chakra centers to take this in, this is the deepest thing. There is so much hunger in this world—hunger for dharma, hunger for enlightenment, hunger for satori, hunger for self-realization, hunger for transformation, hunger for nirvana, hunger for oneness. Sometimes I am hungry. So I eat a schnitzel—a tofu schnitzel. I eat ten tofu schnitzels, and my hunger is satisfied, I am all schnitzeled out. But, my beautiful friends, and this is one of the deepest levels, there are also spiritual schnitzels, and however many spiritual schnitzels I eat, I can never be satisfied. Spiritually I always remain hungry, spiritually I am always seeking. Now listen to this, my sweetest friends. Say you are hungry now, even though eating is forbidden in Birkenau by the rules of the camp. Say, though, that you really could use a coffee break, with a doughnut maybe, or a bagel with cream cheese, or a bialy and butter, or a pineapple-walnut muffin, perhaps, even though if eating were allowed here we would of course permit ourselves only a thin soup made from potato peels, which we would drink from a tin bowl without a spoon, and maybe also a chunk of moldy bread. What is the biggest problem in the world? My friends, we do not know how to nourish ourselves. That is the problem. It is so so deep! Listen to this, my beautiful friends. We must nourish ourselves now by reading out the names of the dead souls whose lives were interrupted and who cannot rest. As we read these names, some of us may be moved to add names from our own private Holocausts and some of us may be moved to speak, to cry out from the deepest depths of our hearts. Do not be afraid, my beautiful friends, the main thing is not to be afraid at all. There is holy holy healing energy here in Birkenau. Open your souls to Auschwitz and let yourselves be nourished. My friends, let us now remember the dead souls. Read!”
Jake Gilguli lifted his shofar to his lips and blew a long doleful wail as everyone in the circle resumed their meditative practice while a Japanese Zen Buddhist nun rose from her zafu and made her way noiselessly through a ring of memorial candles to the large carved cinnabar bowl resting on a rosewood stand set between the rails like an offering in the center of the circle. She took one of the lists of names out of the bowl and began to read: Horowitz, Anna; Horowitz, Eva; Horowitz, Henrik; Horowitz, Hinda; Horowitz, Joseph; Horowitz, Laszlo; Horowitz, Milka; Horowitz, Reiza; Horowitz, Shlomo; Horowitz, Tibi. She continued the naming of the members of the Horowitz tribe for many minutes. Were they related at the start, she wondered, as they were at the end? When she reached Horowitz, Zygmunt, she had completed the names on her list. Bending down to return it to the bowl, she added in a high trembling voice, “And Sadako Sasaki and all of the other children radiated and vaporized in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the Japanese Holocaust.”
A black man in an impeccably tailored three-piece suit and an orange dashiki-cloth tie, with a close-fitting white crocheted openwork skullcap pulled over his head, stood up in the circle. “Brother Mickey,” he began in confident resonant revivalist tones accustomed to the podium, “I, Pushkin Jones, am moved by the words of the good sister to bear witness for the sake of our forefathers and foremothers by naming the nameless of the Jones clan, the lawful property of the slave master Jefferson Jones, who were among the more than sixty million—sixty million, I stress!—victims of the African-American Holocaust.” Closing his eyes, he sang in a deep bass riffing on the blues: Jones, Negro girl, age eight. Jones, Negro boy, branded. Jones, Negro female, age twelve, lactating. Jones, mulatto boy, age three months. Jones, Negro male, age twenty-two, scarred back. Jones, Negro female, possessed by the devil. Jones, Negro male, age thirty-eight, no teeth. Jones, Negro female, runaway.”
From the other side of the circle, Reb Tikkun from the Shtetls, the former Sheldon B. Noodleman from the Office of Management and Budget, dressed like a Polish peasant except for the fringed garment over his white shirt and black vest, and the beard and curled sidelocks dangling like coiled ribbons from under his cap, took up his klezmer fiddle to jam with Pushkin Jones, and then began to sing counterpoint to him, in a melody like a Yiddish dirge. “We also must name our nameless. Prisoners numbers 74883 to 74885—three Jewish females from Oppeln. Number 172853—baby boy born in the Birkenau women’s camp. Numbers 74889 to 74901—group transport of thirteen Jewish females. Numbers 172860 to 173049—one hundred and ninety Jewish men from Westerbork, Holland. Numbers 74902 to 74970—sixty-nine Jewish women on the same transport from Holland. No numbers—the six hundred and eighty nine others on the transport from Holland, including one hundred and twenty-two children, killed in the gas chambers.”
The two gladiators, Pushkin Jones and Reb Tikkun from the Shtetls, were sufficiently armed and ready to carry on with this musical duel until the camp closed and they were chased out by the guards, but they were silenced by a chain of actions that began with Fisher-roshi jabbing his elbow into Jake Gilguli’s side, who, in turn, was catapulted out of his profound meditative state, fumbled to retrieve his shofar, took it up to his lips, and let out a startling blast. After allowing some time for the purity of the meditation practic
e to be restored in the ensuing silence, Fisher-roshi began to strum his guitar again and weave his mantras into the mind streams. “My sweetest friends, remember these words—peace and oneness. Peace to all the souls of the victims, living and dead, nameless and named. Oneness to all of our Holocausts, oneness in honoring our Holocaust diversity. So deep, so deep! We will never know, my beautiful friends, we will never know what mysteries lie in the depths of the human heart. For the sake of peace and oneness, for the sake of enlightenment and healing, my holy holy friend Jake Gilguli will now share the testimony of his karmic transformation.”
Jake Gilguli stood up, taking some time to unfold to his full six feet four inches in his brown robe for this special occasion, presenting himself before them in all the blond perfection of a superhero in mufti. As Jack Gallagher, he told them in the confident tones of the hereditary senior corporate executive, he had been trained from the earliest years of his privileged childhood to become a warrior on Wall Street, mowing down and slaying all of his competitors. But all along he was troubled by strange phobias and nightmares. He was terrified, for example, of high black leather boots and of trains. Trains were the dominant motif in his dreams—being pushed into and out of trains to the accompaniment of the screams and lashes of uniformed officers, standing on crowded platforms wedged among weeping women and children and men weighed down with bundles, huddling inside dark boxcars unable to breathe, with no possibility of escape. At the same time, he was inexplicably attracted to movies about the Holocaust and to Jews, especially to Jewish women of more zaftig proportions, with dark mustaches over their lips, and a black mole in the crevice of the nostril, and prizewinning puckered thighs—the kind of stereotypical Jewess who, for a Jack Gallagher, must remain a secret vice, with whom he could never be seen in public. It was one such woman, a drill sergeant from the Israeli army named Bathsheba, who led him to the discovery of his past life as Yankel Galitzianer when she showed him an ad in a Hebrew newspaper, a language he could not read or understand, for the New Jersey burial society of the shtetl of Przemysl, seeking other survivors. Immediately he recited the names and described the physical characteristics of his two comrades, Jacek Lustiger and Henryk Pfefferkorn, who had escaped into the forest three days before the roundups in Przemysl, while he, Yankel Galitzianer, had been herded into a cattle car by black-booted guards, and he rode for a week on the rails without water or food until he came here to Birkenau, where he was sent to the left at this very unloading ramp during the selections by Dr. Mengele himself, and marched with the others into the gas chamber of Crematorium III—from which all that remains is that pile of imploded rubble over there. The Przemysl burial society ad was like a lightbulb being switched on in his brain; it was—enlightenment. Everything came back to him at that moment, his entire childhood, his mother’s Sabbath candlesticks, his father’s melodies amazingly authentic, like the tunes in Fiddler on the Roof. As for the mundane details of what happened to him after his spiritual awakening, he did not really want to go into that, it was much too hurtful—how the surviving members of the Przemysl burial society refused to recognize him as one of their own, as the reincarnation of Yankel Galitzianer, and to give him a plot; how the rabbis from every Jewish denomination repeatedly rejected him as a candidate for conversion; how even his own Gallagher family had sought to have him declared legally incompetent and committed to a mental institution and divested of his fortune, though thanks to his excellent attorneys, they were foiled in this nefarious scheme resoundingly and expensively—boy, were they sorry that they ever started up with him! Suffice it to say, however, that his life was renewed when he met his great Zen master, Mickey Fisher-roshi, who illuminated his karma, who saved him from annihilation a second time and rebirthed him as Jake Gilguli, an awakening for which he would be eternally grateful and indebted, in this and in all his future lives.