My Holocaust

by Tova Reich

  The minister of jihad indicated the Hasid, who was now crouching down, pulling equipment out of his luminous orange bag, and attending to the fallen body on the floor of the Hall of Witness, and confided in a familiar way to Maurice, “That’s my son the doctor.”

  “He’s a doctor?” Maurice asked incredulously. Almost nothing could surprise him anymore.

  “Ah well, you’ll excuse a poor father’s forgivable embellishments,” Abu Shahid conceded, working his worry beads. “Actually, he’s merely an emergency medical technician. But, alas, he is my son, Shahid, a crazy boy unfortunately. They should call me Abu Majnun, not Abu Shahid! I sent him to the Harvard of terrorist training camps in Afghanistan, he was on track to become the world’s greatest jihad martyr for Allah, a hero of Islam. But then the rabbis got hold of him when he was on holiday in Ukraine looking for a preview of paradise—the rabbis of Chabad. He mixed them up with the mullahs of Hamas, my poor Shahid. Chabad, Hamas—what’s the difference? A bunch of beards on the prowl for lost souls, promising deliverance, salvation, the Messiah—the boy was never too discriminating. And this is my reward—a Jewish doctor without even a shingle.”

  “I see, I see,” Maurice replied, nodding his head sympathetically. “Well, if that’s your son the doctor, then maybe that holy schwester nun over there talking to herself holding that urine analysis pish bottle is mine daughter the nurse. It looks like a shidduch made in heaven. Maybe we should introduce them.”

  That was the last time anyone connected to the museum saw or spoke to Abu Shahid, though his chief of staff, Leyla Salmani, having at some point changed out of her military gear into a civilian public relations suit with an elegant leather briefcase, the rich black tresses of her hair pinned neatly back in a stern chignon that revealed the coiled wire descending from the plug in her ear, took up her post in front of the Fourteenth Street entrance as the official spokesperson for United Holocausts throughout the ensuing takeover of the museum. Afterward it was determined that the minister of jihad had probably vanished during the wild confusion of the opening salvos of the action, when the strobe lights on the ceilings throughout the museum began to flash, the fire alarm started blaring, and the public address system came on with calm authority. “Ladies and gentlemen, this is a Holocaust simulation role-playing exercise. It is only a test, but all visitors are required by law to just follow orders as if it were the real event. Remain calm and do not panic. Collect all your belongings and valuables, and proceed to the designated Umschlagplatz assembly points for resettlement. Uniformed guards with batons will conduct you down the stairs, which for the purposes of this exercise will serve as virtual cattle cars to be unloaded at the Department of Agriculture as you exit the building on the Fourteenth Street side, or, if you are sent to the right, Raoul Wallenberg Place and the official entrance to the popular Bureau of Engraving and Printing on the Fifteenth Street side. Once again, please remain calm and refrain from talking—and have a nice day.” It had been Monty’s brainstorm to frame the fire-drill announcement in this way, in line with the overall concept of immersing visitors in a virtual Holocaust experience from the perspective of the victims, as reflected also in the raw crematorium-like brick and steel design of the building with such atmospheric details as its narrowing central staircase and its watchtower-like structures on one side, and the ID cards distributed to visitors upon entering the exhibition personally linking them to a random victim in the creepy journey through the haunted house of the Holocaust in the lottery of ultimate extermination or survivorship—all carried out within psychologically tested parameters set by the comfort-level consultant, of course, visitors safely aware throughout that it was all not real, that it was all just for fun, that after undergoing this self-improvement tour, and after inscribing their selected deep thoughts in the comment book at the end, “I enjoyed it very much, thank you for making the Holocaust possible,” they will walk out Homo erectus as they had walked in, resuming once again the hunt for something to eat.

  Now as the visitors, prodded and hustled by the guards, streamed down the stairs and out of the vaulting gallery of the Hall of Witness to the two exits on either side of the building, mostly calmly but also on occasion with sporadic flurries of muted cries and mounting panic that were swiftly and decisively brought under control by the uniformed personnel, Bunny turned in a fury to Maurice. “Is this really really for real?” she demanded. “Who authorized this, if I may ask?” Maurice simply flipped out his palms and elevated his shoulders with a look of utter confusion on his face; it was one of the rare occasions in his life when he truly had nothing to say and did not say it anyway. The next moment, though, he and Bunny, along with Krystyna, as well as Fisher-roshi and his complete entourage, including Koan Gilguli, and the twins Rumi and Rumi, one carried by Rama, the other in the arms of her niece, the teenager who had read the message from the Tibetan government-in-exile, were borne down the steps like pieces of a shipwreck along with the massive tide of fleeing visitors and museum personnel. Incense and prayer wheels and copies of speeches and other props for the Tibetan Holocaust program were trampled underfoot. The chairs for honored guests and the costly speaker’s podium that had been placed on the landing were also swept or levitated down the stairs at some point in the midst of the stampede, miraculously injuring no one. As for the now-empty wheelchair, only toward the end, when the building had been almost totally evacuated, a visitor with a handicapped-parking-space gripe, who unfortunately had not had time to absorb the lessons of the Holocaust before the alarm went off, gave it a definitive push. As if in a dream, they all watched from the floor of the Hall of Witness as it went bumping down, steered, it seemed, by some invisible divine hand, until it came to a halt upright and undamaged at the foot of the stairs. Maurice immediately sat down in it. He did this unthinkingly, for in every other known public circumstance without exception he took great pains and pride in separating himself from the signs and symbols of infirmity and old age that afflicted lesser mortals. He was simply not himself at that moment. That moment, it could reliably be said—and, indeed, Maurice did say so himself to his Blanche afterward, when it was all over—was the worst moment he had ever experienced in his entire life, not excluding the actual Holocaust itself, which, however terrible it was, with the humiliation and torture and murder of his mother and father, his brothers and sisters, and so on and so forth, not to mention all that he had personally suffered and gone through, at least had a reason. What was that reason? “What kind stupid question is that? To make lessons, of course, to make memorials mit morals,” Maurice stated categorically.

  Seated in the wheelchair, Maurice now regarded this beloved estate of his in which he would have vowed that the mortar between every brick was mixed with his own life’s blood, you could probably prove this with a DNA test. He saw that the place was already almost entirely empty. It gave off the hollow ghostly residue and vibrations of a space that was forlorn and solitary after having once been tumultuous with life. It seemed now to have finally truly been turned over to the dead. Looking around, Maurice observed someone he did not immediately recognize taking great pains to adjust a large notice of some sort behind the glass on the Fourteenth Street entrance of the building and locking securely the doors from within; he assumed that another thug was carrying out a similar criminal act on the other side. Apart from himself and Bunny and Krystyna, representing the museum, and apart from Fisher’s Buddhist delegation with the twins Rumi and Rumi, supervised by their cousin, now chasing each other with wild squeals and skidding delightedly on their rumps along these vast, polished, evacuated spaces, the only other people he could see in the shadows of the lofty Hall of Witness were the nun, the Hasid, and the cloaked creature now evidently recovered, the three of them unloading the grocery bags from the baby carriage in front of the entrance to the Remember the Children exhibition. Maurice’s eye turned to the information desk in the center of the atrium. Information, he thought, that’s what I need. With remarkable speed and dexterity,
he rolled the wheelchair across the floor to this visitors’ service facility. Though it was now completely abandoned, he was determined nevertheless to exercise his right as a taxpayer to get his money’s worth. “Gottenyu,” Maurice cried, “what’s going on here?”

  As if in answer to his question, a deep voice came down from the monumental heights of the Hall of Witness with its great angled skylights letting in the fragmented light of the brooding heavens. “Brothers and sisters, rejoice! The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum is liberated. The Holocaust has been returned to the people. All Holocausts are created equal. United Holocausts, the umbrella group for all Holocausts, known and unknown, past, present, and future, has occupied this infrastructure. The occupation will continue until equal representation is given to all Holocausts, public and private, personal and global, animal, vegetable, and mineral. The Jewish Holocaust will be apportioned an equal place among all other Holocausts, no better and no worse, no more and no less in the universe of Holocausts. Stand by for the posting of the details of our nonnegotiable demands on our Web site and in the media. Museum personnel still on the premises are free to leave unharmed. We take no human hostages. We take hostage only the infrastructure and everything it contains, pledging our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor not to leave until the Holocaust is returned to We the People, to all Holocausts united. Remember, when it comes to Holocausts, a laboratory rat is a force-fed chicken is an endangered-species whale is your grandma. Brothers and sisters, take back your Holocaust!”

  “I’m out of here,” Krystyna declared, and, dropping the tote bag at Bunny’s feet so that the DustBuster came spilling out, she loped on her high heels across the vacated expanse of the Hall of Witness toward the exit on the Fourteenth Street side, where she was quickly let out by a tall menacing figure in a three-piece suit with the leg of a pantyhose in a mocha latte hue squashing the features of his face beyond recognition.

  Bunny turned sharply to Mickey Fisher. “How could you do this to me after I gave you this gig today in the Tibetan Holocaust?” she demanded with barely suppressed hysteria. Then, glaring in a rage at Rama, she hissed, “And I thought we were sisters!”

  “You’re free to leave too, you know,” Rama said serenely. “You heard the man.”

  “Are you out of your mind? I should leave this place for trash like you to vandalize and muck up like nobody’s business? Never! You’ll have to carry me out in a box first!” Bunny bent down furiously to retrieve her DustBuster. Then, noticing some dirt a short distance away, she could not stop herself. She flicked on the switch and began to vacuum. As she spotted more and more places that required attention, she started to crawl on her hands and knees, vacuuming as she went along. Fisher-roshi, Rama, and Koan Gilguli intuited that it was a tremendous relief to Bunny to be engaged in this useful chore, it was overwhelmingly healing and therapeutic under the circumstances, it helped her enormously in dealing with this extremely stressful situation. They watched with enlightened and tolerant interest as Bunny continued to do her thing, crawling away from them on all fours, behind the staircase in the direction of the Donor’s Lounge, vacuuming all the way. Only when she came suddenly to a stop, depositing herself with a thud directly on the floor with her head sunk in the palms of her two hands and her shoulders heaving, did they judge it to be the correct time to approach.

  Bunny lifted her flushed face with her red-framed glasses all askew, resembling a portrait by Picasso. “I need a Valium,” she said.

  “We don’t do Valium,” Rama responded. “I can roll you a joint though.”

  “Just do me one favor please?” Bunny said. “No marijuana in the museum—out of respect for the dead? It’s the least you could do for me when I’ve really really always been on your side, after all. Who has worked harder for Holocaust equality and diversity than I have?—only I’ve been doing it the whole time by peaceful means, bit by bit, and now you’ve come in like gangbusters and blown it all to hell. Thanks a lot! Why are you doing this to me of all people—especially at a time like this? My mother is dying in your deadbeat dad’s crappy nursing home,” she spat out, glaring at Rama. “I was supposed to catch the shuttle right after today’s program to visit her on her deathbed—and now I can’t go. By tomorrow she’ll be gone. Because of you, I’m never going to see my mommy again. And afterward I won’t even have a chance to do the appropriate grief work. I’m going to have to sign up for a three-week session at bereavement camp when this is all over if I ever want to get closure—and where am I going to find time for that with my schedule? It’s all your fault.” She began to grope desperately around on the floor for her DustBuster, her fingers itching again for the relief of at least one more small dose of vacuuming.

  Rama looked down at her unmoved. “The way I see it,” she said, “you have two options. You can split like the man said and catch your old lady before she heads out to the bardo, or you can call off your final-solution orders and hire a private nurse to give her something to eat—you dig what I’m saying? You can afford a private nurse, right? That way, if she’s not too far gone already, since you’re so uptight about doing the right thing when it comes to looking good in this bourgeois town, maybe you’d have a little more lebensraum to get to her in time for the deathbed trip.”

  “Starving your own mommy to death?” Koan Gilguli put in, gliding his two forefingers over each other. “Shame, shame, not very nice, especially for the director of the formerly Jewish Holocaust Museum. What about the lessons of the Holocaust? I truly hope and pray that reports of this don’t get out—so unseemly, such a tacky Third Reich thing, life unworthy of life and all that yucky stuff. And scheduling the mercy killing at such an inconvenient time, too, when it’s so hard to slot a deathbed visit into your calendar—who would have ever thought? We heard all about it through the grapevine, by the way, that you’ve given the order to hasten the end so to speak, from Rama-sensei’s sister, Naomi-zenchin’s mom,” and he indicated the teenager now positioning herself for meditation on the floor, not far from the information desk where Maurice remained parked in his wheelchair, absorbed in watching three figures drawing closer, grimacing as they struggled to peel the pantyhose off their heads.

  Bunny stood up, suddenly feeling herself to be at an extreme disadvantage on the floor, looked down upon and reduced like a child by these emboldened inquisitors. “Excuse me,” she said, “but just who do you think you are? What happens between my mom and me is none of your business—is that clear? I, and I alone, am privy to her living will, and I alone have the legal authority to make decisions in her best interest. Furthermore, for your information, there is no reason in hell why I should feel obliged to justify myself to a gang of terrorists and pot-heads who don’t understand the first thing about it.” Her voice was rising shrilly. “Now if you don’t mind, I need a time out, I need some space to make a call.” She extracted her cell phone from the pocket of her extra-long suit jacket and pressed the top number on her speed-dialing list, instantly reaching her psychiatrist’s answering machine. Even after all her years in therapy with him, going on half a century, he still had never disclosed to her his August number at his vacation house, paid for in large measure, she had no doubt, by the steady flow of her hefty checks, somewhere on Cape Cod or in the Hamptons, she thought, even that detail he had not revealed to her, it had become a bitter theme in their sessions when other topics ran dry.

  “Ah, that beautiful soul, the holy holy Jiriki, is poised at the threshold of the fourth bardo, the bardo of the moment of death,” Fisher-roshi now somberly intoned. “How I wish I could be at her side at this moment to guide her toward the liberation of the after-death plane. But I must remain here to claim this memorial in the name of the oneness of all Holocausts, in the name of all the dead of all Holocausts who call out to me now to guide them to rebirth in this holy holy place.” Closing his eyes and raising his arms, he cried out in a voice pitched to pierce the high brick and masonry walls of the Hall of Witness and travel hundreds of mi
les to penetrate the ears of the hollow-cheeked and dry-lipped Gloria as she lay curled up on her side, clutching a pillow to her breast in a strange institutional bed. “Oh noble one, you who were called Gloria-Jiriki in this life, what is known as death has now come upon you. You are departing from this world. Do not cling to this life out of weakness or fondness or fear. You have no power to remain. Open yourself to the shock of the transition and seek your liberation.”

  Maurice shook his head as this madness engulfed him. What had he done to deserve it? He had heard that Gloria was dying. He had even heard the rumor that Bunny had helped her along with a grateful daughterly kick out the door. She was going to become a very wealthy lady, this money Bunny. If he ever managed to get out of this present mess, he should not forget to consult with the council lawyer about the public perception and the appearance of impropriety, never mind the ethics, of accepting mega-donations from the in-house sitting director. He could count on his lawyer to deliver the desired opinion, his lawyer was his own personal lapdog, maybe he wasn’t so bright upstairs as lawyers go, but he was his slave, there was nothing he wouldn’t do to hold on to his place of honor at the head of the table at the twice-yearly festive meetings of the full board. Bunny would be forced to resign in order to really really contribute, Maurice fantasized. That would be a blessing from heaven, he would seize the opportunity when this mess was over as he had snatched opportunity from other dark moments in his life, beginning with the Holocaust. Oh, where was Monty now when Maurice truly needed him? Monty would have had the brains and guts to stand beside him in this perilous hour, with the survival of the museum and the entire Holocaust and the memory of the six million at the very top of the severely endangered species list. They would have been an unbeatable team, he and Monty, the two of them together would have instantly vaporized the three goons now stationed in front of him, two of whom, to his dismay but not to his shock, he of course recognized instantly—Jews, what then? Why was it the case that Jews are always the ones who are so liberally ready to sacrifice everything that they’ve struggled so hard to earn, including this powerful monument to their unrivaled, spectacular pain and suffering, for the sake of some soft, deluded, utopian ideal? The third terrorist in front of him, the black guy in the three-piece suit wired for radio communication, the one who looked like the affirmative-action ringleader, standing a head taller between the other two like the African in the Olympics who always wins the gold medal—well, Maurice reflected, that one also looked familiar, Maurice definitely knew him from somewhere too. What, Maurice repeated to himself, oh what had he ever done to deserve this? Bunny, his sole ally on the ground in this crisis, had already fallen to pieces beyond repair, hanging on to her vacuum cleaner like it was a ventilator, life support. She could now be seen shambling around in circles pressing her cell phone to her ear with her right hand, plugging a finger of her left hand into her other ear, engaging in a therapy session with her shrink’s answering machine, speed-dialing over and over again whenever the machine timed out. This was Maurice’s reward for his selflessness in accepting Gloria’s lousy ten million for the sake of the museum. Had he been thinking about his own interests and preferences, of course Monty would be his director today, never mind the potentially explosive scandals such as the refugee calamity due to reckless reporting, or the cans of Zyklon B in the garage, or the police rap for wife and prostitute beating—he and Monty together would have found creative ways to spin all of that, and, for that matter, anything else that might have come popping up out of the sewers. Had Maurice been thinking of himself instead of the museum, he would have turned down Gloria’s money no matter how much she offered, even if she had written out a check on the spot for one hundred million dollars—and Monty would be standing at his side at this very moment, Maurice would not have been so desperately alone.