My Holocaust

by Tova Reich

  “It’s finally happened,” she reported to Herzl when she returned to the tree. “The takeover by the universalists that we were all expecting one day. A cholera on them all! What did I always tell you, Rabbi? We can just kiss our one-and-only Holocaust good-bye.”

  Moreover, she informed Herzl, the “bystanders,” as she called them, namely the riffraff and slime that always appeared instantaneously the minute there was word of a disaster, spontaneously generated like maggots on rotting meat—the press, the politicians, the big shots and the big-shot wannabes, every single one of them with an opinion, the hucksters and hustlers and hangers-on, the vultures and buzzards, parasites and scavengers of every shape and size, indecent onlookers and weirdos and freaks of every race, religion, and creed—were collecting on the other side of the building, on the Fourteenth Street side. This is what she had been told by one of the guards, a very nice-looking young man, an American giant with a nose of such cavernous breadth that Henny could see directly inside by tilting her head back and looking up from below. The Fourteenth Street side of the museum was where all the action was, she advised Herzl in a let’s-face-facts tone. It was where they—she, Herzl, and Lipman—ought to go at once without wasting another minute, where they of all people had the right to be, where they above all belonged in this critical hour for Jewish history and memory. The only problem was, as both she and the rabbi understood without acknowledging it out loud, the two of them delicately averting their eyes from the chain that encircled Herzl’s waist and bound him in a grotesque union with the tree, Lipman was hopelessly unreachable at the moment—and it was Lipman who had the key.

  To Lipman’s credit, however, when he finally did show up to liberate the rabbi, and the two men bearing the coffin with Henny bringing up the rear then raced within the limits of their individual speed plateaus to the Fourteenth Street side of the building, it was mainly thanks to his cultivated brazenness, Henny had to admit, that they were able to cut through the massing crowd and slide the coffin under the police barrier into the section directly in front of the museum reserved for the “privileged characters,” as Henny referred to them until she too gained entry into their midst. Taking the lead from Lipman, Henny turned up her bare arm below the elbow to display the blue concentration camp numbers, with Lipman crying out as they pushed boldly across the line, “Holocaust survivors coming through—wanna see our tattoos? What—you think maybe this is my telephone number in case I forget? Don’t try no funny business!” With this fanfare, they hauled the rabbi between them by his armpits with his shoes levitating off the ground into the restricted zone. It was a passkey into an exclusive society with an elite membership, the blue numbers burned into their flesh and seared between their eyes into the memories of their dying bodies. They were the crème de la crème of survivors, more authentically survivors than those who had also been in the camps but had not been branded, those who had been in work camps but not death camps, those who had been in the greatest number of camps for the most years, those who had been in ghettos but not camps, those who had survived by hiding, by blending in with the local populace, by fleeing to Russia, by being rescued by a Schindler or a Sugihara or a Sousa Mendes, those who had been evacuated on a Kindertransport, those who had been hidden as children in monasteries and convents and stables, those who could claim passage aboard the doomed ship Saint Louis, those who left Europe before the war but could boast the greatest number of family members killed, and so on and so forth down the survivor food chain. The blue numbers etched into their flesh were an indelible code that admitted them into the inner circle of the exclusive Holocaust club now, by popular demand, being opened to the general public.

  Immediately, of course, all the other survivors similarly set apart who had gathered from the greater Washington metropolitan area and beyond also turned up their arms to flaunt their own numbers, the whole lot of them, Henny observed with disgust, the lesser and the superior survivors, too slothful and passive until now to take action against the assorted Holocaust poachers and deniers and minimizers and trivializers, finally condescending to make an appearance even in the face of the emergency heat warning directed emphatically toward the elderly, as word got out that their Holocaust was under siege from the competition. The numbered elite flapped their forearms in the stagnant air like ragged flags. “What about me? I’m not a survivor too? Who made them the boss?” But it was as if their voices could not project beyond the O of their mouths, like in a paralyzing dream, as if no sound could be emitted no matter how hard they tried to expel their protests. No one regarded them, no one recognized them for who they were. After Lipman and Henny with the rabbi dangling between them got through, the gate crashed down with a thud of finality and they were condemned to stand on the other side of the tracks with all those alien American nonentities whose history was transparent and whose suffering had borders.

  “Thank you, dear friends, for lifting me up—in every respect,” the rabbi said when they finally set him down again in the VIP section.

  Beyond the blockades, the mob of gawkers and gloaters was multiplying by the minute, Henny could see, flowing north to Independence Avenue and streaming onto the lawns of the Mall itself, packed not only with the malcontented survivors who huddled together for spiritual warmth and security like immigrants from a single country settling in the same neighborhood, but also with the full palette of America partaking of the communal entertainment of the latest news from the Jews. Represented in their numbers, among other onlookers and bystanders, was the stodgy majority citizenry of the District of Columbia in a spectrum from pale bisque to the darkest chocolate, their young manipulating stereophonic equipment where their voluminous pants crotched at the knees; spectral government beetles with ties askew and hair wrung out by the humidity scuttling out of the monumental white marble tombs; fry-fed families yoked to their cameras and ready to strangle each other, thankfully released from the dogged misery of touring to which they had condemned themselves by this lucky stroke of crisis and spectacle coinciding with their visits to the nation’s capital. Foreigners, too, and immigrants in all their vaunted diversity were everywhere Henny cast her eye, their outstretched arms with a five-dollar bill fluttering from their fists reaching out toward the peddler in the shimmering lavender shirt open to the belly button and the rows of glittering gold chains who had managed somehow to finagle his way into the VIP section with his cart hauled by a white donkey and trailing red, white, and blue streamers in honor of the United States of America. At five dollars apiece, the peddler was hawking little plastic capsules filled with blessed dirt collected from the base of the Holocaust Museum, as if any minute the entire edifice would crumble to the ground in a pulverized ruin and disappear. Africans, Asians, and South Americans from such backward cultures they had no concept really as to why Jews were so vital to human existence were clamoring for these sacred souvenirs. Germans, whom Henny could always smell a mile away, waved soiled bills clutched in the raw hands they employed to carry out their unsavory private habits. Even Arabs, usually so immemorially slow about parting with all payment except revenge, took time off from secretly plotting whatever it was that they plotted, acts Henny did not even want to begin to imagine, to claim a piece of this unfolding history. Only the Israelis, annoyingly present in that crowd as everywhere else on earth in numbers vastly out of proportion to the size of their tiny, expendable state, were not buying. “They want the fucking Holocaust? Bevakasha, let them have it! Good-bye and good riddance!”—screaming like barbarians over the heads of the delegates from the more civilized nations, jolting Lipman Krakowski with their harsh Hebrew out of the hum of his leveling deafness.

  Lipman’s Hebrew derived from his decade in Israel after the war, smuggled by night from a D.P. camp in Germany through the snowy mountain passes of Italy to descend into the dark holds of the ghostly ship Galila at Brindisi, disembarking in the port of Haifa to circle madly in an underworld hora with kindred lost souls. He could make himself understood in th
irteen languages, in fact, or so he claimed, a “linguist from necessity due to persecution and exile,” as he romanticized himself when hitting on the immigrant Latin American or Haitian or Chinese girls in their native tongues. “I love the ladies—so what can I do?—I love them even when they don’t smell so good,” he always said. He used this line now too, in Hebrew this time, addressing a gorgeous executive type, like an actress playing the part in a movie, who was inside the winner’s circle along with himself and the other luminaries, and not only that, she had a hearing aid too just like his; despite her richly deserved vanity she could not fully hide the wire descending from her ear. Their eyes had met in mutual recognition at the offending stimulus of the shrill shouted Hebrew, and he had sealed their connection by personally employing the holy tongue. There was no question that she got his message. “Pardon me, missus,” Lipman inquired, switching now to English, “you from the embassy—from Israel?”

  “Palestine,” was Leyla Salmani’s clipped retort.

  “Did you say Philistine? Ha, ha! That’s okay, lady, that’s okay, don’t worry your pretty little head about it. When I first came to Israel it was also called Palestine. Israel, Palestine, it’s all the same thing, back and forth, all the same, I’m a big believer in intercourse between the human animal.” Then, stung by the sight of her turning disinterestedly away from his insignificance, he called out in desperation, “Tell me something, lady—you know what a Jew is? I bet you think a Jew is a scrawny pathetic little pimple on the backside of the planet. Lady, look at me for a minute, I wanna show you something, I’m telling you, one little look, you won’t be sorry.”

  With italicized indifference, Leyla turned her head to bestow on the lowly supplicant the begged-for look. In captive amazement she went on looking as Lipman smoothly stripped off his shirt and trousers to expose a remarkably well preserved and fit physique in a snug red Speedo swimsuit packaging a proud tight bulge, a flawless body if you forgave the subtle betrayal of a nearly negligible graveward sag in the pectoral zone and a practically indiscernible looseness and mottling of the skin. He spanned his well-defined muscular arms, raised his fists over his weightlifter’s shoulders, and swiveled, displaying himself like a champion in the ring. “Does this look to you like the body of your average stereotype? Tell the truth, lady. Feel free to look—it don’t cost you nothing. Go on, missus, you can also touch, don’t be afraid, it don’t bite, no obligation, money-back guarantee if you’re not one hundred percent satisfied.”

  Lipman’s nakedness flashed by the corner of Henny’s eye like a bizarre streak of light in the wrong climate. Was he out of his mind, she wondered, undressing like this in public, and in such a holy place too, and at such a time, with all the media cameras pointed like a firing squad at an execution? Did he want to get himself arrested? she fretted anxiously, waddling over as fast as her heavy legs in the wrong shoes could transport her to rescue this old troublemaker’s skin from the two swarthy guards who had broken from their squad and were also drawing closer. “Officers, officers sir,” Henny cried out, “this gentleman is a Holocaust survivor. Lipman—show them your numbers! You see, officers, like cattle they branded us! Let me explain to you, officers. Mr. Krakowski here took off his clothing as a sign of mourning to protest about what’s happening inside our holy memorial museum here this very minute. You know what I mean—the takeover, they’re stealing our Holocaust in broad daylight right in front of our eyes. It’s highway robbery. Can you believe such a thing should happen after all what we went through? Mr. Krakowski needed to show the whole world the defenseless human body that Hitler, he should rot in hell, tried to exterminate, so the world should know and never forget. I can vouch for him, officers. Mr. Krakowski is a museum volunteer, a respectable citizen, eighty years old—an old man—harmless. It won’t look so good for your police blotter if you lay a hand on a senior citizen Holocaust survivor right in front of the Holocaust Museum of all places, believe me, I’m telling you this for your own good.”

  “Seventy-nine,” Lipman observed glumly to Henny in Polish. “I heard what you said. I’m seventy-nine, not eighty. You’re the one who’s eighty minimum no matter what you tell to yourself and to everybody else is your true age. You can’t fool me, Henn’sche, the two of us go very far back, all the way back to the dark ages. Please, I’m asking you, don’t do me no favors—okay? Don’t try to help me out, I don’t need your help. And don’t call me harmless, it’s the same thing like castrated, with the you-know-what cut off, it’s not a compliment to a red-blooded American male, for your information. And also, if you don’t mind, can you hold back maybe from calling me an old man in public—a senior citizen? You thought I didn’t heard? Well, Henn’sche’le, I heard very good! Who asked you to go ahead and broadcast my age right here like a loudspeaker in front of this beautiful kura? Maybe now you also want to go ahead and announce how I fought in the Israeli army in the War of Independence in 1948—and spoil one hundred percent whatever crumbs are left over from my chances with this hoo-hah Arabische chicken?” Almost imperceptibly, Lipman indicated Leyla Salmani, who was still observing the scene in fascination. He referred to all desirable women as chickens, as Henny knew very well because of her name. It was a tired joke between them based on the implicit understanding that she was like a piece of wood to his arousal organs, irredeemably unattractive, she might be a hen but she was no spring chicken. And Lipman was genuinely stirred by chickens. He had been an egg candler by profession until his retirement to full-time bodybuilding and newspaper monitoring. He had a long and distinguished career behind him of lovingly cupping in his hands the products of chickens and holding them up to the light to reveal their bloody secrets.

  “Mr. Krakowski is also a very famous author, officers, I’ll have you know,” Henny went on, deliberately ignoring Lipman’s infantile petulance in this emergency. “Extremely prophylactic, if you know my meaning—the author of so many articles you couldn’t even count them.” She turned to Lipman, yelling urgently in Yiddish, “How many letters to the editor did you write so far, Lippa?” She had seen them yellowing with her own eyes, pinned up over every space of the cork-covered walls of his garden apartment in Wheaton, Maryland, and glued into piles of scrapbooks cramming the metal bookshelves.

  “Three thousand four hundred and sixty-seven,” Lipman answered her sullenly in Russian this time. “But I don’t need to impress these peasants, these imbecile kulaks.” He gave the two officers a charmingly insincere smile and patted his little red swim trunks. “So maybe I mixed up the Holocaust Museum with a beach in Puerto Rico,” he said to them in Spanish. “So sue me. It’s hot out, amigos, very hot. Maybe you noticed. And then this pollo comes along,” again he indicated Leyla, discreetly, as he chose to believe, “and if it was hot already, boy, did my bubble boil. You get my meaning, compadres?”

  With a proprietary look, Lipman reinforced his claim on Leyla, earned, in his mind, by this close brush with the indigenous authorities that she had witnessed, an immigrant bonding experience between them as far as he was concerned. Addressing her in Hebrew, he said, “Lady, on a hot day like this there are only two things to do—make love, and eat ice cream.” He puffed out his bare chest, which revealed only the slightest of droops under a faint cumulus of white hairs, and, glancing from Leyla across the restricted area to the vendor, who went on frenetically unloading the capsules of holy Holocaust Museum dust to the clamoring customers, he added slyly, “You think maybe that distinguished entrepreneur over there has some ice cream he can sell to us?”

  Henny shook her head tragically. How had it all come to this? she asked herself. Her eyes moved from Lipman, pathetic in his nakedness, to the cops wandering off bludgeoned by their own incomprehension, to Leyla, who had detached herself from Lipman’s death stink as from contagion and was now chatting familiarly over the back of the white ass with the vendor still cashing in on the devastation, the vast alien mob spreading from his wares as far as Henny could see. Lipman, too, was gazing at the dark pa
ir on either side of the white beast. “Go ahead,” Henny heard him spew out with a shrug, “make him a matzah brei—what do I care?”

  On the prime real estate spots nearest to the entrance of the building clustered the heaving mass of politicians and journalists, with Congressman Jedediah Jaspers sounding off into a bank of microphones as he loosened his tie and opened the top button of his shirt to the steamy seductions of the cameras. Museum and community leaders were conferring in important clots, officials and experts of all pretensions rubbing against each other like killer ants on the last sweet bit of crust, Henny observed. Circulating among them was that weird couple they had all noticed but whom no one could claim, the veiled nun and the Hasid in the shade of his black hat pushing their carriage with a “Remember the Children” banner fluttering from it, their dark oversize porcine baby within, legs draped over the sides, sucking on a bottle of liquid supplement that poked out from under the raised hood. Like a parody of new parenthood they strolled unmolested into and out of the museum the way the lunatic birds used to fly freely over and through the electrified fences—even as she remembered this in the sanctuary of America, Henny felt a twinge of envy—into and out of the death camp.