My Holocaust

by Tova Reich

  Her eyes followed the pair as they steered their baby carriage among her fellow survivors, stopping alongside Dr. Adolf Schmaltz the proctologist, a real doctor M.D., yes, but not a specialty you would wish for your child. From her privileged vantage point, Henny watched as Schmaltz bent his head to read the letter they handed him, then scribbled something probably illegible on what looked like a prescription pad, tore off the sheet of paper, and gave it to them. She was exceptionally gratified to note that this millionaire macher and big-shot doctor was consigned at least for now to the lowly general-public side of the barrier. Such a major donor like him, she couldn’t figure out why he hadn’t made a big stink yet, demanding his rightful place in the precincts of power and prominence. Ever since Schmaltz had collaborated with Maurice Messer in distorting history and endangering Holocaust credibility by claiming to have been the aide-de-camp to that great resistance liar, following which he was immediately appointed to the museum council and named chairman of the Ethics Committee, Henny had despised him. Then he dumped his poor Yetta like used goods for Vonda with the legs, from the casinos. Only when Henny learned that Schmaltz’s son had dropped out of school to become a Hopi Indian on a reservation in Arizona, and had stubbornly dug in there sucking mushrooms all day long even in the face of the deprogramming interventions lavishly funded by the old man, most notably the mission in a private luxury jet of Rabbi Dr. Monty Pincus to demonstrate to the boy the superiority of the Holocaust high over all other forms of highs—only then, perhaps for the first time in all the long years since she had been marched off to the cattle cars with the Nazis behind her sealing up the house in which her mother and baby sisters were hiding, did Henny feel once again that maybe there was a God in heaven after all and some measure of justice on this earth.

  She watched now as the heat of the day congealed and became concentrated, the sky began to darken and blister, and the police helicopters that had been hovering overhead all afternoon started to give chase to a small commuter plane that suddenly appeared, circling wildly. As if to shelter their baby from the coming storm, the Hasid papa and the nun mama picked up their pace with their beat-up buggy, moving rapidly from Schmaltz’s humble place among the masses into the restricted VIP area. Pausing one more time before dashing back into the museum, the nun slipped a crumpled sheet of paper to Rabbi Herzl Lieb’s sister, who lowered her head and read swiftly. Passing the note to her brother, the sister then swirled down to the top of the coffin in a kind of faint, surrendering all self-consciousness with respect to how she looked to the rows of judging eyes such as Henny’s that were fixed upon her, and sat there hunched over in a tragic pose, her elbows planted on her thighs, her palms pressed into her cheeks, her fingertips raking her temples.

  This was not the rabbi’s hippie sister, Henny realized as she continued staring, the lost Mara, not the prodigal dropout daughter who had caused so much embarrassment and anguish to her father, that indicted nursing-home-fraud criminal and Warsaw Ghetto partisan impersonator Leon Lieb—further heartwarming proof, in Henny’s opinion, of the existence of divine justice unto the tenth generation. This was the good sister, the proper, balabatish one, the one who had married the psychiatrist, not strictly a real M.D. no matter what they said—more like an unfrocked rabbi, in Henny’s opinion. This was the daughter whom Leon Lieb had set up at the head of his charitable foundation that funded such worthy and noble causes as obesity clinics in memory of his late wife Rose, as well as centers for the study and recognition of Jewish courage and resistance during the Holocaust in his own honor. This sister had latched herself on to the rabbi the minute that he and Lipman with Henny puffing behind had arrived with their coffin, her long ashen face exactly like her brother’s only without the punctuation of a beard. Never releasing the rabbi from her sight for a minute, trailing closely behind him, she clutched the edge of his prayer shawl like a life jacket as he carried on with his pastoral duties, leaning over the barricades to kiss and embrace and stroke the aged cheeks of his congregation of compromised survivors, greeting them as My rebbes, my holy teachers, my spiritual guides, while they in return bent toward his dimming light as to their last hope.

  He was a fearless, dedicated leader, Rabbi Herzl Lieb, Henny could not deny it, faithful and steadfast at their side from the very beginning. But in those innocent days long ago, when they had first started out with their original and startling Never Agains and their Remembers, their Kaddishes and their candles, their testimonies and lessons, their memorials and museums, who would ever have imagined that this would be the consequence, who could have predicted that their small band of idealistic survivor saints would metastasize into a fatal plague of persecutees, an epidemic of victims, a pestilence of freelance and copycat Holocausts? In those early days it had been Rabbi Herzl Lieb, young and brash, who had valiantly risen before them to lead them into battle with his rallying cry against the Six Silences—how well Henny remembered being struck by the epiphany of his formulations at that time before they had deteriorated into pieties and manipulations and clichés: the silence of the perpetrators, who trusted the world to collude in covering up their crimes; the silence of the collaborators, who muted and muffled their participation in the unspoken understanding that they were victims too; the silence of the bystanders, witnesses who did not raise a voice of conscience to help; the silence of the American Jewish leadership, too frightened to speak truth to power; the silence of the survivors, too traumatized to come forward with their testimony; and the silence of the six million victims, who could not speak for themselves. “I am hoarse from all these silences,” the rabbi had mystically declared. But then, in reaction to these toxic silences, such tumult and cacophony had been generated, Henny thought mournfully, unconsciously elevating her hands as if to stop up her ears, such screaming and yelling culminating with everyone tearing at the remains of the Holocaust to claim their own personally monogrammed piece, memorials and museums sprouting up everywhere, even El Paso, Texas, had to have its own Holocaust museum for the cowboys, even Whitwell, Tennessee, had to have its own cattle car to contain its plague of paper clips, that now a little silence would definitely be appreciated—yes, a little peace and quiet, if you don’t mind, the dignity and refinement of a time when there were still no words, when the words had not yet been mass-produced and packaged and made universally available for instant consumption.

  In those heady days, when the rabbi was still young and the Holocaust was still unique, Henny recalled, he had led his demonstrations decked out in a striped concentration-camp-prisoner uniform, blasting his ram’s horn and lamenting with thunderous sincerity that he himself had not been privileged to be among the martyrs of the gas chambers and the furnaces. She and her good-hearted Milton the CPA newly retired from the Internal Revenue Service, may he rest in peace, who had first taken her captive as his future tax deduction when he had penetrated the Buchenwald concentration camp at the end of the war with his American GI battalion, had debuted with their acclaimed long-running hit routine as husband-and-wife liberator-and-survivor duo, including triumphant personal appearances and prizewinning documentary films, on the Holocaust testimony circuit. And they were the real goods, the two of them, one hundred percent certified—she an authentic survivor, branded with the official tattoo seal of approval, he a genuine liberator, not one of those blacks or Afro-Americans or whatever they called them nowadays mythologized in the flush of affirmative action by this very museum supposedly dedicated to historical truth as the first to charge into Buchenwald and free the slaves. But when she and her innocent Milton first took their show on the road, those were the undisputed glory days, the golden age when Holocaust survivors reigned unopposed as victim royalty, the rewards of their universally acknowledged unparalleled and preeminent suffering laid lavishly at their feet, climaxing in the jewel in the crown, this monumental museum, rising audaciously on United States government soil, dead Jews bearing witness to the goodness of America in an unambiguously just war, and also in peace. It
was an astounding feat, which Henny fully appreciated—the transformation of our Jewish Holocaust into an American memory, almost too stupendous to absorb.

  Her eyes moved from the imposing museum, now overrun and crawling with the hordes of demonic baby Holocausts that they had spawned, to her growing tribe of eternally aging and dying and soon-to-be-no-longer-with-us fellow survivors. We have used this institution and the Holocaust it packages for our own glory and pride, she admitted to herself, and we have been used by it in turn for legitimization and sanctimoniousness. We have been greedy for the spoils of our suffering in the form of restitution and reparations, and have allowed our names, our plundered assets, and our dormant claims to be exploited for the greed of others. We have let ourselves be seduced by power and profit in no way different from those who had not been purified in the fires so that our entire enterprise has become fatally tainted and our time has truly run out.

  “We have been guilty, we have betrayed, we have robbed, we have spoken slander,” Rabbi Herzl Lieb was intoning to his congregation of defeated survivors who had come out searching for the salvation of meaning in that punishing August heat but were now either fleeing the approaching storm or standing there wretchedly, the thin hair and translucent skin defining their mortal skulls shielded with newspapers or crackling plastic bags as the drops began to fall. The rabbi was invoking the litany of transgressions from the breast-pounding confession of the Day of Atonement descending unrelentingly upon them as summer declined to fall. “We have extorted, we have been perverse, we have been loathsome, we have committed abominations, we have strayed. Gevalt, my friends, it is what I have told you from the very beginning. This museum and everything associated with it is a corrupter and a seducer, mired in politics and deals and compromise from its conception in 1978 as a sop to Jews who were making feeble little noises against the sale of F-15 fighter planes to Saudi Arabia, and it continues to be steeped in special interest agendas to this very day, dragging the six million and the entire Holocaust down to universal cynicism and revulsion along with it. As I said to Jimmy Carter when it was my turn to shake his hand at a White House reception for rabbis, ‘Mr. President,’ I said, ‘don’t give us the Holocaust in exchange for the State of Israel.’ Needless to add,” Herzl Lieb added, looking with wonder at his own right hand, which had been complicit in insulting the most powerful man on earth, “I have never been invited to the White House again.”

  The rabbi now extended that hand to his sister and helped her to rise from the coffin. “My friends, I want you to meet my sister, Rashi,” he told his audience. “Rashi, say hello to these nice people.”

  She shook her head, uncharacteristically oblivious to the rain soaking and flattening her hairdo. Tightening her lips to a rippled chalkiness and closing her eyes, she metronomed a finger in the negative in front of her face, too overcome to speak.

  “This is what it has all come to, my dear faithful companions,” the rabbi shouted over the fat drops of rain slapping against the sidewalk, the thunder in the distance, the helicopters and light commuter plane looping overhead, the squawking of birds diving headlong to the ground like dark mythic omens. “It’s the end of the line for us,” the rabbi bellowed. “We have given away our past, our history and our Holocaust. Now they are claiming our future too. The terrorists have stated that nobody inside this building will come out alive unless all their demands are met. My sister’s daughter, Naomi, is inside that building.”

  Those who had remained from among the survivors and could hear above the rain exhaled a collective gasp. Herzl did not go on to elaborate that not only his niece, Rashi’s daughter, but also their other sister, the strayed Mara, and her two children were in there too; that would have been more detail than these old folks could process in this weather, much too complicated and strange, and far less effective in wringing out their quivering hearts. The sight of a stricken mother standing before them over whose child’s head doom was throbbing was as much stimulation as they could bear. Every living Jewish child was a survivor, a firebrand snatched from the burning, yet still the lessons had not been learned.

  “Naomi has written a letter to her mother,” the rabbi revealed. “We believe that the girl has been brainwashed. With Rashi’s permission, I will read you the letter.”

  Rashi was unable to respond. She was not so sure it was such a good idea. The rabbi raised his voice over the storm and read: “Dear Mommy, peace and love. I’m writing this letter to you to say good-bye. The old man in the wheelchair says they’ll never give in so I guess we won’t be coming out alive. Maybe Grandpa Leon can like dialogue with him? I think they fought together during the Holocaust or whatever. This whole museum is so bogus. Don’t be sad, Mommy, it’s okay. It’s part of the cycle, it’s samsara. I’m here with my cousins, Rumi and Rumi. They are so cute you can just die. Their mom, Auntie Mara aka Marano aka Rama-sensei the Buddhist nun, is also here for sure. She’s like the coolest person in the whole world, totally awesome. She says I’m just like her when she was my age. It’s like the biggest compliment. She says I’m channeling the Mara she’s sloughed off, so I’ve changed my name to Mara. So Mommy, if like by some miracle or whatever I make it out of here, please don’t call me Naomi anymore.”

  The delivery of this letter was the last stop on the route of the nun and the Hasid steering their black baby carriage before vanishing behind the screen of the rain back into the hollows of the museum. Leyla Salmani’s eyes had followed their circuit, observing them fade away in the darkening downpour after their visitation among the survivors as she had kept track of them from the moment they had first materialized, floating unobstructed in the white haze of the heat among the inflated power brokers pressing closest to the entrance of the besieged museum. She and Tommy Messiah’s donkey were standing side by side, regarding them together.

  Leyla had come over to inquire if Tommy Messiah had any ice cream. He gestured with thumb and index finger rounded into a circlet for her to have a little patience please and wait a second while he completed giving instructions to the two urchins of color he had recruited on the correct way to fill the little plastic tubes with dirt from the base of the Holocaust Museum, now doubled in price due to increased overhead costs and continued heavy demand for these relics by the public. Having adjusted the production of his assembly line to his satisfaction and while still executing a fever of transactions without pause, Tommy Messiah then managed to snatch the opportunity to slip his hand into the donkey’s carpet saddlebag, extract a few pink and white pills, and with an almost imperceptible movement deposit them inside the breast pocket of Leyla’s man-tailored suit jacket, taking as he did so in the form of his rightful payment a sly pinch, as a reminder, of the living nipple underneath. “Strawberry and vanilla,” Tommy Messiah said, “flavors of the day.”

  Leyla stood frozen in her place beside the donkey, her beautiful chocolate eyes fixed on the Hasid and the nun wading into the knot of personages of consequence, wielding their baby carriage before them as a kind of implement to clear their path and hack their way into the jungle. They were doing their job. What was she waiting for? She too ought to proceed into the heart of the heart of the action, Leyla knew, to pound away on behalf of United Holocausts. The media were all in place, parched for adjectives, all the usual suspects set out like putty for her to mold, from the hard-liner former reporter, now exalted to pundit and talking head, Crusher Casey, to her old movie director and screenwriter, R. C. Hammer, filming importantly, and every specimen in between. Pushkin Jones and all the holy martyrs were fulfilling their part, sacrificing themselves inside the museum, relying on her on the outside to articulate in the cool persuasive polish of her Oxford English the message of United Holocausts. Her own people too were counting on her for special recognition, among the hosts of all the other Holocausts, of their Palestinian Holocaust perpetrated to rectify that holiest-of-holies Holocaust of the Jews to which the entire world was required to pay daily deference and render hourly homage. Really, she
ought to seize the opening of the wake created behind the progress of the pram, Leyla knew, in order to reenter the precincts of influence and power, but for the moment she was unable, she felt for the moment dull and emptied, as if all her energy were leaking into a shameful little puddle forming on the sidewalk around her like the dung dropping under the donkey. To lift a foot and take a single step forward was beyond what she could imagine.

  Not removing her eyes from the shadowy couple as they smoothly penetrated the innermost circles with their weird offspring, with a subtle sweep of her hand, as if she were wiping her mouth, Leyla positioned one of Tommy Messiah’s pills in the well of her tongue, worked up a quantity of saliva, and swallowed it down. Then she took another, just in case. She recognized the Hasid of course from his past life as a shabab, for which, it seemed, he was now making demented atonement, and the nun too was known to her, but the deformed creature in the buggy was a special effect wrought by these two creative types of their own peculiar devising—she wondered what could possibly have possessed such a pro as Pushkin Jones to sign off on such grotesquerie. The alarming thought struck her that the contents of that carriage might even be the monstrous offspring of her old companion, the fanatic settlement leader Yehudi HaGoel, behind whom in an hourof wild recklessness she had ridden on the bare backs of white stallions over the brown hills of Judea, admitting him into the secret chambers of her citadel, where he had planted his bomb and blown off her father’s legs. This strange fruit of one of his wives, named in a dead language for the onset of the redemption, as a child almost transparent in her slightness, had been lowered by a rope through the most minuscule of orifices in the floor of Al-Haram Al-Ibrahimi, the Tomb of the Patriarchs in Hebron, Leyla had heard, to seek out the haunted beds of the forefathers and mothers in the subterranean caves below. After that, the girl was never again the same, or so the story goes, like the docile boy Isaac after he was bound atop the altar on Moriah. Abraham had descended from the mountain without him, alone. Or more to the point, without Ishmael. It had been over the throat of his other son, Ishmael, her own untamed ancestor falling upon all of his brothers, Leyla was convinced, that the father had brandished his knife on the mountaintop.