He paused and nodded sadly.
‘I wish I could tell you some uplifting stories about Ebensee,’ he added. ‘But who can produce a clean thing out of unclean matter?’
The Stillness of Death
The last commandant of Ebensee, Bachmayer’s successor, was a notorious SS man, an ill-humoured sneerer who out-did all previous commandants in cruelty. He had once been a bouncer in a nightclub. Our barrack scholar, whom we called ‘The Rabbi’, enlightened us: ‘This Bouncer, enwombed by Scylla and diswombed by Charybdis, whose barbarity has been handed down through the generations, was born an inverted kabbalist — he knows how to transmute life into dead matter.’
Among the Bouncer’s many ingenious methods of bringing lives to an end was his habit of making us stand naked in freezing snow throughout the night, facing the furnace where piles of bodies were awaiting cremation. ‘Gentlemen,’ he would announce with mock-compassion, ‘I promise you that corpses have a trouble-free life. You’re in for a warm, radiant future.’
As the echoes of the approaching American artillery began to wake Ebensee’s mountainous terrain from its lethargic sleep, and the mighty trees of the Schwarzwald that for years had kept the blue sky out of the prisoners’ sight began to quiver, scores of inmates attempted to make their escape. Our Bouncer knew that his time was up, yet he went after these desperate freedom-seekers with all his might. When caught they were ceremoniously brought back, and, though they were already half-dead from beatings, he would hang them with enthusiasm and panache.
On such occasions the entire camp population was assembled to witness the Lagerführer’s incredible triumph. To ensure that everyone had a proper view, the Bouncer divided the camp into three rows. The first row of prisoners sat on the cold mucky ground in front of the gallows; the second genuflected behind them as if in worship; the third stood like a line of grey, resigned tombstones in some shimmering graveyard.
These executions were timed to coincide with evening roll-call — always the dying light, the horror of swinging ropes, the backdrop of gratuitous violence. To enhance the ceremony with his own malevolent sense of mischief, the Bouncer would force one of the victim’s closest companions to kick away the stool supporting him.
The Bouncer’s trusted informers included a certain electrician called Harvas, a stocky, short-legged man whose vacant face resembled a full moon where the twin tadpoles that passed for his eyes swam restlessly in muddy puddles. The Bouncer loved him dearly, not only for being a natural squealer but because Harvas understood the art of trust and betrayal.
Just a few days before our liberation, Harvas encouraged a Russian boy to cut a piece of rubber from a waterhose to mend his cracked wooden clogs, splinters from which kept aggravating the boy’s already lacerated feet. Having performed his good turn, the treacherous messenger quietly reported the youngster’s misdeed to his benefactor, who must have received it with relish. The boy, barely nineteen, was hanged. I remember the dark marble firmament, and the camp sinking into an eerie twilight, and the sad, insipid light dancing on the victim’s features — what perfect touches to a well-thoughtout spectacle. As the stillness of death grew around us, we prisoners were marched past the gallows in strict military formation, five abreast.
Afterwards, when ‘The Rabbi’ kindled a memorial candle in the heart of our barrack, I heard him murmur: ‘Bitterly weeps the night, her cheeks wet with tears.’
Days of Reckoning
Spring. As if in a fairytale, a green pelerine was draped overnight across the shoulders of the stony mountains around us, and I wondered whether it was because these giants, conscripted by our enemy, now understood that it was time to assume a disguise. Look, I said to myself, how their pure snow-white caps stand like numb apostles concealing secret crimes. Their indifference struck me as malevolent, and un-pardonable.
At the beginning of May, Ebensee, which had been built to house three thousand inmates, contained ten times that number. Haggard, worn-out, half-demented men, driven like herds of cattle across the land of Cain, arrived here daily. I asked one of them, a former citizen of my city of the waterless river, how long he had been on the road and from which camp he had come; perhaps he knew somebody I had once known. He looked at me with suspicion. ‘Silly questions,’ he said, ‘deserve silly answers, and idle curiosity brings men to grief.’
By the end of April, one loaf of bread was being given each evening to six working men — or to nine, in the case of those whose lives were clearly ebbing away. Hunger took scores of prisoners every day. One evening, in Block 26, the body of a young Hungarian Jew was found with the buttocks sliced away.
When news of Hitler’s death reached the camp, Raymond remarked with grim satisfaction, ‘The monster died like a rat in a dark hole, as I predicted.’ Of course we rejoiced at his demise, but with a sense of sombreness. Levity had no place in the realm of tragedy, though perhaps we had simply forgotten how to celebrate.
The Bouncer took flight before dawn broke, leaving an indecisive Wehrmacht detachment in charge. At the next roll-call our new chief custodian told us that a ferocious air-battle over the camp was imminent. ‘Men!’ he shouted passionately. ‘Avoid unnecessary casualties, save yourselves in our underground factories!’ But we had been tipped off. During the long night before he absconded, the Bouncer had wired the whole underground complex with dynamite. His last wish had been to blow us to smithereens and bury us there. A resounding ‘NO!’ rose from thirty thousand parched throats; it sent what was left of camp authority scurrying off like frightened mice.
Over the next few days our fate hung in the balance.
How bright was the morning of 8 May 1945. How peacefully the azure sky hung over our shaven heads. An early zephyr ruffled the resigned forest that had held us captive, and although we knew it was all over, nevertheless the years of pain and disenchantment, of hopes raised and repeatedly dashed, had taught us to hold our breath.
The whole camp emerged into the main assembly area, where we had previously been counted and recounted daily. Then the mass of men suddenly parted and drifted and regrouped and rearranged itself, forming into clusters of separate nationalities: Frenchmen, Dutchmen, Greeks, Spaniards, Italians and Poles. Out of nowhere, various national flags appeared. Naturally, we Polish Jews wanted to stand beneath the proud flutter of the red-and-white, but they pushed us away. ‘Shove off, Jew,’ they said, ‘if you know what’s good for you!’
So we, a few dozen of us, stood beside no flag, with no anthem to sing; we, the pariahs of Ebensee who did not belong. Although my generation of Jews was very much at home with Polish history, language and literature — Żeromski, Słowacki, Mickiewicz, Sienkiewicz and Orzeszkowa were deeply embedded in our hearts – and though there were surely those among us who had proved, through the war years, to be far better Polish patriots than these base antisemites could ever hope to be, we were not in a position to argue with the brutes.
At this point something unreal happened, something amazingly beautiful. From behind the Sherman tank that had smashed through the camp’s wire fence, a small squad of infantry emerged, as in a dream, and they sped towards the Polish flag. ‘Cześć, chłopcy!’ they shouted. ‘Greetings, boys!’ The Polish prisoners responded enthusiastically with ‘Long Live Poland!’ — to which the battle-weary squad leader reciprocated, again in Polish: ‘And may she live forever and ever!...’
‘But gentlemen,’ he added, looking around. ‘We are Jews, from New York. Are there any of our brethren amongst you?’
Vision of Survival
On the eighth of May 1945
I walked out of camp
a homeless tramp.
Out of camp into an open world, but with nowhere to go. Suddenly freedom, but without being free. So much to celebrate, but with whom?
In the small hours of the night I discovered my own corpse, lying on a heap of other corpses outside the crematorium. They were really only bones, covered in a veneer of skin with no flesh to speak of. ‘Who sent for
you? Who needs you?’ said the bones. ‘We were here first. Where’s your respect?’
‘Friends, please,’ my corpse replied. ‘Surely we’re all one brotherhood. Is it not written somewhere that only by knowing death can one begin to live? Doesn’t this put us in an enviable position?’
‘Oho, that damned socialist, I remember him from the ghetto,’ scoffed a nearby skeleton. ‘Even there he spoke of brotherhood, how only an exiled nation can understand its true meaning, how only a people in exile can be true children of the prophets. When our Messiah arrives we’ll make sure that your kind, with your rotten jargon, remain outside the gates of our promised land.’
‘You forget,’ another pile of bones cut in, ‘that we’re too far gone. We ourselves are tired of waiting, and our prophet Ezekiel lies dead.’
I felt my body recoil in alarm. ‘How can you say that? I disagree wholeheartedly with your cynicism. Life is worth living even in the most heinous of circumstances. Remember what a great bard once wrote: the worst is not, so long as we can say “this is the worst”. I can see that you dwell on the very brink — only your will, only your imagination can protect you now from sinking into an abyss of iniquity.’
That last remark drove the bony corpses into paroxysms of laughter, a crazy rattling laughter, like a ghostly refrain from deep inside a hollow-throated chorus.
But I was prepared to argue my case. ‘Please, sirs, don’t laugh at imagination. Any worthwhile poet will confirm that fantasy outlives death. Trust me, this is a profound truth, on which I have built my whole world.’
‘Stop him, somebody stop him!’ shrilled the bony heap. ‘His words, God forbid, might deprive us of our daily bread!’
‘Don’t make fun of me,’ I replied, trying to remain calm. ‘Don’t take fantasy so lightly. Think of Noah. His ark was but a hoax, and so was his white dove. He only dreamt it all, yet the dream saved his life.’
‘Maybe so,’ a youngish cadaver retorted, ‘but you still have no place here amongst us.’
‘I have, I definitely have! There is no reason why you should view me as an outcast. I belong to you, not to the world ruled by bullies and sadists. Yes, I know that the Great Leper himself is dead, but his bequest lives on, and I fear that the wicked will again give birth to a new brood of reigning bandits, fools, despisers of memory.’
‘Well, long live stupidity!’ the first skeleton cried. ‘Sages are thinkers not doers. Fools are the ones that build. Look at us — where would we go now if not for the furnace?’
It is early morning. A translucent blue sheet of ice hangs above the town; there is no sun. I am entering a dimly-lit café. No one acknowledges me, yet everyone is strangely aware of my presence. In the tense silence I can hear their condemning eyes, see the deceit on their numb lips.
They wait to find out what I will say, though they know that my words will be irrelevant.
What unsettles them most is my striped uniform. And my previous night’s vision, embossed on my forehead forever.
Everywhere Nowhere
We met outside Ebensee, shortly after liberation. ‘Now that the Germans have gone, who will look after us?’ he asked with a half-smile.
I didn’t answer — I knew that such a question, bizarre as it might seem, afflicted many prisoners who had grown accustomed to a life of slavery. But I could see that he was a sad jester, with a pressing need to talk. Besides, he looked vaguely familiar. So I let him talk.
‘I remember you from ghetto,’ he said. ‘My name was Maximilian Zacharski — now I call myself Moshe Zakhor. Before the war we lived in a spacious apartment on Narutowicza Street. My father, Szymon Zacharski, was a wonderful man, a renowned tailor who worked only for the military, mainly high-ranking officers. He wore a Piłsudski moustache, called himself Stanisław — a ferocious assimilator who advocated that Jews should make themselves socially invisible. He refused to speak anything but Polish. “Poland is our fatherland,” he would tell me.’
‘Friend,’ I cut in, ‘your father’s beliefs were mine as well, though I suffered many disappointments. But I still can’t erase from my memory those days when Jew and Pole marched arm in arm beneath the flutter of red flags. I was once a member of the Bund, a party of humble people that believed strongly in integration, though never, ever, at the price of losing their integrity.’
He nodded, impatient to continue. ‘My mother Miriam, known as Magda, was a beautiful, restless woman, much younger than father. She was slim, with sky-blue eyes and a proud bearing. He idolized her. Gentiles didn’t know she was Jewish — they couldn’t understand why a woman like her had married a Jew. Anyway, before the ghetto was sealed he urged her to run away, perhaps one of his highly-placed clients could assist. There were negotiations, an exchange of money, but at the last moment the sympathetic client had a change of heart. And in the end her Aryan looks didn’t help her either. As you know, my friend, betraying Jews became a lucrative source of income. And it wasn’t just the financial reward. To my mind, the murder of Jews through the ages was always the most effective pagan rebellion against authentic Christianity.’
He smiled bitterly and awaited a response, but I remained silent. ‘So, what do you intend to do?’ he asked at last. ‘Palestine is closed, the quota for America is as long as the Jewish exile, England has shut her gates, as in the good old days. We’re displaced persons now — is that a future?’
‘My friend Raymond is going back home to France. I’ll probably go back to Poland, the land of my birth, where our people lived for a thousand years.’ And, yielding to a poetic impulse, I added: ‘Where the great Vistula speaks my tongue, where my beloved silver birches pray to God in the silence... Someone over there, Moshe, is surely awaiting my return, ready to welcome me with open arms.’
‘No, no!’ he cried. ‘In your old home, people of stone now dwell. You think they await you? — maybe they lie in wait for you! Just itching to finish the job.’
‘There are always the hoodlums. Most people over there are not like that.’
‘Please,’ he fired back, then shook his head. ‘There is nothing more difficult than to convince a fool.’
‘No, wait! People are people, everywhere — some are good and some are evil.’ I was prepared to argue the point vehemently. ‘After all, have we always been such angels?’
‘Listen,’ said Moshe, gesturing for me to stay calm. ‘I know we’re not angels, that we’re also capable of evil. But think of what we’ve been through, think of all the evil we’ve suffered and witnessed. And let’s not forget: evil begets evil.’
The day was about to depart and there was a chill in the air. Moshe touched my shoulder and half-turned, as if about to take his leave. ‘You know,’ he said, ‘when I was younger I thought very much like you.’ He fell silent but seemed reluctant to go. I could tell that something was lingering within him, something he was unable to impart. What a solitary vessel is man, I thought, with language such an imperfect means of navigation, especially when the waters become unnavigable — around camp survivors, for instance. I suddenly felt that our conversation had shaken my new acquaintance.
He nodded distantly, privately, and with a deep sigh began again.
‘Do you remember a man called Joseph Gross in our ghetto, a little fellow with a lugubrious face? His enormous eyes were always tearful. Before the war he was an amateur boxer in Germany; in ghetto he was a steam-presser. I can still recall the song he used to sing. It was enough to break your heart...
‘Die Welt ist so gross,
Für dich ist sie klein;
Ein Land ist noch frei,
Du kommst nicht hinein;
Ein Tür ist noch auf,
Für dich ist sie zu;
Kein Platz in der Welt,
Ein Jude bist du.’
Survivors
We led a symbiotic existence: shadows on a precipitous rock, holding on to one another, defying night. The ever-talkative Moshe repeated the story about his parents. As for me, I had not yet divulged my own pa
st to anyone — very few people spoke about the past. Why was this? Did we suffer a kind of mental paralysis? Had Germany succeeded in destroying our inner selves? Or was it simply a fear of remembering?
I spent many an hour with Zakhor. His mood shuttled between murkiness and jest, though there were times when I thought the jester within him had died. I had once read that Shakespeare removed the Fool at a critical point in King Lear because the great bard understood that true tragedies cannot accommodate jest.
But there was also another reason, gnawing not only at Moshe’s heart but eating away at all of us: the question of a kind of shame at being the ones who had made it through the storm. How do you go on living when you know that all your dear ones are dead? How do you continue struggling with such a knowledge, too fearful to articulate? What sort of faith can there be about the future? In the small hours of the night I had a vision: I saw Moshe Zakhor with a cloud of mist around his head, and as he walked towards the sun his shadow preceded him. I was puzzled. How could anyone walk with both the sun and his shadow before him?
As with many of my other dreams, I didn’t mention this one to Zakhor. I dreaded its sinister meaning. How could I tell my friend about his future shadow? I began to realize, more than ever, that a man — especially a survivor — is truly a solitary island protected by dangerous, rocky waters. One has to be an extremely skilled sailor to moor one’s words safely on the shores of such an island without causing untold damage.
I recall an evening when I sat with Zakhor and watched him moving his almost voiceless lips; yet I could hear his every word. ‘I saw a doctor today, a lady doctor,’ he was saying, ‘a tiny little woman in a white starched blouse and a face like a wrinkled apple with a pair of beady, mercantile eyes. “You have six months to live,” she told me nonchalantly. “I can lengthen your life with injections, but you must see me twice a week.” “But doctor,” I said, “I have no money.” To which she replied: “Young man, my job is to look after your health, not your bank account.” I became very agitated, jumped up from my chair, called her heartless and arrogant. But the woman sat there unruffled. “Doctors don’t have to be admirable people,” she said.’
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