Layman's Report

by Eugene Marten

  “Thank God,” Fred’s wife whispered, for the doctor was still at large and you might find yourself seized upon entering, strapped to a table or into a chair in a sealed chamber, the air gradually pumped out till you couldn’t breathe, till your ears bled and your eyes popped forth as with cartoon amazement, in order to study the effects of high altitude on Luftwaffe pilots. Or for the hell of it.

  They’d put the priest in Cell 18.

  An inmate had turned up missing. In order to discourage further escape attempts, ten men were selected at random and condemned to the starvation cells. Only one of them asked for mercy. The priest, who had been arrested for hiding Jews in his friary, volunteered to take the man’s place.

  The tiny cell was locked. Through the bars they could see candles and a plaque on the floor the priest had knelt upon, starving, praying. The missing man was found drowned in a latrine. The priest was made a saint. The guide did not know what became of the man who’s life had been spared, though he was not a Jew.

  Fred crossed himself.

  The draftsman listened to his stomach and said, “We should all be saints.”

  Snow crunching and cracking ice, labored white breaths. 21, 20, 18, blocks devoted to the victims of other nations, to the Dutch, French, Hungarian. Past the open space of ground used for roll call, and the guide told them an inmate standing in the back row had given premature birth during morning muster, had buried the squirming infant alive on the spot, pushing it into the mud with her foot then covering it like a dog burying a bone. Across from this a mass gallows for political prisoners that could hang twenty at a drop, and Fred regarded its construction critically.

  “What’s a political prisoner anyway?” his wife asked. Her eyes were dry. There seemed to be no buttons for this.

  “Swim team,” the draftsman said.

  “Whatever they want it to be,” Fred said, and his wife said, “Your furry little hat.”

  You went in through the back. The sun was low and the snow almost blue. The door was open. A light hummed over it. A sort of vestibule and you turned right into a room filled with ceramic urns. Empty. She called it the laying out room. She said the urns had been filled with ashes and could be returned to relatives and loved ones for a fee. You turned left. The door was made of wood, and opened outward.

  A narrow chamber maybe fifty feet long, maybe a third as wide. Floor of poured concrete, a large vase of flowers in the middle. Walls and ceiling of stucco. Beams overhead, naked bulbs between them. As they filled the room the echoes faded. It was cold enough to see your last breath here. Fred looked up. Four square holes in the ceiling.

  The guide told them these were the vents through which the pellets were dropped. They were framed in wood.

  “How old is that wood?” Fred asked.

  “This I’m not sure,” the guide said.

  Four (4) square roof vents exhausting less than two (2) feet from the surface of the roof. No fans, no sealant, no gaskets, no stack, no heating mechanism, no circulation system, high humidity, floor drains that would leak into the camp sewer system, wooden doors that open inward, inhibiting the removal of decedents.

  She called their attention to the walls, cracked and crumbly, gray and stained, to the marks she said were scratches, scratches made by their nails, she said.

  There were other marks as well: broad, straight, deliberate. Fred pointed and said, “There used to be a wall there.”

  “Yes,” the guide said.

  “And there.”

  “Yes,” the guide said. “For lavatories.”

  “Lavatories in a gas chamber,” Fred said.

  “It was convert to air raid shelter in ’44,” the guide said.

  “When was it converted back?”

  “After the war.”

  “So this is a reconstruction,” Fred said.

  “It is a manner of speaking,” the guide said.

  “It is or it isn’t,” Fred said.

  “A restoration, yes,” the guide said. “As it was.” She looked around. “Does anyone more have question?” She looked at everyone and repeated herself. No one said anything and they went to see the krema, oven mouths full of flowers.

  Mortar, brick, concrete, sediment. Hammer, chisel, auger bit and brace. A mattock you could hold in one hand.

  The second camp was much bigger. You could take an unguided tour.

  Bride and groom, draftsman, interpreter. Maps and plans, official literature, what passed for blueprints from the State Museum. They took the tracks through the mouth of the gatehouse. Long wooden buildings like horse barns. On one side the women’s camp; to the right only chimneys remained, a field of totems running in rows north and west. The Rampe, the siding where selections were said to be made. Links oder Recht, they made one of their own, broke a lock: steam ovens, showers, a blue stain on a wall. He took up his auger and drilled: “Control sample.”

  His wife stood watch. Sometimes she held the camera. A road cut the camp in half.

  (They’d found a restaurant at the bus depot. You paid upon entering, exchanged your receipt for a meal. A bowl of goulash for sixty cents, an amusement arcade. A German tourist told the translator only Poles went there.)

  It fell to the floor and crumbled. He put them in a sandwich bag.

  “I am bagging,” he says on tape. On YouTube.

  The road ran north to Mexiko, the tracks went west toward Kanada—they’d stored stolen clothing there. He carried a black valise. The men’s camp, the gypsy camp, some kind of cart in the distance, bumping and swaying over the icy grounds. The tracks ended in flowers: cross section of bed and rails, flat and abrupt like the stumps of amputation, pointing to the monument, official art. Beyond this the ruins of the krema.

  A man and a woman rode the cart. She stepped off with a trash bag, bagged trash. Frozen flowers, burnt candles, a beer can—people had no respect. Words were exchanged, the custodians moved on. The interpreter wouldn’t say what had been said.

  The snow squalled and the rain froze. The weather was on their side.

  They consulted the printed matter, ducked under yellow tape. The roof and walls of the undressing room gone, it looked like an empty basement. The crematorium reduced to rubble—German demolitions team, the booklet said, but the ground that it called a roof only partially collapsed, a ragged hole in its middle just big enough.

  Seven from I, seven from II, but they took only four samples from III. His wife was to whistle if someone came near. He worked with the utmost respect.

  Brick and mortar, plaster and paint. Sour-flesh smell of old wet wood. He hammered and chiseled, swung the mattock, scraped, put things into zippered bags, wore a dust mask. The draftsman carried them in his backpack, took pictures and drew them, arrows; the interpreter diverted a guard…They photographed, taped, measured length and height, widths and depths of gray empty spaces.

  But often they seemed to be alone.

  Breakfast at the bus station café: hot milk, bean soup, a mushroom omelet…vents and ducts and valves.

  Stood around the hole in Krema II. It was barely big enough.

  “You don’t know what might be down there,” she said. Squatted behind the privy on the path. The women’s room was foul, the sauna in good repair. The draftsman kicked in the door and limped the rest of the day.

  “Sixty-one feet,” he says on tape. “Sixty-one feet from the rear.”

  Drains, pipes, trenches, rabbets, blowers, baffles and gaskets. A long wall splitting a long hall, a side for each sex. She sat on a bench, said she wasn’t going to the next one—she couldn’t even pronounce its name…steam ovens protruding through the wall in the sauna, gaskets. He hammered away like Van Helsing, but he meant to bring something to life. He calculated and counted, inspected and plumbed, looked through windows, peepholes, grills. Examined and estimated, distinguished between, decided on the color of ash: oyster gray.

  The draftsman bore truth on his back, limping.

  “As you can see, a rough-cut hole,” he
says, sitting on the edge, legs gone. Excuse me down there.

  She thought she’d seen something running past the barracks. She might have been mistaken. She hated to complain.

  So much of it wasn’t even there. The buildings of Kanada gone, the White House a wooden square in the snow (they were saving the Red one for last). They took the road past the ash pond to the fence. The pond was frozen, they looked through the wire: Mexiko.

  Eight from IV, four from V. Twenty-five pounds but they were almost done.

  Chimneys, retorts, urns, showers, washrooms, anterooms, morgues, booths, rooms not mentioned in the official literature, and rooms that seemed other than what they were said to be.

  Camp extension, the booklet said. Unfinished. Not even tracks in the snow, but what could live there?

  Women smuggled dynamite from the factories. It was down in black and white. They would smuggle the samples through Customs in their dirty laundry.

  Finally, the path through the woods. (The next day she sat in the car with her crosswords—they forgot to leave the keys, she couldn’t feel her feet.) It was getting dark. A mass grave, another burning pit, a gate and another long road. Houses filled with families and light—there must have been some mistake. Follow the signs. Another fence, an enclosure like someone’s backyard. A marble marker in Hebrew and English, but the Red House wasn’t there.

  Finally, he lowered himself into it, disappearing down the hole.

  She insists on the dark.

  He sits on the edge of the bed, in the smell of sulfur and gasoline. Piles his clothes on the chair. The room is cold, the floor feels like marble. The blanket, coarse and stiff, covers them like a lid.

  “Your glasses,” she says. He forgot, feels himself grin, his face expanding sheepishly in a void. Drops them where he hopes his clothes are. He can’t see her anyway. The radiator comes on, thumps and clangs like beating it with a pipe. She says words he can’t hear through the racket but they smell like their last meal: sausage, cucumber, duck blood soup. He tastes it again, lurches forward on his hands and knees.

  “No,” she says, “that’s not.” He tries again. She is still in her gown.

  “That hurts,” she says. Hurts them both. She says she has something she can use.

  Let her, she says, help him. Dishpan hand rough through the oil. Still, it finds a fit. He moves forward again. At the same time it is a sinking, a different disappearing.

  “There,” she says, and he tries to suck the word off her tongue. It is the last sound she makes before the machine takes over. The wind wailing through its narrow mouth in the window, snow and ice pelting the glass like little stones. The squeak and clank and clang.

  “Oh,” she says. “Uh.”

  She says nothing and he is lying somewhere next to her. They hear the radiator spitting and dripping.

  “Trap must be full,” he says, and draws smoke. She says something. He hears the wind sound like something else, the feral howling of what the desk clerk warned them about.

  Just trying to scare them, thankyouverymuch.

  Their train leaves for Warsaw in the morning.

  NO. 041062671Q4

  IN THE COURT OF QUEEN’S BENCH OF ONTARIO

  JUDICIAL DISTRICT OF TORONTO

  BETWEEN:

  HER MAJESTY THE QUEEN

  -v-

  __________Accused

  PROCEEDINGS

  Toronto, Ontario 1st March, 19__

  Transcript Management Department

  5th Fl North, 10036 University Street Toronto, ON

  (780) 427-6181

  Proceedings taken in the Court of Queen’s Bench of Ontario

  Superior Courts Building, Toronto, Ontario

  March 1, 19__ 2:00 P.M. Session

  The Honourable Justice__________

  Court of Queen’s Bench of Ontario

  _______For the Crown

  __________For the Accused

  ________Court Clerk

  Ivan L_____, sworn, testifying:

  Defense, examining:

  Q: Good morning, sir.

  A: Good morning.

  Q: What is your name, sir?

  A: My name is Ivan L_____.

  Q: And what is your occupation?

  A: I am a professional embalmer and funeral director. I also manage and operate the largest crematorium in North America.

  (Objection.)

  Q: Would you care to rephrase that, sir?

  Canadian money had funny names. A one-dollar coin had twelve sides and was brown as an American penny. They called it a loonie. The two-dollar coin was called a toonie and was silver. When spending Canadian currency, Fred’s wife said loonie and toonie as often as she could. It tickled her.

  A: My name is Ivan L_____. I manage and operate what I believe to be the largest crematorium in North America.

  Q: Would you also say it is the most efficient?

  (Objection.)

  Q: Would you say it is one of the most efficient? (Objection.)

  (Brief discussion off the record.)

  Q: Let me put it to you this way, Mr. L______: how do you get a hundred Jews in a Volkswagen?

  EXHIBIT P-1: FILE PROVIDED

  Q: And when did you arrive at the camp?

  A: December, nineteen-hundred forty-two.

  Q: Are you Jewish?

  A: Not that I know of.

  (Laughter.)

  THE COURT: Order.

  Q: Why were you there, then?

  A: I have sexual intercourse with a Polish man. Sexual relation with not-Aryan was consider…

  (Consults with Translator.)

  TRANSLATOR: A political crime.

  Q: Did you wear a badge of any kind.

  A: A triangle, half red and half black.

  Q: What did it stand for?

  A: Anti-social.

  THE COURT: Must have clashed something awful with the stripes.

  THE ACCUSED: ().

  Q: How long does it take, then, to burn a human body? A: About an hour and a half under optimal conditions.

  Q: But children burn faster than adults.

  A: That’s correct.

  Q: And Jews burn faster than gentiles.

  (Objection.)

  Q: And skinny people faster than fat people?

  A: On the contrary. Human fat is very good fuel—it ignites instantly at high temperatures. A person with little or no fat is very difficult to burn because they consist mainly of wet tissues.

  There was a heavy metal club and a subway station under the hotel. They thought they would take a train to the courthouse. They thought they would go to Osgoode Station but boarded on the wrong side. Found themselves at Finch, the end of the line.

  A: On the contrary, the refractory bricks won’t tolerate it. A cool-down period of at least an hour between cremations is required. The burner must be turned off and air blown through the chamber. But with the older, coal-fired units it’s not so easy. You can’t just turn coal off.

  EXHIBIT P-2: DANDELION

  Q: You were picking flowers in a concentration camp?

  A: Well…at Raisbo. For work. They use the dandelion in production for…(consults with Translator).

  TRANSLATOR: Synthetic rubber.

  Q: Did you ever see any smokestacks in the camp?

  A: I saw them but they are very far away, very tiny. Maybe five kilometer away. They are smoking but I couldn’t say they are in the camp or no.

  Q: Did you see any movement of prisoners, of the yellow stars, toward the chimneys?

  A: Only the ones already who was dead.

  Q: There were bodies about?

  A: Yes. Hundreds, thousand maybe. Dead of black fever, the typhus. And some who taken their lives at the electric wire. They taken them away by the wheelbarrow.

  Q: But you didn’t see living prisoners being taken toward the smokestacks.

  THE CROWN: Objection.

  THE ACCUSED: ().

  JURY: Happy, happy birthday to you!

  Happy, happy birthd
ay to you!

  They ate lunch at a Mexican restaurant. It was not an authentic Mexican restaurant but one link in a chain that had begun in the States and crossed the border. Fred’s wife found its presence reassuring. She would say “America” like some exile an ocean from home, and she ordered the seafood chimichanga.

  They were joined by the barrister and several other witnesses. The defendant begged off, complaining of stomach flu. They sat in a large booth surrounded by salmon-colored stucco, canned mariachi music, faux balconies bristling with flowers. Arches. Fred ordered a steak and asked the waiter, whose name was Steve, to make sure the meat wasn’t marinated. His wife allowed herself one margarita, and the barrister asked for a glass of water. It was someone’s birthday. When someone was having a birthday in the Mexican chain restaurant, the waitstaff and busboys would surround the table and sing a birthday song, clapping their hands. They couldn’t sing “Happy Birthday to You” for fear of copyright infringement. When it was over they would get back to work, resuming their former expressions.

  Someone was coming to the table. His name was not Steve. He wore black pants and a white shirt and was holding a glass, and must have been bringing the barrister her water. No one really noticed him till he was almost there—they were watching the besieged celebrants and the circle of employees singing and clapping their hands. The man whose birthday it was wore a sombrero.

  You look good! You look good!

  You look fine! You look fine!

  When the man dressed as a busboy got to the table, you could see it wasn’t a drinking glass in his hand but a jar, that the jar had a lid, and that the lid wasn’t screwed down because the man simply lifted it off before tossing the contents of the jar in the barrister’s face. Then you saw that it wasn’t water the jar had contained.

  Happy, happy birthday to you!

  Happy, happy birthday to you!

  Olé!

  The barrister rolled out of the booth, face in hands as with some great despair. The man whose name was not Steve and who was dressed as a busboy ran out of the chain restaurant like someone who has not paid for his meal, and this was at first what some patrons thought was the case. One of the character witnesses, a friend of the defendant who had spent time in a Swedish mental institution and ordered the Grande Burrito, ran out in pursuit. No one else at the table had been splashed. The barrister writhed on the carpet in her business suit, not making a sound, the men trying not to look up her skirt. Fred knelt uncertainly at her side and called for a doctor. Years later the chain would be struck by the largest outbreak of hepatitis A in U.S. history and close its doors, though it is still operational today in Canada.