Another circle was the ravaged rest of Kraków surrounding the Planty. In the lower town, some of the buildings seemed no less than charred, crucifixes set in smudged lintels, a decapitated statue of the Virgin and Child sooty in a recess by a door, again and again on disintegrating walls the black-faced Madonna from the Mariacki Church, head tilted at the precise angle of compassion. But soon they were in the countryside, passing farmhouses, some thatched or wooden with carved, brightly painted staves along the eaves. In a flash of field, Alison saw a dwarf scarecrow berserkly windmilling its empty sleeves, and behind a grove of trees, on the rise of a hill, three copper church domes floating like balloons. A woman in a babushka, a rake over her shoulder as she marched through a ditch, comically interrupted and made bolt a shitting cat. It all seemed innocuous and green. Alison could even smell it. It smelled like spring.
She was smelling her own hair. Last night, she finally showered, then sat before the atonally clanking radiator with her head bowed, wet hair flipped over her face, a dark tangled veil. She sat combing with her fingers; it took two hours to dry.
After nearly as long a time, the bus stopped and the American finally shut up. For most of the ride he’d been jawing opinions that Alison thought she shared until she heard them voiced over-loudly and ad nauseam, with Polish country and western twanging in the background.
‘Sure everything’s cheap, but not when you factor in the wait. Time is money, right?’ Then, passing the silently imprecating driver and stepping down from the bus, she saw she had been mistaken about him. He hadn’t been cursing her at all, but singing with the radio.
Instantly the wind made her hair fly. Standing in the open, she had trouble even restraining it, it whipped so wildly about her head. Alive, she thought. It’s alive. She gathered it at her nape, then set off walking the wind-tunnel behind the others.
No sense of feeling is found in the:
a) skinb) fingers
c) hair d) lips
Back in hairdressing school she had had to memorize a cross-sectional diagram of a hair follicle, epidermis pushing down into dermis. It had looked like a crocus before it flowers, which was not so romantic an analogy: at the bottom of the follicle there is a bud. The soft precursor cells are nourished there as they grow and divide. Pushed upward by more cells growing beneath, they die. When she first learned this, Alison could not believe it, that hair, the very growing, shedding, shining, tangling thing which seemed to her most alive about a person was, in fact, dead.
She rounded the wall. Ahead, a row of little shops; in the window of the first, flowers and votive candles. The smell as she entered was funereal and sweet. To the freshest of the limp white carnations the clerk added a sprig of fern browning at the tips, then tied the two stems together with a ribbon curled against a scissor blade and presented it, upside down, to Alison. Malcolm was just coming around the wall as she left the shop, the direction his hair was blowing abruptly changing as he turned; she waited for him to catch up and took his arm.
Just who, thought Malcolm, is leading whom?
The entrance had obviously been built later as part of the Muzeum. A long wide hall, coat check, book-stand, and behind a glass wall an empty cafeteria, the way it was lit discolouring and surreal. On the wall, the plan of the camps was painted—Death Block, Extermination, Execution Wall—then the more complicated circuit-board of Birkenau. After a second set of glass doors, they had to get in line to register. Alison hadn’t wanted to come today, would have preferred to wait one more day for the intermittent delirium of jet lag to pass. Yet here she was, feeling exactly as she should: as if she had been dragged off in the middle of the night to a place spoken of only in dire whispers.
‘Two Canadians,’ she said.
‘Do you wish to see the film?’
‘Yes.’
‘It will be shown in English in half an hour.’
In the cinema foyer was a tableaux of gypsy prisoners photographed in the three familiar poses, but for some reason they were not in uniform and their heads were unshorn. They could even have been passport photos, each child scrubbed, men in suits and ties, the women’s hair variously styled, lustrous and black. None were smiling, though neither did they look afraid. What impressed Alison was their dignity and how seriously they took it. Turning, she saw people milling, also looking at the tableau or talking hushedly or simply waiting in silence though no sign in four languages commanded quiet. The last and only other time she had been in a room where solemnity had seemed physically present was waiting for Christian’s memorial service to begin. Then, too, she had felt this queasy foreboding.
Malcolm had wandered off somewhere. She hoped he would come back.
‘Here is plan of Birkenau to where we shall go to next . . .’ she overheard in the hall. It was the same taxi driver who had brought them from the airport, talking to the two American women she had seen yesterday in the hotel.
‘Let us go! We start now the tour!’ Clapping fat hands together, he waved them on.
The double doors to the cinema were open now, but Malcolm was still nowhere to be seen. She took a seat and saved him the one beside it by laying the wilting carnation on it. In the foyer, the two American women were arguing with the taxi driver, loud enough for everyone to hear; they wanted to see the film, but he wanted to start the tour. Even after the lights were dimmed and the film began, their disputing voices carried in every time the door was opened.
Many of the pictures in the book turned out to be stills taken from this very film. Just as she had used to lie in bed staring up at the white rectangle on the ceiling and see the images projected from her mind as a slide show, now she stared straight-ahead and watched her imagination flipping, rapid-fire, the pages of the book. When the lights came back up, Alison noticed a family sitting in front of her, among them a little boy. In profile, she saw his cogitating face. He kept scrunching up his nose, as if he were sniffing. Every time, his glasses lifted.
‘That wasn’t a nice movie, was it?’ said his father.
The boy swung around, glaring. ‘No! It was a dead movie!’
Alison stood. There was Malcolm, leaning against the back wall, waiting for her. She came over and, once again, offered him her arm.
Double doors led from the cinema directly outside where, diagonally across the green, the wooden tower of the guardhouse was. She saw the black-and-white striped posts on either side of the gate and, although she couldn’t make it out from this distance, she knew that above the gate the wrought-iron scroll read ARBEIT MACHT FREI.
In preparation for the onslaught of wind, she collected her hair in her free hand, the one not holding Malcolm’s arm and the flower. She looked at Malcolm. He nodded and, together, they started along the path towards a sign.
YOU ARE ENTERING A PLACE OF
EXCEPTIONAL HORROR AND TRAGEDY. PLEASE SHOW YOUR RESPECT FOR THOSE WHO SUFFERED AND DIED HERE BY BEHAVING IN A MANNER
SUITABLE TO THE DIGNITY OF THEIR MEMORY.
You are standing beside the two Canadians, the woman holding tightly to her hair, though it is sheltered here in the quadrangle. Now you see that you were mistaken about their relationship, that if he is her uncle, he is her great-uncle. The dye fooled you. He didn’t seem quite this old getting off the bus.
No one else you rode in from Kraków with is around. When you arrived the film was about to start in German and the Dutch girls were heading for the cinema. Probably the Swiss Italians watched it then, too, so all of them would have a head start. Where the American boy is, you don’t know, but as they weren’t selling popcorn and the film is black and white, he likely skipped it.
People leaving the cinema recluster in the quadrangle around their guides. It reminds you of how they used to be grouped as ‘fit’ for work or, most often, ‘unfit’. Today, though, no one is stripped naked. No detour to the gas chamber. Like you, the Canadians seem to be waiting for a less crow
ded moment to start, and though you don’t intend to intrude upon their privacy, you overhear her ask a question, which is not so strange except that you were sitting right behind them on the bus, and for the whole long ride they exchanged not a single word. Now you hear her asking if it’s true that a person’s hair can turn white overnight, but you step discreetly away before he answers.
Just before the gate stands an enormous weeping willow that, tousled by wind, appears to be shaking its head. Pass by it, then under the flat black letters—ARBEIT MACHT FREI. Stop and look back. The Canadians are following, the woman slowly leading the old man. In the quadrangle, another tour group forms. The gate has not slammed closed behind you, no distempered canine nightmare brings up the rear, no black boot delivers a coccyx-cracking kick—yet look at the tree. It keeps on rustling.
No, no.
Before you is a wooden building, beside which a group falls into a listening circle around the guide. Take the pamphlet from your pocket and find out what the building is.
e) Camp kitchen
Mounted behind glass on the wall, a poster-sized enlargement of the very spot you are all standing looking at the photograph. THE CAMP ORCHESTRA IN 1941 reads the caption in Polish, English, French and, this time, Russian. Macabre, the shorn musicians in their stripes, the conductor on a wooden box in pyjama bottoms and tails. See the emaciated concert-master, the percussionist with rickets. What are they playing, you wonder. Wagner?
‘Marches,’ says the guide, who has a Polish accent but is speaking near-perfect English. ‘They played as the prisoners left the camp to work and also as they returned, often carrying their expired comrades.’
In the pamphlet, red dots and arrows map a route, but instead of going straight, turn where no one is, down an avenue of tossing trees and identical red-brick blocks, each with its own little lawn and numbered Art Deco lamp. Except for the guard tower at the end and the triple barbed-and-electrified fence, it’s almost pleasant, like pristinely maintained council housing. Instead of going in, you walk on until you reach the triple wires at the end of the avenue, the concrete posts arching inward to discourage climbing. Who would try, you wonder, with a current running through and, right behind, the guard tower and the dogs? Sick-makingly eerie, the wind against your back, trying to push you against the wires. When it lets up, it is only to gather strength for another shove.
Continue walking. Ahead, between the last two blocks, is a dead end—quite—a courtyard where a large rectangular something stands against the brick of the back wall. You can’t make it out yet, but there is a scattering of shiny objects on the ground in front. The facing windows are boarded up on the one side, and bricked in on the other, preventing anyone from looking out.
Inside the courtyard, you see flowers wrapped in shiny cellophane and candles flickering in a row and, closer, a panel made of some curious sod-like, bullet-absorbing material. Consult the pamphlet. The block on the left, Block 10, was boarded up so no one could see in. Dr Mengele worked here with his dwarfs and twins.
Block 11, to the right, is quaintly named the Death Block. A tour group just now arriving, the guide monotonously counts off in French each person crossing the threshold. Wait for her to enter or you’ll be counted in.
On the main floor is where summary sessions of the Gestapo court were held. The walls retain their original paper, a marbled brown and green shot through with rusty streaks that bring to mind dried blood stopped in veins. The furniture is still here—sturdy wooden chairs, a monolithic desk. Missing is the gavel that precipitated each prisoner being bullied down the corridor to the second room, which you come to now, where they waited for their verdict—a flogging in the yard or a suspension: on a post, hung by wrists tied and wrenched up behind the back. Next are the rooms where they were stripped before being led out to the courtyard and the Execution Wall of grey sod. If they weren’t taken outside, they went downstairs, as you go now.
The stairwell is so crowded that the line comes to a halt until some of the visitors already in the cellar come back up. You stand watching, looking at the faces of those mounting the stairs. There is no comprehensive reaction, but something does strike you. Oddly, it reminds you of how as an adolescent, in the tumult of self-definition, you began to recognize secret signs and gestures and would make pronouncements in your head like: This one is like me, this one isn’t. Then the line starts to move and you descend, to where it is palpably colder and damper. Down here, an echo—the reiterated shuffle and whisper, the nauseating ring of a full sole on cement.
Long dark corridors lined with cells, some with doors regrilled in the motif of the Muzeum, some piled high inside with cellophane-wrapped flowers. People press up behind you, trying to look through the tiny barred windows. According to the pamphlet, most of these concrete closets were for the ho-hum routine of torture and detention, but Cell 18 was one of those reserved for particular torments—a ‘starvation cell’. Cell 20, windowless, was a ‘suffocation cell’. In Cell 22, they have opened the wall of the ‘standing cells’ to show the yard-square cubicle where four people were wedged in for the night.
Here at the end of the hall a small crowd has gathered. No one is talking, but the way those in the rear determinedly push forward, you can tell there is something in that cell that everyone wants to see. Wait for them to clear away and when a young man butts in ahead of you, let him. He comes right out again.
Stoop and enter. You have to look twice to notice the protective square of plexiglass. Under it, a crude crucifix scratched into the plaster.
Climbing back up the stairs, you pass the people waiting to go down. Now they study your expression, as you studied others while you were waiting to descend. Do they see that you are thinking of that prisoner-cum-artist, shivering in his stripes, waiting for the stamp of boots to recede down the hall? What had he found for a tool—a bent and priceless nail? Did it dig into his own palm as he worked? Did he perish for it, his self-expression? Then you think of the young Frenchman ducking into the cell fifty years later and ducking smugly out again.
Leave Block 11 now, and as you go, recall the old Queen of Uncles reciting back when you were getting off the bus—this way enter the Museum of woe . . . And watch the people entering, their varied expressions of outrage or grief, the blank faces of those in shock, the profound weariness, the revulsion. At the same time there are people coming through who seem detached. Perhaps they are simply unprepared; they skipped the film, or history in school. The sceptics and deniers, the imaginatively impoverished, the perversely curious—they are visiting, too.
Continue along the avenue, against the flow of people and wind. A couple walk slowly towards you joined at the hip, the man the woman’s very sight and volition. Encircled in his arms, she moves along with both hands over her face. Then, sheltered between the blocks, four teenagers from a school group huddle around a communal cigarette.
Entering Block 7, you find yourself in a corridor lined with women’s faces, their expressions worse than blank—gaunt and hauntingly restrained. Aurelia, Emilia, Hana. A flower hangs from a photo, tied with a long curled ribbon. Teresa, Allegra. ‘Living and Sanitary Conditions’ the theme of this block, some of the rooms are glassed in. Stand and look inside, where, on the floor, straw and filthy blankets have been shaped into loose fetid pallets. Farther along—Luzie, Flor, Katarzyna—is a room with ten crude and unprivate toilets in a row.
Bożena, Bondi, Irena.
This next room you can walk through: three-tiered bunks strewn with straw and blanket scraps. ‘C’est affreux,’ the woman behind you mutters. ‘C’est comme une installation.’
Leave, walk down the steps and back out on the avenue to Block 6 where, in the corridor, you are met with the tearless eyes of men. Edward, Józef, Michał, Stanisław, Emil. In the first room off the corridor, a chart explains the triangular badges: red for Politicals; two in yellow, one reversed and overlapping, to form a star for Jews; for Gyp
sies and the Mentally Ill black; Jehovah’s Witnesses purple; Homosexuals pink; Criminals green. Slowly, you turn and see at the far end of the room a display of prison uniforms and, for the first time, recognize that a colour is missing from the abject spectrum. You hadn’t known that the stripes, seen all along in photographs in black and white, were blue.
Now it occurs to you that you have been following the official route after all, but in reverse. ‘Material Evidence of Crimes’ reads the legend for Block 5. So it’s like this: first photographs and drawings, reconstructions, models; now actual, contemporaneous objects. You are moving from the abstract to the personal. Following the route backward—Block 7, Block 6, Block 5, Block 4—makes a kind of countdown.
The first room in Block 5 is empty except for a wooden case under the window just inside the door containing nothing but round dinted tins of shoe polish. Turn now, look across the long room and, as you stare at the hill of brushes behind the glass, the physical emptiness of the room is filled with the suggestion that the room itself was once filled with brushes.
Hair brushes
Nail brushes
Shaving brushes
Tooth brushes
Lint brushes
Shoe brushes
Scrubbing brushes
Step out into the corridor where the walls are lined with photo murals—pictures of the stores. Here is the very Everest of brushes you just imagined and, here, a magnitude of combs. Pause now to think of your own brush, the lost hair woven in a mat around the bristles. Give thought, too, to your toothbrush, flaring from overuse—a toothbrush that will be casually discarded, that never stood for anything but dental hygiene. Continue on past prayer shawls suspended like sails, mangled eyeglass frames, enamel dishes, pots, sieves, tubs, basins, all stacked to the ceiling, trusses, crutches, wooden hands, artificial legs and arms amassed like the limbs in the pits.
A History of Forgetting Page 24