by Alan Elsner
I bristled. Russell grabbed my arm to stop me from saying something we would all regret. “Perhaps you could give us five minutes while I consult with my colleague,” he said.
We stepped into a corridor lined with buckets to catch the water leaking through the roof.
“Cain, you promised to stick to the agreement,” he said, glaring at me.
“This is absurd. I wanted to know if they shared living quarters with the SS. The question is legitimate.”
“Stick to what you really need, okay? Otherwise everyone is going to get angry, and you'll end up with nothing. You don't need to know who lived with whom or what they had for dinner.”
We returned to the room.
“Very well. I apologize for the irrelevance of my earlier questions.” I said. “Could either of the gentlemen please tell me if they recall an orchestra or musical band at Belzec?” The translator translated. After a brief pause, the two old men looked at the official for permission to answer, then mumbled between themselves when he nodded his approval. Eventually, one offered a response, speaking haltingly. When he was finished, the other added a few words. The translator took copious notes, then relayed the answer.
“There was a small band. You could not really call it an orchestra. The number of players varied as people came and went,” the interpreter said.
“What people?”
“Musicians. New musicians arrived in the camp and were added from time to time. Usually there were four or five players.”
“Who was in charge of it?”
“An SS man ran it.”
“When did it perform?” One of the men was seized by a burst of coughing. He spat into a filthy handkerchief before responding. “It played sometimes in the evening for the entertainment of the Germans, who occasionally had parties, and also when the transports arrived. It helped calm the visitors as they were getting off the trains.”
“Did he just say ‘visitors’?” Lynn interrupted.
The translator referred to his notes. “Yes, that's the word he used.”
“I take it by visitors, he means specifically Jewish visitors, who arrived at the camp to be murdered,” I said, taking up the point.
Both men nodded, expressionless.
“What kind of music did they play?” I asked.
The men consulted. One shrugged his shoulders and answered, “It was mainly German music—marches, waltzes, polkas, that kind of thing.”
“Do they recall anything about the SS man in charge?”
Another consultation. “He was young, not very tall; we don't remember his name. He was just another SS man.”
“What did he do? Did he conduct, did he play?”
“He conducted. Sometimes he joined in the music. He had a nice singing voice, very deep, almost like a Russian voice. He was popular with the Jews when they arrived. Also, he often sang in the evening at the parties the Germans had.”
“Can the gentlemen remember any of the people in the orchestra?”
A longer, much more animated conversation.
“One was a pretty young girl—nice body, good pair of breasts, cute face—if you like that type.”
“What type?”
“Dark, Jewish looks.”
“I see. What did she play?”
“The violin. There was talk the SS man was sweet on her.”
“What do they mean, sweet on her?”
“He had a soft spot for her, protected her, got her food. We assume he was fucking her.”
Interesting. I remembered the first journal extract Susan Scott had given me. What did it say? “I know in some sense she is not fully human, but who of us is in this place? And yet her form is human and lovely.” Was this the mysterious creature from the diary?
“Was that allowed between the SS and a Jewish woman?” I continued.
“It happened. They had their urges.” “I am but a man. I will be strong. This is a test of my will, and I shall not fail it.” Perhaps he had failed.
As the interview progressed, the two Ukrainians relaxed, even enjoyed the proceedings, lighting one cigarette after another, inhaling deeply, coughing with abandon. They made me want to puke. I handed over the photo-simulation of the young Roberto Delatrucha.
“Is this the man they remember?” They both studied it carefully, consulted with each other, then shrugged.
“We're not sure. It was a long time ago. It looks familiar, but we can't say for sure,” the interpreter said. I was fast losing patience with the whole business. It was hardly surprising their memories were fuzzy. The Ukrainians and many of the Germans at the extermination camp had spent much of their time in a drunken stupor, their way of blocking out the horror. We wouldn't get the evidence we needed here. These two old men certainly remembered Franz Beck, but they didn't even know his name. My last chance of nailing Delatrucha was vanishing into the smoggy air of L'viv.
“Please thank the gentlemen for their help,” I told the interpreter.
“Is that it?” asked the man for the Justice Ministry.
“That's it.”
“Wait. One more question,” Lynn interrupted. “Ask them what happened to the musicians, especially the young girl, the violinist.”
The interpreter translated the question, which the Ukrainians found amusing. One of them looked at Lynn and began to chuckle—a donkeylike bray that set my teeth on edge.
“What's so funny?” Lynn said, distressed.
The old man began to speak. The interpreter scribbled notes. “Everybody had the same fate there, whether they could play the violin or not. It wasn't a holiday camp, after all.”
“She was gassed?”
“Everyone who was not gassed was shot.” The old man cackled. Lynn gasped, which only made him cackle some more. My father looked ready to punch the man. We left.
We reconvened in a café, and I pulled out the journal extract Susan Scott had given me. Now that we knew of the Jewish violin girl, the brief sentences held an unbearable emotional weight.
July 1, 1942.
I think of her night and day. I know it's wrong. I know in some sense she is not fully human, but who of us in this place is? And yet her form is human and lovely, and I am but a man. I will be strong. This is a test of my will, and I shall not fail it.
My heart broke. The poor girl. What must her life have been like, her only hope of survival resting on this Nazi who was determined to suppress every human emotion?
“We're only a couple of hours away,” my father said. “It's just across the border. I looked at a map. I want to go there.”
“Go where?”
“Belzec. I want to see the place where my parents died, the place where all these terrible things happened. I never said Kaddish for my parents. I told you I had personal business.”
“This is your personal business? Saying Kaddish?”
“This is why I came with you to Ukraine.”
Strange. After weeks of immersing myself in Belzec, I had somehow forgotten it was a real place that we could actually visit. Now that I had the chance, I wasn't sure if I wanted to go. What would I see?—and what I would feel?
21
When tears flow here, you will realize
If there was no other sign,
That I was here.
—“THAT SHE WAS HERE” BY FRIEDRICH RüCKERT, MUSIC BY FRANZ SCHUBERT
NEXT MORNING, I wandered the streets looking for a place to buy some flowers—obviously the wrong time of the year. A few sorry blooms were laid out on the tables of the restaurant at the hotel, already several days old. It took a while to explain the situation, but I finessed the manager into letting me have the lot for twenty bucks, which he pocketed, looking very pleased with himself.
Belzec was less than fifty miles from L'viv—a couple of hours on the poor roads—but I hadn't counted on a two-hour delay crossing the Ukrainian-Polish border. We arrived in Belzec in the early afternoon on another mild, overcast day. It was a shabby little place, maybe a couple of thousand res
idents, nestled in thick pine forests. Most of the snow had melted, leaving dirty puddles flanking the potholed street that ran through the center of the village. Our rented Fiat appeared to be the only car in town. The streets were deserted. We circled the village center for a few minutes, looking for the way to the camp, a mile or two out of town.
“Strange,” Lynn noted. “You'd think there would be a signpost. People must come here to pay their respects.” But there was none.
“Quick, ask her,” I said, spotting a teenage girl crossing the road.
My father rolled down the car window. “Where's the memorial?” he asked in Polish. She shook her head and muttered a few words. “She doesn't know,” he said.
“This is the right place, isn't it?” Lynn asked. She had a point, but how many places called Belzec could there be? How could you live in a place where half a million people were slaughtered within living memory and not know anything about it?
A young man was coming out of a shabby grocery shop smoking a cigarette. He, too, shook his head. Then Lynn caught sight of an old man walking down the street.
“Ask him. He'll know. He looks old enough to have been here then.”
“Excuse me, sir. Can you direct us to the memorial?” my father asked.
The old-timer shook his head. “What memorial?”
“Well, the museum then.”
“What museum? There's no museum here.”
“The place where they burned the Jews,” my father snapped. The man scowled, baring a toothless mouth, and retorted in Polish.
“What's he saying?” I asked. My dad's face was white and drawn with anger.
“He says we shouldn't bother going there because there's nothing to see except a memorial for the Jews, as if their lives were worth more than all the Poles who died in the war. Welcome to Poland, land of my youth.”
My father addressed the man again, who shrugged his shoulders and pointed vaguely ahead. “He says it's two kilometers this way, near where you cross the railway tracks,” my father said.
We had passed it without noticing on our way into the village. The only sign acknowledging the site was half hidden behind some trees and coated with rust. Next to it was another, larger sign advertising agricultural vehicles. We turned onto a muddy track crossing a railroad line—the same line that brought the victims to their deaths all those years ago. The path ended beside a house, from which we could hear pop music blaring. It felt like the most desolate place on earth. Drizzle dripped from the leaky gray sky. There was a palpable sense of evil about this place, deserted and forgotten as it was. We sat in the car for a couple of minutes, not speaking.
My father clearly felt the same reluctance as I did. Neither of us had spoken more than a couple of words the entire way from L'viv. I was almost afraid to set foot inside. He opened the car door.
“We came halfway around the world,” he said. “Let's see what there is to see.” I took the flowers and followed him through the wrought-iron gate that led into Belzec.
At the entrance stood a large map of the layout of the camp as it had been. It was written only in Polish.
“Where do you suppose he stood with his band, singing?’ Lynn asked.
My father studied the map. “Right here,” he said. “Just about where we're standing now.” Ahead of us would have been the Schlauch, the tube that led to the gas chambers. We walked between clumps of bedraggled trees—silver birches, pale and anemic, trunks like malnourished limbs. A faint wind blew, rustling an image of a Christian saint hanging from the branches of one of the birches. The Nazis had planted these trees after they burned the bodies and tore down the camp, as a way of covering up the crime. Just beyond the wire fence enclosing the site, a sawmill was working. Only the high-pitched whine of machinery punctured the silence.
A hundred yards beyond the gate stood the memorial, if you could even call it that. Five crumbling steps led up to a metal sculpture of two emaciated figures, one holding up the other by the shoulders. An image of people struggling to survive oppression, no doubt, but these two figures seemed horribly inappropriate, like space aliens from comic books. They looked like somebody's idea of a bad joke, a caricature of the real humans who had died here. Behind them stood a wall of discolored marble, marred by cracks and fissures, in which was carved a Polish inscription.
“In memory of the victims of Hitler's terror murdered from 1942 to 1943,” my father translated.
“It doesn't say anything about the victims being Jewish.” I noted.
He shook his head.
In fact, there were no Jewish symbols here at all. We were standing in a place forgotten by the world. Who remembered the victims now? It was as if they had never been. Yet each had been a human being, an entire universe unto himself. Now they were just a number conveniently rounded to the nearest hundred thousand—500,000 victims of “terror” who weren't even classified as Jews. I laid the flowers on the ground below the sculpture and noticed traces of yizkor memorial candles. So some people did come here seeking comfort. It was hard to imagine them finding any.
“Marek, do you have your prayer book?” my father asked softly.
“Yes, of course.”
“Please, help me say Kaddish. I've forgotten the words.”
I bent my head. Softly, together with him, I recited the words, which affirm the greatness of God. Lynn joined in as well. Strange, the power of these words for a person who did not believe in God at all.
When we looked up, a little dog was sniffing around at the flowers. Tail wagging, it lifted its hind leg and pissed on the steps of the memorial. “No,” my father said in a choked voice, convulsed by great, shuddering sobs. “O God, O God,” he wailed. “My mother, my poor mother. What she must have suffered.”
In my whole life, I had never seen my father cry. I had now witnessed it twice in as many weeks. “It's okay, Dad,” I said, hugging him, feeling stiff and embarrassed.
“Oh, Marek, Marek,” he sobbed,“I wish my parents could have seen you. They would have been so proud of you. And your mother, too. She would have been so proud of the man you have become.”
As I choked up, Lynn put an arm around us both. We three stood there for a moment in an awkward triangle. My father broke the union abruptly, turned away, and walked into the woods beyond the statue. Lynn followed him. I gazed at the trees, and a quotation from the Shabbat service came into my head as I stood there: “It is a tree of life for those who grasp it, and its ways are ways of pleasantness.” But there was no life here.
I had never had a sense of my grandparents as real people. The gap in my father's life and in mine left by their murder had never been completely filled. A great, encompassing anger began to fill me. Was this crumbling edifice, bereft of any dignity, the best that Poland, that humanity, could do to honor the memory of the dead? The marble wall had been scrubbed in several places. There were faint traces of swastikas, scrawled on the memorial and then removed.
The site wasn't very large—about the size of a couple of football fields. Behind the memorial, the terrain dipped into a kind of trench, probably the remains of one of the antitank ditches in which the Nazis had dumped the bodies of the victims. A dirt track led around the perimeter, parallel to a wire fence gaping with many holes. Adjacent to the path stood a row of concrete blocks, which, like everything else in this place, were decaying. Pieces of rubble lay scattered along the side of the path. Weeds poked through the slushy snow. Two women with shopping bags were taking a shortcut through the camp.
“This is disgusting,” I said.
“Yes,” said my father. “I knew my parents died here, but I imagined they could rest in peace with some kind of honor. There is no honor here. But still, I'm glad we came. It was time to close the circle.”
“It's not closed,” I said. “In the next few days, one of the murderers who stood at this very spot is going to receive a prize for lifetime achievement from the president of the United States.”
“That's your problem, not
mine. For me, the circle is closed. This is where my mother and father died. I'll never know how they felt in those last terrible moments, or what they suffered. I almost hope they heard that bastard singing his damned Schubert; it might have made it easier. But now, I'm standing here where they stood, breathing the air they breathed. They are dead, but I survived, and their spirit lives on in me and in you and in the next generation, which, God willing, you will bring into the world.”
Lynn bent down and picked something up.
“Oh, my God,” she said.
It was a human jawbone.
We dug a shallow hole in the ground with our bare hands and silently buried it.
22
The Jew was tied to a post and two Ukrainians rubbed his naked body with harsh floor brushes until the bones showed.
—TESTIMONY OF MIECYSLAW NIEDUZAK
IT WAS NOW FEBRUARY 15, five days before Beck received his award from the president. We'd missed the Super Bowl. Valentine's Day had come and gone. It was as if we had been in a strange time warp, but now time had caught up with us.
I still lacked that vital piece of evidence, the final link in the chain, to prove beyond doubt that Delatrucha was Franz Beck. And I couldn't figure out where I might find it.
On our last night in Europe, CNN reported that the UN was charging twenty-one Bosnian Serbs with genocide and crimes against humanity. I was devoting my life to a genocide that happened half a century ago, while another one was going on right now a few hundred miles away.
I called Fabrizio in Washington. “We're coming back tomorrow. I want to know if it's safe.”
“I don't know.”
“What do you mean, you don't know?”
“Field sources have been picking up more and more chatter that some kind of extremist attack might be coming. The problem is, we don't know where or when. We think maybe a federal building in D.C., but that's no more than a guess. The director has set up a task force; the entire government's on alert.”
“Holy shit!”
“You may have set the attack in motion with your little gun fight in West Virginia.”