That language sank them all in silence. It was one paradox produced by the sight of Hurbinek. For a month they barely spoke if it wasn’t to refer to him; they only responded to the sounds that child made, sounds that immediately vanished, the prescient symptom of an intense, humiliating wail. A dirty silence, as dirty and silent as streets were now, and houses, bodies, mathematics, novels, trombones, newspapers, and the dead throughout Europe.
Henek strains to listen to Hurbinek’s voice. He brings his lips close to his cheek. He knows it is a privilege. “Hello, my little sweet,” Sofia Pawlicka, Cèrmik by her maiden name, would have said, in other circumstances, had she been alive.
2
Some words belong to a dream.
Walter Benjamin had a dream on June 28, 1938. He was climbing a ladder but couldn’t see the top. Other ladders like his were everywhere, that other people were climbing. They took a long time; they were very steep at the end. The ladder came to a sudden halt and he saw he had reached the top, a fragile step separating him from the void. He looked around and saw other men in the same situation, at the top of their respective peaks. One raised his hand to his head and said, “I am dizzy and feel sick” and hurtled down from the peak. That dizziness spread and they fell one after another, after they’d raised their hands to their foreheads. When Benjamin felt dizzy symptoms—or thought he did in his sleep—he woke up.
And I have just woken up from a similar dream in the hospital in Frankfurt: in my dream I was on the top of a mountain of rubbish and filth. I couldn’t identify the kind of rubbish, but I knew, as a matter of course, that it was foul-smelling; there were old clothes, scrap metal and even human remains that I accepted, as a matter of course. Next to me, at the top of the mountain, someone had nailed up a sign: FRANKFURT. From where I stood, I could see two other mountains, also containing all manner of filth and rubbish. The sign on one said AUSCHWITZ and on the other WARSAW. There was a man like myself on both peaks, deaf in fear and shock. I knew that both men were me, but they didn’t have my face. Then one of them, the furthest away, (WARSAW), sank into his mountain, as a matter of course, and was swallowed up by the detritus. The other man and I stared at each other, but as we did so, the second was also swallowed up by his mountain (AUSCHWITZ). The nurse woke me up because I was waving my arms and was soaked in sweat. She was afraid I had a temperature and gave me an injection, but when I came round and she left the room, I couldn’t get to sleep again. The cold presence of the nurse reminded me that I was still in Frankfurt, and I thought of Benjamin. I thought how I was in the city that had allowed Mengele to qualify as a doctor, yet hadn’t accepted Benjamin as a teacher in Goethe University. Benjamin wrote that some kinds of important dreams endure in the shape of certain words. I wonder which word would contain his dream of the men falling from their mountain peaks. Perhaps it was simply that word: peak, or maybe dizziness, and hence, the end, and hence, and why not? revenge. In my case, the word that encapsulates my dream is paralysis. I was going to Auschwitz, but not anymore. Or the word is shit, and hence origin, and terror.
What dream did Hurbinek’s words belong to?
With one finger, Henek lovingly cleans the dribble from the boy’s lips and listens. Henek listens every day, Henek listens every night.
3
After the horror, dumbness is all, and Hurbinek was dumb. His words—if that is how one can describe those syllables that emerge from his mouth, like the sigh from a disenchanted angel who lets himself drift into death, and not the projections from the men around him in this shack for the sick—his words were simulacra of an elemental language as unutterable as a sacred or accursed name.
There are words that are not possible.
Jean Améry wrote in one of his books,“Words cease in any place where a reality is imposed that is totalitarian in form.” Améry was in Auschwitz and survived. He discovered what “totalitarian in form” meant in its purest state, where death was gratuitous and life was worthless. He had coincided with Primo Levi in the Buna-Monowitz factory, but they didn’t meet then. Améry’s real name was Hans Mayer and he was from Vienna. He changed his name in 1938 when he sought refuge in Belgium. But here’s another throw of the dice by fate: by chance he chose the name of John Amery, son of the former British Minister of War and founder of the Legion of St. George, a military society created to support the Nazis at the heart of Great Britain. Did he ever realize? Maybe not. It is irrelevant, perversely curious. John Amery was hung by the Allies, and Jean Améry, like Primo Levi, committed suicide. He took an overdose of barbiturates in a Salzburg hotel in 1978, after mercilessly pouring scorn on the word-mongering of poets who were friends of the Nazis, like Ernst Bertram and Gottfried Benn. Benjamin said that as we get older words make more of an impact, and even a single word, however impossible it may seem, can impact so strongly it can lead to a new, even definitive state of mind. Perhaps the word Améry found was the same one that Hurbinek uttered: the desperate attempt to voice silence. Or the lost line from the lullaby sung by the peasant women in the Beskides mountains that Henek had sung. After the horror, only dumbness can ensue.
4
Henek makes an effort. I admire the effort he makes to do things. Like, for example, getting Hurbinek to speak. He spends a lot of time by his side, teaching him to pronounce his name, Hurbinek, a name that isn’t even his real one, a name they’ve all given him there, after Henek interpreted a few vague sounds, the almost guttural noises the child made, and suggested that name quite persuasively because they suddenly reminded him of the name of a footballer he once met who played for Ferencváros.
“He got out of a car in my town and said hello to everyone. And shook my hand.”
When Henek comes back from flirting with the nurses (or them with him, particularly Jadzia, the thin, anemic Polish nurse who’d been tortured and didn’t dare touch Hurbinek and when she did so, she couldn’t avoid showing her repugnance), he spends hours caressing the arms of the child so they don’t get cold and tenderly spelling out his name in syllables,“Hur-bi-nek, Hur-bi-nek, Hur-bi-nek.”
Again and again, and with an insistence for a lost cause the rest of the men in the barrack had never seen before. Every day, while Hurbinek was alive, Henek sat by his side and patiently repeated his name. He was loathe to accept, after pronouncing those syllables, just as he’d heard them, that in fact the child was only emitting a sound of pain or sorrow.
But Hurbinek never said Hurbinek, in spite of all that.
Henek understood the nurses reasonably well. He mixed up words from the languages he had heard in the camp: Yiddish, Hungarian, Polish, plus a couple of greetings in Russian, sexual obscenities in Slovakian, three ways of saying “don’t forget me” and “I hate you” in Greek, and the odd German word, like mensch,“fellow,” that was forever on his lips as an epithet for anything.
Thanks to that mosaic of languages he managed to find food and clean clothes for the sick in the shack, particularly for Hurbinek, who immediately dirtied himself and never had the right clothing—his body shrunk so rapidly by the day, and he was so worn down at the end, when he died, that his shroud consisted of a trouser leg and half a blanket. Consequently the words that began to be more habitual around him appertained to material objects, were all concrete and real: shirt, blanket, bowl, spoon, cap, shit, water, bread, morphine, hair, cudgel, rat, eye. Henek repeated them ten, twenty times, when he had the opportunity, so he would learn—“My shirt, shirt, shirt,” and pointed to his clothes, “Your cap, cap, cap” and touched what he was wearing on his head. “Water, water, water” and made him drink from a tin. “Your eye, eye, eye” and put his finger on Hurbinek’s cheek.
Sometimes Henek tried to teach him words he had heard the executioners use, such as fressen, that he used meaning “to eat” when in fact it meant “throw the pigs some feed” or “fodder” because that’s what they were in the eyes of the SS, livestock, animals only kept alive to be slaughtered. Or s
pritzen, the favorite word of Höss, the Camp Commandant, who would repeat it to great laughter when they were slicing through a child’s neck and the blood streamed down its body, “Spurt, spurt!” Patzold and Goldstein reproached Henek for using these words that were damned because they evoked a raft of painful experiences that they then re-lived. Primo Levi told them those meanings were degraded, were language that must be forgotten, erased from dictionaries, removed from all tongues, destroyed in books. “They are words that should be tried and executed,” schoolmaster Rubem Yetzem would say in turn.
5
“Wstawać!”
Primo Levi relates how this Polish word was the word he most feared and hated, the one that pursued him in his nightmares for the rest of his life after January 1945. It was the dawn word, the word for waking up from a sleep into which your body collapsed exhausted, sleep that healed nothing, simply a paralyzing of life in motion where the torture of starvation surfaced in the subconscious, the only sleep really possible. It was a cruel word that carried within it an unpleasant sensation of cold and intense discomfort, reality that couldn’t be eluded, non-sleep. He defined it as “the foreign order”: “Get up!”
Henek hears that word no longer and similarly no one else in the camp hears it now. It has disappeared. But the tinny, absurdly nasal voice over the loudspeakers (when Henek heard the word “death” it would always remind him of the nasal loudspeaker in Auschwitz) still echoes in the ears of everyone and begins in the middle of the night. It is easy to mistake Hurbinek’s coughs for the howls from that loudspeaker: “Raus! Raus!”3
They take their time to become mere coughs in the head of Henek, who suddenly wakes up, eyes bulging out of their sockets and temples quivering. Frightened, he gets up in the night and seeks consolation by kissing and touching Hurbinek.
Then when he recovers his sense of absurd normality, Henek helps Hurbinek; a torture renewed every night; death zigzags across the anonymous child’s straw cradle. He runs his hand over his back and presses the sores; the child produces an even wheezier rattle. What did he say? Henek wonders, but it isn’t a word, only a word in disguise, a stammer, an intention that is never fulfilled. Hurbinek’s eyes want to live and are glued to Henek’s reactions. He repeats his two words, or perhaps one. Mass klo, very quietly. Sleepy Henek hasn’t heard it.
“Mass klo” Hurbinek repeats making a supreme effort.
Henek brightened up when he heard that and understood he was asking him to stay there, where language and time had been suspended. He cuddled up to him and for the first time realized that Hurbinek’s belly was going up and down very fast. That was his reply.
6
Are words eternal?
For almost fifteen years, the Führer’s fetish word and the favorite word in Germany was Vernichtung, “annihilation.” It was used as much as auszurotten, “eradicate.” In the bed next to me, my companion in this hospital ward is reading these same words in a sporting newspaper. The German language has a very poor memory.
7
Walter Benjamin had a prophetic dream on September 10, 1939, a year before he died. He was sitting on the branch of a tree. Underneath him was a kind of lawn or green wooden dais and a huge crowd spread over a meadow on a hillside. They wandered about like zombies and lived in barracks that were aligned symmetrically; they all wore prison garb. They were skinny, and some repeated in their companions’ ears “They will burn us, they will burn us.” They looked up, to where he was sitting, but weren’t looking at him, as he thought, but at a huge figure even higher up. It was a child in a general’s uniform. He couldn’t see his face but could make out his arm and his stripes. His arm made movements similar to a child putting his hand into a box of toys. Perching on his branch, he jotted down the most important ideas he’d ever had, and did so on sheets of paper that then drifted down onto the crowd. His tiny writing filled each sheet and left no margins. Those who read a sheet, ate it and looked back up. Were they perhaps expecting more? As if responding to the unvoiced question as to why he was writing those sheets, Benjamin replied loudly, “It is very spiritual,” but the child in the general’s uniform didn’t respond, and put his head into the box the wood of the tree with the branch where he was sat had become. Everything seemed to indicate they would stay like that indefinitely—him writing, the people down below reading, then swallowing the sheet—when he discovered that the child was sick and was about to die. From his branch he heard the doctor say, “When he dies, shut the box and throw it on the fire.” That horrified him so much he woke up. Who could have imagined that Benjamin’s dream anticipated camps like Auschwitz or Treblinka? “I have had a frightful dream,” he wrote to a friend, “but I don’t know what it means.”
Walter Benjamin was going to Auschwitz, but not anymore.
IX
STONES FULL OF VOICES
1
Place is all. Place creates reality. That’s why I buy realities. That’s why I buy places.
One cannot understand Auschwitz in its totality without knowing the place, without knowing the place in its totality by heart.
What is its climate like, what is the color of the soil, what is the snow like in Auschwitz, what sort of view does one get from there? The thousands of photos I’ve seen have never made me feel I am in that place.
What does one breathe in Auschwitz?
I buy memory. I buy the lot, that is, I buy that climate, that soil, and that air. The location, in a word. I am a desperate, alert buyer in this Frankfurt hospital room.
I will visit the Auschwitz camps—now called Oświęcim once again—in Poland; of course I will; I will visit them later, in the cold month of March. I will succeed in what I have failed so far. Perhaps I really will some day, I tell myself, but not now (my body is in so much pain, my legs are still sheathed in plaster, I so badly need to leave this country whose history is like a throbbing migraine!) I will visit the Auschwitz camps in due course, will go on a tourist package with lots of Jews, Italians, and two or three Spaniards, but no Germans (evidently, Germans never visit Auschwitz—statistics don’t lie), I will accompany the group to the entrance over which one can read the undulating letters—an imitation of a strip of cloth—and the cruelly ironic slogan Arbeit Macht Frei, “Work Makes You Free”—the motto for all the camps ever since someone inscribed it in the first, Dachau-1933—and I will see the railroad tracks, and then, inevitably, the truncated brick chimney, all that remains that seems genuinely sinister, though abstract as if it were an object out of context. Everything here is out of context, I will reflect as I walk over the paving in the camp, stones full of voices that are heard by very few, that are heard by me. Whispered voices more like. Crazed voices. Voices that are suddenly silenced, struck by real blows that split open skulls or break jaws.
The place is now only an empty space, a uniformly flat, snow-covered plain where one can see the silhouettes of distant lines of barracks and barbed wire fences with lamps shaped like butchers’ hooks, hanging intact on concrete posts, nightmarish adornments memory imprints on its wax against oblivion, on behalf of the ghosts. That day I will have traveled the fourty-five miles from Krakow and alighted from bus number 24, at the end of its route opposite the Auschwitz Museum, a few feet from the car park. Soon I will deliberately get lost, searching for Hurbinek’s tree in the little forest of birchtrees surrounding Crematorium VI at the feet of which are hundreds of labels with names in Hebrew nailed on small stakes. Only ruins and gaping holes remain of the actual Crematorium.
Everything in Auschwitz is a gaping hole in something else that no longer exists.
Close by, covered in earth and weeds, are signs of several narrow gullies. Barely fifty years ago they were full of half burnt corpses because the ovens couldn’t keep pace with demand.
This is what I shall see the day I go to Auschwitz.
2
The place. I need to refer to the place once again.
Oświęcim, the city in Upper Silesia, first Polish, then Austrian, then Polish again, then German, then finally back to Polish, is today a city with a population of 45,000 inhabitants: for some it is a tortured place, for others it is accursed. In 1939, when the Wehrmacht invaded Poland, it had 12,000 inhabitants, and an antiquated artillery barracks that surrendered without offering any resistance. Only a sergeant in the Polish army, by the name of Prohaska, died. A few months after Oświęcim was taken, Arpad Wigand, a colonel in the Security Police, visited on a fact-finding mission, carrying out orders from SS Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler, and he concluded he had found exactly the right place on the plain one could see from the barracks to build the large concentration camp for the East that they were planning in Berlin. Himmler was delighted with the report he received from Wigand and on April 27, 1940 he signed the decree for the camp to be built. In Wigand’s view, as he noted in his report, the suitability of the place was based on the fact that it was a railroad junction, the Auschwitz-Birkenau station, reached by trains from Silesia, Czechoslovakia and Vienna, and from the cities in the East under the recent General Government, like Katowice, Krakow and Warsaw. It was also very easy to re-direct convoys there that were coming from the Ukraine and Byelorussia. Moreover, it had an added advantage: the Vistula and Sola Rivers flowed into each other in the nearby area of Broschkowitz, north-east of Birkenau, Brzezinka in Polish, thus creating a huge hairpin that isolated a large part of the region of Bielitz, under the administration of the city they now re-christened as Auschwitz. The camps were rapidly built and repeatedly extended between the two rivers.
The Birthday Buyer Page 12