Alex's Wake

by Martin Goldsmith

  On Saturday afternoon, January 27, 1945, soldiers from the 60th Army of the Soviet Union’s First Ukrainian Front came upon the smoking remains of Auschwitz and Birkenau. They discovered around six hundred corpses and more than seven thousand emaciated survivors, prisoners who had been deemed too weak to accompany the death march. The fleeing Nazis also left behind clothing stolen from their murdered victims, including nearly 350,000 men’s suits and more than 830,000 women’s dresses and other apparel. In a warehouse near the main camp, the Soviet soldiers discovered more than seven and a half tons of human hair. Researchers estimated that it came from the shaved heads of about 140,000 women.

  Since the Nazis destroyed so many records and files as they prepared their hasty evacuation from Auschwitz, arriving at an exact number of human beings murdered there has proven to be a difficult task. Based on testimony from survivors and perpetrators and the work of latter-day scholars, the figure of 1.1 million to 1.5 million people seems accurate. About 90 percent of those gassed, at least 950,000, were Jews. It has been estimated that about 75,000 non-Jewish Poles and 20,000 Roma, or Gypsies, were also gassed. About 200,000 people died of starvation, disease, or overwork.

  In June 1942, Polish teacher Antoni Dobrowolski, who was working for the Polish underground, was arrested by the Gestapo and sent to Auschwitz. On October 21, 2012, Dobrowolski died. He was 108, the oldest known survivor of Auschwitz.

  ON OR ABOUT MONDAY, AUGUST 17, 1942, Convoy Nineteen, the train from Drancy bearing my grandfather, my uncle, and 989 other Jewish prisoners rolled slowly beneath the guard tower at Birkenau and came to a halt, its piston-applied brakes moaning on the iron wheels. The boxcars’ doors slid open and the 991 inhabitants, after three days packed together in darkness, emerged blinking into the unfamiliar sunshine. They were ordered onto the well-trampled grass and dirt of the siding and marched before the row of doctors and soldiers who had gathered under the open summer sky to render judgment. In the next few minutes, 875 of the 991 were pronounced too old or weak for work on behalf of the Reich. These 875 souls were sent down the path to the left, toward the guards who ushered them into one or the other of the little brick houses under the pretense of a shower and, afterward, a nourishing bowl of soup. Each of the 875 had led lives of happiness, sorrow, adventure, wonder, frustration, boredom, generosity, peevishness, hope. One of those 875 had been born into a well-to-do family of horse dealers, had fought for his country in the Great War, had run a successful women’s clothing store where he’d acquired a reputation for kindness and honesty, had been arrested for the crime of his religious heritage, and had spent the last forty months engaged in a futile attempt to escape his pursuers and achieve a life of freedom for his family. His name was Alex Goldschmidt, he was my grandfather, and on that day he was murdered in one of the gas chambers of Birkenau. He was sixty-three years old.

  Of the 991 passengers in Convoy Nineteen, 116 survived the selection process conducted on the dusty siding by the railway terminus and were sent off to the right to be stripped, shaved, tattooed, and assigned a barracks at Auschwitz. Of those 116, only one would still be alive at the time of the camp’s liberation in 1945. Another of the 116 was a young man born to a wealthy merchant, a young man whose school years had been marked by no particular academic achievement but who had risen to his feet in an impulsive act of bravado and defiance that would be remembered and admired many decades hence, a young man who had spent the last 15 percent of his life as a refugee and a prisoner but who had utilized part of that time tending the sick, learning the skills of animal husbandry and bookbinding, and reading the plays of William Shakespeare, and nearly all of that time being his father’s constant companion and close friend. His name was Klaus Helmut Goldschmidt, he was my uncle, and on that day he was tattooed with the number 59305 and assigned to Barracks 7 in Auschwitz.

  Barracks 7 was the site of what was called the Mauerschule, or bricklayers’ school, where relatively healthy young men were taught the craft of fashioning and laying bricks. All the main buildings of Auschwitz were made of bricks, so the camp authorities deemed it necessary to have a constant supply of skilled workers. The students of the bricklayers’ school had a remotely easier existence than the other inmates of Auschwitz in that their food rations were of slightly better quality and their place of work—the school—was on the second floor of Barracks 7. While other prisoners had to work outdoors in all weather, often marching hundreds of yards to get to their construction sites, all the bricklayers had to do was climb a flight of stairs.

  But if Helmut had drawn a relatively plum assignment, he did not have long to enjoy it. On October 7, fifty-one days after he had entered the iron gates of Auschwitz under the archway proclaiming that work would make him free, he was sent to Barracks 20, one of the camp’s hospitals. According to a plaque affixed in a room of the barracks by the curators of the Auschwitz memorial, “Prisoners who suffered from infectious diseases, mainly typhus, stayed in Block 20. In this room, in the years 1941 to 1943, prisoners were killed by lethal injections of phenol into the heart. Prisoners selected from the camp hospital or prisoners sentenced to death by the camp Gestapo were killed here. In one such special procedure, 121 Polish and Jewish boys were killed in this room. Corpses were put in the opposite room, from where they were transported to Crematorium 1. Almost every day a few dozen prisoners were killed by lethal injections in the camp.”

  Two days after he entered Barracks 20, on October 9, 1942, Helmut died. The official cause of death was listed as typhus, but there is every chance that he was one of the prisoners who was murdered by lethal injection. Helmut Goldschmidt was twenty-one years old.

  WEDNESDAY, JUNE 15, 2011. “My God, it’s a theme park!”

  After all the miles and all the anticipation and all my fears of the past two days, these are the words I growl to Amy as we enter the crowded parking lot of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial Museum in Oswiecim. There are at least a half-dozen tour buses and milling crowds of tourists, among them a group of older Japanese men and women, many of them with multiple cameras hanging from their necks, and high school classes from Tel Aviv and Far Rockaway, Long Island, some of the kids solemn and attentive and some of them hanging back, sneaking a smoke.

  “Welcome to Holocaust World 3-D!” I continue, as we squeeze into a parking space. “It’s the emotional roller-coaster of a lifetime! Thrills! Chills! You’ll never forget to Never Forget! (Tattoos sold separately . . . striped pajamas not included . . . Zyklon-B no longer in stock.)” Amy smiles at me indulgently, then kisses me to shut me up. I can’t explain to her the source of my confused feelings. On the one hand, I think it’s very much a Good Thing that so many people have traveled so far to tour this memorial and to learn the details of the horrors that were perpetrated here. On the other hand, I’m put off by all the eagerness to gawk. It’s as if we’re rubbernecking at the smoldering wreckage of a colossal accident along the highway of Western civilization. I want everyone to just move along.

  There is no admission fee to enter the Auschwitz camp, but there is a charge to join any of the several tours that depart regularly from the museum’s entranceway, tours conducted in English, French, German, Italian, Polish, and Japanese. Even though we are not joining a tour group, we find ourselves caught in the swirl of humanity packed into a hallway. Three or four security guards size us up and then one of them waves us through turnstiles onto a gravel path. After perhaps fifty yards, we turn right and walk beneath the notorious iron gate bearing the words Arbeit Macht Frei. Somehow, I think, it shouldn’t be so easy.

  We ring the bell at Barracks 24, which today houses the archivists who work in the Office for Information On Former Prisoners. We are buzzed in and meet Piotr Supinski, a helpful young man who confirms the date of Helmut’s death and tells me the details of his time in Barracks 7 and 20. Piotr speaks slowly and softly in perfect English; it comes to me that he regards me, respectfully, as grieving next of kin. His kindness moves me deeply, and suddenly all my parking
lot cynicism dries up and blows harmlessly away.

  Amy and I leave the archives and, hand in hand, join the quiet throngs strolling along the well-kept gravel paths from barracks to barracks. We seek out Barracks 7, where Helmut lived for a few weeks with his fellow bricklayers, and then make our way with unwilling steps to Barracks 20. Here is where my uncle died, and here is where I have determined to tell him goodbye. But I realize that I have forgotten his picture in the car.

  I am in no mood to face the crowds back in the entrance hall, but there is nothing to do but walk back to the parking lot and detach the photos of Alex and Helmut from their position above the Meriva’s rearview mirror, where they have kept us company during our long journey. I anticipate an uncomfortable wait standing in line to get back into the camp, but something remarkable happens. The people in the halls, tourists and security personnel alike, take one look at the photos I am carrying and, without a word, shrink back and give us room to pass. Everyone seems to know why I am carrying pictures of these people and their relationship both to me and to this hideous place. My path back into Auschwitz is made free and clear.

  One of the rooms in Barracks 20 is dimly lit and a small trough of earth-colored gravel lines the base of each wall. I borrow a small pair of nail scissors from Amy and slowly and carefully separate Helmut’s photo from Alex’s. I then kneel by one of the gravel borders, kiss Helmut’s seventeen-year-old face, softly say, “I love you,” and place the photo onto the gravel, where it leans against the wall. This is the loving burial my sweet uncle never had, and as I bow my head, my tears drip onto the tiny crushed stone. “Ruhe ruhig, mein liebe Helmut,” I whisper. “Rest in peace.”

  In silence, we walk slowly back to the parking lot and then drive the two kilometers to Birkenau. Here there are fewer cars and only a single tour bus. The remains of the camp seem vast in comparison to the tidy Auschwitz memorial. At Auschwitz there are many small brick buildings connected by well-groomed gravel paths; here there are only a handful of wooden barracks slowly rotting in the wind and weather of the Polish countryside, surrounded by large empty fields of tall grasses that bend in the breeze of this warm June day. The Auschwitz camp is alive with visitors crunching along the paths, snatches of their varied languages competing for attention. Birkenau is all sad silence; conversations are hushed and muted; what sounds there are come largely from nature: the wind sighing in the grass, the occasional bird song, crickets.

  Barracks 20 at Auschwitz, where Uncle Helmut died, either of typhus or of a deliberate lethal injection, and where I left his photograph.

  A memorial plaque, on which visitors have placed many small stones, reads, “Forever let this place be a cry of despair and a warning to humanity, where the Nazis murdered about one and a half million men, women, and children, mostly Jews, from various countries of Europe. Auschwitz-Birkenau, 1940–1945.”

  The parking area abuts the elevated guard tower that straddles a single railway line; together the tower and track form one of the indelible images of the Holocaust. Amy and I walk inside the gates of Birkenau to stand in the shadow of the tower at the approximate point where the selections were made, where Alex and Helmut were separated by the wave of a Nazi doctor’s hand.

  They were father and son, they had been constant companions for more than three years, becoming each other’s best friend, on sea and then on land, in Boulogne-sur-Mer and Martigny-les-Bains, in Sionne and Montauban, Agde and Rivesaltes and Les Milles, and finally on those terrible trains to Drancy and then to this very spot. And then, in the blink of an eye, Alex was sent to the left and Helmut was sent to the right. Did they know what was in store for each of them? Were they permitted a last embrace, a final handclasp, anything at all? Did father cry out to son, son to father? Could they have heard each other over the wail of humanity at the scene of this unspeakable crime?

  I am gasping for breath, my legs suddenly too weak to support me, and I very nearly collapse, but Amy gathers me in her arms and we rock together back and forth, back and forth, until my heartbeat returns to normal and my eyes can see again.

  When I have regained my strength, we slowly walk several hundred yards to the site of two of the crematoria, both of which were nearly destroyed by the retreating German army in January 1945, as they sought to cover up their deeds. Today the crematoria are harmless holes in the ground, bordered by low brick walls and crumbling concrete. From a nearby field, I pluck three little wildflowers, one yellow, one purple, one white, and then jump lightly down into what remains of one of the crematorium’s foundations. I place my grandfather’s photo on the ground, leaning it against the bricks, and then lay the flowers beneath the photo. “Goodbye, Alex,” I whisper, “I love you so much. Ruhe ruhig.” Amy hugs me again, and I hold her as I weep.

  Then I dry my eyes, take a final look at the photo and the flowers and climb up out of the grave. It is time, I tell myself. It is now time to let go.

  For the next ten or twenty minutes, we sit with our backs against a tree, taking refuge in its shade against what has become quite a warm and humid day. We face away from the ruined crematoria and toward the boundaries of Birkenau. The barbed wire enclosing the camp is affixed to concrete pillars that curve inward gracefully as they crest, and I am reminded of a fragment of a poem written by a young prisoner who was held here seventy years ago. Zofia Grochowalska Abramovicz also noticed those graceful curves strung with wire and called them “the harps of Birkenau,” writing that the wind made the cruel wires vibrate and utter pleasing sounds. What a sweet soul Zofia must have possessed, I think, to find a little beauty amid such cruelty and ugliness.

  Alex’s “burial site” in the ruined foundations of one of the crematoria in Birkenau.

  I close my eyes and hear the wind whispering and rustling in the green leaves overhead and imagine that I hear a thin and distant melody in the ghostly strings of Zofia’s harps. Then a cow moos and a rooster crows from a nearby farm and I realize that life is everywhere. Birkenau’s instruments of death are indeed in ruins, and they can no longer harm me. Alex and Helmut’s journey, painful and hopeless as it turned out to be, ended here. I need to acknowledge that it ended, that they died here, but also that I am alive, that I have survived. Having followed in Alex’s wake for so long, now that I have come to the spot where he died I must resolve, for the rest of the time that I’m given, to live life to the fullest.

  A few of the graceful harps of Birkenau.

  “C’mon,” I say to Amy, “let’s get the hell out of here.”

  We drive away from Oswiecim toward a few days of rest in the Swiss Alps. After weathering a long, construction-induced traffic jam on the Polish-Czech border, we head west on a clear stretch of open road in the beautiful Czech countryside, toward a glorious sunset. I have brought along a recording of the Mass in B Minor by Johann Sebastian Bach, whose birthplace we visited two days ago, and as the Meriva purrs along, we listen to the Mass’s last two movements.

  Dame Janet Baker, one of my favorite artists, sings Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi, miserere nobis. (“O Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world, have mercy on us.”) It occurs to me that it would have to be a lamb of immense strength and fortitude to take away all of the sins committed at Auschwitz. Perhaps, I think, it is an impossible task; perhaps some sins will outlast us all.

  But then comes Bach’s final magnificent chorus on the words Dona nobis pacem (“Grant us peace”). The music soars, carrying voice and spirit ever upward. If anything can restore my abiding faith in the human animal, this glorious creation can, and does. My dear wife and traveling companion sings along with me, and I think to myself, “Let my journey grant Alex and Helmut peace. Let them rest in the earth and sky of Poland forevermore. And may it grant me peace as well.”

  14

  Coming Home

  “JOURNEYS END IN LOVERS MEETING.”

  That song from Twelfth Night—“It Was A Lover and His Lass”—sounded through my mind as we made the trans-Atlantic crossing on the
solstice, June 21, and flew back to the States. From the haunted, death-soaked soil of Auschwitz, we had driven south and west to the clear, bracing air of the Swiss Alps to spend our last days in Europe amid the old-world luxury of a grand hotel. Amy’s Uncle Jim, a professor and diplomat, loved to stay at the Hotel Waldhaus in Sils-Maria, an inn that has been owned and operated by the same family since 1908, and we came in remembrance of him. Three days of Alpine hiking and gourmet dining did much to restore our bodies and souls. On the morning of the longest day of the year, we returned our faithful little Meriva to the rental agency. Its odometer now read 20,177; in our six weeks on the road, we had driven 9,214 kilometers, or 5,725 miles, nearly twice the width of the United States.

  On the plane ride back to Washington, I reflected that those six weeks seemed to have lasted a long, long time and yet to have passed in the blink of an eye. I recalled that before I left, I had feared both that I would be unable to uncover much information about Alex and Helmut’s lives and that the trip would feel more of a mockery of Alex and Helmut’s suffering than a tribute to them. Looking down on the world from thirty-six thousand feet, I decided that those fears had not been realized. I had learned a great deal, factually, from the archives in Bückeburg and Helmut’s school records in Oldenburg; from the newspaper clippings in Boulogne and the saga of Adolphe Poult and René Bousquet in Montauban. And I learned a lot, viscerally, at Barracks 21 in Rivesaltes and Barracks 7 and 20 in Auschwitz.

  How deeply moving it had been to stand where Alex and Helmut had stood, to see what they saw, to feel just a bit of what they felt, if not the danger and terror they experienced. I recalled walking the docks of Boulogne, imagining how hopeful they must have felt as their ship pulled into what must have finally seemed like a safe harbor. Driving through the smiling countryside of the Vosges, I again had imagined their hope as they saw the lovely fields and hillsides that might have become their new home. The ruins of the Hotel International in Martigny-les-Bains had sharply reminded me of the futility of that hope. Peering through the locked gates of the Poult factory gave me the first inklings of what they must have felt as prisoners and enemies of the Vichy state. And, oh, the bleak, windswept emptiness of Rivesaltes! It was there that their hope must have begun to die. The catacombs of Camp des Milles had given me the sense of being buried alive; the view of the boxcar from the brick factory’s second floor was chilling in the June heat. And though I learned nothing of their final moments together on the railroad siding of Birkenau, I now had that terrible place forever fixed in my inner eye.