‘And your mother?’
‘She jumped near a town called Żółkiew, and she stayed there until the Aktion, and again was put on a train. And here she jumped again, only this time … I must be skipping time a bit … when she finally found me in Rohaytn she came … this I remember like today … she came with a bandaged head. She was still alert, normal, but maybe she had a weakness in her head which contributed to her death later. Such a beautiful woman; such a waste.’
‘And Grandpa?’
‘Also a waste. After the war, a different person. A waste. You never heard him recite poetry. Das es … Das es von dem Felsen klang. That’s it. Das es von dem Felsen klang. So la la, le ralla! That’s the end of the poem.’
Signed: The People’s Investigator
XXVII
Only once did she ask where they might have gone:
‘Bełżec.’
‘I know, but what was it like for them?’ She held her hands to her chest as she asked, as if she meant to catch a gasp of breath trapped inside her.
I could not answer her. The final moments can never be retrieved by history.
Nor by memories: for every life, there are countless other deaths.
So I turned to a testimony composed by Kurt Gerstein, chief of the Waffen SS Technical Disinfection Services. In August 1942, he toured Bełżec. He suicided three years later after writing this:
Bełżec, on the Lublin–Lwów road. Maximum per day 15,000 persons:
A little before seven there was an announcement: ‘The first train will arrive in ten minutes!’ A few minutes later a train arrived from Lemberg: forty-five cars with more than six thousand people. Two hundred Ukrainians assigned to this work flung open the doors and drove the Jews out of the cars with leather whips.
A loudspeaker gave instructions: ‘Strip, even artificial limbs and glasses. Hand all money and valuables in at the “valuables” window. Women and young girls are to have their hair cut in the “barber’s hut”.’
Then the march began. Barbed wire on both sides; in the rear two dozen Ukrainians with rifles. They drew near. Captain Wirth and I found ourselves in front of the death-chambers. Stark naked men, women, children and cripples passed by. A tall SS man in the corner called to the unfortunates in a loud minister’s voice: ‘Nothing is going to hurt you! Just breathe deep and it will strengthen your lungs. It’s a way to prevent contagious diseases. It’s a good disinfectant!’
They asked him what was going to happen and he answered: ‘The men will have to work, build houses and streets. The women won’t have to do that. They will be busy with the housework and the kitchen.’
This was the last hope for some of these poor people, enough to make them march toward the death-chambers without resistance. The majority knew everything; the smell betrayed it! They climbed a little wooden stair and entered the death-chambers, most of them silently, pushed by those behind them.
A Jewess of about forty with eyes like fire cursed the murderers: she disappeared into the gas-chambers after being struck several times by Captain Wirth’s whip. Many prayed; others asked: ‘Who will give us the water before we die?’
SS men pushed the men into the chambers. ‘Fill it up,’ Wirth ordered. Seven to eight hundred people in ninety-three square metres. The doors closed.
Twenty-five minutes passed. You could see though the window that many were already dead, for an electric light illuminated the interior of the room. All were dead after thirty-two minutes.
Jewish workers on the other side opened the wooden doors. They had been promised their lives in return for doing this horrible work, plus a small percentage of the money and valuables collected. The people were standing like columns of stone, with no room to fall or even lean. Even in death you could identify the families, all holding hands. It was difficult to separate them while emptying the room for the next batch. The bodies were tossed out, blue, wet with sweat and urine, the legs smeared with excrement and menstrual blood. Two dozen workers were busy checking mouths which they opened with iron hooks. Dentists knocked out gold teeth, bridges and crowns with hammers.
Then the bodies were thrown into big ditches near the gas-chambers. After a few days, the bodies swelled. When the swelling went down, the bodies matted down again. They told me later they poured diesel oil over the bodies and burned them on railway sleepers to make them disappear.
Wirth asked me whether I thought it was better to let people die in darkness, or in a lighted room. He asked me as if he would have asked: ‘Do you prefer sleeping with or without a cushion?’ or ‘Do you prefer coffee with or without milk?’
This was the only answer I could offer my mother but I did not give it to her.
XXVIII
‘Couldn’t be. Couldn’t be.’
‘But Dad,’ we both insist. ‘There was no other place they could have taken you to. All the trains stopped here for the selection.’
‘No. I don’t remember this.’
His fingers are tapping again on the edge of his mouth. Tap tap tap. Does it help him remember? Or is it a new nervous twitch he has developed in Poland, another one to add to his inventory of petty habits? Sometimes his eyes blink at a rapid rate. Or else there is the involuntary clicking of his throat, usually activated at red traffic signals when he feels hedged in by columns of cars. ‘Yossl,’ my mother ribs him, ‘is there a birdie caught in your throat?’
Tap tap tap.
‘Trains. Barracks. No. The chimneys were closer. I remember they took the gypsies. The children crying. It wasn’t this spot.’
‘When was I here?’ he asks.
It was the success of the Red Army that had indirectly brought him here. As Soviet forces approached Starachowice in the summer of 1944, the labour camps in the Radom District were immediately liquidated. In its final moments, 300 Jews from my father’s prison in Majówka escaped into the forests, some of whom survived by forming partisan units or joining a detachment of the Polish People’s Army.
‘It was too risky,’ he comments somewhat guiltily.
He was right; only thirty prisoners survived in the forests, most of whom were gunned down by Nazi guards who surrounded the environs and ferreted out Jews with the partial collaboration of local fascist groups. At least my father was alive when he arrived at Auschwitz.
‘You arrived on 16 June 1944,’ I tell him, ‘and stayed till 18 January.’ I had become his calendar, making sense of time for him when days, months and even years meant nothing. It is not that he had forgotten something that he had once known—he never knew.
‘About six months. You’re right. That feels right. But not here. I mean, I remember we got off the train, and there was screaming and pushing. And then they divided us. To the left, to the right. But I don’t remember this spot. They took us somewhere else.’
He has told my brother and me this story before; how it was the worst day in his entire life.
They stopped the train near a big gate. This was Auschwitz. We came out of the train. I remember police with dogs, like you see in the movies, and they scream: ‘Quick, quick, hurry up, schnell.’ Yes, this was Auschwitz, and it was a selection there. They took old people this side, young people the other side. We had to run into a big block; I was one of the first to go there from the train. It was a big block and from it we saw the crematoria. They started to take people inside, into a room, and we saw people going in but we saw nobody coming out. One way only. We stood outside, but we didn’t know what was there. Everybody was screaming: ‘They’re going to kill us, it’s a gas chamber.’ People said: ‘We’re finished. Gone.’ We had heard already, something about gas, about Auschwitz, but we didn’t really know what it means. We didn’t know till we saw the smoke. Now people were saying: ‘This is Auschwitz and here’s the gas. We’re finished. Finished.’ Some were crying.
My father is walking along the railway lines that run through the tunnel beneath the concrete block that serves as the entrance to Auschwitz–Birkenau, connecting to a tangle of tracks whos
e reach once extended to Germany in the west, and beyond to Paris, Copenhagen, Amsterdam, Oslo, and every other city, the celebrated and obscure ones, enumerated in the Final Solution. It is raining, and he hides under my mother’s red umbrella. He looks down at his feet, preoccupied by the water which has penetrated his Gortex shoes, the new hiking boots we had forced him to buy duty free at Tel Aviv airport.
‘I’ve taken my Sfida jacket,’ he told us before we boarded the plane to Warsaw. ‘It will keep me warm and dry. I won’t ketch a cold.’
Sfida is a branch of his clothing business which imports sporting gear and garments from overseas. His Sfida jacket (‘Tsvida’, he pronounces it) is a luminous affair, a short zip-up coat with glow-in-the-dark oranges, blues and yellows, a robe fit for the biblical Joseph, and made for weather conditions more suited to a Melbourne frost than the icy chill of a Polish winter. We cannot tell him that. Although my mother makes him wear clothes boasting labels from Rome and Paris, he prefers to dress in the garments he manufactures for the mass-markets of Melbourne. Poland has afforded him the opportunity to steal a furtive victory from his wife. The Sfida jacket has already been packed, buried in the bottom of the suitcase somewhere under my mother’s tiger-patterned raincoat.
Quickening his pace, he leads our family group toward the barbed wire fence that separates the unloading area from the camp. He peers through a space in the wire, crouching down to see if he recognises a familiar building, a path, a sound, just any fragment from his last visit. I can see that he is frustrated, angry at his memory again, failing him first at Wierzbnik and now here.
‘I shouldn’t have come,’ he complains. ‘Nothing to see. You sure this is Birkenau?’
He knows he has been here before. Through the wire he can make out the shape of rows of red-brick barracks.
‘I was in a barrack like that, but not here. Where’s the shower block they took us to first? I don’t see nusink.’
He finds a space in the fence and walks ahead, his feet kicking up the water which has settled on the lushly planted grass surrounding the camp grounds. I walk behind, dodging the spray that follows his movements. We stop in front of one of the barracks.
‘Come, let’s go in,’ he waves to us. ‘I’ll see if I recognise sumsink.’
Maybe he just wants to avoid the rain. He finds the door and pulls it. It is locked.
‘Closed,’ he says.
He is disappointed, wasting no time in trying another door, and another, until one finally responds to his impatient push.
We enter the barrack, not noting its number in this enclave of architectural order and perfection. It smells musty inside, from the passing of years, perhaps from the rain. Our voices echo inside the concrete block.
‘Here are the beds,’ he guides us. ‘I remember this. Three in each bed, three levels high.’
He knocks with his knuckles on the planks of wood against which he had once rested his body.
‘But I tell you, I wasn’t in this one. Not here. It was somewhere else. The barracks looked like this, that much I remember. I always tried to get the top bunk. It was squashy. You couldn’t turn at night.’
It is hard to imagine him sleeping in these beds. From him I have inherited a stubborn liking for what he calls ‘comfy’. ‘This pillow’s not comfy,’ he will frequently complain after a bad night’s sleep. Only that morning over breakfast at our hotel in Warsaw, he had announced:
‘I slept good last night. You know, it’s a comfy bed. I like it. Maybe we should stay here tonight and not go to Auschwitz.’
Knock knock knock. It is a hollow sound. He checks his knuckles for splinters. At the end of the row of beds is a tiny room, and he peers inside to review its contents. ‘Not much better,’ he says, ‘but an improvement—it must’ve been for the Kapo in charge of the block.’
He has had enough of this bedroom. He steps into the rain, turning back for a last time.
‘I always liked the top bunk,’ he chuckles. ‘That way no one could pish on me.’
I hid in a toilet. I remember, it was a toilet outside the shower barrack. And everyone was crying. This was the worst day of my life. Everyone was crying, and I said to myself: ‘Why should I be the first? Maybe something will happen. Something good. Anything could happen, you know?’ After I was sorry I didn’t go in first. I sat in the toilet for hours, watching through a hole how they took the people from our train into the rooms. It took quite a few hours, almost the whole day. That’s how I remember it was morning when we arrived, because they spent the whole day pushing us into this block. Four hours, five, six, maybe more. And I was one of the last to go in from my hiding place in the toilet.
He is ready to leave now. He has seen Birkenau and has declared to us all that yes, he has been here, but not here.
‘Stubborn mule,’ my mother growls at him. ‘Maybe you just don’t remember?’
The rain is falling heavily now, and he is soaked through. He shakes the pellets of water off his Sfida jacket.
‘I don’t want to stay any more. You shouldn’t of taken me here. Last night I had nightmares. Bad dreams. What for do I have to remember this? There’s nothing here except a few farshtinkene buildings.’
The car is supposed to be waiting for us outside the main gates of Birkenau. There is no sign of our guide, nor of his vehicle, so we take shelter beneath the tunnel, standing next to, but not on, the railway lines. We are ready to leave Auschwitz, to drive on to Kraków where my father is already looking forward to a hot cup of tea with lemon and honey. Ever since his open heart surgery last year he had stopped adding sugar, but honey, he convinced himself, was not so bad for his heart.
In the distance, we can now see the car approaching us, and when it grinds to a halt our guide jumps out of the door, drenched from head to toe. He waves a wet piece of paper in the air.
‘Mr Baker. You were here. I found your registration in the administration office. You were number A–18751.’
‘Let’s go home,’ my father says.
He heads off into the rain, toward the car, when my brother and I pull him back. During his exchange with our guide we had been studying a large map of the camp pasted to a wall inside the Birkenau tunnel. Each of the barracks is illustrated as a black rectangle, scores of them radiating outward like soldiers standing at attention. Above them, almost beyond the reach of our eyes, we notice a horse-shoe structure which bears no resemblance to any of the places we have visited.
‘Could be,’ my father mutters as we drag him out of the wetness in front of the map. ‘It could be.’
Within seconds, our guide has returned to us, triumphantly dangling a set of keys in the air.
‘We need to drive to the gate,’ he says. ‘The guard gave us these keys to get in. I have protektsia here for my guests.’
The drive around the perimeter of the camp affords us a real sense of the vast space occupied by this death factory. I count the gates we are passing, one, two, three, four, and before counting the next my father erupts:
‘That’s it. That’s it. See.’
At this last ‘see’, he looks sideways at my mother. He runs out of the car, oblivious of the rain. He is soaked through.
‘See,’ he calls out. He is standing alone, next to a U-shaped building. Four chimneys protrude from the largest section of the block around which a dramatic cloud shape has formed.
Our guided tour of the Birkenau ‘Zentral Sauna’ is set to commence. Built in the autumn of 1943, it was a disinfection installation erected in panicked response to the typhus epidemic of August 1942.
‘This is where they brought us,’ he begins as he leads his family toward the double doors. They are grey, like the ones he had defiantly pushed open in his boyhood town the day before.
‘They’re open,’ he observes aloud, ‘so maybe we shouldn’t go in?’ He momentarily retreats before stepping inside.
‘This big room I remember.’ His body is silhouetted against a window which looks out upon an empty field.
/> ‘See,’ he says again. ‘No barracks here, just like I told you. We could see the smoke from here too.’
He points through one of the windows. ‘Over there,’ and in the distance I can make out a square patch encircled by red bricks, piled two or three high.
‘They shaved us in this room. I was placed in the corner, and everyone’s hair was being cut off. Zhiip. Off. Next. Zhiip. Off. My hair they also shaved. Zhiip.’
My poor father. His hair is a perennial source of concern, an object of cunning manipulation and strategic arrangements. It’s called making the best of a situation, and this, as with everything else in my father’s life, inspires new schemes and inventive techniques. He has grown the surviving remnants of hair that extend from the side of his head so that two hippyish bands of hair, like tangled balls of string, can be folded diagonally across his head into a woven tapestry. It is resistant to everything, except the wind, and so my father applies a daily dose of hairspray to the juncture where the two strands meet. ‘It’s for my wife,’ he tells the chemist.
‘They led us from here into the shower-room.’ He turns through an open space at the far end of the room. We follow him along a concrete tube past a series of four square archways which are really cages for the containment of a row of bins. They look like black supermarket trolleys, only larger.
‘Must of been where they put our clothes,’ he says. He rolls one out from its place, and pokes his head inside.
‘Empty,’ he notes.
He walks past each arch, tapping the trolleys one at a time as he passes them, unaware that behind them stand three Topf disinfestation ovens which utilised hot air to expunge lice from large and heavy clothing items. The operations continued twenty-four hours a day, with three shifts of prisoners assigned to the task, changing every eight hours.
The Fiftieth Gate Page 12