The Holocaust Kid

by Sonia Pilcer

  Sitting across the room, Uly noticed me. He raised his eyebrows. I nodded slightly. No thanks, I thought.

  Mostly it was a downtown-artist-type crowd. They had paid twelve bucks a head and looked all fired up. Why? Around me, people flashed name tags that said DACHAU, TREBLINKA, BERGEN-BELSEN. Was it some kind of joke?

  I turned my attention to the program. “Ms. Ehrlich was born in Lodz, Poland in 1947. Her mother and aunt went through the war together.” I skimmed down the page. “Ehrlich was raised in Forest Hills, Queens . . . ”

  “Queens,” I muttered. This time, the woman next to me, who I hoped might be an ally, did not respond.

  A couple sat down on a cushion next to mine. The man, frizzy-haired, wore a Mickey Mouse T-shirt. He pinned his nametag in the center, over Mickey’s nose. MAIDENEK. His date, a black woman with beaded dreadlocks, already wore hers: RADOM.

  The lights dimmed. The man in military gear closed both doors with a loud bang. Probably Maryse’s old man, I thought. Was he really German? A heavy chain clanged. The locks clicked. Several people turned around. Crossing his arms, the man positioned himself in front of the door.

  Suddenly, slides flashed on the walls all around us. Photographs from concentration camps! The familiar, horrifying ones. A chiaroscuro of hollowed sockets, skeletal corpses dumped in cavities filled with mangled limbs, lineups at Nazi gunpoint.

  Simultaneously, a tape began. The voices were in Polish, German, French. Then, English. A man cried: “Please don’t hit me! Sir, please!” More cries, moans. A woman’s voice wailing. “How can you do this? You are human, no?”

  A thin spotlight framed Maryse Ehrlich as she commanded the center of the stage. Dressed in black, her body disappeared into the darkness. Her hair was pulled back severely from her face, lit like sculpture. The bold hawklike nose balanced an aggressive jaw. A grotesque mask, but I couldn’t take my eyes off her face. So different from when I had met her. This was her show.

  She took the microphone from a stand. “I dedicate this evening to my family, murdered in camps like these. The ones who never even survived in a photograph.”

  She looked around. “Fifty years ago, the Lodz ghetto was liquidated. Burned. Destroyed. Next month is the deathday.” She paused. “I like to remember deathdays. Don’t you think it’s a fine idea? Like birthdays? And the great thing is you don’t have to buy presents.”

  Controlling the remote, she flashed more images of concentration camp victims. Emaciated, toothless faces staring out, bony limbs in striped pajamas. The wooden bunks. Showers. Death marches.

  Some of the slides reflected on our cushions. There was a moment when I saw a dead skeleton at my feet.

  Maryse’s eyes circled the room like a falcon’s. Then she commanded, “Bring up the lights, Hermann. I want to see our audience.” There was absolute silence. We held our breath, not knowing what to expect.

  The light from the projected atrocity slides made everyone’s nametags glow. RAVENSBRUK, AUSCHWITZ, we flashed back and forth. Around us, TREBLINKA, BIRKENAU, DACHAU. The nametags of some nightmarish international convention. The woman next to me did not stir, her attention riveted.

  “No response at all?” Maryse paused. “Look at the slides. Listen to the voices. For God’s sake,” she sneered, “this isn’t TV. It really happened.”

  She stopped, took a deep breath. We sat there like expectant inmates. “Have you ever noticed how people will admit to almost anything? Except rage,” she said. “‘It’s okay. Really. You can murder my family, my best friend. Castrate me.’”

  She walked back a few feet. “We’re all liars,” she said. “We lie all the time about our anger.”

  Several people stood up. They walked to the door. “It’s okay, Hermann,” she motioned to the man in the back, “they can go. Is there anyone else who wants to leave? Come on. Get the fuck out if the heat’s too strong.”

  The couple in front of us stood up. “I’ve had enough of this,” the frizzy-haired man said. MAIDENEK glowed on his Mickey Mouse T-shirt.

  “You want Chinese or Indian?” his date whispered.

  I wanted to leave too. I didn’t move.

  The door slammed with shocking power. The lock clanged, then locked. We couldn’t escape. Maryse began to stalk back and forth, gripping the microphone. “You know what? Your meekness makes me sick!” She spat out the words. “You just sit there and watch the slides. When are you going to stop being so pathetic? Don’t you have any reaction at all?” Her eyes burned as she peered over us.

  The audience stirred uncomfortably.

  “They murdered, tortured, experimented on human beings. Shoved people into gas chambers. They thought they were going to take a shower. There were even cute soap dishes. Look at what those bastards did. Say it. You hate them,” she hissed. “Say it, you weaklings! Hate!”

  “Hate!” Someone called softly.

  Her voice jeered. “Hate, hate! Hate!”

  A few people began to chant “Hate! Hate!” Their voices grew louder.

  “Rage! Hate! Rage! Don’t you feel it? People stuck into ovens, their own brothers forced to push them in. Crematoria filling the air with the smell of flesh burning.”

  Several people seemed to cower from her as she screeched, “Hate, hate, hate! All of you are seething with it,” she cried. “Don’t be afraid of it. Hate! Hate! Hate!”

  “Hate, hate, hate . . . ” Voices chanted. A few people rose slowly to their feet. “Hate, hate, hate, hate . . . ”

  “Let out your repressed rage, you cowards. Scream it. Curse! What you feel about those murderers! The medical experiments. Don’t be afraid. Collecting human hair, eyeglasses, dentures. Turn up the volume,” she commanded. The taped voices grew terrifyingly loud. “DON’T KILL US. ISN’T IT ENOUGH YOU MURDERED MY FAMILY? PLEASE, SIR.”

  “Hate, hate, hate . . . ” A few more people stood, their hands clenched in fists. Others followed.

  “RAGE!” she shouted. “HATE!”

  “Hate, hate! Bastards!” A cacophony of voices. I could see Uly beginning to chant softly. “Hate, hate, hate . . . ”

  “Rage, you assholes! Or are you too stupid and too scared, you castrates!”

  People were shouting. “Motherfuckers! Die! I hate you!” Their faces lit by fervor. A long-haired girl in an Indian smock began to sob.

  “Oh, shit,” I said under my breath. “This is awful.”

  The woman next to me had joined the chant, her voice growing louder. “Hate, hate . . . ” I felt like I was at a Hitler Youth rally.

  Maryse’s black eyes narrowed to lasers sweeping across the room, searching for an infidel, honing in, I could swear, on me. I quickly shifted my stare to the floor.

  The voice of the woman next to me boomed as she chanted, “Hate, hate, hate . . . ”

  “Hate, hate, hate,” Maryse roared into the microphone. “No one sits this one out. Don’t you understand? There’s no free ride.”

  Suddenly Maryse pointed to me. “You. You over there. Are you above this sort of thing?”

  The voices screeched around me. “Hate, hate, hate!” People punched the air, pulling at their own hair as the tape wailed. “DON’T YOU SEE I AM DYING? JUST A SHTICKEL BREAD.”

  The microphone wire snaked behind her as she walked through the audience. “HATE, HATE, HATE, HATE, HATE!” she chanted, her voice hard and vicious, stepping past people huddled in groups on the floor. It wasn’t my imagination. I would be her victim.

  Desperately, I turned to the back of the room. The door was locked. The man stood guard against any interruptions.

  “Don’t look away from me,” she ordered.

  I met her preying eyes, her black uniform.

  “Hate, hate, hate!” The people in the audience grew more agitated. “Kraut bastards, pigs!”

  “Yes, you,” she said, standing several feet from me. “Your father was in Auschwitz?” she asked, staring at my tag.

  How did she know? Was it just a bizarre coincidence? I looked at Uly, who h
ad stopped chanting. I nodded.

  “And how much family did you lose?”

  “Everyone,” I whispered.

  Maryse approached me. Standing over me, her face contorted with contempt. “Can’t hear you.”

  “Everyone,” I said louder.

  “And your mother?” she demanded.

  Someone nearby started to say something to her.

  She turned on him. “I’m not talking to you!” She turned to the others. “Don’t stop. HATE, HATE, HATE . . . ”

  “Czestochowa,” I answered.

  “Forced labor?”

  I nodded.

  “And I suppose you have lots of grandparents, cousins, uncles and aunts. A big happy family.”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “So why are you sitting there like a docile lump? Don’t you understand? They reduced your people to slaves, the ones they didn’t shoot in the head, burn, gas—” She paused. “Like my family. And you’re going to act like a good sport about it. Be a liberal? Broad-minded? Open your eyes to what’s going on! HATE!” she brayed. “Say it, goddamn it!”

  I said nothing.

  “I can’t hear you.” She stood over me. “Don’t you get it?” she rasped.“You’re sitting on your power. Get up off the floor, you groveling mess!”

  “HATE! HATE! HATE!” The word surrounded me like sludge as I rose to my feet. “HATE! HATE! HATE!”

  I faced her squarely. “Go back to goddamn Queens!” I spat at her.

  The door finally opened. I rushed out, found a toilet down one flight of stairs, went inside, and locked it. Facing the mirror, my tears heaved. Furious, self-pitying tears that turned my mascara into tiny black pebbles.

  “Hate,” I repeated the word bitterly, splashing water over my face.

  Knocking. More knocking. “Just a moment!” I called, wiping my face with a paper towel.

  I opened the door. Several women stood in line. I started for the stairs when I saw Uly. He approached me. “That was rough, kiddo.” His voice was drenched with compassion.

  “Do you call that theater?” I demanded.

  “It was somewhat cathartic.”

  “More like sadistic,” I said. “If I want therapy, I’ll go back to my shrink.”

  “I think Maryse’s onto something,” he responded. “That’s what I told her.”

  “You know her?” I asked.

  “Not in the biblical sense.” He smirked in his self-satisfied way, “But I’ll probably interview her. Find out if she actually has a conceptual base to her work.”

  That’s when it hit me. “You’re going to fuck Maryse too,” I said. “Aren’t you?” I didn’t wait for his answer.

  IMAGINE AUSCHWITZ

  I have this dream, except my eyes are open. There are tracks. Train tracks that transported people to death camps. They were old, young, sick, hungry, too insensible to trade a gold tooth for a breath. I walk on the tracks, overgrown with weeds.

  Black wire fences with their arching posts stand on either side, and high above, the spindly legs of guard towers once mounted with rifles. This starkness, a landscape of ritual murder.

  Yet it is lush. Verdant grass where once there was mud, body slime. Clusters of brilliant goldenrod. Wildflowers sprout everywhere. Bushes with tiny berries. Soil enriched by human mulch.

  A young man in suede shorts and hiking boots approaches from the opposite direction. He is returning. “Don’t bother,” he says, “There’s nothing left to see at Birkenau.” As he passes, his metal cup swings from his knapsack.

  He’s right, of course. Nothing to see, no education to be had from the open fields circumscribed by wires like a demonic grid. But I must go. The sun, brilliant all afternoon, begins its drop.

  Looking ahead, I see a field covered with drops of blood. Millions of drops sparkling. Murdered Jewish blood. Walking closer, I discover a field of succulent red poppies, their petals plumped like mouths. The sun blazes as it drops into the horizon slit.

  I come to the ramp of the train station. End of the line. Another Selection. That infamous pageant. Here. People were selected: right for murder, left for slave labor. I stare down the tracks. A transport could arrive. My mother’s family. My father’s.

  I walk down the Lagerstrasse, the wide street that crossed from the women’s camp to the men’s. Past the quarantine camp and camp for families, Gypsy camp, the storage sheds of inmates’ belongings called Canada. An abandoned ghost town of a death mall. The sun blazes above the tall poplars. Soon it will set. I stop at the broken brick and rubble, all that is left of the crematoria.

  Why hadn’t the Allies blown everything up after the war? Destroyed the evidence. The bestial victimization. Why save Hess’s amusement park, complete with labeled hangman paraphernalia?

  Behind the barracks, there’s a small pool of murky water. Tall weeds and algae don’t obscure its contents, a dump for human ash. The lagoon is empty, desolate as if its souls had fled. A crunching sound underfoot, amid grass fat with fertilizer. Bending over, I pick up a sliver of bone the size of a nail clipping.

  Bones have a phosphorescent substance, I recall. They glow in the dark.

  Running my hand over the ground, I discover more splinters of bones and, digging in further, the remains of a spoon.

  Someone used it to eat a sorry portion of soup. I rub the charred surface, its twisted handle. Someone had carried it with her everywhere. As she burned, the spoon melted.

  The sun’s golden rays have grown gray, mauve clouds weaving a somber tapestry. Steam rises off the lagoon in whorls of smoke. Soon it will be dark.

  What to do? Try to get back through the fields in the dark? Auschwitz with its hotel and two restaurants, bitter refuge, is several miles away. The poplars’ shadows lengthen, their branches lurking.

  I steal into the women’s barracks, a long, narrow room with rows of bunks separated by brick partitions like cages in a chicken coop. Not enough room to sit. I lie down on one of the hard, narrow bunks that slept several women. The wood is damp. A bone-chilling draft.

  What to do? Shivering, I grasp the thin cotton of my pullover. Should I try to run back? I look out the window frame. Darkness shrouds everything. Not even a moon and the sky, starless. There isn’t anything. Head propped against the brick wall, I stare ahead.

  I’m scared. The leaves hiss and a bitter wind blows through the bare windows. My teeth chatter as I lean against the cold brick wall of the barracks. Hours of darkness. The punishers lurk nearby. My eyes glow like bone splinters. I clutch my own body for warmth.

  When I close my eyes, it is worse. The punishers attack like dogs, teeth flashing white, driven mad by the color red, saliva glistening.

  The war isn’t over. I am the Musselman, shuffling in a blue-and-white striped uniform, despising the model prisoners, my parents, for their mute helplessness. Orphans who had found each other at a refugee dance, clinging in terror and joy and finally as parents.

  There is an injunction to live. No posthumous victories for Hitler. When one doesn’t live, the devil triumphs. Had my parents survived so I, their only child, could put myself back into a concentration camp. Back? I’d never left.

  I had spent years within its architecture. I was not supposed to leave, to have or want. Tattooed on my arm: Must never forget, not even for a moment. Because I lived when so many died.

  Feeling my way in the darkness, I find the door. It is locked. Someone has locked me inside. It is 1944. The ghetto has been liquidated. I am to die. “Let me out!” I cry, banging my fist against the door. The wind blows it open. A death rattle of leaves against the barracks. Souls without bodies, hissing, murder without mercy.

  In the daylight, these are just barracks. No one has slept in them for fifty years. Stepping outside, I see a field overgrown with weeds and sharp-toothed brush. An abandoned railroad track. These are historical artifacts. I start to run.

  Past the barbed-wire grid. I leap over the rails, running on the tracks. The guard towers bleak as scarecrows. It is
no longer nightmare country. Just a rural landscape. A gray morning. Tourist buses are already arriving at Auschwitz.

  I find a uniformed guard. “Excuse me. Where’s a telephone?”

  “Cafeteria,” he says with a Polish accent. “Right off the parking lot.”

  I walk through a large modern room with white Formica tables and a long counter on which sandwiches, bowls of salad, plastic-wrapped pastries, and French rolls are displayed. I think of the turbid soup, the crusts of bread they had eaten to survive. Why not show that? There are tiny bottles of vin rouge. The smell of strong coffee wafts in my nostrils. Though my stomach groans with hunger, I know I can’t touch this food.

  “Mom—”

  “Where are you?”

  “Is Daddy all right?”

  “Yes, everyone is fine. Where are you?”

  “Auschwitz.”

  “They have phones there? Heniek!” she calls. “Pick up the phone. Heniek, it’s Zosha. Pick up!” she screams. “He must be on the toilet,” she mutters. “Have you been eating?”

  I hear a click, a line opens.

  “Where are you?” my father demands.

  “Auschwitz.”

  “They have phones there, Heniek.”

  Silence.

  “Talk to your daughter. It’s collect long-distance.”

  “So how do you like it?” he asks.

  “There are a lot of tourists.”

  “What do you think?” he asks. “Did you learn anything?”

  “Daddy,” I begin to weep. “I—”

  “Oh, no, she’s crying,” he says.

  “You always make her cry,” my mother scolds.

  I stand in front of the famous iron archway, facing the black letters. ARBEIT MACHT FREI. Work Makes You Free. Sure. You could die of starvation and exhaustion, and escape through the chimney.

  It looks like a theater marquee. The entrance to a children’s sleep-away camp. Picking up a large stone, I hurl it. The iron clangs. ARBEIT MACHT FREI.

  RESURRECTION

  Fragrant, about to find pups, apron-up, bagged, broken-knee’d, clucky, cocked-up, double-ribbed, enciente, full of heir, gone to seed, gravid, having a dumpling on, a hump in front, nine-months dropsy, one’s cargo aboard, high-bellied, how-came-you-so, in a fix, dutch, pod, in the pudding club, Irish toothache, jumbled-up, ketched, kidded, knapped, knocked-up . . .