The Memory Monster Read online

  In Lublin we also visited the Chachmei Lublin Yeshiva, which now operates an odd hotel, decorated with Jewish symbols. The synagogue can be entered through a side gate, where one pays the Polish guard a few zloty. Religious kids with knitted yarmulkes like to pray there. I stand on the side, listening. Sometimes I like the tune, or I relate to one line or another. Later, at the old city, at the foot of the fort, I read to them from The Magician of Lublin. It’s rare to find one among them who has read Bashevis Singer—there I go again, bad-mouthing the youth, but I promised to tell the truth.

  Other than Jewish history, not much is left of this eastern city, what a bore. Tourists rarely go there, aside from war buffs. This building used to house Gestapo headquarters; this villa used to be the home of Odilo Globocnik, the SS officer responsible for Operation Reinhard; this backyard is where Jews were forced to perform hard labor. Those are the kinds of attractions Lublin has to offer. The population is pale and forlorn. Black people and Arabs are not allowed to enter Poland. Borders are closed to them, and the State of Israel helps them achieve their goals with all sorts of electronic equipment we provide them. And it’s working. All you see on the streets are white faces, all alike, unnerving.

  At night, I sat at the hotel bar and drank. Otherwise I wouldn’t be able to sleep. Often, my nerves were so shot that it was as if the operation was happening right then and I was taking part in the planning, the handling, the maintaining of schedules. Sometimes I had chest pain, eyelid twitching. I wasn’t calm. I looked forward to my moments of drinking at the bar at the end of the day, hidden from view, sitting in a remote corner so as not to be seen. Sometimes some rebellious teacher who also felt the need for some distance joined me. You always had to keep an eye on the kids, worrying about what they might do, to make sure they didn’t try to flee the hotel. It was a week-long anxiety attack.

  Whenever a female teacher sat down beside me at the bar, I felt like a hairy carnivorous plant. I wanted to swallow them whole. They wanted me to comfort them after the difficult sights of the day, to explain to them how it was possible. Later, after we’d had a few drinks, they asked about my life, about my wife. It happened on occasion that we took it even further. A spark lit up in our eyes, and we had all the necessary emotional excuses, a need for warmth and love.

  The first time it happened, the teacher had a long face and sad Jewish eyes. She wanted me to explain to her personally why they did it. She just couldn’t wrap her mind around it. She had too much to drink. I gently told her she was overreacting. I don’t care, she said with the light-headedness of a drunk. She couldn’t have the children see her like that, and the only solution was to take her to my room, which was on another floor, and let her rest there until her intoxication wore out. She asked to take a shower and then came out of the bathroom half naked. I truly tried to avoid it, but she fell asleep in my bed and only woke up in the morning. I’d hoped she’d come back over the next few days, but she’d sobered up. I don’t want to share the other incidents; it happened one or two more times, it doesn’t matter right now. That really wasn’t the kind of guy I was. Usually, three shots of vodka were enough for me to fall asleep in the old Gestapo hotel in Lublin.

  On the first trips, I was always teamed up with the same survivor, an old man named Eliezer. A short, energetic, friendly guy. He liked talking to the kids, answering their questions, pulling them in. He was eleven years old when he fled his hometown the night before the Germans sent the Jews to die in Belzec. His parents told him to run away by himself. His siblings were too young. He lived in the forest until the Partisans found him. His father was a tailor, so he was able to mend their clothing. He also cooked for them, and on occasion even joined them in sabotaging train tracks. The students ate up his words with bated breath. Though I recognized all sorts of holes in his narrative, it was mostly reliable, so I didn’t interrogate or make comments. I’ve never heard a survivor’s story that was completely whole.

  Eliezer’s main shortcoming was that he’d never spent any time at a camp, having lived out most of the war in the forest. Still, he liked to talk about the camps, the youth, and the State of Israel, speaking proudly and hopefully about topics that had nothing to do with his personal experience. But the students and the teachers loved him, and I didn’t intervene. The survivors from the camps were few and infirm, and Eliezer was just fine. I sat next to him during long bus rides. He told me about his children and grandchildren, about the fine workshop he’d started when he came to Israel, and about other matters related to commerce and family. His clothes smelled pleasantly of old age. We made a good team. He made up for my lack of emotion. We had a regular lineup: I delivered the facts, and he added the personal touch. It worked perfectly until one day Eliezer fell at home and broke his hip. He couldn’t join the trips while he recovered, and never came back after that.

  I went to visit him. He was lying in bed, pumped up with painkillers. All at once, he’d become an invalid, his wife spoon-feeding him oatmeal. I stayed briefly, and never saw him again. He was very hard to replace. I made use of your information resources in order to set up meetings with some survivors, traveling quite a bit over Israel to see them. I interviewed them, tried to figure them out, and to convince the suitable candidates to join me. I explained the importance of giving testament to our youth, to transfer memory to them directly, but success was limited. Most of them were not healthy enough to withstand the trip. Some had lost their lucidity of thought and recollection, suffering from some level of senility. Others were afraid of the trauma, refusing to return, which was understandable. I suspected that a few used to be kapos or collaborators and hid the truth their entire lives. Why would they open this can of worms now, so close to their own graves?

  I worked for months, trying to convince a survivor named Yohanan to join me. He lived up north and was a retired construction engineer. His entire life he vehemently refused to go back, but after his wife died, he was plagued with yearning for his parents and sister, who had been murdered, and for their old home. I convinced him to join and promised we would visit his hometown. He told me briefly about how he was fifteen when he was taken away. His sister was seventeen at the time, and both of them passed selection. Their mother did not pass due to her skin disease, and their father had been taken to a labor camp and disappeared months earlier. “I’d forgotten their faces years ago,” he told me, “and now they are back. I can see them so clearly.”

  I kept my promise. On the way to Krakow, we got off the highway and drove to his town, which was identical to thousands of others in Poland and tens of thousands of others all over Europe. The bus stopped at the town square, across from the church, the butcher shop, and the bakery. I told them—based on my research—that the church was built by the landowning noble during a period of healthy crops. This noble had also accused five Jewish men of mixing the blood of Christian babies into matzah meal. Their sentence was carried out by two horses that pulled each man in opposite directions. Nevertheless, Jews continued to live there. They were loathed and harassed, but they were part of the landscape.

  Yohanan pointed to a remote corner of the square, where the synagogue used to be. We discovered it was now a small bank. We went inside and I pointed out the spot where the Holy Ark would have been. The bank teller got nervous, speaking in agitated Polish. One of the hotheaded boys answered her, and a brawl almost ensued. The branch manager came out of his office, gesturing for everyone to settle down. I explained in English that Yohanan used to live in this town and that this place used to be the synagogue. The bank manager hummed and said, “Welcome, welcome,” but his body language told me he wanted us out.

  From there, Yohanan led us toward his old house. I could see him searching for clues in the old trees, the yards. He stumbled over the broken sidewalk, turned onto a neglected street, paused in front of a small house, and said: “It was here. This is where we used to live.”

  We glanced inside through the window. Darkness and abandon. Nobody answered the
door. One of the teachers cried. The kids surrounded Yohanan as he told them about his family, choking on his tears. He was beside himself. The children comforted him, the teachers hugged him, they were all so wonderful.

  When we returned to the church square a few Polish people stared at us. The bank manager stepped outside as well. Tourists never came to this town, and it had certainly not seen Jews since the war. One of the passersby, reeking of booze, came over to talk to us. Go argue about a thousand years of history with a drunk. I gave him some money, so he didn’t think Jews were cheap, and he waved the money in front of the others. We left.

  The next day, having paid my debt to Yohanan, we went to Auschwitz. Even the worst-behaved kids can’t help but be awed at Auschwitz. The branding does the job. Yohanan was feeling weak, and I could see he had trouble walking, his face expressionless. His personal story was meant to imbue all the abandoned structures and objects we would see throughout the day with meaning, and I hoped he would do his job. At first, as usual, we toured the first camp—Auschwitz I. The students had trouble figuring the place out. It didn’t contain the wooden sheds they’d seen in pictures, but better-looking stone structures that used to serve as Polish military barracks. Only inside can one see the torture rooms, the piles of hair and prosthetics, the original gas chamber, and the crematorium. Yohanan told me awkwardly that he’d never been there; it didn’t resemble anything he could remember. I assured him that he hadn’t been here, but in Auschwitz II, better known as Birkenau. Two students supported him, but he insisted on walking on his own, using a cane.

  From there, we rode for two or three minutes to Birkenau. There’s that moment when the camp suddenly sprawls before you—electric fences, sheds, train tracks, gate. It’s real, it’s the place. You can actually touch the place where humanity was murdered. I saw Yohanan’s hands shaking, his mouth moving inaudibly, and I realized I’d made a mistake. I shouldn’t have talked him into it; the memories were too strong. The children wrapped themselves with their flags and took pictures of the gate and the tracks running through it. I led them to the ramp, right near the model train car, where I always start my lecture. That was where the selection process took place: To the right, those sent to immediate death, an average seventy-five percent of each transport; to the left, those found suitable for death by hard labor. They went to the sheds, the undressing, the shaving, the tattooing of numbers.

  “I can see the fire,” Yohanan said, staring into the distance, toward the end of the road. “Tell them,” I implored. They were all standing around him, waiting for him to speak.

  “Mother was taken there right away,” he said, trembling. “She had a red rash because we didn’t have water for bathing. When we saw the smoke coming out of the chimney, we knew it was Mother. There was no need for explanations. We were taken that way.” He pointed toward the sheds beyond the tracks. “First my sister, then me. I saw her in the distance. She was taller than me. That was it. What did I do there, in the sheds, the shitters, the quarries, you ask? Who cares? What difference does it make? I knew why I didn’t want to come here. I knew they would start the fire and have me jump into it. I didn’t do anything to deserve to live, kids, don’t let anyone tell you that kind of nonsense. It hurts, oh, it hurts too much,” he said. There was no point in trying to get him to say more. He had made his sacrifice to the Memory Monster.

  I ended the tour there. We didn’t go to the sheds or the ruins of the gas chambers. It was as if his mother and sister were suffocating in there right at that very moment, writhing, turning blue, pissing and shitting themselves. Maybe they were having their periods. Maybe the Sonderkommando pulled them outside and checked for diamonds in their mouths and between their legs. It was happening as we spoke, and we couldn’t stay there.

  The group rebelled. The school principal tried to persuade me, offering to have someone walk Yohanan outside and sit with him on the bus while we continued the tour. There was a rustle, disappointed stomping. The girls were wearing booties, and the boys clumsy sneakers. But my mind was made up. I brought him here, and I would get him out. He would not be staying in Auschwitz a moment longer.

  We returned to Krakow. When we arrived at the hotel our delegation doctor examined Yohanan and gave him a tranquilizer because he was still very upset. I arranged with the travel agency to have him on the first flight to Warsaw the next morning, from which he would continue to Israel. Please don’t worry, the children didn’t miss a thing—the next morning we returned to Birkenau without him to complete our tour.

  “Hate,” I tried to explain to them inside the model shed, among the bunks, “and evil, and economy. Economy, hate, and evil—that’s what happened here.” For the first time, I dared to veer from your regular script, the one all guides use, and my voice was shaking. “This is where the illusion we call humankind was erased. Look at yourselves, look at your friends. What are you? Hunks of flesh. Have you ever cooked a cow? If you have, you’ve seen the tendons, the blood vessels, the tissue. Have you ever fried a fish? Have you removed the intestines, seen the dead eyes? That’s what you are. If there’s anything inside of you, other than guts, it’s lusts and ugly urges, worms with aspirations. But for the sake of economy, let us utilize the animal energy that remains inside of you. You aren’t strong African men, accustomed to hard work, and so your demise will be quick, pathetic, ridiculous. Your existence wounds the earth. Your appearance, the cunning way you talk, are an insult to humanity.”

  They looked at me, scared. What side was I on? Why was I saying those hideous things? I had to shock them. I couldn’t carry on with those serene, forlorn explanations, without real protest. Later on, we paused at the ruins of extermination buildings 1 and 2, about a kilometer away from the ramp. “They arrived by foot, leaving heavy loads by the train cars. Seventy-five to eighty percent of the people on each transport were murdered on the spot.” I had to make them understand this: the story of those who survived is a footnote. The real story is that of the immediate deaths that were never marked, never registered, never tattooed. Straight into the gas chambers.

  I stood before them over the underground undressing hall with the shaved roof, like a picked-over scab, underneath all rot. Perpendicular to that is the gas chamber, an enormous rectangle. Everything is still screaming there, those rectangles crying at us. How can you not see? There’s a mother, a grandfather, a child, from here they take the steps down, this is where the hangers used to be, and the benches, and the signs pointing the way to the showers. The Sonderkommandos walked among them, promising cake and hot beverages after the shower. Here and there the Germans administered some clubbing, as little as possible so that a riot didn’t ensue, complicating the operation, requiring more manpower. It would make things messy, bloody. I couldn’t scream it, I could only give them the facts, calmly, with restrained grief.

  Sometimes, if weather permitted, we went as far as the new extermination buildings that had been built in 1944 to handle the unusually high number of transports from Hungary. It was like touring a nature reserve: waterbirds floated in small ponds, large trees swayed gracefully in the wind, small wildflowers dotted the spring grass. Nature sounds. The Germans and the Sonderkommando Jews, the extermination team, were disconnected from the rest of the world. Transports arrived two or three times a day, were taken to undress, shoved into gas chambers, two thousand people at once. A Red Cross car arrived, a German man stepped out of it and tossed in a single can of Zyklon B. The killing process lasted twenty-five minutes. When the steel door was opened they were all twisted around each other, deformed, filthy, the floor covered with their excrement.

  The Jewish slaves quickly cleaned the interior, evacuated the dead transport, checked their mouths, cut the women’s hair (this was in stark contrast to other camps, where the shearing took place before the murder), placed them inside the ovens, fat woman beside a skinny man, or woman–child–man, making sure there was enough fat to make the entire bundle burn. There were a few such fatty bursts of work every
day, but for the most part, after they and their remnants were consumed and while the camp waited for the next transport to arrive, there was European peace and quiet and time to eat and rest.