A History of Forgetting (32 page)

‘That wasn't a nice movie, was it?' said his father.

The boy swung around, glaring. ‘No! It was a dead movie!'

Alison stood. There was Malcolm, leaning against the back
wall, waiting for her. She came over and, once again, offered him her arm.

Double doors led from the cinema directly outside where, diagonally across the green, the wooden tower of the guardhouse was. She saw the black-and-white striped posts on either side of the gate and, although she couldn't make it out from this distance, she knew that above the gate the wrought-iron scroll read ARBEIT MACHT FREI.

In preparation for the onslaught of wind, she collected her hair in her free hand, the one not holding Malcolm's arm and the flower. She looked at Malcolm. He nodded and, together, they started along the path towards a sign.

 

YOU
ARE
ENTERING
A PLACE
OF

EXCEPTIONAL
HORROR
AND
TRAGEDY.
PLEASE SHOW
YOUR
RESPECT
FOR
THOSE
WHO
SUFFERED AND
DIED
HERE
BY
BEHAVING
IN
A
MANNER
SUITABLE
TO
THE
DIGNITY
OF
THEIR
MEMORY.

 

You are standing beside the two Canadians, the woman holding tightly to her hair, though it is sheltered here in the quadrangle. Now you see that you were mistaken about their relationship, that if he is her uncle, he is her great-uncle. The dye fooled you. He didn't seem quite this old getting off the bus.

No one else you rode in from Kraków with is around. When you arrived the film was about to start in German and the Dutch girls were heading for the cinema. Probably the Swiss Italians watched it then, too, so all of them would have a head start. Where the American boy is, you don't know, but as they weren't selling popcorn and the film is black and white, he likely skipped it.

People leaving the cinema recluster in the quadrangle around their guides. It reminds you of how they used to be
grouped as ‘fit' for work or, most often, ‘unfit'. Today, though, no one is stripped naked. No detour to the gas chamber. Like you, the Canadians seem to be waiting for a less crowded moment to start, and though you don't intend to intrude upon their pri
vacy, you overhear her ask a question, which is not so strange
except that you were sitting right behind them on the bus, and for the whole long ride they exchanged not a single word. Now you hear her asking if it's true that a person's hair can turn white
overnight, but you step discreetly away before he answers.

Just before the gate stands an enormous weeping willow that, tousled by wind, appears to be shaking its head. Pass by it, then under the flat black letters—ARBEIT MACHT FREI. Stop and look back. The Canadians are following, the woman slowly leading the old man. In the quadrangle, another tour group forms. The gate has not slammed closed behind you, no distempered canine nightmare brings up the rear, no black boot delivers a coccyx-cracking kick—yet look at the tree. It keeps on rustling.

No, no.

Before you is a wooden building, beside which a group falls into a listening circle around the guide. Take the pamphlet from your pocket and find out what the building is.

e) Camp kitchen

Mounted behind glass on the wall, a poster-sized enlargement of the very spot you are all standing looking at the photograph. THE CAMP ORCHESTRA IN
1941
reads the caption in Polish, English, French and, this time, Russian. Macabre, the shorn musicians in their stripes, the conductor on a wooden box in pyjama bottoms and tails. See the emaciated concert-master, the percussionist with rickets. What are they playing, you wonder. Wagner?

‘Marches,' says the guide, who has a Polish accent but is speaking near-perfect English. ‘They played as the prisoners left the camp to work and also as they returned, often carrying their expired comrades.'

In the pamphlet, red dots and arrows map a route, but instead of going straight, turn where no one is, down an avenue of tossing trees and identical red-brick blocks, each
with its own little lawn and numbered Art Deco lamp. Except for the guard tower at the end and the triple barbed-and-electrified fence, it's almost pleasant, like pristinely maintained council housing. Instead of going in, you walk on until you r
each the triple wires at the end of the avenue, the concrete posts arching inward to discourage climbing. Who would try, you wonder, with a current running through and, right
behind, the guard tower and the dogs? Sick-makingly eerie,
the wind against your back, trying to push you against the
wires. When it lets up, it is only to gather strength for another shove.

Continue walking. Ahead, between the last two blocks, is a dead end—quite—a courtyard where a large rectangular something stands against the brick of the back wall. You can't make it out yet, but there is a scattering of shiny objects on the ground in front. The facing windows are boarded up on the one side, and bricked in on the other, preventing anyone from looking out.

Inside the courtyard, you see flowers wrapped in shiny cellophane and candles flickering in a row and, closer, a panel made of some curious sod-like, bullet-absorbing material. Consult the pamphlet. The block on the left, Block
10
, was boarded up so no one could see
in.
Dr Mengele worked here with his dwarfs and twins.

Block
11
, to the right, is quaintly named the Death Block. A tour group just now arriving, the guide monotonously counts off in French each person crossing the threshold. Wait for her to enter or you'll be counted in.

On the main floor is where summary sessions of the
Gestapo court were held. The walls retain their original paper, a marbled brown and green shot through with rusty streaks that bring to mind dried blood stopped in veins. The furniture is still here—sturdy wooden chairs, a monolithic desk. Missing is the gavel that precipitated each prisoner being bullied down the corridor to the second room, which you come to now, where they waited for their verdict—a flogging in the yard or a suspension: on a post, hung by wrists tied and wrenched up behind the back. Next are the rooms where they were stripped before being led out to the courtyard and the Execution Wall of grey sod. If they weren't taken outside, they went downstairs, as you go now.

The stairwell is so crowded that the line comes to a halt until some of the visitors already in the cellar come back up. You stand watching, looking at the faces of those mounting the stairs. There is no comprehensive reaction, but something does strike you. Oddly, it reminds you of how as an adolescent, in the tumult of self-definition, you began to recognize secret signs and gestures and would make pronouncements in your head like:
This one is like me, this one isn't.
Then the line starts to move and you descend, to where it is palpably colder and damper. Down here, an echo—the reiterated shuffle and whisper, the nauseating ring of a full sole on cement.

Long dark corridors lined with cells, some with doors regrilled in the motif of the Muzeum, some piled high inside with cellophane-wrapped flowers. People press up behind
you, trying to look through the tiny barred windows. Accord
ing to the pamphlet, most of these concrete closets were for
the ho-hum routine of torture and detention, but Cell
18
was one of those reserved for particular torments—a ‘starvation cell'. Cell
20
, windowless, was a ‘suffocation cell'. In Cell
22
, they have opened the wall of the ‘standing cells' to show the yard-square cubicle where four people were wedged in for the night.

Here at the end of the hall a small crowd has gathered.
No one is talking, but the way those in the rear determinedly push forward, you can tell there is something in that cell that everyone wants to see. Wait for them to clear away and when a young man butts in ahead of you, let him. He comes right out again.

Stoop and enter. You have to look twice to notice the protective square of plexiglass. Under it, a crude crucifix scratched
into the plaster.

Climbing back up the stairs, you pass the people waiting to go down. Now they study your expression, as you studied others while you were waiting to descend. Do they see that you are thinking of that prisoner-cum-artist, shivering in his stripes, waiting for the stamp of boots to recede down the hall? What had he found for a tool—a bent and priceless nail? Did it dig into his own palm as he worked? Did he perish for it, his self-expression? Then you think of the young Frenchman ducking into the cell fifty years later and ducking smugly out again.

Leave Block
11
now, and as you go, recall the old Queen of Uncles reciting back when you were getting off the bus—
this way enter the Museum of woe .
. . And watch the people
entering, their varied expressions of outrage or grief, the blank faces of those in shock, the profound weariness, the revulsion. At the same time there are people coming through who seem detached. Perhaps they are simply unprepared; they skipped
the film, or history in school. The sceptics and deniers, the imaginatively impoverished, the perversely curious—they
are visiting, too
.

Continue along the avenue, against the flow of people and wind. A couple walk slowly towards you joined at the hip, the man the woman's very sight and volition. Encircled in his arms, she moves along with both hands over her face. Then, sheltered between the blocks, four teenagers from a school group huddle around a communal cigarette.

Entering Block
7
, you find yourself in a corridor lined with women's faces, their expressions worse than blank—gaunt and hauntingly restrained.
Aurelia, Emilia, Hana.
A flower hangs from a photo, tied with a long curled ribbon.
Teresa, Allegra.
‘Living and Sanitary Conditions' the theme of this block, some of the rooms are glassed in. Stand and look inside, where, on the floor, straw and filthy blankets have been shaped into loose fetid pallets. Farther along—
Luzie, Flor, Katarzyna—
is a room with ten crude and unprivate toilets in a row.

Bożena, Bondi, Irena.

This next room you can walk through: three-tiered bunks strewn with straw and blanket scraps.
‘C'est affreux,'
the woman behind you mutters.
‘C'est comme une installation.'

Leave, walk down the steps and back out on the avenue to Block
6
where, in the corridor, you are met with the tearless eyes of men.
Edward, Józef, Michał, Stanisław, Emil.
In the first room off the corridor, a chart explains the triangular badges: red for Politicals; two in yellow, one reversed and overlapping, to form a star for Jews; for Gypsies and the Mentally Ill black; Jehovah's Witnesses purple; Homosexuals pink; Criminals green. Slowly, you turn and see at the far end of the room a display of prison uniforms and, for the first time, recognize that a colour is missing from the abject spectrum. You hadn't known that the stripes, seen all along in photographs in black and white, were blue.

Now it occurs to you that you have been following the official route after all, but in reverse. ‘Material Evidence of Crimes' reads the legend for Block
5
. So it's like this: first photographs and drawings, reconstructions, models; now actual, contemporaneous objects. You are moving from the abstract to the personal. Following the route backward—Block
7
, Block
6
, Block
5
, Block
4
—makes a kind of countdown.

The first room in Block
5
is empty except for a wooden case under the window just inside the door containing nothing but round dinted tins of shoe polish. Turn now, look
across the long room and, as you stare at the hill of brushes
behind the glass, the physical emptiness of the room is filled with the suggestion that the room itself was once filled with brushes.

Hair brushes

Nail brushes

Shaving brushes

Tooth brushes

Lint brushes

Shoe brushes

Scrubbing brushes

Step out into the corridor where the walls are lined with photo murals—pictures of the stores. Here is the very Everest of brushes you just imagined and, here, a magnitude of combs. Pause now to think of your own brush, the lost hair
woven in a mat around the bristles. Give thought, too, to your toothbrush, flaring from overuse—a toothbrush that will be casually discarded, that never stood for anything but dental hygiene. Continue on past prayer shawls suspended like sails,
mangled eyeglass frames, enamel dishes, pots, sieves, tubs, basins, all stacked to the ceiling, trusses, crutches, wooden hands, artificial legs and arms amassed like the limbs in the
pits.