Hypocrite in a Pouffy White Dress (30 page)

“Oh look,” I said sarcastically. “What a great place for a picnic. Or, better yet, a fashion shoot. Here,” I said, striking a pose beside a chunk of granite with the name “Bialystok” etched on it. Bialystok had been the town my grandmother had come from; all her relatives there had been killed.

“Get one of me like this.” I tucked an arm seductively behind my head. “For Grandma.”

Shimon looked at me incredulously. “You’re insane,” he said.

“Why not?” I said bitterly. “Everyone else here seems determined to pretty things up.”

Just then, Jonathan ran over to me. Jonathan was one of the kids I’d chosen to track throughout the March, recording their impressions and experiences. He was a sixteen-year-old punk rock aficionado and sci-fi enthusiast from San Francisco. Out of respect for the trip, he’d pinned a yarmulke to his dyed-blue-and-purple hair. “Hey, Susie,” he said breathlessly. “Are you ready for the height of sickness? Check out the souvenir shop.”

Amazingly, while authorities hadn’t bothered to put up detailed plaques or exhibits explaining what had transpired at the camps, they had managed to build a souvenir kiosk. In case you’re ever in dire need of a concentration camp commemorative
tschotchke,
you’ll be relieved to know that, at least when I was there, Treblinka sells key rings, change purses, and souvenir bookmarks.

“What, no snow globes?” I cracked.

“Yeah. Why not?” Jonathan said with mock annoyance. “I mean, they could have little ovens inside, and fake ashes instead of snow.”

“I see there are no Nazi lawn trolls, either,” I sniffed.

“Hey,” Jonathan called over to the bored-looking woman behind the counter. “Do you have any bumper stickers that say ‘Honk If You Love the FÜhrer’?”

“Communists.” I shook my head. “They know nothing about merchandising.”

“Un-fucking-believable, isn’t it?” Jonathan handed me his camera. “You have to take a picture of me here. Otherwise, people back home will think I’m making this up.”

“Ohmygod. Look at these,” I cried, motioning to a rack of postcards. The cards had attractive shots of Treblinka on a sunny day, some with a montage of close-ups and long views of all the memorials. “Okay,” I said. “Hands-down, this wins.”

We each bought some, along with the airmail stamps thoughtfully provided at the cashier’s window.

“Augh, this is so great,” Jonathan said, writing hurriedly. “I just hope people realize I’m being ironic. How’s this? ‘Dear Mom. Here I am at Treblinka. As you can see, it is very pretty. The people are friendly. I am having lots of fun. That’s all for now. Bye.’”

“Oh, that’s brilliant,” I said, then handed him mine.
Greetings from Sunny Treblinka! Having a Wonderful Time,
I’d written.
PS. Wish You Were Here.

“Are you okay?” Shimon said when we climbed back on the bus.

“Of course,” I snapped. Ever since Jonathan and I finished our postcards, we couldn’t stop making caustic remarks and laughing—if laughing is what you’d call the shrill, mirthless asthma that seemed to have overtaken us. My ribs ached and my breathing was irregular. “Why wouldn’t I be okay?” I said acidly. “I’m a professional journalist.”

That night, Shimon and I drank two bottles of wine with dinner again. When the restaurant closed, we moved on to the dreary bar at the hotel and ordered shots of industrial-strength potato vodka washed down with the Polish version of champagne, which is every bit as bad an idea as it sounds. A group of sad Polish prostitutes lingered by the elevator banks in out-of-date dresses and stucco-like makeup; the same old men who’d been there the night of my arrival remained hunched over their drinks, staring at the cheap laminate tabletop. Being awake at 2:00
A. M
. in Warsaw was depressing, but given the images that were swirling in my head, I figured it beat going to sleep.

The next morning, the March of the Living toured the site of the Warsaw ghetto, now a concrete housing development that reminded me of any number of inner city projects back in the states: one ghetto echoing another. A memorial to the uprising had been constructed in a plaza nearby, an abstract sculpture of fists emerging through flames. Then, the group was taken to a dilapidated Jewish cemetery which had been mostly destroyed during the war.

“What genius figured that a Jewish cemetery would be a nice break from the concentration camps?” I said to Shimon. “I mean, what are they trying to do here, depress every kid to death?”

“No,” he sighed wearily. “Make sure they realize their responsibilities as Jews. You know, support Israel. Don’t marry a
shiksah.
Call your mother. That sort of thing.”

The so-called highlight of the March took place on Friday. All the participants would go first to Auschwitz. From there, they’d march two kilometers to the neighboring Birkenau. This would be a replay, in reverse, of the “March of the Dead” that concentration camp prisoners often had to walk from the labor camp to their own extermination. Nobel laureate and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel was going to be leading the March personally.

“Another day, another horror,” I moaned as I settled in beside Shimon for the ride to Auschwitz. Then I said, “Do you think, if we asked really, really nicely, they’d drive us to Dachau afterward? Because frankly, I just don’t think we’re getting to see enough concentration camps on this trip.”

The fields around Auschwitz were flooded with hazy sunshine. Forsythia bloomed on the roadsides. “Ugh, my allergies,” wheezed a kid across the aisle. People handed around Kleenex and cans of 7-Up they’d bought at the hotel vending machines. I realized I loved and hated teenagers for exactly the same reason: only teenagers, en route to Auschwitz, would sing “We Will Rock You,” then pass around an economy-sized bag of Doritos.

The great irony about Auschwitz was that now, apparently, you had to pay to get in. Near the entrance was a cafeteria/snack bar, followed by an ice cream stand. A few families were there already; parents sat at the tables, trying to cajole squirmy, petulant children into eating cut-up pieces of kielbasa and melty vanilla ice cream. There it was:
Auschwitz
—
-fun for the whole family.
Since I’d somehow lost both Shimon and the teenagers I was interviewing, I just sort of wandered around by myself. We had an hour before the March, and as I walked up a stony path, I came upon the official entrance to Auschwitz, the famous wrought iron “Arbeit Macht Frei” gate that had mocked prisoners with the announcement “Work Makes You Free” as they staggered to their deaths. I’d seen plenty of photographs of the gate before, yet seeing it for real was almost more disturbing than anything else I’d witnessed thus far. Before I could even absorb the shock of it, a group of teenagers from the March came barreling up the path.

“Ohmygod, it’s the gate!” a girl in a Day-Glo orange T-shirt and a scrunchie shrieked. “Quick, you guys, we have to get a picture!”

In a moment, four of them were posing beneath it in their shorts and baseball caps, their arms flung around each other chummily, everyone squirming and giggling. One kid made a peace sign with his fingers. “Okay,” called the boy taking the photograph, “at the count of three, smile and say ‘cheese.’”

“CHEESE,” they chorused.

I could only imagine their photo albums back home:
Here’s me and Jason at Disneyland. Here we are at the junior prom. Oh, and here we are at Auschwitz
… But then, strangely, I found myself tickled, almost gleeful. Hitler, after all, had hoped to turn a handful of synagogues into museums documenting “the extinct Jewish race.” Instead, his own machinery had been preserved as a tourist attraction, and now here we were, the shrill, popcorn-crunching crowds, the kids with cartoon T-shirts, Instamatic cameras, and picnic lunches, as mindless and ordinary as any other group of spectators, posing beneath the defunct infrastructure of genocide, laughing and squeezing together to fit into the frame of the autofocus.

Suddenly, I felt buoyant—the best, really, that I had ever had since arriving in Poland. Oh, it was good to be at Auschwitz! Jews weren’t just victims; in the end, we were victors, too! The Third Reich was gone, but all the people they’d tried to exterminate were still here, kicking around on the planet: the Jesuits, the gays, the disabled, the Gypsies, and, yep, the Jews. Here I was, a reporter on assignment, surrounded by thousands of exuberant teenagers, and the machinery of Nazism had been converted into a sort of impotent theme park. Just how triumphant was that?

I rounded a corner onto dirt paths separating blockhouses. Apparently, these were former barracks where prisoners had slept packed together like cattle. Now, except for a sample bunk room, they were largely empty. Yet after wandering upstairs, I stopped. Preserved behind a wall of Plexiglas was an enormous pile of hairbrushes and combs. There must have been a hundred thousand of them—piled nearly to the ceiling—and if you looked closely, you could see a few strands of hair in some of them.

More disturbingly, the next room was filled with shoes, men’s and women’s—all sizes and styles—scuffed leather, buckles, lace-ups, high heels that had clearly been danced in—and tiny children’s shoes—the kind that parents used to have bronzed and made into paperweights, commemorating “Baby’s First Steps”—thousands of pairs, again piled nearly to the ceiling, an avalanche of footwear, all of them bearing the shapes, the sweat stains, the imprints of their former owners.

Six million. Hearing that number, my mind always went numb. I had trouble simply visualizing a dinner party for more than twelve people. Six million was like trying to wrap my mind around the limits of the known universe: I just wasn’t capable of it. But to see the ‘ combs and the shoes that belonged to people, suddenly I could picture the woman in dark green leather pumps with cracked soles, the man with a tortoiseshell comb tucked in his breast pocket. One hairbrush, one belt buckle, and for the first time, the dead became individually palpable.

Then, compounding this awfulness, in the next room were eye-glasses, a big, mangled tumbleweed of wire. I wore eyeglasses. As light came through the window, I could see myself perfectly, reflected in the display case.

I don’t know how I got out of the barracks, or accidentally stumbled into the gas chambers next door, but that’s where I was next. A dank, impassive, clinically tiled room—or was it merely concrete?—I couldn’t quite focus. I felt disoriented and strangely lightheaded. Overhead were big, flat shower heads. Were those fingernail gouges in the walls, or was I imagining things?

The first time I’d heard about the gas chambers was on the ice cream line at Silver Lake. My friend Ruthie had told me there was a man named Hitler in Europe who’d made all the Jews take off their clothes and go into a big group shower where poison gas came out of the pipes instead of water. After the Jews died, she said, they were burned in giant ovens.

I was horrified—yet stunningly, more so by the idea of being naked in public than by anything else. “So wait,” I said to Ruthie. “Before the showers, they didn’t even let you wear towels?”

Now, here I was, in a gas chamber myself. The horror was sonic. The room seemed to vibrate with malignancy and pain. I was out of jokes; I was utterly alone. Stepping out of the chamber proved no less devastating: adjacent to the showers was a crematorium. True to their rep, the Nazis had been efficient. The ovens were reddish brick, long and deep, with human-sized spatulas protruding from them. Even the gas chambers looked a little nonspecific, but with the design of the ovens, there was no mistaking their purpose.

Until that very moment, I realized, I’d stupidly believed, “I would’ve gotten out of this somehow.” Until that moment, staring directly into the genocidal maw of a body-sized pizza oven, I’d somehow assumed that the Holocaust had been meant for other people— for real Jews, Jews who actually cared about their religion, Jews who had some allegiance to their people and their heritage, Jews who were earnest and pigheaded. Jews who had been weak or naive. Jews who hadn’t been nearly as savvy, charming, or modern as my family was. Surely, we would have been spared. Surely, we would have figured out some way to wriggle out of it, to avoid the debasement of it all, to be granted an exemption from a fate reserved for six million others. Surely, in trying to kill us, the Nazis would at some point have realized that they were making a terrible mistake. Look: We had a Christmas tree. I’d sung in a choir. The last time I’d checked, my mother was a Buddhist.

Yet as if it could speak, as if a demonic voice had been summoned from the inferno of its past, the oven gaped before me and its message was only too obvious: Oh, Sister. Don’t kid yourself. This one’s for
you.

At some point, I suppose, all of us in our lives confront some unavoidable, outsized horror. Maybe it’s a tumor, or a little brother playing with a gun, or a psychopath in a day care center, but inevitably, a moment comes for all of us when we realize that we cannot beat the devil on this one: we have been targeted for injustice or tragedy. And nothing in school, nothing in daily life really prepares us for this. Maybe nothing can, except art, perhaps. Or faith. All that piousness and religion that irritated me so.

At twenty-two years old, I had been ridiculously lucky. In my own neighborhood, I’d grown up surrounded by kids who had constant, firsthand knowledge of the world’s prejudices and cruelties. Yet amazingly, I’d remained strangely naive. Now, staring into an oven designed specifically for me—me in my shoes and eyeglasses—I was suddenly aware of just what a moral and psychological lightweight I was, how spoiled and ill-equipped I was to cope with the viciousness of the world. What the hell did I know? I was just some ambitious little asshole from New York. Until that moment, the free fall of adulthood had seemed scary enough to me, without the horrors of the world to confront. Now, I didn’t want greatness or glory. I wanted to go home and curl into a fetal position in my bedroom, then get a job replacing toner cartridges in a Xerox machine. I’d happily forfeit substance and forgo all wisdom if it meant I’d never have to recognize
this.

I had the urge to rip open my own skin, crawl out of it, and leave it behind as I fled. Hurrying out of the crematoriums, slipping down the stony path beneath the “Arbeit Macht Frei” gate, I banged right into Shimon.