There's an Egg in My Soup (12 page)

Their services in the West, incidentally, fetch about $45 to $90 a pop, from which the woman gets a very small proportion. If you cross the border into Poland to pick up one of these roadside girls, the most you'll pay is about $25 with condoms, $45 without. To think a girl is willing to risk her life for an extra $20 is an example of how desperate they are.

The type of club that we had envisaged going to is quite common throughout the country, essentially lap-dance and strip clubs that have a regular strip show if you don't wish to get too close. Some are seedier than others, but we used to look at it as entertainment for the boys abroad, and rarely considered that some of the girls may have been there against their will. We would
go and spend hours sipping vodka and gazing at girls, many of whom would previously only have visited our dreams. These clubs are mostly run by thugs, who are very easy to spot. When you enter the club, they're the ones at the largest table, surrounded by food, girls, and bottles of vodka and dressed in tracksuits and gold pendants. You would want to be a brave man to try anything, but by the same token they try and run the clubs with some degree of efficiency.

The thought that this brothel was mafia run went through our heads that night. If it was we were in a spot of trouble. There were no tracksuits around, but that didn't mean much. We sank lower and lower on the bar stools and broke into a fit of laughter, especially since the girl with her breast hanging out was parading herself in front of us.

Goatee comes up and asks if we want a drink before ‘going upstairs'. A beer costs about four quid, about five times the amount we've been paying all night. Goatee then says that to ‘go upstairs' will cost us three million. Back then, that was about seventy quid, almost a month's wages for a teacher. His girls must be good. I gaze over at them on the couch and they stare back at us. I wonder which one it would be, if I had to. But whatever about having a giggle or a grope at a girl swinging her breasts over your vodka in a strip bar, I felt too young, too innocent and too poor to be going upstairs to a smelly mattress. Keith, still in paranoid
mode, suddenly leans forward on the bar and, with his head in his hands, tries to explain.

‘Look, we're Irish,' he blurts out, ‘and I think we've made a mistake here. We don't want to go upstairs, we want to go home. We're really, really sorry if we've wasted your time.'

Goatee stares for a minute, then he laughs. This is not a mafia place, he tells us, though most are. It is his private house and the girls get a good commission. They are screened regularly, thus the higher charges. As he speaks, a large, stiff-looking guy strolls in and, without even getting a drink, grabs one of the girls by the hand and disappears through the curtain. ‘German,' Goatee says. After chatting for a while he orders a taxi for us and we leave, bidding the girls a goodnight on the way.

The next night is a repeat of the first, only we don't go near any taxis. After three nights we arrive back in Warsaw, having spent two months' worth of our Polish wages on expensive bars and tricky situations. The idea of a bar is, of course, down the toilet, leaving a large, black space in our futures that neither of us really knows how to fill. But then, none of us had any idea of our futures when we came here. In many ways that was the beauty of it.

By the close of that year, though, it was decision time. It was 1996, and a lot was happening back in Ireland. People were picking up houses, securing good
jobs, investing money and settling down. The repercussions of being away when the Celtic Tiger was beginning to roar was something that none of us could have anticipated. Those who acted on instinct – like Keith, who was depressed after that Wroclaw trip anyway – and made the decision to pack up and leave, ultimately made a wise choice. He now works in an estate agency in Leeds. Whenever I met him thereafter his reaction was always one of disbelief.

‘So you're still in Poland? In the same town? What the hell are you doing there? Get your act together. When you get home you'll realise that teaching English abroad is not going to stand to you.'

It worried me greatly at the time.

Most of the original group had by now made the decision to bail out. They were replaced with others from Ireland, as APSO deemed that the project had so far been a success. At least, they were still getting requests from schools to supply more teachers.

Those of us who remained did so for various reasons, a common one being the irresistible draw of Polish girls, or in some cases, Polish men. From the original group of nineteen that came over, five in total got married. Another friend of mine from the second group also eventually married, making a total of six. But to prove that Polish girls were more attractive than Polish men, four out of the seven guys tied the great Gordian knot, compared to only two of the dozen or so girls.

At that point, I had requested an extension of my contract, after much thought and some very long nights. Asha's doctor in Warsaw had been given the shoulder at the end of year one, once I had sent a letter to APSO requesting an extension to my contract. Now, at the end of year two, after long nights of soul searching, I did the same again.

With some of my close Irish friends gone, life was a bit tougher. I had some decisions to make about a career, but had no real options. I eventually reasoned that I was as happy here teaching as I was going to be anywhere, even though some of the conditions were miserable. Misery though, is a relative state, and can be tolerated when you've knowingly put yourself in a situation. I never wanted much when I came here, and I never got much. What I got, though, I called home. I found myself quite contented with my measure, and was growing to love the place I lived in. It is amazing how a lack of luxury can make the simplest of pursuits so pleasurable. After two years I still had no television, but found that a stereo, a decent selection of CDs, a bunch of books and a fridge with a few beers in it can make a man content for a time.

I confess to later getting a television, so that I could get hold of some videos in English. And to be honest, any more than a couple of weeks without company and depression would set in. But I was living among people who had less than I had, and if they managed, then so
could I. I had become friendly with many of them and had settled into their way of life. Although I moaned about some of the day-to-day chores I had to endure, I basically had no impulse to leave.

Largely cut off from life at home, relying only on a weekly paper and with no internet, I began to immerse myself in books about Poland, whenever I could get my hands on something in English. My students recommended a few novels. I read histories of the country and books by Czeslaw Milosz and Ryszard Kapuscinski – brilliant stuff. I read histories of the Second World War, particularly on the Holocaust, a subject that seems to fascinate so many people. That it does is probably a good thing, because it means it will never be forgotten. But so much of Poland contains vestiges of the Holocaust that it is impossible to avoid the subject.

I got hold of a book by Daniel Goldhagen called
Hitler's Willing Executioners,
which had a photo of Jews being rounded up in the Jewish Quarter of the very town I was living in. The photo shows the Jews being forced to play leapfrog before being put into waiting vans. The Jewish Quarter had been only a stone's throw away from where I was in the internat, and nearby was a Jewish cemetery. There were now very few Jews still in Minsk.

Asha's father had a long spell in hospital around this time, with an illness that would eventually lead to
his death at the tragically young age of fifty-seven. One evening when we went to visit him he was beside a very old man who chatted away and joked, despite the fact that the hospital was grim and his condition appeared grimmer still. He told us that he had spent years imprisoned in Soviet gulags and the physical extremes were now really taking their toll.

Asha's grandfather, she once told me when I brought up the subject of the War, had also been imprisoned in Russia, where he was tortured. He managed to escape from the train that was bound for the gulags of Siberia and made it all the way home on foot in mid-winter. He got to the family home, but collapsed in the house and died from a heart attack very soon afterwards.

You could pick any student in any class and doubtless they would have a tragedy behind them. However, you generally didn't hear about it unless you asked. Silent, strong, tough, resilient people are the Poles. I learned to look at them differently, and look at human nature differently, after some time in their country.

The suffering that these people had gone through, during and after the Second World War, eventually became something of an obsession of mine. I felt compelled to learn more about it.

Before the war, there was a young Polish man who had a fine career as a writer ahead of him. His name was Tadeusz Borowski, and his short life was a tough one.

Born in the Ukraine in 1922 to Polish parents, his father was transported to one of the worst labour camps – the White Sea Canal, above the Arctic Circle – for having participated in a Polish military organisation in the First World War. His mother was sent to Siberia.

In 1932, his father was among prisoners exchanged for communists held in Poland and the family was eventually repatriated in Warsaw. Tadeusz was sent to a boarding school run by Franciscans. When the war broke out he was only seventeen.

During the German occupation, college and school were forbidden to Poles, a ‘sub-species' who didn't warrant a good education. The Nazi jackboots had hammered resistance into the ground within a matter of days in the west of the country, when they invaded on September 1, 1939, and the plan with regard to Poland soon became obvious: the educated class was to be exterminated, the country colonised. The east of the country was well looked after by Stalin, who invaded
on September 17, deporting thousands to prisons in Siberia, and massacring the elite in the forests of Belarus.

Borowski studied in underground classes and later worked as a night watchman and stockboy for a firm that sold building materials. This meant he had a work card and could avoid being sent to the Reich to make up for the labour shortage there.

The underground press in Warsaw during the war was prolific and extremely hardworking, with dozens of leaflets, such as translations of radio broadcasts from the West, appearing each day from various sources. Borowski published his first volume of poetry,
Wherever the Earth,
underground in a rudimentary form. But it was enough to incriminate him. A few weeks later, he was arrested. He had with him at the time a copy of Huxley's
Brave New World.
This was a bad move. A copy of
Mein Kampf
might have saved him, but he wasn't in Paris and he wasn't Beckett.

From a prison in Warsaw he was moved to Auschwitz, and from there, in 1944, to Dachau in Germany. His stories, which were later published under the title
This Way to the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen,
are sordid tales of life in the concentration camp. The world he portrays and the figures fighting for survival in it, are not only rugged, naked, fragile and devoid of flesh, but are also devoid of any scrap of moral or altruistic inclination. People are stripped of any feeling but that
of the base, animal instinct to survive. The other creatures – the dogs, rats and lice that crawl over every page – walk hand-in-hand with the victims. Life, through Borowski's lens, doesn't care a damn who it lives in, a Jew or a rat or a louse.

In 1951, having survived ‘the chimneys', Borowski gassed himself in his flat. He wasn't yet thirty.

It is a bleak read. And it was one of the first books I read, having asked the girls in school which books from Polish authors I was likely to pick up in English. This book had become compulsory reading for the students on the school curriculum.

Majdanek was the first camp I visited. The second biggest camp in Poland, it lies just outside the town of Lublin, where we all stayed in the first year. I will admit a certain amount of ignorance about the place when we went to visit in that first week in the country, even playing travel scrabble on the bus with one of the girls on the way there.

Most people were just yawning and gazing out at the scenery as we passed through the town and out onto the main road towards the camp. There were the usual comments when some of the more conscientious girls said they weren't going to go in at all – ‘Go on, it'll be a gas.'

None of us really knew what to expect. Schindler's List had been showing at the time, so the subject of Poland and the Holocaust was fresh in our minds at
least, but not all of us were aware of the whole history. I remember turning the corner on the coach and suddenly being faced with the camp in the distance.

The joking stopped instantly and all heads turned to stare. It resembled one of those evil castles in animated fantasy cartoons. The reaction was the same all over the bus, the scene tapping straight into childhood reserves of bad feelings.

Dark towers loomed out of the field, bowing down on the still and eerie interior, which was surrounded by a raging mess of barbed wire. Within lay the butcher's yard, most of it still intact. The hanging posts. The gas chambers. The crematorium. The prisoners' blocks. It was motionless, inert, deadly quiet, yet still seemed to exude a vicious, punishing energy. It looked, in fact, as if it had only been abandoned yesterday.

There was a film, followed by a guided tour which took us around the camp, through the gas chambers, the prisoners' compounds, the punishment blocks and finally the crematorium at the back, the fierce chimney still blackened and whole. A vast mountain of ash lay next to the crematorium, sheltered by a roof to form a memorial. The history of the camp was vividly described by the old Polish guide, who had lost some of his own family within those walls. He stood in the gas chambers, the walls still stained, and went through details of how long it took for the gas to kill a person and what exactly happened.

Wood is supposedly a good retainer of human energy, and standing there in the wooden prisoners' blocks, it was as if someone ran a cube of ice down your spine or a comb over the back of your neck. But Majdanek is only one of many such places in Poland. The country really is littered with reminders.

Not only did Poland have the highest number of Nazi concentration camps of any country – one commentator put the figure at 5,800, which would include holding camps and transit camps of all sizes and shapes, but camps nonetheless – but each and every town you pass through bears scars of the Holocaust and of the War. As a work camp, Majdanek had a mortality rate higher than any other camp – except the extermination camps – with forty percent of victims being gassed or shot on arrival, and most of the rest dying from starvation, exhaustion and disease within weeks. Of almost 500,000 people who passed through the gates of Majdanek, 360,000 never left.

It was in Poland that the answer to the ‘Jewish question', which had been lingering on the lips of Europe for centuries, was answered. It became a slaughterhouse. Poland, by the twentieth century, was the ‘crown' of World Jewry. King Kazimierz, Poland's great King who reigned in the fourteenth century, had granted refuge and special privileges to Jews, who settled in great numbers during his reign, a time when Jews were victimised in just about every other country
in Europe. But Poland would ultimately pay the price. Hitler wished to close the Jewish chapter once and for all, and Poland was the place to do it.

The country was perfect, not only to deal with Polish Jewry, but Jews all over Central and Eastern Europe. It was centrally located geographically and had a widespread railroad infrastructure, together with a large supply of rolling stock, which could easily feed the rest of Europe. The great English historian on Polish events, Norman Davies, has an apt title for the country: God's Playground. Stalin called it a crossroads.

Hitler's fervent anti-Semitism was really without basis – at least, any basis that anyone can find. The myths of his Jewish background have no foundation, as he was brought up a Catholic. Many commentators believe that Hitler's plans for world domination were subordinate to those for the annihilation of the Jews. For if he really believed the Jews to be so powerful, could he not have used their skills for his nation, since many were able scientists? But he didn't.

Instead of concentrating the German army on making up for its failure to take Moscow in 1941, he used up large quantities of supplies and highly trained divisions for the murder of innocent people who weren't even the legitimate enemy. Even when the tide had turned in 1944, and the war was as good as lost, Hitler continued to transport Jews from Hungary and Greece.

Hitler had at his mercy about 500,000 Jews in
Germany, and about 200,000 more once Austria was annexed in 1938. It was then he turned to Poland.

Hitler's crusade didn't only involve the Jews, of course. As soon as he came to power he began his euthanasia spree in Germany. Invalids and the elderly were wiped out, though this campaign was suspended eventually. Gypsies were rounded up and killed or taken to the camps. By 1945, only 5,000 gypsies remained in Germany. After Germany's walkover in Poland in 1939, he immediately ordered the massacre of the Polish elite. Two-and-a-half million officers and intellectuals from various backgrounds were executed, ensuring the Polish populace had less chance of being trained and educated by their own.

The dual camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau is probably the one with the most familiar name to people, and I visited the place several times. I remember one year in the town of Oswiecim – Polish for Auschwitz – a peculiar and rather tragic battle of a different kind was raging.

Most visitors to Auschwitz are surprised to find a town there at all. But there was, and still is, a town with a population of about 50,000. Life goes on there as it does in any other town. But how normal can a town be with the ghosts of over a million victims haunting it? Two arguments are constantly cropping up.

There are those who feel that life should continue, and wish to see bars, clubs and cafés spring up as they do everywhere else. One entrepreneur even wanted to
open a ‘social club' – a brothel, basically. Others feel that the town should respect the memory of its victims by retaining an air of calm and peace, and so object to the idea of bars and cafés and the like.

The second argument is also about sensitivities. The Jews erect Stars of David in memory of the victims of Auschwitz-Birkenau. The Poles erect crosses to pray for the non-Jewish victims of Auschwitz-Birkenau. One cross in particular, a twenty-six-foot cross blessed by the Pope in 1979 and moved from Birkenau to Auschwitz, became a huge sticking point. The Jews saw it as an outrage, an attempt to ‘Christianise' the Holocaust. It is as if a decision has to be made over who suffered more, and who therefore deserves greater symbols. There was an international agreement to avoid symbols of any sort at Auschwitz, but that was ignored.

Auschwitz-Birkenau was officially a camp for Jews. We can establish that as a fact quite easily, because it came from the horse's mouth. The camp commandant, Rudolf Hoss, said so himself: ‘Auschwitz became a Jewish camp. It was a collecting place for Jews, exceeding in scale anything previously known.'

The mortality rate in the camp for Jews was higher than for other prisoners – Poles, Russian prisoners of war, Gypsies, other European nationals and anti-socials (such as German prisoners, homosexuals and Jehovah's Witnesses). Jews who arrived in the camp would already have been subject to harsh conditions in the
ghettos, where they had to do the hardest work and received starvation rations. In the camps, they were not allowed to receive parcels and were thus deprived of any chance of getting extra food. They were also excluded from any privileged positions in the camp. These positions, such as camp ‘capos', tasked with keeping order, were given to more brutal and mostly ‘green' (criminal) prisoners. These capos were notorious for their sadism against their fellow prisoners.

Other privileged positions were in the camp Sonderkommando – where Borowski worked, managing to stay alive because of it. This unit was in charge of unloading the prisoners from the ramp upon arrival, separating them from their goods and cremating the bodies after the gas. Because of the nature of their work, they were topped up with rations – especially vodka – and enjoyed better living conditions.

Jews arriving in the camp were separated into those who were fit to work and those who weren't. This decision went against the original order of the immediate destruction of all Jewish transports, which began arriving in January 1942. However, there was a need for more labour in the armaments industry. The elderly and infirm, as well as children and women with children in their arms, went straight to the gas. The rest were put to work, but few lasted longer than several weeks.

In February 1943, a telegram was received by the camp
commandant to the effect that all Gypsies should be exterminated. Gypsies from France, Hungary, Poland, Germany and elsewhere began to arrive. The rounding up of Gypsies was in itself an act that only proves the madness of the Nazi regime. For military reasons, certain people are rounded up and used in war as hostages. Even the killing of the elite of societies in time of war can be seen as a strategic act, whether morally justifiable or not. Long before the war, Gypsies were being rounded up and placed in camps as part of the campaign against ‘asocials'. Research was being conducted to separate the ‘stock' of pure-blooded Gypsy, the direct descendants of the Indo-Germanic race. The idea behind this was, as Hoss puts it, ‘to have them registered and preserved as a historical monument'.

After 1942, all other Gypsies were taken to Auschwitz, to be kept there for the duration of the war. However, the regulations governing arrest were ambiguous and caused much confusion among the arresting officers. Many men were arrested despite having been decorated or wounded, because their mothers or grandmothers were not pure-blooded.

A total of 22,667 Gypsies were transported to Birkenau and lived in appalling conditions. As Hoss reports, disease was rife as a result of starvation and exhaustion. Finally, he was ordered to destroy them, which he says was hard on him because they were
really like children.

Also brought to Auschwitz were 13,775 Russian prisoners of war. At the last roll-call before the camp was evacuated, there were ninety-two prisoners of war left. Among those shot or gassed immediately were 900 Commissars of the Soviet army. The first trial in using Cyclon B – the official gas of the camps, normally used as insecticide – was in fact carried out against the Russians. It was a success, and came to take the place of exhaust fumes from lorries in the bigger extermination camps.