Jewels and Ashes (27 page)

‘After the period of mourning was over, I searched for a house of prayer, an active Jewish community. There was a shul in Katowice where a handful of people would gather on Shabbat. When I first heard their Hebrew chants, I recognised them instantly as my mother tongue. Among those who attended the shul I found one who was willing to teach me. In his apartment I felt more at home than in my father's house.

‘Whenever I returned to the village I would plead with father. He remained resentful. Sometimes he broke into a rage. “Do not insult the memory of your mother”, he would say. “Do you think I would marry into that race of heretics and Christ-killers you have fallen so in love with?”

‘For three years the devil danced in our house. We lived in perpetual distrust. But I persisted. I would light and bless the Shabbat candles despite his disapproval. In time the glow of the candles softened our home. It soothed father's heart and dissolved his simmering rage, until one Shabbat night, without warning, the story I had longed for emerged; and as he told it, I saw for the first time in years a gentle smile play on his lips.

‘When the Nazis were about to evacuate the Jews of our village there had come to our house a man known to the family. He had begged them to hide a daughter of his. She remained in the house while everyone she had known in childhood disappeared. The villagers knew where they had been transported to. The secret had seeped into the countryside. In the not-so-distant town of Oswiecim, factories of death were at work. After the war father had married the girl. A love of sorts had evolved between them in her years of hiding; and besides, there had been nowhere else for her to go. She took on his beliefs, converted, and never again mentioned her origins.

‘That was all he ever told me. But it was enough. In the remaining year of his life he rarely spoke. I accompanied him to church on Sundays, while on Friday evenings I continued to light the Shabbat candles. When he died I left the village, and I have never since returned.'

On the wall there hangs a portrait of Shylock and Jessica. His face is suffused with fatherly love. Jessica appears radiant. Monika stands in front of the painting and stares at it intently, as if seeking within it an idealised view of herself, the reflection she longs for, a unity between father and daughter, a reconciliation of the warring factions within herself. This is the vision to which she clings. Without it there is no place for her on this scarred landscape; without it she stands alone in a no man's land forever shrouded in shadows.

In the evening I ask Feigl about Monika. ‘Who knows who she is?', she replies. ‘A Polack? A Yid? A meshugene? She speaks a few words of Hebrew; she works day and night in the museum. She comes regularly to the Rema. When the men are at prayer she stands in the courtyard and sways. She is not quite one of us; yet she does not seem to be one of them. Who knows? And what is so strange about this? We are all tainted by madness here. When you visit Oswiecim you will see why it is we spend our lives looking after museums and graveyards.'

Like a shadow, I move through the camp entrance under the infamous words,
‘Arbeit Macht Frei'
. The sign is smaller than I had expected, partly obscured by a background of trees. The black letters carved in steel weave and twist as if dancing in the air. Welcome. You have nothing to fear. Work liberates.

Just inside the entrance stands a massive kitchen complex, and beside it plays the camp orchestra. Flowers are in full bloom outside the manager's office. The finger, gloved in white, points left or right: instant death, or death on the instalment plan.

Auschwitz was no makeshift camp made of timber where the job had to be done in haste, out of sight, beyond memory and conscience. Auschwitz is of solid brick and mortar, with blocks several storeys high, constructed to house a hospital, research scientists, permanent camp personnel. It was to be a durable feature of the Reich, a continuing enterprise with an assured future. Its barracks now serve the purposes of display. A museum of the impossible exists here.

In recent months I have come to know many levels of silence. It is a language with an extensive vocabulary. There are silences which echo ancestral presences; silences in which it is possible to observe the slightest movement of dust, an insect in hiding, a pod floating from a dandelion with the faintest promise of rebirth; and the awesome silence of forest clearings where mass executions took place against mute backdrops of stunning beauty. Yet here, in the headquarters of the Reich terror network, the vocabulary of silence reaches beyond its own limits. It overwhelms with the sheer force of numbers: and the fact that here, lived and worked a company of technicians and bureaucrats who went about the task of efficiently and quickly annihilating over a million human beings.

The scope is too vast. I can only register glimpses. At random. Electrified wires. Watchtowers. A wall where twenty thousand were executed. Cellars one metre square where prisoners stood without light for weeks on end. Rooms in a hospital where experiments were carried out on infants. Each glimpse offers an insight into an eternity of suffering.

There are children bearing flowers, schools on excursion. The flowers glow: golden chrysanthemums and marigolds, blood-red roses, emerald-green ferns. Guides repeat grim stories in a babel of languages. Yet all I hear clearly is the beating of my heart, the tread of my own footsteps, and the rustle of clothes against a backdrop of infinite silence.

There remains just one crematorium standing in Auschwitz. I am struck by how small and innocuous it looks. The only harsh feature outside is the chimney, which juts upwards in a jagged thrust towards the heavens. The impact is softened by trees and lawns which have been planted around it.

Inside: a dimly lit cave. Trolleys, which had conveyed the bodies along rails directly into the flames, stand still, as if frozen on a tightrope in time. At the entrance to one of the gaping ovens burns a single candle. A wreath of fresh flowers lies beside it. Glued to the the oven door is a sheet of paper which is headed: ‘Voices of the Children Saved from the Ashes.'

Written for the most part in cool anger, the notice lists demands for retribution, increased reparations, and the apprehension of war criminals. But it is only the final pledge which fully resonates within me. It is a miracle of poetry; a slim but potent reminder of my goal in coming here. The Voices assert: ‘We promise to show our children where their grandparents hugged us for the last time.'

As I walk back towards the entrance I feel alert, nerves stretched taut like finely tuned wires — antennae ready to pick up the faintest of signals. I pass the block of apartments where the commandant had lived. There are potplants on several window-sills. A woman trudges home with a bag of shopping and disappears into the building. A car is parked in the driveway. A man exercises his dog. It is bizarre to see the rhythm of normality beating in Auschwitz.

Moving between rows of barracks I catch sight of a ring lying on the ground: a silver band with a black stone. The ring fits easily. So often I have seen the tattooed numbers on the lower arms of family friends — their indelible signature from the kingdom of darkness. It seems appropriate to have found this token, a permanent reminder of my brief stay, the black stone of Auschwitz. Yet I feel uneasy. Does it belong beyond the perimeters of this sinister universe so tightly contained within barbed-wire fences? Should I carry with me a constant reminder of the power of evil? Why be so obsessed with maintaining the memory?

It is late afternoon. The tour groups have departed. The museum is about to close for the day. Above the camp entrance leap those words which make such a mockery of reason. The silence is a vortex drawing me back towards the first intimations of clarity. I approach the fence, hang the ring on a barb of wire, and walk out of Auschwitz.

It is three kilometres from Auschwitz to the sister camp, Birkenau. This was the killing field, the end of the line. The tracks are now covered in weeds and are rusting. They snake towards a towering red-brick structure known as the ‘Gate of Death'. A lookout rises above a spacious arched entrance. The tracks continue into the camp past a sprawl of barracks constructed to house over 200 000 inmates at a time. Several kilometres on stood the gas chambers and crematoria. Only the ruins remain, and a lake in which, it is said, ashes still float to the surface. Here, thousands could be disposed of in a single day; as they were, day after day, month after month, the victims conveyed by train from countries throughout the expanding Reich.

The sky darkens. A row of poplars stand guard behind a monument on the far edge of the camp, the leaves softly rustling. The air is cool, penetrating, chill. In the distance the ‘Gate of Death' fades into night, enclosing a field where so many precious souls were wrenched from life.

Krakow bursts from the mists into a glorious autumn day, as if revealing its beauty for the first time. The Royal Way threads into the walled city through St. Florian's Gate and proceeds along what was once a much-travelled trading route. Merchants, pilgrims, adventurers and foreign armies were drawn to the renowned marketplace in the central square, and beyond, up a steep ascent to the summit of Wawel Hill. Overlooking the Vistula River loom the palaces of former Polish kingdoms. Underground, beneath Wawel Cathedral, the vaults of the royal crypt contain tombs of kings, bishops, and eminent dignitaries. It is too impersonal, grandiose, too cold, this citadel of royal corpses. I descend to the familiar streets of Kazimierz and to the Krakow Jewish cemetery, whose crumbling stones seem far more accessible.

The flowers on David Schaffner's grave have withered. The front door of the caretaker's apartment is opened by an elderly woman. Her greying hair is tied back tightly into a bun. She glances at me warily, retreats into the apartment to consult the hidden presence within, and returns minutes later with a welcoming smile.

He is seated in the kitchen, hunched over a table beside a desk lamp which sheds light over a transistor radio in an advanced state of disarray. Screws, nuts, wires, and strips of plastic lie scattered about. The old soldier probes the innards of the transistor with miniature tools. He is, in his sceptical, hard-bitten way, pleased to see me. ‘I'm just playing, passing time', he says. ‘What else is there to do?'

His Polish wife hovers around us quietly. She prepares tea and sandwiches with slices of salami and tomatoes. ‘At least she doesn't expect me to be a millionaire, as most Poles do. And there is always something to eat, a clean shirt to wear.' She smiles faintly at his words. There is an obvious bond between them, a softness that could be called love, despite … or is it because of his wary cynicism?

‘I'm just playing out time in this mad world', the old soldier muses. ‘People torture and kill each other. They don't know what to do with their insatiable desires. Yet we all end up there.' And he gestures towards the window through which can be seen the object of his remarks — a burial ground of decaying stones fading in the evening light.
‘Azoi iz es'
, he says in his sing-song Yiddish as he attempts to reassemble the transistor. ‘That's the way it is.'

The bus is climbing upwards, ascending foothills which swell from the Vistula valley, well beyond the walled city and cobblestones of Kazimierz, far above outer industrial Krakow barely visible in a veil of smoke, lumbering into the Carpathians past fields of radiant greens, landscapes flooded with sun, steep slopes criss-crossed with haystacks; and with each passing mile I feel lighter, more exhilarated. Herds of goats and sheep move slowly on the upper reaches. Multi-storey timber farmhouses with intricately carved facades rise amidst vegetable gardens and fodder-filled barns. Interminably upwards the bus moves, towards mountain peaks looming in the distance; and it is not fast enough, nor high enough as yet, to tame the wild images dancing in my mind.

We spill out of the bus into the streets of Zakopane. The air is startlingly crisp; the resort town teeming with tourists, backpackers, farmers; the streets crowded with jeeps and four-wheel drives. I am caught unawares by this sudden gust of affluence, and I keep moving, beyond the town limits, along country roads, onto narrow paths that weave through forests of conifers, of evergreens among autumn annuals engulfed in crimsons and gold. The sun is moving downwards, touching mountain peaks now well within reach. I look out upon an ocean of swaying trees. They give way to barren, rock-strewn slopes which stretch steeply towards summits and beyond, into skies of blue clarity, beyond suffering and despair, beyond past and future, beyond obsession and hope, and far beyond all trace of that blot in a distant valley, that ugly smudge of darkness called Auschwitz.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

PERHAPS IT WAS BLOOMFIELD who gave me the first inkling. He would tramp the streets of our neighbourhood in a worn suit, verging on neatness in a navy-blue tie and white shirt. But the heels of his shoes were non-existent from constant walking, and his clothes were frayed. He would pause only for a quick chat, a few cryptic remarks. Forever restless, he was anxious to resume his rapid strides which headed purposefully nowhere except within a well-defined territory of local streets and parks. It was said he slept in rooming-houses for paupers and single men. In winter a large coat weighed him down, while in summer he would discard the jacket of his suit and walk with his shirt sleeves rolled up. It was then that I would see, clearly exposed, the primitive scrawl of blue figures, his ‘passport number' as he called it with a nervous laugh. And for as long as I can recall, I associated him with whispered conversations among my parents and their friends: something about him having been a human guinea pig in experiments conducted by a Doctor Mengele, the white-gloved arbiter of life and death in a place they called by its Polish name, Oswiecim. The word would evoke in me a chill, a sense of terror, a feeling of dread.

Or perhaps I first heard it in the annual commemorations which took place, late April, throughout the 1950s, in the Melbourne Town Hall. It would be packed to the last seat, with several thousand East European Jews, most of them recent arrivals from ‘yener velt', the other world, or simply ‘over there', as they often called it.