The time is November in 2013. It’s an unusually warm evening out. The restaurant, rated by the Village Voice as serving the best Chinese food in the city, is in Midtown Manhattan East. At a corner table on the left side of the room sit two well-dressed couples sharing a variety of dishes: stir-fried lotus with ginger and scallions, sliced chicken breast with baby bok choy, spicy hot and sour cellophane noodles, braised assorted fresh mushrooms, pan seared pork dumplings in a chili-soy sauce, along with both steamed white and brown rice, and different pots of tea; oolong, jasmine, and black.
“Twenty-five thousand people a day were unloaded from the trains. They gassed twenty-five thousand people a day. He watched them arriving . . .” one of the men is saying.
The other man’s father, in 1946, brought a large black-and-white photo journal back from Germany. The father had taken it from the khaki duffle along with his other trophies: the small, black rectangular collar patch with the twin white lightning bolts on it; the heavy, dull, gray-green Wehrmacht steel helmet whose sides efficiently covered the ears and back of the neck, complete with leather liner and sweat-soaked leather chinstrap, that had been selected to fit the boy’s head; the heavy iron and wooden sheathed German infantry bayonet whose blade, when the boy finally saw it, had a wide grove down its black length that prevented it from sticking when being pulled from a body. The father had left the journal out on the kitchen table. The boy had looked at it, even though he’d been told not to. There were thirty or so pages. The pictures on the thick paper were grainy in appearance. Each page was covered with naked bodies in huge piles stacked in open dirt pits. The bodies were skeletal. They lay in every direction on top of each other. The heads had no hair. You couldn’t tell if they were alive or dead. They looked dead, but the boy heard his father say that many of them were alive. It was something the boy couldn’t understand. He heard his father talking to his mother. His mother said that couldn’t be true; they have to be dead. He heard his mother saying don’t let him see it. He heard his father say the stench was unbearable. The boy didn’t know what the word stench meant.
The man who is talking is the grandson of an Auschwitz survivor. He had found his grandfather’s diaries.
“He watched them arrive, and watched them being unloaded, both men and women and children; there were many children . . .” the man is saying.
He went on with more of it. When he finished, no one at the table said anything for several moments.