HOLLY ANHOLT

Journey

NILS THOUGHT IT WAS A BAD IDEA. He’d been there himself, so his skepticism could be taken two ways, either the considered voice of experience or the light condescension of someone who thinks something’s right for him but not for you. I decided to take his advice both ways. I’d go, but with appropriate fear, doubt, and self-loathing. He would have gone with me but he was in the Middle East covering the Gulf War. I would have waited for him to return but I thought, no, I’m a big girl, I have a car, I have my plans, I should carry them out.

Nor was Nils the only dissenting voice. Oksana furrowed her brow and of course David mocked me for it. “A little tour de Pologne?” One more of his little phrases. “It’s in the papers. American woman seeking enlightenment. No job too dirty.” But then, David was always mocking me. Nils’ best pal had so successfully taken on the relentless aspect of my nemesis from fifth grade that I had begun thinking of ways to mollify him, which, as I’m sure he understood, is how I wound up buying one of his cars. The customer’s always right: wasn’t he teaching his charges capitalist tricks? But David was the worst capitalist I ever met.

I stayed the first night in Cracow. I won’t bore you with the guidebook descriptions. It seemed alright, it was old, it was no longer Communist. One more “Paris of the East”, or something else of the East. I stayed in a place called the Metropole that was still musty and chintzy from the old regime and the next day drove to Auschwitz. You know there are signs for it on the motorway, Oswiecim, this exit. I found that rather odd. But then, it’s a good-sized town. You couldn’t not have signs for it. I began to feel badly for people who were born there. If they ever went anywhere, they’d have so much explaining to do. Or maybe they never went anywhere, just for that reason. Or maybe they just never went anywhere period. I was afraid and thought about such things.

I can’t remember how you get from the motorway to the main camp. There must have been signs but I don’t remember. The main camp is the one with the “Arbeit macht frei” sign and the museum, but it wasn’t actually the extermination camp. The approach is by a cobbled path that could have been to a zoo or a monastery, and the buildings themselves are of brick and neat enough. There was plenty of room in the parking lot. It wasn’t a very popular place in the autumn of 1991. I walked the cobbled paths, like a proper museum-goer read the guide and observed the displays. Everything was stacked high as if you were getting something wholesale, empty suitcases, pairs of shoes, Zyklon B cans, hair. Now there would be a punishment, a just retribution, to have to spend your life counting up every single human hair, and if you make one mistake, if you miss one hair, you have to start over. I thought such things. I was alone. And this too: if work can’t make you free, what can? Only God’s grace? Only love? Only luck?

I left, feeling properly alienated, as if this wasn’t what I’d come for, this main camp with its straight paths and brick buildings and numbers on the buildings that could have been a second-rate prep school or what in fact it once had been, a Polish army barracks that the Nazis grabbed. If I was making a pilgrimage at all, it had to be to the other camp, the outlier, Birkenau, Auschwitz-Birkenau, Auschwitz II, the processing plant of death. I drove the couple miles and parked in a muddy lot. Now this was more like it, out of town and out of the way, vast, dilapidated, destroyed and gray; I laced on boots and looked up at what I’d seen in pictures, the watch tower with its fort-like flanks extending in either direction and the hole in the wall in the middle where the trains went through. There was only one other car in the parking lot, Polish or Russian and rusted out. I’m not even sure how I knew that this was the parking lot. But there weren’t any other cars anywhere else. It seemed like it would rain soon.

There was a guard house to one side of the portal. I entered, to see if I needed a ticket. A wasted-looking kid about eighteen in a green shirt thrust a guest book at me. I signed without even looking at who had signed before me. The kid pointed to a stairs and said in English, “Go! Up! You see whole thing!” I said, “Thank you, not now,” or whatever I said, and the kid retreated to a second room where another kid in a green shirt was waiting for him, with a couple of glasses and a vodka bottle. One of them slammed the door shut. Immediately a radio went on, the music loud and laced with acid. I filched a small map off a pile of them, left the guard house, and walked through the portal, hearing from inside the sounds of falling-down drunkenness, shouts, the music, static, people or things crashing into walls. I can remember thinking: they weren’t expecting anyone today.

By now, I don’t really know but I imagine, there’s a bit of an Auschwitz tourist industry, the buses filling the muddy fields, or who knows, there could be a paved lot by now; but that cloud-laden afternoon, it was just me and the two Polish guards; and I soon forgot their drunken brawling or dancing or whatever it was.

In my numbness, I forgot pretty much everything, even why I came. I could observe but not feel. This of course I recognized as possibly emblematic of my life, but it didn’t make it any easier. How much I wanted to have definitive reactions, to make connection, to truly be where I was. But as I walked down the weedy railroad track, looking back every once in a while at the “Portal of Death,” I was more like those drunk guards. If I’d thought about them then, I would have understood them.

On each side of me, past barbed wire, were low wooden barracks, like sheds, that went on tirelessly in rows, and where the barracks left off, there were chimneys where the burnt ones had been. And why was the barbed wire still there, why had no one ever bothered to remove it? Evidence, all was evidence. That’s how someone must have thought about it. And of course they’d have been right. Such old barbed wire. There was a break in it and I went through to the sheds. The little map I’d grabbed in the guard house said these were the women’s barracks. I looked through cobwebbed windows, uncertain what I was seeing. A creaking door flapped open and shut. I walked through it with superstitious dread, afraid something rabid might jump out and bite me. I can say only the few words my map said about the lines of hard bunks, that women slept head to toe, eight to a bunk, the bunks themselves stacked three high. Don’t take my word for it. I won’t vouch for such things. There were a few graffiti on the walls. Why should I have a preference if they were made by inmates or tourists?

All the same, all the same, the world is all the same. These were my thoughts. I was alone. Look here, a wash basin. Look there, a latrine. Back out in the open, I followed my map to where one of the gas chambers had been. A couple of steps to the undressing room remained. An indented, grassy spot that had been a pond of ashes.

Why I went back to the guard house is unclear to me. Perhaps I did want to see “the whole thing,” as advertised. Perhaps I only wanted to see another human being. Only one of the bleary-eyed young men was there when I returned. He was the one I’d spoken with before. “Good?” That was what he asked me. “Good?”

He looked like a caricature, as well, half-steady on his feet with a cockeyed grin, as if the noise I’d heard before was him bouncing himself off the walls.

“Oh, very good. Very good. The only not good thing, if you want me to be critical, was it wasn’t horrible enough.”

“You want go up? See whole thing. Very good.” His old refrain. He threw an arm towards the stairs.

And probably because I’d been sarcastic and regretted it, I gave in to his persistence. Maybe he was right, maybe it was something I should be seeing. I nodded and followed him up the narrow stairs, oddly aware of the mud on my boots, as if I were tracking mud into someone’s house.

The upstairs space – you could hardly call it a room, it was more like a narrow attic – was fetid the way you’d expect if it was the retreat of these boys. Odd, too, but I felt no fear going up there, as if once you’re afraid of everything, it’s hard to be afraid of anything, there’s no longer background to tell the foreground. I looked out through the wind-filthy window at “the whole thing.” I tried, without success, to imagine what my parents must have done to survive this place. The field of play below me had become familiar. Death, but at a suitable distance. I again began to compose such thoughts, to become lost in my opinions or what I would someday say. To Nils, for instance, what I would say to Nils. Though he was hardly a “for instance,” there was no one else to tell, my mother being gone. Dearest Mother, Dearest Father, what? This was not the place I would remember them or know them, this was only a long gray field where it had begun to rain. Then I felt the boy behind me. His breath stank of vodka and garlic.

“Love me? You want love?”

I could feel his chest and legs on me. I turned, to laugh him off or push him away.

“No. Are you crazy?”

He put his hands on me and with a Brueghel leer tried to kiss me.

I’m not sure what then happened first or second but he kept talking about love, nice love, have nice love, American girls like love, in that ridiculous stewed pidgin, then we were wrestling and I wrestled him away and the stairs seemed far away. For certain he grabbed my breasts and I spit on him and we wrestled on the filthy floor. He got a knee between my legs and fumbled with his pants. I screamed whatever I screamed. I was as tall as he was but he was stronger. Everything was disjointed. The only thing I remember clearly thinking is what if the other one came back, if the other one came back then I’d be done for, because what would they do, they’d lose their jobs, they’d have to kill me and I’d be the only Anholt to die in Auschwitz.

But the other one didn’t come back. Nor did the first one rape me. I don’t know how long we wrestled or exactly which body parts of mine he touched. What I thought at the time was that I freed myself by desperate effort, that I somehow rolled away and pulled my leg away from his reach and made the stairs and he didn’t follow me down. But the truth is he may have spent himself in his pants. In retrospect, later in the Metropole in the so-called light of day, I decided I had heard a little groan.

My car suffered greater physical injuries than I did. When I woke the next morning, somebody had stolen the side view mirror, both windshield wipers, and the front grille. If it had been the grille from Oksana’s Mercedes-Benz, I might have understood, but off my funny little clown car that barely made the trip, it was only adding ludicrous insult to injury. I laughed out loud then, thanking God for everyday life.

So much for my tour de Pologne. They won’t be writing this one up in a tourist brochure. Driving home I thought, they ought to abolish all ruins, because they’re phony, but they ought to keep the guards, because at least they know what they want.

I took care not to tell David of my misadventures. To Nils I told everything. He seemed to think it was his fault.