MONDAY, JUNE 13, 2011. We have been in Europe for over a month. Each time we’ve begun a new leg of our journey, whether starting out for Sachsenhagen or heading south to Agde, I have contemplated that destination with a combination of moderate trepidation and the eagerness of discovery. Not so today. As we drive east, I am aware of nothing but pure dread coursing through me.
It took the trains from Drancy three days to reach the Polish city of Oswiecim. We will make it in two. Fully cognizant—once more—of the profound differences between our luxurious mode of travel and that endured by Alex and Helmut, I am terrified at the prospect of reaching this final destination. These feelings stem in part from my realization that, unlike all the other places we’ve visited during the past four and a half weeks, where my relatives always had a future, we are speeding ever closer to the end of their hopes and the end of their lives. But I’m also aware of a large reservoir of irrational fear that I am carrying with me, the terrors birthed in childhood of late-night knocks on the door, of shadowy yet somehow corporeal figures called “Nazis” who meant me harm, who would stop at nothing to do to me what they had done to my grandparents, uncle, aunt, and to millions of other innocent people. It occurs to me with frightful clarity that I have borne these fears all my life, and now here I am driving directly toward the epicenter of that murderous campaign of cruelty, hopelessness, and loss. “No. Stop. Turn around. Flee. They’re going to kill you, too!” These and countless other foolish warnings flood my thoughts. But I drive onward, ever onward, toward the East.
There is one saving grace to our journey, which I discover as I look over the map this morning in our Paris hotel. Based on my calculations, it’s about fifteen hundred kilometers to Oswiecim, and it should take us about fourteen hours to drive there. Searching for a place to spend tonight, I notice that almost exactly halfway to Oswiecim—about seven hundred fifty kilometers from Paris—lies the town of Eisenach, the birthplace of our favorite composer, Johann Sebastian Bach. It occurs to us both that a pilgrimage to Eisenach would be a good way to cushion the blow that will strike us in Poland. And I reflect, not for the first time, on what seems to me the perfect karmic balance represented by the fact that Germany has brought forth both Bach—not to mention Beethoven, Brahms, Goethe, and Schiller—and the Holocaust.
We are very fortunate that today is Whit Monday, a holiday that reduces Paris traffic considerably. So after squeezing our Meriva through the narrow passageway from the underground garage, nearly shearing off the car’s right outside mirror in the process, we escape the maw of the city’s fearsome congestion in mere minutes. Mindful of the distance we need to travel these next two days, we stick to expressways.
As we purr along, I attempt to explain to Amy my deep reaction to what Ingrid told us in Drancy on Saturday. I had never before personally met a German citizen with direct ties to the Nazis who had expressed any grief, remorse, or even simple sadness for what happened to my family. Ingrid’s tears were a gift.
Then we both note Ingrid’s mention of her father’s possible feelings of guilt over the loss of his high school acquaintance—whether that young man’s name was Alex or Günther—and wonder if Ingrid herself feels a sense of inherited guilt. Here was a paradox . . . she seems to feel guilty because of her father’s actions and I feel guilty because of my father’s inactions, and yet our families were on opposite sides in the drama that enfolded them. How can we both feel guilty? The only answer we can imagine is that the crimes committed by the Third Reich were so monstrous that both the perpetrators and the victims have been forever sullied and stained. The two sides are not equal in guilt, of course. But the oceans of tears on both sides are deep and seemingly inexhaustible.
We turn northeast toward Mainz and Wiesbaden and realize, as we circumnavigate Frankfurt, that we traveled this road back on May 11, during the initial part of our journey. We head north, travel northeast again to Bad Hersfeld, and then settle on a due easterly direction on Germany’s A4. As the afternoon shadows begin to lengthen, we turn off the expressway and drive slowly and joyfully down a gentle incline into Eisenach, where our hero Johann Sebastian was born on March 21, 1685.
To the south of the city stretch the canopied hills of the Thuringian Forest and, looming over Eisenach from its perch on a twelve-hundred-foot crag, is the legendary Wartburg Castle, the foundations of which were erected in the eleventh century. Martin Luther attended school in Eisenach as a youth and later returned as a heretic. Declared an outlaw by the Holy Roman Emperor in 1521, Luther took shelter in Wartburg Castle, where he translated the New Testament from Greek into vernacular German. Today the house where Luther lived during his school days is a popular tourist attraction.
The prolific composer Georg Philip Telemann also lived in Eisenach, and a house around the corner from the Luther residence bears a plaque in Telemann’s honor. But what makes this place a must-see destination for classical music lovers is that Eisenach was the birthplace of Bach, whose music, Goethe observed, “is as if the eternal harmony were communing with itself, as might have happened in God’s bosom shortly before the creation of the world.” In 1884, a statue of Bach in his choir robe and wig was unveiled here; twenty-two years later, a Bach museum opened in a six-hundred-year-old house near the site of the Master’s birth.
After checking into our hotel, we walk the few blocks to the Bach Haus, a bright yellow building that seems to radiate more than a little of Goethe’s “eternal harmony.” It is past 6 p.m. and the museum is closed, but we are content to gaze in awe at the house and grounds and to take pictures of each other at the base of the Bach statue in a little park across the way. It is a perfect evening, just days from the summer solstice, and we sing the Gloria movement of Bach’s prodigious B-Minor Mass as we stroll through the cobblestoned streets of the old city. We come to the central market square, which is dominated by the facade of the Church of St. George and a sixteenth-century gilded fountain also dedicated to St. George, the town’s patron and protector. We find an open ice cream shop, and, sitting on a marble bench, we eat our ice cream and listen to the play of the fountain’s waters and the sounding of the church’s chimes every quarter hour, as darkness slowly falls on a scene of utter peace and tranquility. As I drift off to sleep a few hours later, I hug that image tight, knowing what the immediate future will bring.
Tuesday dawns cloudy; saying little, we pack up the car and return to the autobahn, heading east once more. Our route takes us about fifty miles south of Leipzig, where Bach served as cantor of St. Thomas Church and wrote some of his most glorious music, and just north of Dresden, where Saxon kings collected exquisite porcelain, Friedrich Schiller wrote his “Ode to Joy,” and at least twenty-five thousand civilians were killed during the Allied firebombing of the city in February 1945.
In the early afternoon, we pass the city of Görlitz and shortly thereafter enter Poland. As we cross the frontier, black-and-white images of September 1, 1939, courtesy of too many hours watching the History Channel, come crowding into my imagination. Much faster even than a Blitzkrieg tank, we speed east and then southeast past Legnica, Wrocław, and Opole. At Katowice, we leave the expressway as it continues on to Kraków and head south to the city of Tychy. It is now evening and we are only about fifteen kilometers from Oswiecim. Nothing on earth could persuade me to spend a night in that godforsaken town, so we find a hotel in Tychy to await the morrow.
I am nervous, short-tempered, and doubtless bad company. But after sitting silently for ten minutes in the hotel’s dining room, waiting for what turns out to be a very flavorful meal known locally as bigos, or hunter’s stew, my dear wife engages me in a passionate conversation about LeBron James. I am, alas, one of the many pitiable fans of James’ spurned team, the Cleveland Cavaliers, whom he abandoned the previous summer so that he could “take his talents to South Beach” and play for the Miami Heat. But two nights ago Miami was defeated by Dallas in the deciding game of the NBA Finals and we Cleveland fans are overflowing with schadenfreude. Forgetting for a while why I am here in this hotel in Tychy, I give Amy the gift of my analysis of LeBron’s shortcomings in big games. She knows me well, one of the many reasons I love her. Tonight I appreciate her ploy to the depths of my being.
I sleep better than I expect to, but in the morning I am more unsettled than ever. It is warm and humid, and shortly after 9:00 we start down highway 44, heading southeast. The countryside is flat and green, with few trees. We could almost be in Iowa, I think to myself. But we are not in Iowa. We are in Poland, coming ever nearer to one of the most hideous places on earth. My mouth is dry, my palms are wet, and my heart is racing. “Turn back, turn back, turn back” are the words my brain fashions to match the rhythm of our tires on the rough road. But my right foot remains firmly affixed to our little Meriva’s gas pedal, and before I am ready for it, we pass through a traffic circle and a black road sign announces that we have arrived in Oswiecim, the end of the line.
IT SITS AT THE CONFLUENCE OF TWO RIVERS, the Vistula and the Sola, and on the imaginary border that divides the German and the Slavic peoples. Its history goes back at least as far as 1178, and for most of the intervening years, it has repeatedly switched its allegiances to reflect the ever-changing political and military administration of the region. In the fourteenth century, the town was part of the Holy Roman Empire and its official language was German. A hundred years later, the Hussite wars brought it under Bohemian rule, and its citizens were expected to speak Czech. During the sixteenth century, both its rulers and language were Polish. In the eighteenth century, Oswiecim became one of the Austrian possessions of the Hapsburg Empire; once again its official language was German and its name was changed to Auschwitz. As late as 1918, one of the honorifics of the Hapsburg emperor was “Duke of Auschwitz.” With the collapse of the monarchy, the town reverted to Polish rule and its name to Oswiecim, but the rulers of the new “Thousand Year Reich” in 1933 were determined to reclaim the region for the revived glory of the German Volk. Adolf Hitler had two primary social, ethnic, and military goals: the destruction of the Jewish “race” and the acquisition of Lebensraum, or an unfettered space in which to live, in Eastern Europe. Those goals, he hoped, would both be realized in Auschwitz.
The origins of a camp in Oswiecim go back to the time of the Sachsengänger, or “people on their way to Saxony.” At the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, a wave of emigration to the west brought workers from Russia and Poland to the German frontier, where they lived until they found employment in Prussia, Saxony, or the other German states. In 1917, a camp consisting of twenty-two brick houses and ninety wooden barracks was built on the outskirts of Oswiecim for the use of these itinerant workers. Twenty-three years later, the Nazis constructed their concentration camp on the site of the Sachsengänger facility.
On September 1, 1939, on the first day of the Second World War, the German air force bombed Oswiecim. One week later, the market square was renamed Adolf Hitler Platz and the town’s name reverted to Auschwitz. The Nazis intended to achieve Lebensraum in Poland through a policy euphemistically identified years later as “ethnic cleansing,” whereby Jews and Poles were to be expelled and people of true German descent were to be imported. Thus, within a few months, Auschwitz was Polish no more, but an essential part of the German Reich.
By the spring of 1940, there were already six concentration camps operating on German soil: Dachau, Sachsenhausen, Buchenwald, Flossenbürg, Mauthausen, and Ravensbrück. But Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS, envisioned a more advanced, more efficient mode of murder and began seeking a suitable site at which to launch his new program. He dispatched inspectors to Auschwitz to render a report. On its debit side was the current condition of the former Sachsengänger camp, which was rundown and stood on swampy land that was a breeding ground for malaria-carrying mosquitoes. But on the plus side were two factors: a camp was already in place and the town was a railway junction that could be easily accessed by German trains but also shut off from the outside world. In April, Auschwitz was selected from among several other possible sites, and construction began immediately to transform the old itinerant workers’ camp into what would become the most far-reaching extermination camp of the Third Reich.
In early May, Himmler appointed Rudolf Höss, who had served as second in command at the Sachsenhausen camp when Alex was a prisoner there in the weeks after Kristallnacht, to be the commandant of Auschwitz, and on June 14, 1940, the camp opened for business. Although Auschwitz is infamous as the epicenter of the Holocaust, its first inmates were not Jews but rather Polish political prisoners. More than seven hundred Poles, mostly students and soldiers, entered Auschwitz on that first day, followed six days later by three hundred felons from nearby Kraków. In August and September, two more transports of more than three thousand prisoners from Warsaw jails were sent to Auschwitz, most to assist in its further construction.
Again, at first the considerable majority of the inmates of Auschwitz were not Jews but Poles who had been persecuted and then arrested for belonging to suspect political organizations or for being involved in the Polish resistance to the Nazi invaders. For nearly two years, most of those unfortunate enough to pass through the iron gates of Auschwitz, which were decorated with the cynical slogan Arbeit Macht Frei (“Work Makes You Free”), were dissident doctors, clerics, students, teachers, and scientists. During that time, mass murder had yet to be unleashed upon the inmates; death was caused rather by hunger, disease, overwork, and the brutality of the SS.
To describe life, such as it was, within the barbed wire and electrified fences of Auschwitz, is to exhaust such adjectives as harsh, cruel, savage, barbaric, and sadistic. Upon arrival at the camp, each prisoner was issued a number that replaced his or her name, a number that was tattooed onto the forearm. Prisoners had their heads shaved and, to replace their clothes, were given coarse canvas striped shirts and pants and poorly fitting wooden shoes. They slept, often six to a wooden bunk that had been designed for three, on sacks filled with straw. They were fed weak tea or coffee in the morning, a watery soup of nettles or parsnips for lunch, and moldy bread for the evening meal. A daily ration of food amounted to no more than seven hundred calories. Days began at 4:30 a.m. during spring and summer, an hour later in the depths of winter. Work in the camp’s gravel pits, brick ovens, or lumberyard occupied most prisoners’ time, generally twelve hours a day, and woe to anyone who fell ill from malnutrition or exhaustion; an inability to work led to physical punishment or on-the-spot execution. Other offenses such as a missing shirt button, a lost cap, or a misplaced shoe were punished with solitary confinement in a tiny cell that required the prisoner to stand for hours at a time. Other miscreants would be hanged by their wrists with their arms tied behind their backs, resulting in dislocated shoulders. Still others were placed in subterranean cells with no windows and with so little air that the prisoner would gradually suffocate. Particularly sadistic guards would secure a lighted candle to the wall above the prisoner’s head to hasten the loss of breathable oxygen.
Auschwitz was by no means the only Nazi concentration camp in which so-called medical research was conducted. But many Nazi doctors regarded it as the preferred place in which to conduct experiments on human beings. The Bayer chemical company, which had invented aspirin in 1897, purchased prisoners to be used as guinea pigs in the testing of new drugs. Dr. Carl Clauberg, a gynecologist from Upper Silesia, attempted to permanently close the uteruses of women prisoners through the use of experimental chemicals. Dr. Horst Schumann murdered hundreds of mentally and physically handicapped prisoners in the service of what was termed a “euthanasia” program; he also used x-rays to sterilize both male and female inmates. Professor Johann Kremer, in the name of an experiment to study the effects of hunger in humans, literally starved his subjects to death in the last five months of 1942. Other prisoners were injected with diseases, including malaria and syphilis, their sufferings duly noted in the doctors’ notebooks.
The most infamous doctor at Auschwitz, SS-Hauptsturmführer Josef Mengele, thirty-two years old when he arrived at the camp, earned the nickname the “Angel of Death” for his grisly experiments. His specialty was twins—how they were alike and how they differed. Using more than a thousand sets of twins, most of them young children, he would induce gangrene and other diseases into one twin, wait for him or her to die, and then murder the other twin, to compare autopsies.
Each prisoner was identified by a number tattooed on the forearm and by a colored triangle known as a Winkel, sewn on his or her shirt and trouser leg. Red triangles identified the wearer as a political prisoner, green a common criminal, black an “antisocial” offender such as a prostitute or drug addict, blue a foreign laborer, brown a Gypsy, purple a Jehovah’s Witness, pink a homosexual, and yellow a Jew.
Eventually, yellow would become the primary color in the grim rainbow of Auschwitz. Although the camp had begun primarily as a prison for Polish enemies of the German invaders, within eighteen months it was deemed ready to assume its role in what came to be known as the Final Solution of the Jewish Problem.
Beginning with the Civil Service Law of April 7, 1933—the ordinance that provided the legal justification for the expulsion of Jews from government jobs, police and fire stations, post offices, libraries, and all state-run cultural institutions across Germany—a myriad of judicial solutions to what was termed the Jewish Problem had been devised and implemented. By late 1941, it had become common knowledge in the upper strata of the German government that Chancellor Hitler had decided upon a Final Solution to the problem; it fell to one Reinhard Heydrich to see that the plan would be carried out smoothly and efficiently.
Herr Heydrich was the director of the Head Office of Reich Security (RSHA), the duty of which was to fight all “enemies of the Reich,” both within and without the German border. He called a meeting for December 9, 1941, that was to include representatives of all the significant branches of the Nazi Party apparatus, from the departments of the interior, justice, and the foreign office to the head of the Gestapo. But two days before the meeting was to convene, on December 7, the Japanese air force launched its secret attack on American forces at Pearl Harbor. By virtue of its treaty with Japan, Germany was obliged to declare war on the United States. As a result, Heydrich postponed the conference until January 20, 1942, and named as its venue a villa at 56–58 Am Grossen Wannsee, a quiet residential street on the banks of Lake Wannsee, on the western outskirts of Berlin. The gathering is now remembered as the Wannsee Conference.
Thanks to the careful notes taken that day by Adolf Eichmann, Heydrich’s right-hand man, we know that Heydrich made Hitler’s aims perfectly clear. “Under proper guidance,” he declared, “in the course of the final solution the Jews are to be allocated for appropriate labor in the East. Able-bodied Jews, separated according to sex, will be taken in large work columns to these areas for work on roads, in the course of which action doubtless a large portion will be eliminated by natural causes. The possible final remnant will, since it will undoubtedly consist of the most resistant portion, have to be treated accordingly, because it is the product of natural selection and would, if released, act as the seed of a new Jewish revival.” In the course of the “practical execution of the final solution,” Heydrich concluded, “Europe would be combed through from west to east.” There was no ambiguity. This Final Solution called for the systematic extermination of the Jewish population from the continent.
There had already been mass deportations and executions of Jews before the Wannsee Conference convened. Beginning in September and October 1941, Jews in Germany, particularly in large cities, were loaded onto trains, shipped to occupied Poland and Latvia, and shot. But lethal as these actions were, they were judged to be too messy, impractical, and inefficient by the Nazi masterminds, who also took into account the strained nerves of the German soldiers who were charged with pulling the triggers. Himmler issued orders to explore alternative methods, and explosives and poison gas were tried out on Jews and undesirables deemed mentally handicapped. In the words of historian Sybille Steinbacher, the Nazi regime became determined “to find a means of murder that was as efficient as it was discreet and anonymous, and which minimized the psychological burden on those carrying out the executions.”
Thus, a series of mass extermination camps came into existence in the aftermath of Wannsee. The names of these camps resound hollowly in the history of the twentieth century like the tolling of a funeral bell: Chełmno, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, Majdanek, and Birkenau.
Brzezinka, which means “birch forest” in Polish, was a small village about two kilometers from the site of the Auschwitz camp. Cleared of its native population by the Nazis, it became the site of the camp known as Auschwitz II or by its German name, Birkenau. Poison gas had been used on prisoners in Auschwitz I as early as September 1941, when about nine hundred Soviet prisoners of war were murdered in the camp’s infamous Block 11, known as the “punishment block.” But it was in Birkenau that the Nazis perfected techniques that enabled them to commit murder on a massive scale using technological advances that had been developed to an exacting degree in the service of genocide.
Skilled as they were in exploiting propaganda and euphemism, the authorities at Birkenau referred to the first two gas chambers simply as “the little red house” for a simple structure made of bricks, and “the little white house” for a building with a whitewashed exterior. Beginning in late March 1942, trains from all over Europe began to pull onto the one-way track that led beneath an elevated watchtower to its terminus in an open field. When the trains stopped moving, guards opened the doors of the cattle cars and roughly removed the terrified inhabitants, those who had survived the days-long journeys from Germany, Hungary, Austria, or France. The victims were first separated according to sex and then marched past a phalanx of soldiers and camp doctors, who in those minutes of terror and confusion acted as angels of life and death. If the doctor determined that a new arrival was young and fit enough for work, a wave of his hand to the right would send that prisoner to a barracks to begin his brutal incarceration at Auschwitz I or II. Generally, no more than about a quarter of each convoy was allowed to live. The most wretched of the newcomers, the old, the very young, the sick, the weak, were dispatched to the left, to the little houses.
At the entrance to the houses, the victims were told that they would be showered and deloused in preparation for their life in this work camp. Guards would sometimes welcome them with an elaborate speech. They promised hot soup and coffee after the shower; they requested that their charges remove their clothes and hang them on a hook, making sure to remember the number of the hook so that there would be no confusion when they retrieved their clothes after their shower. Then the naked prisoners would be ordered into the houses. The little red house could hold around eight hundred people; the white house’s capacity was around twelve hundred.
When the rooms were full, the airtight doors were closed and fastened. Then SS men stationed near small holes in the roof and in two of the walls would dump in pellets of a cyanide-based pesticide known by its trademark name, Zyklon-B. Panic ensued within, and the condemned would hurl themselves against the unyielding doors where, in the words of an eyewitness, “they piled up in one blue clammy blood-spattered pyramid, clawing and mauling each other even in death.” To muffle the agonized screams of the victims, the SS would sometimes order motorcycle engines started and gunned, although it is unclear whose sensibilities they were protecting.
After about twenty or thirty minutes, all would fall silent within the little houses. The doors would be opened, and the Sonderkommandos, Jewish prisoners who were promised extra food and their ultimate freedom as payment for this horrific detail, would enter wearing gas masks and rubber boots. Gerald Reitlinger, in his study of the Final Solution, wrote, “Their first task was to remove the blood and defecations before dragging the dead bodies apart with nooses and hooks, the prelude to the ghastly search for gold and the removal of teeth and hair which were regarded by the Germans as strategic materials.” Gold fillings were collected, melted down, and turned into ingots for eventual delivery to the Reichsbank. The victims’ hair was spun into a fine thread and used to make rope, stuff mattresses, and manufacture felt.
The looted corpses of the murdered were taken to the crematorium of Auschwitz I, tossed into mass graves and covered with quicklime, or simply burned in a nearby field. The ashes from the incinerated bodies were usually dumped into the dark waters of the Vistula and Sola. But they were often sold to a local fertilizer company as human bone meal or used at the camp as insulation for buildings and paving material for the surrounding roads.
By the end of 1942, the little red and white houses were deemed inadequate for the task of murdering Jews on a mass scale, so plans were developed for the construction of higher-capacity crematoria. By June 1943, Birkenau boasted four fully functional gas chambers that each could execute up to two thousand people a day. These new buildings were not only state-of-the-art killing centers but also landmarks in the cruel and cynical art of deception. The ruse that victims were about to undergo nothing more taxing than a cleansing shower was underscored by freshly painted signs in German, French, Hungarian, and Greek that pointed the way to the “bathroom” and the “disinfection room,” and offered cheerful slogans such as “Through cleanliness to freedom.” The gas chambers themselves were outfitted with dummy shower heads, and guards would distribute soap and towels to their naked charges before locking the airtight doors behind them.
The new facilities featured special double-paned glass peepholes through which the guards could watch their victims’ death agonies and high-powered ventilators that sucked out the lethal remnants of the Zyklon-B from the chamber before the Sonderkommandos ventured in to clean up. The new crematoria also included built-in incineration rooms to enable more convenient access for the disposal of the corpses. Bodies could now be hoisted via elevator to one of the five ovens that were kept busy night and day.
During the Nuremberg trials of Nazi war criminals, correspondence from the corporations vying for concentration camp building contracts was introduced as evidence. One such business, the firm of C. H. Kori, made its case by pointing out that it had already furnished the Reich with four furnaces for the Dachau camp. Its letter continued: “Following our verbal discussion regarding the delivery of equipment of simple construction for the burning of bodies, we are submitting plans for our perfected ovens which operate with coal and which have hitherto given full satisfaction. We suggest two crematoria furnaces for the building planned, but we advise you to make further inquiries to make sure that two ovens will be sufficient for your requirements. We guarantee the effectiveness of the cremation ovens as well as their durability, the use of the best material, and our faultless workmanship.”
The skill and workmanship of the Kori company, as well as the efforts of such businesses as I. A. Topf and Sons of Erfurt, Huta Structural and Foundation Engineering from nearby Katowice, the Silesian construction firm Lenz & Company, and the chemical giant I. G. Farben, which held the patent for Zyklon-B, proved to be as effective as promised. Engineers and designers who a few years earlier had conceived of medical innovations and advancements in the technology of highway construction now set their minds to the task of ever more potent and efficient engines of death.
Their handiwork, though planned to be carried out in secrecy, was not and could not be hidden. Also testifying at Nuremberg was Commandant Rudolf Höss, who declared, “Of course the foul and nauseating stench from the continuous burning of bodies permeated the entire area and all of the people living in the surrounding communities knew that exterminations were going on at Auschwitz.”
In July 1944, Soviet troops began what would become their victorious advance to the west, pushing back German lines of defense as they went. They liberated the Majdanek death camp in eastern Poland and then crossed the Vistula River about two hundred kilometers from Auschwitz. The Nazis used the next six months attempting to erase from history all record of their crimes at Auschwitz. In July, about 155,000 prisoners were held there; by the beginning of 1945, about half that number had been transported to concentration camps in the West, among them Dachau, Buchenwald, Sachsenhausen, and Bergen-Belsen.
During the month of October, about forty thousand people were murdered in the gas chambers of Birkenau. In November, Himmler ordered the executions to stop. In the fields of Birkenau where bodies had been burned, the trenches and other low-lying areas that had been filled with bones and ashes were cleared, leveled, and covered over with turf. The crematorium at Auschwitz was redesigned and changed into an air-raid bunker. And in January 1945, the gas chambers of Birkenau were dynamited.
On January 17, 1945, the SS issued orders calling for the immediate execution of all remaining prisoners in the Auschwitz camps, but in the chaos of the Nazi retreat, those orders were ignored. Instead, Auschwitz and Birkenau were evacuated and nearly sixty thousand prisoners were forced to accompany the Nazi army as it fled to the west. Many thousands perished in the cold and bitter conditions; anyone who couldn’t keep up, fell, or tried to rest or run away was shot. A little more than forty thousand prisoners survived the death march and were then interned in other camps to await their eventual liberation.
Back at Auschwitz, the final ten days of the camp’s existence saw a frenzied attempt to destroy the carefully tended records of the murderers. Files, dossiers, death certificates, and other papers were burned. The x-ray machine that had been used for Horst Schumann’s experiments was removed and sent west. On January 21, the last of the sentries were ordered down from the camp’s watchtowers. Before they fled, the retreating Nazi soldiers set fire to the main facility; six days later, only six of the thirty barracks remained.
On Saturday afternoon, January 27, 1945, soldiers from the 60th Army of the Soviet Union’s First Ukrainian Front came upon the smoking remains of Auschwitz and Birkenau. They discovered around six hundred corpses and more than seven thousand emaciated survivors, prisoners who had been deemed too weak to accompany the death march. The fleeing Nazis also left behind clothing stolen from their murdered victims, including nearly 350,000 men’s suits and more than 830,000 women’s dresses and other apparel. In a warehouse near the main camp, the Soviet soldiers discovered more than seven and a half tons of human hair. Researchers estimated that it came from the shaved heads of about 140,000 women.
Since the Nazis destroyed so many records and files as they prepared their hasty evacuation from Auschwitz, arriving at an exact number of human beings murdered there has proven to be a difficult task. Based on testimony from survivors and perpetrators and the work of latter-day scholars, the figure of 1.1 million to 1.5 million people seems accurate. About 90 percent of those gassed, at least 950,000, were Jews. It has been estimated that about 75,000 non-Jewish Poles and 20,000 Roma, or Gypsies, were also gassed. About 200,000 people died of starvation, disease, or overwork.
In June 1942, Polish teacher Antoni Dobrowolski, who was working for the Polish underground, was arrested by the Gestapo and sent to Auschwitz. On October 21, 2012, Dobrowolski died. He was 108, the oldest known survivor of Auschwitz.
ON OR ABOUT MONDAY, AUGUST 17, 1942, Convoy Nineteen, the train from Drancy bearing my grandfather, my uncle, and 989 other Jewish prisoners rolled slowly beneath the guard tower at Birkenau and came to a halt, its piston-applied brakes moaning on the iron wheels. The boxcars’ doors slid open and the 991 inhabitants, after three days packed together in darkness, emerged blinking into the unfamiliar sunshine. They were ordered onto the well-trampled grass and dirt of the siding and marched before the row of doctors and soldiers who had gathered under the open summer sky to render judgment. In the next few minutes, 875 of the 991 were pronounced too old or weak for work on behalf of the Reich. These 875 souls were sent down the path to the left, toward the guards who ushered them into one or the other of the little brick houses under the pretense of a shower and, afterward, a nourishing bowl of soup. Each of the 875 had led lives of happiness, sorrow, adventure, wonder, frustration, boredom, generosity, peevishness, hope. One of those 875 had been born into a well-to-do family of horse dealers, had fought for his country in the Great War, had run a successful women’s clothing store where he’d acquired a reputation for kindness and honesty, had been arrested for the crime of his religious heritage, and had spent the last forty months engaged in a futile attempt to escape his pursuers and achieve a life of freedom for his family. His name was Alex Goldschmidt, he was my grandfather, and on that day he was murdered in one of the gas chambers of Birkenau. He was sixty-three years old.
Of the 991 passengers in Convoy Nineteen, 116 survived the selection process conducted on the dusty siding by the railway terminus and were sent off to the right to be stripped, shaved, tattooed, and assigned a barracks at Auschwitz. Of those 116, only one would still be alive at the time of the camp’s liberation in 1945. Another of the 116 was a young man born to a wealthy merchant, a young man whose school years had been marked by no particular academic achievement but who had risen to his feet in an impulsive act of bravado and defiance that would be remembered and admired many decades hence, a young man who had spent the last 15 percent of his life as a refugee and a prisoner but who had utilized part of that time tending the sick, learning the skills of animal husbandry and bookbinding, and reading the plays of William Shakespeare, and nearly all of that time being his father’s constant companion and close friend. His name was Klaus Helmut Goldschmidt, he was my uncle, and on that day he was tattooed with the number 59305 and assigned to Barracks 7 in Auschwitz.
Barracks 7 was the site of what was called the Mauerschule, or bricklayers’ school, where relatively healthy young men were taught the craft of fashioning and laying bricks. All the main buildings of Auschwitz were made of bricks, so the camp authorities deemed it necessary to have a constant supply of skilled workers. The students of the bricklayers’ school had a remotely easier existence than the other inmates of Auschwitz in that their food rations were of slightly better quality and their place of work—the school—was on the second floor of Barracks 7. While other prisoners had to work outdoors in all weather, often marching hundreds of yards to get to their construction sites, all the bricklayers had to do was climb a flight of stairs.
But if Helmut had drawn a relatively plum assignment, he did not have long to enjoy it. On October 7, fifty-one days after he had entered the iron gates of Auschwitz under the archway proclaiming that work would make him free, he was sent to Barracks 20, one of the camp’s hospitals. According to a plaque affixed in a room of the barracks by the curators of the Auschwitz memorial, “Prisoners who suffered from infectious diseases, mainly typhus, stayed in Block 20. In this room, in the years 1941 to 1943, prisoners were killed by lethal injections of phenol into the heart. Prisoners selected from the camp hospital or prisoners sentenced to death by the camp Gestapo were killed here. In one such special procedure, 121 Polish and Jewish boys were killed in this room. Corpses were put in the opposite room, from where they were transported to Crematorium 1. Almost every day a few dozen prisoners were killed by lethal injections in the camp.”
Two days after he entered Barracks 20, on October 9, 1942, Helmut died. The official cause of death was listed as typhus, but there is every chance that he was one of the prisoners who was murdered by lethal injection. Helmut Goldschmidt was twenty-one years old.
WEDNESDAY, JUNE 15, 2011. “My God, it’s a theme park!”
After all the miles and all the anticipation and all my fears of the past two days, these are the words I growl to Amy as we enter the crowded parking lot of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial Museum in Oswiecim. There are at least a half-dozen tour buses and milling crowds of tourists, among them a group of older Japanese men and women, many of them with multiple cameras hanging from their necks, and high school classes from Tel Aviv and Far Rockaway, Long Island, some of the kids solemn and attentive and some of them hanging back, sneaking a smoke.
“Welcome to Holocaust World 3-D!” I continue, as we squeeze into a parking space. “It’s the emotional roller-coaster of a lifetime! Thrills! Chills! You’ll never forget to Never Forget! (Tattoos sold separately . . . striped pajamas not included . . . Zyklon-B no longer in stock.)” Amy smiles at me indulgently, then kisses me to shut me up. I can’t explain to her the source of my confused feelings. On the one hand, I think it’s very much a Good Thing that so many people have traveled so far to tour this memorial and to learn the details of the horrors that were perpetrated here. On the other hand, I’m put off by all the eagerness to gawk. It’s as if we’re rubbernecking at the smoldering wreckage of a colossal accident along the highway of Western civilization. I want everyone to just move along.
There is no admission fee to enter the Auschwitz camp, but there is a charge to join any of the several tours that depart regularly from the museum’s entranceway, tours conducted in English, French, German, Italian, Polish, and Japanese. Even though we are not joining a tour group, we find ourselves caught in the swirl of humanity packed into a hallway. Three or four security guards size us up and then one of them waves us through turnstiles onto a gravel path. After perhaps fifty yards, we turn right and walk beneath the notorious iron gate bearing the words Arbeit Macht Frei. Somehow, I think, it shouldn’t be so easy.
We ring the bell at Barracks 24, which today houses the archivists who work in the Office for Information On Former Prisoners. We are buzzed in and meet Piotr Supinski, a helpful young man who confirms the date of Helmut’s death and tells me the details of his time in Barracks 7 and 20. Piotr speaks slowly and softly in perfect English; it comes to me that he regards me, respectfully, as grieving next of kin. His kindness moves me deeply, and suddenly all my parking lot cynicism dries up and blows harmlessly away.
Amy and I leave the archives and, hand in hand, join the quiet throngs strolling along the well-kept gravel paths from barracks to barracks. We seek out Barracks 7, where Helmut lived for a few weeks with his fellow bricklayers, and then make our way with unwilling steps to Barracks 20. Here is where my uncle died, and here is where I have determined to tell him goodbye. But I realize that I have forgotten his picture in the car.
I am in no mood to face the crowds back in the entrance hall, but there is nothing to do but walk back to the parking lot and detach the photos of Alex and Helmut from their position above the Meriva’s rearview mirror, where they have kept us company during our long journey. I anticipate an uncomfortable wait standing in line to get back into the camp, but something remarkable happens. The people in the halls, tourists and security personnel alike, take one look at the photos I am carrying and, without a word, shrink back and give us room to pass. Everyone seems to know why I am carrying pictures of these people and their relationship both to me and to this hideous place. My path back into Auschwitz is made free and clear.
One of the rooms in Barracks 20 is dimly lit and a small trough of earth-colored gravel lines the base of each wall. I borrow a small pair of nail scissors from Amy and slowly and carefully separate Helmut’s photo from Alex’s. I then kneel by one of the gravel borders, kiss Helmut’s seventeen-year-old face, softly say, “I love you,” and place the photo onto the gravel, where it leans against the wall. This is the loving burial my sweet uncle never had, and as I bow my head, my tears drip onto the tiny crushed stone. “Ruhe ruhig, mein liebe Helmut,” I whisper. “Rest in peace.”
In silence, we walk slowly back to the parking lot and then drive the two kilometers to Birkenau. Here there are fewer cars and only a single tour bus. The remains of the camp seem vast in comparison to the tidy Auschwitz memorial. At Auschwitz there are many small brick buildings connected by well-groomed gravel paths; here there are only a handful of wooden barracks slowly rotting in the wind and weather of the Polish countryside, surrounded by large empty fields of tall grasses that bend in the breeze of this warm June day. The Auschwitz camp is alive with visitors crunching along the paths, snatches of their varied languages competing for attention. Birkenau is all sad silence; conversations are hushed and muted; what sounds there are come largely from nature: the wind sighing in the grass, the occasional bird song, crickets.
Barracks 20 at Auschwitz, where Uncle Helmut died, either of typhus or of a deliberate lethal injection, and where I left his photograph.
A memorial plaque, on which visitors have placed many small stones, reads, “Forever let this place be a cry of despair and a warning to humanity, where the Nazis murdered about one and a half million men, women, and children, mostly Jews, from various countries of Europe. Auschwitz-Birkenau, 1940–1945.”
The parking area abuts the elevated guard tower that straddles a single railway line; together the tower and track form one of the indelible images of the Holocaust. Amy and I walk inside the gates of Birkenau to stand in the shadow of the tower at the approximate point where the selections were made, where Alex and Helmut were separated by the wave of a Nazi doctor’s hand.
They were father and son, they had been constant companions for more than three years, becoming each other’s best friend, on sea and then on land, in Boulogne-sur-Mer and Martigny-les-Bains, in Sionne and Montauban, Agde and Rivesaltes and Les Milles, and finally on those terrible trains to Drancy and then to this very spot. And then, in the blink of an eye, Alex was sent to the left and Helmut was sent to the right. Did they know what was in store for each of them? Were they permitted a last embrace, a final handclasp, anything at all? Did father cry out to son, son to father? Could they have heard each other over the wail of humanity at the scene of this unspeakable crime?
I am gasping for breath, my legs suddenly too weak to support me, and I very nearly collapse, but Amy gathers me in her arms and we rock together back and forth, back and forth, until my heartbeat returns to normal and my eyes can see again.
When I have regained my strength, we slowly walk several hundred yards to the site of two of the crematoria, both of which were nearly destroyed by the retreating German army in January 1945, as they sought to cover up their deeds. Today the crematoria are harmless holes in the ground, bordered by low brick walls and crumbling concrete. From a nearby field, I pluck three little wildflowers, one yellow, one purple, one white, and then jump lightly down into what remains of one of the crematorium’s foundations. I place my grandfather’s photo on the ground, leaning it against the bricks, and then lay the flowers beneath the photo. “Goodbye, Alex,” I whisper, “I love you so much. Ruhe ruhig.” Amy hugs me again, and I hold her as I weep.
Then I dry my eyes, take a final look at the photo and the flowers and climb up out of the grave. It is time, I tell myself. It is now time to let go.
For the next ten or twenty minutes, we sit with our backs against a tree, taking refuge in its shade against what has become quite a warm and humid day. We face away from the ruined crematoria and toward the boundaries of Birkenau. The barbed wire enclosing the camp is affixed to concrete pillars that curve inward gracefully as they crest, and I am reminded of a fragment of a poem written by a young prisoner who was held here seventy years ago. Zofia Grochowalska Abramovicz also noticed those graceful curves strung with wire and called them “the harps of Birkenau,” writing that the wind made the cruel wires vibrate and utter pleasing sounds. What a sweet soul Zofia must have possessed, I think, to find a little beauty amid such cruelty and ugliness.
Alex’s “burial site” in the ruined foundations of one of the crematoria in Birkenau.
I close my eyes and hear the wind whispering and rustling in the green leaves overhead and imagine that I hear a thin and distant melody in the ghostly strings of Zofia’s harps. Then a cow moos and a rooster crows from a nearby farm and I realize that life is everywhere. Birkenau’s instruments of death are indeed in ruins, and they can no longer harm me. Alex and Helmut’s journey, painful and hopeless as it turned out to be, ended here. I need to acknowledge that it ended, that they died here, but also that I am alive, that I have survived. Having followed in Alex’s wake for so long, now that I have come to the spot where he died I must resolve, for the rest of the time that I’m given, to live life to the fullest.
A few of the graceful harps of Birkenau.
“C’mon,” I say to Amy, “let’s get the hell out of here.”
We drive away from Oswiecim toward a few days of rest in the Swiss Alps. After weathering a long, construction-induced traffic jam on the Polish-Czech border, we head west on a clear stretch of open road in the beautiful Czech countryside, toward a glorious sunset. I have brought along a recording of the Mass in B Minor by Johann Sebastian Bach, whose birthplace we visited two days ago, and as the Meriva purrs along, we listen to the Mass’s last two movements.
Dame Janet Baker, one of my favorite artists, sings Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi, miserere nobis. (“O Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world, have mercy on us.”) It occurs to me that it would have to be a lamb of immense strength and fortitude to take away all of the sins committed at Auschwitz. Perhaps, I think, it is an impossible task; perhaps some sins will outlast us all.
But then comes Bach’s final magnificent chorus on the words Dona nobis pacem (“Grant us peace”). The music soars, carrying voice and spirit ever upward. If anything can restore my abiding faith in the human animal, this glorious creation can, and does. My dear wife and traveling companion sings along with me, and I think to myself, “Let my journey grant Alex and Helmut peace. Let them rest in the earth and sky of Poland forevermore. And may it grant me peace as well.”
