Chapter 14
MASHALLAH
“Whoever it may be, the man who’s at this moment somewhere on the face of the Dru is one of us. Let’s pray for him, to our Lady of the Dru, and of the Géant and of the Grépon.”
—R. FRISON-ROCHE, FIRST ON THE ROPE
LAST NIGHT, my first night ever in Poland, the air was loud and electric. Thunder woke me up in my aerie-high hotel room in the lonely center of Warsaw; sleep was only ever fitful after that. Now, this morning on the train, the June skies over the Polish countryside are cool but moody still as I barrel south and east, trying to keep my balance.
I am in a compartment with two young women. The one sitting in front of me—we are knee-to-knee now—took my seat and wouldn’t give it back. When I walked into the compartment, she was already in my place. I smiled with a question mark and pointed at my ticket—clearly marked okno, window—and then at my seat. The woman, who has piercing blue eyes and a broad swath of dark brown bangs, took one look at me and my ticket and my question-mark smile and waved me off with a frown and a flourish of the hand: “It doesn’t matter.” That okno ticket wasn’t the easiest thing in the world to procure. I’d had to wait on a couple of ridiculously long lines at the train station, with several middle-aged women in a row dismissing me, one after the other, with nie nie nie, no no no, and the wave of a hand.
Now, on the train finally, the young woman sits in my place, her white, freckled arms folded across her chest, her mouth set in irritation. She looks out my window, icily. The thick green fields, the telephone poles, the abandoned buildings, the summer gardens, the swathes, here and there, of red poppies, all come rushing toward her in greeting. From me, they shrink away.
Where is my balance?
I’m not used to traveling like this, without a usable language of some kind. I feel oddly naked—like I have nowhere to hide. Before I came to Poland, friends who know the country well gave me a couple of pieces of important advice. First, they said, do not speak Russian to people, even if you are absolutely sure you’ll be understood. Of course, both Russian and Polish are Slavic languages, and if you could somehow, poof, make hundreds of years of on-again-off-again hostilities disappear, it’s clear the two do have intelligible overlaps. Jeden bilet do Lublina, in Polish, is, after all, pretty close to the Russian Odin bilet do Lublina. One ticket to Lublin. But no. No Russian. No risking an odin instead of jeden, even while holding up a single index finger and smiling. One. Poland and Russia share a past that is just too freighted with anger and pain. So, no bringing Russian into a train station, or a tea shop, or a museum. Better to wait for a half hour on the English line with its nie nie nie nies. Better to pretend it is impossible to understand one another, even when it isn’t.
The second counsel my friends gave me was even more important. Never, I was told, refer to “Polish concentration camps.” An almost unforgivable error. Auschwitz-Birkenau, Bełżec, Chełmno, Majdanek, Sobibór, and Treblinka, these were all Nazi extermination camps in Occupied Poland. These camps were neither created nor maintained by Poles. Millions of Poles, after all—millions—were themselves victims of Nazi aggression and murder, including right in those very camps.
The combined lesson of my two warnings was this: Poland was not Nazi Germany and it was not the Soviet Union. It lived an epically tragic century of its own—caught in the overlapping maelstroms of two terrible regimes.
And yet, only the most nationalist of observers would claim that Poland—and Poles—were innocent of all crimes in that period. It’s very hard to live as an innocent right in the eye of the storm—even harder when there is, say, a long and entrenched history of pogroms against vulnerable populations there.
I look over at the blue-eyed woman again. I notice now she has a thin layer of black liner drawn around each eye, like some of the meaner girls in my junior high school. She can’t know that this is my first trip ever to Poland—the abandoned homeland of much of my mother’s family. She can’t know that Henry Herzog, my great-great-grandfather, had a shiny silk top hat, or that I was named after his daughter May, or that he had a grandson, Eddie Herzog, my first cousin twice removed, who would one day arrange music for Jimmy Dorsey and would compose a single hit song, “Love Is.” She can’t know that Henry left Kraków just in time.
And this woman—I see that she has pulled out a book that is marked up with notes and yellow highlighter—can’t know that nie nie nie nie sounds like a taunt to me. Or that right now, I’m in the middle of reading Jan Gross’s book Fear, about a murderous Polish pogrom against Jews in Kielce in the years after the end of the Second World War. She can’t know that I’m sitting across from her right now not expressly to be irritating and foreign and petty about my place at the window, but to travel to Lublin, and then to Majdanek, for Daniel’s sake. She can’t know what it means to me to be on this very train, moving forward, watching the grasses and the trees and the red blotches of poppies in the fields come and then go.
At the town of Dȩblin, just east of the Vistula River, the train stops. A top-heavy water tower, three stories high in peeling yellow paint, looms over crowds of people with suitcases, all waiting to get on the train. Seventy years ago, thousands were deported to their death right from this station, from under this water tower. They, too, had suitcases filled, hopefully, with the supplies of survival. Now, a young man enters our compartment. He looks at the blue-eyed woman knee-to-knee with me and smiles at her, maneuvering his bag into our small space. She looks up at him and says softly, prettily, “Proszę.” You are welcome. He sits. The train strains with its first movements again. Two men, standing in a high window of the yellow water tower, turn to follow our departure. They grow smaller and smaller as we pick up speed. Then disappear into the infinite away.
Forward, we go. Backward again, for me. Southward.
My grandfather Sheldon Siskind smelled like cigarettes and felt like leather. He had a large, knee-slapping, room-sized laugh, like he was an extra in Guys and Dolls. He taught me to play poker and shuffle the cards in a fancy way; called me Toots. With only fully a high school education, he read every line of my big fat book about Russia, directing all queries to his rabbi. Whenever I got to dance with him—at weddings or in the kitchen, with the music up high—I would somehow, guided by his fluid ease, become improbably graceful myself.
She can’t know—this blue-eyed woman in front of me—that my heart is aching today, with missing Grandpa’s arms around me.
Or that today, as I travel backward toward the heart of darkness, I feel like a Jew.
THE YOUNG MAN EDUARD GALLAND, now 30482, cried all the way from Germany to Poland. André Rogerie, 31278, was a witness:
Tall and skinny, Galland started crying when, on February 5, 1944, a thousand prisoners were called to meet at the entrance of the Dora tunnel. He was feverish and needed help just to stand, so he cried as a blanket of snow fell on the camp that night and the thousand were sorted and stripped of all but one coat and one sweater, one shirt and one vest. And then he cried the next day when, in the already dirty snow, the thousand of them—all sick, all vraies loques humaines, true human wrecks—were loaded on a new train and the doors closed and locked behind them again. He cried in the wooden car, his bony legs intertwined with those of his dysenteric companions, and he cried when night came and the last glimmer of light left them alone in the rancid dark. Galland cried comme un enfant, like a child, as his friend André was beaten, blow after blow, by a brutish man who wanted André’s spot at the wall of the car. And he cried as they stopped and started and stopped again under the dark sky.
And maybe, who knows, Galland was even crying right here, under the yellow water tower at Dȩblin, from which thousands of local Jews had been deported to Treblinka in 1942, and thousands more to Sobibór in 1943.
I don’t know if Daniel Trocmé shared that car with Galland, or heard his weeping, though he was certainly on that very train, traveling east, and then south. This was the second of three transports from Dora to Lublin in early 1944, designed to rid the camp of the sick and dying, to make more room for actual workers. I don’t know if Daniel cried, too, though it would not seem quite like him to weep and weep, his face in his hands. But there’s no way of knowing, is there?
My own train rocks south, still, on this ghost-heavy route. Out the window, twisted red pines rush by, backward. Clouds gather. So many faces, so many hands. So many tears under a single water tower.
If I am to be honest, faith first came into my life through fear. Fear of the night. Fear of the dark. Fear of dreams. I was that child who would lie in bed, eyes wide open in the dark, long after her big sister was already asleep. I was the one who, after stretches of waiting, would creak out of our little room, into the hallway, over to the staircase—feeling the cool corner of the wall at my cheek, and, after a pause, would finally say out loud, “I can’t sleep.” And then, louder, I would say it again, until my parents downstairs heard me. I was afraid of nightmares, which I felt with a shattering intensity. And I was afraid of what I might see hovering between life and shadow in the dark corners, because—who ever knew how thin that line might be. Ghosts.
Faith came when I looked up into the night, into the dark, still and small, and asked God—that big infinite yellow-crayon explosion—to protect me from bad dreams. Please. Please! It was how I learned my first Bahá’í prayer: “O God! Guide me! Protect me! Illumine the lamp of my heart, and make me a brilliant star. Thou art the Mighty and Powerful.” Every night, I would say that prayer, sometimes crying as I said it. But still, the nightmares would come: The sky would rumble, the earth would tremble, monsters would climb out of dresser drawers, and I would stand, alone, small, and accused—“It’s all your fault!”
It seems I’ve always been susceptible—for entirely nontheological reasons—to a feeling of awful cosmic judgment. I was just that kid. Night after night, I would keep asking for help, keep hoping for relief. And I would keep praying. Once in a while—rarely—I remember dreams of luminous beauty, dreams that floated in out of nowhere: a quiet lake, a peaceful forest, a loving smile. But still, nightly, I feared, and prayed, and feared some more.
And so, if I am to be honest, my faith was at least partly lizard-like in its origins. Primal, twitchy: Please, God. Take the monsters away.
But what does that kind of faith do in the world? Faith that is the fruit of fear?
Well. I suppose, if it never evolves further, it can do lots of things. Its prayers—recognizable in most of the religious traditions of the world—might look like this: O God. Protect me from the girls who are mean to me at school. Protect me from the drunk guys in the back of the bus. Protect me from nightmares. Protect me from this bad grade, or the fruits of a bad decision I myself made. Protect me, O God. From the Nazis. From the marauders. From the Bitch of Buchenwald. From bad health. From pain. Protect me from suffering, O God. Please, remove it. Wipe it away.
And, if you are on that train to Lublin, having now finally struggled past the yellow water tower onto the last leg of your journey, and you are with Daniel, 38221, who is already une vraie loque humaine, and André, 31278, who has been beaten by a brute for his seat at the wall, and the young Galland, 30482, weeping, ceaselessly . . . your prayers might be: God. Help me. Ease my pain. Take me from here. Send me a letter with news of the Little Crickets. Send me home.
And how could God not hear those prayers lovingly? Mercifully?
But if my faith was founded, to some degree, in fear—and never grew beyond that—that would mean that faith lived, for me, in the realm of the self . . . my very own self—a self that might in the end turn out to be sympathetic, or not. My faith would therefore be limited in its reach, propelled only by desires for my own protection, against my own monsters, my own dangers. My own ghosts.
That kind of faith doesn’t bear up well under close scrutiny.
Because if faith lives in the realm of the self, then how is it not also a cousin of other lizard impulses? Like the ones that say, my pain must be relieved before your pain matters. The ones that say that my family’s pain—or my clan’s, or my people’s, or my nation’s—is more important than yours. Or that say that my holy book is holier than yours. Or that my heaven is higher, my eternity brighter.
About this self-bound faith, the anthropologist could ask: Who does what with whom? And the answer would be: God protects me and mine, while leaving you and yours out in the cold. God sends me to heaven, throws you in hell. To which the anthropologist might well respond: Wow. That’s a small form of faith, indeed.
I sit on this train now, chugging farther into the heart of darkness. In that lizard form of faith, I can feel justified in looking at the blue-eyed girl across from me—who has caused me only the tiniest discomfort, really, on a day that probably is not so great for her, either—and decide that she is cruel, while I am kind. I can harden my own eyes toward her. Fix a frown onto my own countenance. Sniff with self-pity. And, abracadabra and voilà, I can decide that her people, her countrymen, her ancestors, are cruel. Dȩblin, Jedwabne, Kielce. And mine—Sheldon Siskind with his big laugh and his liquid fox-trot, Eddie “Duke” Herzog with his hit song, “Love Is”—are sweet and dear and righteous. Fear—potent as it is—gets so quickly sidetracked into stiff-necked parochialism. If you’re not careful, what begins as innocent and sympathetic in a stringy-haired child, creaking out of her room at night in tears, can become, in effect, the root of all evil.
My train speeds by the town of Puławy. There, on December 28, 1939, two and a half thousand Jews were forced to march out of town in minus-thirty-degree weather, surrounded by police. Those who couldn’t march—mostly old people and children—were shut in a synagogue until they froze to death.
But on this day, there are twisted red pines and birches in the forests beyond the rail line. Barbed wire is strung between the train tracks and the trees. The dark clouds come in and out and in again.
I am afraid of ghosts. But what am I doing, if not seeking them out?
As the train lumbers on in its last leg from Dora to Lublin, the ghost of the man who is beating André for his seat at the wall might be praying, too. He was once a child. He, too, wanted to live, unmolested. Sick and starving, he, too, one might presume, longed for redemption and love. For his safe spot on the train.
When did I last raise a hand or a fist, righteously? How am I different from the brute?
Maybe I’m not.
The train stops. Rain begins, softly. Lublin.
It was a difficult technical problem, how to rid a whole continent—not to say the whole world—of a certain kind of person. The Final Solution, as static as the phrase sounds, kept having to evolve according to the exigencies of war and occupation. There were people’s wills—born to decency—that had to be bent, in time, toward compliance and murderousness; and then whole lives that had to be extinguished; corpses—one; ten; a hundred; a thousand; ten thousand; a hundred thousand; a million; ten million—that had to be managed before they spread pestilence. Mountains of evidence—on paper, yes, but also in gray flesh and white bones—that had to be hidden. Various provisional solutions had been tried since the beginning of the war: chaotic street violence, roundups into prisons or ghettos, summary mass executions, mobile killing units that included gassing facilities, mass starvation, and then killing facilities located at concentration camps. By the time the Final Solution was explicitly drafted in January 1942, the actual work of genocide had been mostly exported out of Germany proper and into occupied lands—Poland in particular—where specialized killing centers were erected. In these centers—known also as extermination camps—lives could be ended quickly, on an industrial scale. With the famous use they made of gas chambers, fewer overseers had to deal directly with the last howls of the dying; corpses could be quickly turned to ash and dispersed on the winds above.
In September 1942—just as Daniel was writing to his parents, “I want to be part of the reconstruction of the world”—Majdanek, or Konzentrationslager Lublin, began operating as one of the small number of killing centers in Poland that were together responsible for the death of 2.7 million Jews. By November 1943, though—a year after the Allies landed in North Africa and ten months after the Soviets defeated the Germans in Stalingrad—the tactics of the Final Solution were in flux again, crackling with ever-increasing desperation. Armed resistance was springing up in the ghettos of Warsaw, Białystok, and Vilna; there were prisoner revolts in Treblinka and Sobibór. Konzentrationslager Lublin felt the reverberations of this tactical shift. It was decided that Jewish prisoners who remained as forced laborers at Majdanek and two smaller subcamps nearby would be summarily murdered. And so, on November 3, 1943, in three separate locations, forty-two thousand Jews were led, naked, by soldiers and barking dogs, to the top of specially dug ditches, where they were shot and fell, layer by layer, to their graves as crashing music played over loudspeakers. Erntefest, the mass killing was called, in code. Harvest Festival.
In all, historians estimate, at least 240,000 men, women, and children passed through Majdanek. Between 80,000 and 110,000 people perished there.
By the time Daniel arrived at the camp, virtually no Jews remained there, and its gas chambers—which had, unlike at Auschwitz, never been hidden from view—were defunct. Majdanek now had two main functions: First, it continued to serve as a depot for belongings that had been stolen from prisoners all over the Reich and other German-controlled lands; second, it would be a place where very sick prisoners from all over the camp system would come to stay. Daniel, together with André and Eduard and roughly a thousand others who arrived on February 9, 1944, were among those whose job was no longer to build a bomb, or fill in forms in an office, or make a road or a ditch, or bury the dead. Sick and useless now, they had just one job, and that was to die.
How strange it seems that Germany—with the massive war it was losing; the gray, shriveled bodies piling up day in and day out; the disease spreading anyway; the murderers going mad, one by one; all the country’s wealth and resources stripped down to the bare bones—made an administrative point of herding all these skinny prisoners onto trains for new three-day journeys, weeping, howling, hungry, beating one another for space, just so that they could arrive at a new place, and fill out more forms, venture into a new kind of hell. And die there. In what currency was all the effort worth it? To have those boxes neatly checked?
Daniel arrived in Lublin among the living still. How he had survived this long is impossible to know. Maybe his heart had been strengthened by the months and months of climbing up and down the streets and forest paths of the Plateau. Maybe the air was so pure in that higher place that it had somehow infused his being with health. In any case, he lived to see Germany and then Poland. Lived to rumble on those train tracks for three days, east, and then south. And then stop.
André Rogerie, 31278, wrote a year later that their arrival in the industrial city was bitter cold and brutal. Once again, the group was pulled out of a cattle car to the shouts of soldiers, then sent off to march from the center of Lublin toward the camp. “With mathematical regularity,” Rogerie recounted, “bodies fell, one after the other, the ranks lightened, corpses littered the road. A violent wind blew on the left, and froze us. To add to this death scene, the SS soldiers killed with gunshot, whip lashes, kicks. I myself got a boot kick so solid that I shook in my wooden sabots, which were too large and filled with snow.”
They marched for two kilometers before arriving at a new camp that was wrapped in barbed, electrified wire, with watchtowers and an incongruously square, high chimney that poured out black smoke. They were again sent into cold disinfection pools—Rogerie noted that he managed to plunge only to his waist—given a hot shower, then sent, naked, to rotten wooden barracks with three rows of bunks, water seeping through the boards.
“The smell of manure filled the atmosphere,” wrote Rogerie. “There was no fire.”
There would be no work here at Majdanek for them. “We were here just to croak.” Crever. No long, agonizing lineup in the morning. No carrying heavy loads from here to there. No being beaten at any moment by kapos. Just life, day after day, as long as it lasted among the gray and dying, with the putrid smell of sickness, with camp hierarchies springing up, as they always did, over the control of food, or the passage through the barracks toward water or the facilities. Just life: among the corpses that would pile up each morning. Life, finding a scrap of cloth to wipe the filth off of other prisoners who could no longer use the toilet. Life, with the smell of the Polish prisoners’ food filling your nostrils. Life, exchanging addresses, so that mothers might be contacted after the war. Life, saying “Hail Mary” the very last time with someone, and then finding a new bony figure to sleep next to. Life, under the constantly churning fires of a crematorium, under an ever-raining cloud of ashes, descending onto the frigid grounds.
It seems to me this is the life Camus wrote about: the life that rats made; the life of pestilence, under the Plague. These crematorial fires, bringing their “faint, sickly odor coming from the east,” were the perfume of the new order; the freshest hell that we can, even now, imagine; the darkest corner of the darkest nightmare; the meanest legions of ghosts. And you didn’t have to close your eyes to see them, then. You still don’t.
TODAY, LUBLIN IS DARK. Outside the train station, it mists with rain. Cars zoom every which way. It’s cold, and I can’t find bus number 23—not at this corner, or that one, or that—which would take me to Majdanek. I’m supposed to be meeting with an archivist at the State Museum at Majdanek, and so time is of the essence. I take a deep breath and decide I will try for a cab at a stand across a busy street outside the station. In Russia, getting a cab—which is much more like hitchhiking there—can be a special kind of tricky.
I lean down toward the window of the first cab in line. Do Majdaneka? I ask. To Majdanek? The driver is a young woman. She smiles, and in English says yes. For sixteen to eighteen zloty—a really good, fair price. Okay! I open the door and pile into the car, and exhale. She is very pretty, the driver, with a thick twist of blond hair piled up on her head, capri-length tights circled in black lace, a big smile. She tells me her name is Ania.
Alert, cheerful, Ania is some kind of Polish urban cowboy Jim Jarmusch angel. It seems like she can fend for herself.
I look out the car window as Ania begins to wind us through the streets. No, it’s not Russia here. But things do look familiarly Eastern European, a little like parts of Saint Petersburg. The yellow, red, rust-colored buildings from the last century and the beginning of this one are arranged on low, snaking streets.
“Is it very far to the museum?” I ask in English.
“Oh no, just three kilometers!” says the urban cowboy angel.
“Oh! I could have walked!”
“Ha. No, you don’t walk. It’s too dangerous.”
“Why? Are the drivers bad?”
“No,” she says. “It’s the people around here. They are very poor.” She points to a ramshackle store, the paint bleeding with years of chemical rain. “And they drink a lot”—she motions her index finger up to her neck and flicks it, like they do in Russia—“they drink and drink. And you wouldn’t be safe.”
“Not even in the daytime?” I ask.
“No, not even in the daytime.”
Ania drives us quickly out of the center of town. We talk about her studies and what different passengers are like. We talk about being a woman cabdriver—doesn’t it scare her? “Well, I have my mace”—she shows me where the can is, on the side of her door—“and I have my scream.” She laughs. “But no, I don’t work at night. Never at night.”
Soon enough, we have turned out of the industrial center and ahead we see green fields made brilliant in the gray misty rain. Ania slows, and then stops at a sign made of barbed wire and bright red letters: MUZEUM MAJDANEK LUBLIN. She gives me her card and tells me I can call her when I’m ready to come back into town. It’s better than the bus, she says.
I’m choking back tears, looking at the red letters of the sign. Not wanting Ania to leave. But soon enough, I walk through the camp gate, then to the information office—a rosebush has been planted outside it—and then over to the archives, where a mild-faced researcher named Robert Kuwałek tells me about the camp’s history, and the “Harvest Festival,” and the packages that might come for prisoners. And how Daniel, as a very sick prisoner, would have stayed up by the crematorium at block number five. Robert’s desk is littered with faded index cards and Post-it notes. I am touched by how Robert clearly prepared for my visit, gathering all he could about Daniel: one prisoner of hundreds of thousands.
Just as I am about to leave, another researcher brings two objects into Robert’s office. She tells me they were Daniel’s. She is wearing gloves. She places two documents carefully on a white table. One looks like a social insurance card. Click. I take a picture. The other looks like a postcard written in the tiniest, blurriest hand. It would be impossible to read, just like that. Click, I take another picture. And click, another, for good measure.
Leaving the archives, I gird myself as I head out onto the grounds of the camp. I’m nearly alone. I need to be alone.
Now, the rain is finally loosed. Now, I cover my head with a hood.
I DIDN’T KNOW I would follow you all the way here, Daniel. I didn’t mean to, when I set out on my journey to the Plateau. And yet, here I am, under dark heavy clouds, in front of a large field, barbed wire laced around the edges of the grounds—the city on one side, woods on the other. The grass is a luminous green under the rain, here; hay is bundled intermittently in tight, cream-colored discs. In the distance, there are buildings—wooden barracks, a watchtower, a crematorium—and a long pathway that leads to a saucer-shaped monument.
What is there to do but walk? Walk and listen to the crows, who perch and squawk on the wire, or the tower, or the fields themselves, where they dig for worms in the grass.
Daniel, it’s me now. I wander into building after building, looking for you. I’m afraid.
The Germans evacuated this camp in mid-April 1944. They left the place with no time to hide their crimes. So these buildings—the gas chambers, the barracks, the crematorium—have been preserved better than at any other extermination camp. Their very existence was some of the most powerful early proof that the Holocaust had, in fact, taken place—a battle of acceptance that hasn’t yet been won.
Rain, grass, hay, crows. The dank smell of wet wood.
In a first building, with an exhibit about camp leaders, there are photographs of men and women whose crimes were tried after the war. One man, SS Senior Squad Leader Erich Muhsfeldt—who once shot eighty prisoners in the back of the head before sending their bodies to the crematorium—looks like a cartoon demon with high pointy brows and pale blue eyes. A woman, Senior Overseer Elsa Ehrich, who’d gone from working in a slaughterhouse to running selection in extermination camps, looks like a lunch lady. In another building, there are photographs of the prisoners, and artifacts of objects that prisoners left behind: Here is a doll, its eyes gouged out.
Rain, grass, crows fly by. A priest walks the grounds, too, speaking Italian with a couple of companions.
I enter another building, a long dark barracks. Lying in heaps on either side of the wall, and in long high central lines of shelves, are row upon row upon row of shoes. Shoes by the thousands, all jammed together. Heavy walking shoes. Thin, flapping shoes. Shoes for ladies. Boots. Delicate, once-white sandals. Shoes that smell like shoes. Rotting shoes. Shoes, displayed behind glass, that go up to the ceiling. Walking the full turns of this long, dark room, I feel a pressure building on the back of my head.
Alone with all of the ghosts that may or may not hover here, I think: Skylark. Have you anything to say to me?
Daniel. It’s me. Where are you?
By now the rain is pouring. I find my way to the gas chambers. The ceiling is very low. I see pictures in my head of fingers scratching at the ceiling to get out. I can’t bear to stay long.
Grass. Rain. Dark, full rain. A crow lands on the top of an electric pole. One rough wind, and it flies off.
There is no mistaking now the function of that square chimney that juts up toward the sky. I walk into the crematorium, look at the long row of red brick ovens, with their black metal doors. I spend time in front of them, trying to make my thoughts clearer, cleaner. It’s no use.
Turning a corner away from the ovens, I find myself in front of a separate room, a space lit by a small window, with only gray rain-light now seeping in. In this room stands a large table; the base is made of concrete; the surface, metal. This is the table where bodies—how many?—would have been laid out; where the last of the bodies’ fluids would have flowed down the sides, toward the ground. Where remains would be ransacked for gold or other final possessions, before being conveyed into the fiery furnace.
Daniel survived until April 4, 1944. On that day, he was not yet thirty-three years old. Infirmary records from Majdanek place his death at 4:40 in the morning. Cause: Tuberculosis and enteritis.
This table is, I suppose, where Daniel’s body was placed, too.
I think of Daniel’s gray flesh. I think of him going into the fire. Think of his ashes, floating up out of the chimney. Into the skies, over the rooftops, onto the fields, into the soil, into the hay, into the birds. Forever.
And this is what is left of you, Daniel: the boy with the curls and the big ears, the boy who said, “Don’t cry Mam’selle, Dani is here.” The man who didn’t fly out the window into the forest to save himself; who crouched in trucks, and busses, and cars, on the way to prisons; who was hungry, who was sick, who was shorn. Who begged for news of every Little Cricket. Who, finally, was gray and dying. And then dead.
I leave the crematorium, nearly blinded with tears.
Daniel. I want to find a stone for you. And I want a holy place where I can put the stone.
I didn’t mean to follow you all the way here when I began. This was supposed to be a story about one Plateau and its clean, clear air. And how that Plateau surprised the world of averages in that terrible, murderous time; how it beat the law of rational choice, there on the rainbow end of a bell curve. It was supposed to be about some social bond—who does what with whom?—that comes to life in the fields, in the hearths, in the schools, a bond that might teach me how to be good, or better at least. It was supposed to smell like fragrant grasses, and sound like an open melody. It was supposed to be about the people of the Plateau. About them.
And now here I am, looking for a stone for you, and a spot where I can put it. But I find no stone, and no spot.
I think of the holy words: “Were it not for the cold, how would the heat of Thy words prevail. . . . Were it not for calamity, how would the sun of Thy patience shine?”
I find a bench in the rain. I see a small bird land on a wire above. I say a prayer. The bird sings one sweet long note. And flies off.
I sit a little longer—the priest walks by again—and then finally head back to the road.
I dig into my bag, and find Ania’s card; I touch my camera, inside it the postcard with the tiny handwriting.
I am haunted by this: I know I have left something undone.
Caroline’s house stands stone sturdy in a hamlet called Les Tavas, four forested kilometers from the center of Le Chambon. I’m staying with Caroline, her husband, Yves, and their children on this visit, a couple of weeks now since my trip to Majdanek. It’s my first time as a houseguest here on the Plateau. I always worry that I’ll be a bad guest, spending long days with the CADA folks and otherwise needing to be alone with the swirl of my thoughts, so I’ve regretfully refused several very kind offers. But I knew the house in Les Tavas was big and strong—it used to be a country school—and I’ve felt so heartsick ever since Poland, I long for real company. So when Caroline invited me again, assuring me it was okay for me to be away during the days, and then to be alone with my thoughts as much as I needed, I was most grateful to accept.
Caroline is universally loved around here, with her big laugh and her mane of brown hair, and her ability to mimic the sounds of animals and people—not to mention her ability to somehow always lead with her big, open heart. She has become a real friend. I can tell Caroline what Daniel has meant to me as the months and now years pass by. Or the CADA families. Or what the flood of stars at night means to me right here and now.
And it is a special bit of our friendship that Caroline, like everyone else in her family, sings. She can herself perform a driving solo rendition of Jacques Brel’s “Dans le Port d’Amsterdam,” and a fittingly theatrical one of Édith Piaf’s “Milord,” throwing an invisible scarf—votre foulard de soie, flottant sur vos épaules—around her neck. Sometimes her whole extended family, everyone looking nice and brown and cheery, travels great distances to eat and then sing together—the brother who is a doctor, the brother who is a nurse, the brother who is a priest, the sister who lives far away, their wives and husbands, their children—with their large and gorgeous matriarch in the coziest chair, closing her eyes, folding her hands in her lap, and listening as they do. A melody, a harmony, another harmony. A hymn.
The nights now are so quiet—with only birds and bugs and the occasional dog bark to disturb the silence. And this particular family is a balm to my tired heart. Even when the summer storms come—as they do in the mountains, the rain beating, the lightning flashing, the thunder roaring, sending the lights into an uncertain flicker—I am safe here, and clear again.
To set me up for work, Caroline has shown me how to walk from her house, through side roads and forest pathways, directly to the CADA residences. I’ve done it a few times now on my own, without getting lost, which is good, because my cell phone doesn’t work much past the center of Le Chambon, and certainly not in the forest. But today, after spending some time with the Vakhaevs, I’m thinking I’ll try something different. I know you can get from Le Chambon to Les Tavas if you just follow the train tracks, which pass through the valley just under Caroline’s house. It’s true the old-timey tourist train runs in the summer, so I’ll need to check the schedule. And I know there are a couple of places, high up in the forest—not far from La Maison des Roches, in fact—where the tracks are perched up on a bridge. You wouldn’t want to get stuck there.
Still. I feel I need that view, from above.
IT’S THE FIRST DAY of Ramadan today, and Akhmad is already going a little nuts with not being able to smoke. Still, I think he’s about the happiest I’ve ever seen him. He just got back from the Resto du Coeur, with bags and bags of food. He’s even been able to get some halal meat, and is now singing the lyric praises of its pink-purple-ness, and its lines of white fat.
Little Dzhamal takes a bag of groceries nearly as big as his own frame, and huffs and puffs it into the kitchen. The girls bounce around. Sulim, the baby, gurgles in their direction.
Mashallah, I hear Akhmad say. Mashallah. I ask him what it means.
“Mashallah, it’s to be thankful. Something wonderful.”
It means, literally, “God wills it.” And yet it seems, there’s a kind of joy inside the word, too. Some large, cosmic gratitude. I realize I’ve never seen Akhmad smile like he is smiling right now; an extra special accomplishment, given his cotton mouth (“During the fast, you can’t drink, either!”).
Rovzan serves me soup with meat and light broth and potatoes. Her head is uncovered now and she has a stuffy nose. She is fasting, too, a first time after her pregnancy and then the birth of Sulim. She teaches me how to say “I am fasting” in Chechen: Sa markha du. I have a fast. Ha-ha, the children laugh as I try to get the syllables right.
In my head, I try to get the meaning of words right, as the afternoon winds down: Mashallah, there is real pink-purple meat you can eat. Mashallah, Akhmad hired a lawyer for their immigration case. Mashallah, their car cost only 350 euros—and so Akhmad tells me the story again, one that has become a trope for him—of the lady who didn’t need her car anymore because it was taking up a parking space that cost her money, and how she saw him counting his twenty-euro bills down to all the money he had, and gave him back the last one. Ah. Mashallah. Mashallah, the car, plus the meat, plus a new friend, who helped Akhmad figure out how he can get to a mosque during this holy season.
Mashallah, that I am able to see Akhmad’s face turn from gray to pink.
It’s getting late, I realize, and I’d told Caroline and Yves this morning that I’d be back in time for dinner. Out the window, there is a rumbling in the distance. It’s sunny, but the storm that smashed the side of the mountains yesterday seems to be threatening some kind of return. Akhmad says he can take me to Les Tavas by car—it might rain—but the truth is, I really want to walk. It’s only about forty-five minutes—even quicker if the train tracks are the shortcut I think they are. And when will I have another chance?
I get ready to leave and Dzhamal takes my bag from the chair where it was lying, puts it over his shoulder, and says, again, “Tu ne sorts pas.” I look at his brown eyes and triangle chin again. Mashallah. I leave, and set out down the road.
The train has just passed by—I can hear the blast of its steam whistle receding farther and farther away—so there is no danger there. I start walking, first down the street, and then onto the rails, passing the houses that line the train tracks near the center of the town. And then the path begins to turn, slowly, into woods.
This is the forest that spans broadly up and beyond both Les Grillons and La Maison des Roches, where the children looked for their mushrooms during the German raids, and where the Resistance fighters, for their part, slept at night among the mosses and tree roots. It’s the forest that Daniel walked through, day after day, thinking, maybe, about his decision to leave his “pretty box,” or, maybe just replaying in his mind the small moments in the life of every Little Cricket. It is where Amélie and I hunt for mushrooms now, and where the Chechens sigh for their cheremsha. It is, more or less, the forest where Agnès was tied up and killed.
Poland felt like a wound. Walking in holy places, like this forest, might be a cure. But I don’t know.
MAJDANEK WAS ONE of the strangest of the strange fruits of the age of modern nationalism. But we are not now innocent of the perversities that caused it. With all of our chances—and all of the moral tools we’ve derived from any number of spiritual, religious, and philosophical orientations—we haven’t learned. It’s like we still don’t even recognize the moral hazard of deciding we are anything—any nation, any race, any religion, any gender—before we are a human being. Even when we must know, in our deepest places, that the oneness of humanity is an absolute truth, we behave as though we don’t.
Earlier this summer, I spent a few weeks in Istanbul; Charles had work in that city and it was easy to travel to Poland and then to France from there. It’s been a summer of massive—and sometimes rather dangerous—antigovernment protests in the city. During the days while I was there, throngs of protesters were periodically sprayed down with tear gas—once, I inadvertently got a face full of it. Then, every night at nine, you could hear the clattering of pots and pans on the streets of the city core, people whooping along with the clattering, and cars would beep their horns, and flags would wave. In the more genteel neighborhoods of old Istanbul, by late dusk, under the leaves of linden trees, under the crescent moon—you could hear a flat ting-ting-ting as forks hit glass or knife hit plate. Ting-ting-ting to the clanging outside. Genteel people would smile at the consonance of it all.
I have felt this giddy effervescence—or some cousin of it—before. In the Palace Square of Saint Petersburg, with a quarter of a million people, in 1991, when the fate of the Soviet Union hung in the balance and tanks waited for orders to shoot; in the freezing streets of Kiev in 2005; at a distance, among the Kabardians in the Caucasus; or, even, in Quebec—where I danced some ridiculous jig on the Jour de Saint-Jean-Baptiste. And there was the time Nelson Mandela came to Montreal after his long imprisonment and I found myself in another giddy crowd, raising my fist with thousands of others. I remember how I looked at my own fist, then, held high in the air.
This summer, in Istanbul, everyone, on all sides, has been righteous and indignant. They throw tear gas at each other; they throw rocks. Their poison seeps into the air; dogs and cats and birds lie motionless in the yellow din.
What are we first when we wake up in the morning? In Istanbul. In Kiev. In the streets of Baghdad, the streets of Cairo. In Paris.
Or in the streets of Boston, where two young brothers—their roots in the North Caucasus of Russia—killed three and injured 364 innocents because when they woke up in the morning they decided they were Chechen.
We act like we’re wandering through an identity grocery store, squeezing here and there for the ripest fruit: I am an American. A Jew. A Bahá’í. I am the granddaughter of a ballerina, the granddaughter of a card-counter. A woman, an anthropologist, a singer. I come from a decaying city. I lean left.
It’s no use, this business of raising fists and pinging glasses or clattering pots and pans, however genteel it all may feel, however lofty the object, however sweet-seeming the fruit. It’s all the same rough beast.
“We know only men,” said the people of the Plateau during the Holocaust, when other people were becoming the Bitch of Buchenwald, or rounding up their neighbors in barns and then burning them alive. “We don’t know Jews. We know only men,” they said in the Plateau when they woke up in the morning.
Is that so hard?
My heart is sick, and for what? Daniel—who only knew men—is dead. And there was nowhere to put the stone for him. . . .
I’VE BEEN WALKING for a while on the train tracks. Walking and thinking, leaving the town behind, leaving the sounds of cars and conversations behind.
As I pace forward into the woods, lost in my thoughts, a ping of rain surprises me. Hits my face. The clouds—far off only a few minutes ago—must have caught up with me. I keep walking.
Ping. Ping. Ping-ping-ping. More rain.
On my left are stony, mossy cliffs topped by pines. On my right, farther and farther below, I can still see the road—Route de Saint-Agrève. The rocks on the rails cut into the soles of my thin cotton sneakers, so I do my best to avoid them.
Looking down, I see little fir saplings—like the ones Daniel described in his letter to the Little Crickets from Compiègne—tucked into the spaces between the tracks. The tiny trees were, he said, fragile like their young family: “And each one of us must take care, each day, many times, not to break [them].”
Ping. Ping. Ping. Ping. A curl of wind pulls my hair up away from my face.
I walk and walk, a little faster now, still trying to avoid the sharper rocks in my path. But now I notice that the sky is getting much darker. I turn around. The clouds are nearly blue-black behind me. I’m an idiot. I should have known this might happen. Without willing it, I pick up my pace again as the path pitches higher and higher away from the road. There’s no way down, now, except through the woods, which are a messy tangle of large and small trees, bushes and brambles.
Down below, La Maison des Roches is within sight on my right. And I can just make out a man in an elegant pose just outside the door, all in black.
The rumble above is louder, closer. I walk faster still.
A little farther, a little faster, and it now arrives in earnest: a full-on, drenching rain. Full upsweeps of wind. And, here they come: clear thunderous crashes. Lines of light break open the slate-gray sky. The sky cracks; I flinch from my stomach to my chin. It cracks again. I twist, jerk forward. Lightning. Lightning! My one great earthbound fear. A bolt; a gut jolt: Now, I’m the girl clambering through the night forest at camp again; the girl in that dream, being blamed for everything under the roiling earth and skies.
It was lightning that killed a little girl in Rochester when I was a kid, as she hid under a metal turtle in a playground; lightning that felled the father of Pierre—hero of First on the Rope—on the peaks of Les Drus; lightning that lit up the skies of Warsaw, and my first night in the Caucasus. Lightning that turns me back into a frightened lizard time and again, in spite of every civilizing veil.
I start hopping from plank to plank, quicker and quicker, wilder and wilder, the stones piercing my shoes. And then I start to run. And run. And run.
In the din, thoughts rush forward: Electricity has laws! It seeks out high open lines like this one. I see my own body lying between metal and wood, alone among the trees, motionless. Lawless.
Running, I start to cry, and I say, up to the sky: I don’t want to die yet. Please. I’m not ready.
I picture my body, again, now dead on the tracks. I picture Charles’s face when he learns I am gone. I picture myself after the storm, surviving, and I picture myself forgetting how terrified I was today.
I don’t want to die.
It feels somehow truer than almost anything I’ve ever said to myself: I don’t want to die.
I ask God to forgive me.
I ask God that, if I live, not to let me forget what this felt like.
Then, as if by way of response, there is a crash and a blinding blaze of white that lands right next to me. And I, now, myself, first on the rope, scream at the top of my lungs, like the little girl I once was, scream with all of my breath, all of my lungs, alone, up high. Just me, alone, in the holy forest, on the holy tracks, with my picture of Daniel lingering in my heart from Majdanek . . . and, in a flash, that singular image of a brilliant, yellow-crayoned, infinite-sized God.
It is a steep, steep drop to the road below where trucks barrel by in the driving rain. I throw myself away from the tracks now, and down, down, down, grabbing small trees and branches and roots to hold me as I go, falling on my seat, sliding. I hear the roots crack and tug at the loose soil, and I grab another one and on I go, plummeting forward, down and down and down, until I find myself on solid ground.
I land; I stand. I am shaking. I’m safe. Or safe enough . . . I have to figure out where I am.
I start to walk down the road, in the direction of Caroline and Yves’s place. I’m still at least a half hour away if I take the Route de Saint-Agrève. I try to get my phone to work. It’s dead. The rain is still driving, sideways, but I’m shaking and oblivious. A truck tears by, too close.
There is a house on my left, oddly tucked into the side of the hill. I see something stirring there. A blond woman with hair pulled in a ponytail leans out of a large window. She tells me to come over to her. I’m soaked with rain and sweat. I tell her my phone doesn’t work, that I’m staying with friends out past the Genest woods. Her big black dog leans out the window, too. He sniffs at me and starts to bark, with the sides of his cheeks. Her husband has a tattoo on his bare arm. He doesn’t talk, doesn’t look at me. Quand même, she tells me. “Anyway, come on in while I call—so you don’t have to stand in the rain.”
My hands are still unsteady. I step through their little front garden, enter the small house. It is full of little souvenir Native American figurines on a shelf—a dozen of them, maybe, all in the same browns and ocher reds. I say I’m from America, but have never been to the place where these Native Americans live. The woman says her husband likes the figurines. It’s his kind of decor.
And then she gives me her phone so I can call Yves, who says he’ll be there right away.
I tell the woman about the lightning, how it came so close and how I screamed and ran down the hill. She says she was outside, too, and was also scared, running right inside.
I notice the dark of her house on its uphill side, and her open window that brings all light in, on the side of the road. I notice that the dog is calm now, lying near my feet.
“Well, now I can say I welcomed an American in my house,” says the woman. She has a soft face.
Yves arrives. I thank the woman and her husband. I thank Yves. And I thank God. Mashallah. Among other things, for answering my prayer to live, and my prayer to remember.
And for answering the prayer that I didn’t even know to say: the prayer for the open door.
THE LIGHTNING STILL streaks across the sky tonight. You can see the whole line of its pathway, its electric bolts through the atmosphere along the hills in the distance. Caroline and Yves’s house is stone, though, and from the very first time I walked into it, it has felt clean and clear.
Not long ago, I learned it was a schoolhouse during the war. Refugee children were sheltered here. Maybe the teacher stood and lectured about mathematics or history where the kitchen is—where Caroline now cooks, licking her fingers, and where her sister-in-law, Nathalie, once demonstrated the cancan to me. Maybe the children looked out that high window onto the road above, toward the forest, and thought of their families back in Poland or wherever else. Maybe, once in a while, they slept upstairs, where I sleep. Maybe they dreamed there, too, as I do. Maybe some traces of them remain.
Maybe they are not so frightening, as ghosts go.
Sandrine and Rémi and their children have come for dinner, and we are now sitting, all together, at the long wooden table, eating beautiful food. Bill and Boule, the black cats, curl up in various corners, aloof. Caroline asks me to sing something—to sing “Dona Dona” again—and I think about how I sang it last time with her whole family, and how they added magnificent layers of harmonies. So I sing “Dona Dona,” this time with a full voice. “How the winds are laughing, they laugh with all their might . . .” Caroline sings, too.
And now I lay me down to sleep. Mashallah, I’m in this house. This house, here, in stone, with the electric cracking and cracking outside, and into the smallest hours of the night.
Seventy years ago, Daniel left two things behind at Majdanek.
The first was a social insurance card, as thin as onion skin and bearing his name, TROCMÉ DANIEL, the number, 1264950284, and the stamp ASSURANCES SOCIALES SERVICE RÉGIONAL—TOULOUSE.
The second was a postcard. It is, by now, a faded, creamy yellow. It is also frail, its edges torn. There is no image on the card, no photograph or anything, just the declaration CARTE POSTALE, with the sender and recipient on the front, and then crowded lines of fuzzy blue letters on the back. Addressed to Monsieur D. Trocmé at École des Roches in Maslacq, Basses-Pyrénées, it is from Madame Trocmé, at École des Roches up north, in Verneuil-sur-Avre.
From a discolored line that runs through its center, it is clear that the postcard was folded for a long period. Into a pocket, perhaps. For safekeeping.
By the date, I know it was written just as Daniel was weighing whether or not to take up André Trocmé’s offer to come to the Plateau and help at Les Grillons. Daniel’s job in Barcelona had fallen through, but there was also the chance to go to Paris and work on his doctorate or—his parents’ clear preference—to continue teaching at the second campus of École des Roches, now located in as yet “unoccupied” Vichy France.
It is a letter from a mother to a son. And that son kept the letter from the moment he received it, in late summer 1942, until he died seventeen months later.
It begins:
My darling, where can we look for you soon?
What will you do next? the mother asks the son.
For the time being, it’s simple. You are working hard preparing the students for their exams and that means you can forget some of your worries. We were very happy to see François. And now, it is for you to choose.
You must choose yourself, the mother tells the son. You must weigh everything.
You know Papa will subsidize you if necessary. But François would have told you all of that, along with everything else. Monsieur Volode left us, and he will tell you some of the present perplexities. However, the boys are no longer sleeping in the lobby, which has resumed its normal appearance. We found a room up high for three of them . . . three very nice boys.
The school back up north in Verneuil is chaotic, but settling into some normalcy. His parents are doing okay. The letter then turns to Daniel’s other brothers and sisters:
Michel is, happily, with us again. Marianne will come back in three days. . . . Suzi had thirty-five pneumothorax patients to insufflate for Delafontaine today.
There she is, in the smallest blue handwriting. Suzie Trocmé, who brought kindness to the last years of my great-grandfather’s stern life. Who made my Jewish mother feel welcome among all the midwestern in-laws. Suzie, working away, filling sick lungs with air. Suzie, whose name sat folded somewhere in a pocket.
We were determined to send something through you to the family. . . . We wanted to send 500 [francs]. Have we already? We can’t remember. Send us word right away. You can say that it comes from the friends of Roches.
The letter gets fuzzier. I can’t read it all, even with help. I can’t figure out who each and every person was. But this sentence, near the end, stands out:
My darling, what worries [are] still in your head and your heart. . . .
The message is signed with kisses. Then, wound up the corner of the card, in even tinier writing, is a postscript: “I am finishing the pull-over and the socks.”
The carte postale was written on September 5, 1942. Daniel took a few days, clearly, to think about all of it. To choose. And then, on September 11, he wrote his response, full of resolve, about how the die was now cast, how Le Chambon represented an adventure for him, an almost religious calling, how he wanted to be part of the reconstruction of the world. And how he didn’t want to be ashamed of himself.
Now I realize: It was not the answer that remained with Daniel, folded in his pocket, for the seventeen months until his death. His beautiful reply, after all, had been thrown out to the winds long before. It was the question that stayed with him through it all—the Plateau, the Little Crickets, the long walks, the arrest, Moulins Prison, Compiègne, Buchenwald, Majdanek. It was the question, written lovingly, trustingly, with the words “my darling,” and “now it is for you to decide.” It was the question that stayed with him perhaps all the way to that metal table in front of the ovens.
Darling, now it is for you to decide. Where can we look for you, soon?
ONCE, when I was around eight years old, I saw something in the dark.
It was the middle of the night. I was asleep in the little room I shared with my sister. But I don’t remember the sleeping part—how could I? I only remember this:
In one violent surge, I sat, bolt upright, with my eyes wide open. At the foot of my sister’s bed I saw, in the dark, a figure. It was a young man. He was sitting, wiry, with his legs folded up at his chest, and his arms wrapped around his legs. He was looking straight at me; he seemed deep in his thoughts. Then, in an instant, he was gone. Absolutely gone.
Almost since this journey began, I’ve been seeing Daniel in that same posture, over and over again, in my mind’s eye. I see him like that in the hallways of Les Grillons as the children sleep—“Was he afraid that there would be a Gestapo raid at night?” I see him like that in a truck or a train, or under a water tower, or in a barrack. I see him thinking, thinking, lost in his thoughts. I see him watching me, too.
Sometimes, I see him that way when I talk with him, in secret.
Darling. Where can I look for you soon?