‘FROM MOSES UNTO MOSES there had never been such a Moses’, the epitaph proclaims. ‘Light of the West, greatest of the generation’s wise men’: words inscribed on the tomb of Moses Isserles, sixteenth-century scholar and preacher, renowned Rabbi of Krakow. It remains standing to this day in the Rema cemetery, within the grounds of the oldest living synagogue in Poland; and to this day the congregation continues to assemble here. They are arriving now, Shabbes eve, for the service. One stumbles through the gate with the aid of a walking stick; others are wheeled in. They approach singly or in pairs, the heirs of Moses, through the streets of Kazimierz, their childhood playing grounds. Shoulders stooped, frail, they walk slowly, berets perched upon their heads, thick overcoats wrapped around to protect them from the autumn chill.
At the entrance to a crumbling tenement a fat bubka sits on a wooden stool and knits. She gazes at me intently as I pass by, and mutters: ‘Yiddish? Ich ken etleche vertex Yiddish.’ Yes, as it turns out, she does know a few words of Yiddish; five lines, in fact, which she had picked up in childhood from the Jewish neighbours who had lived within these tenements one generation ago. As I wander the streets of Kazimierz the bubka follows me, reciting her well-rehearsed Yiddish lines as one would intone a verse from the scriptures:
I am not afraid
I have no money
I have no compliments to offer
Kiss me on the behind
Go away you black devil
Bubka’s face is circular, and the frames of her spectacles are similarly shaped; two moons within the larger moon. Her eyes glint with a hint of mirth, as if on the verge of cascading into uncontrolled laughter. Moon lady has, it seems, become my self-appointed escort. She follows me through Szeroka Square, muttering her Yiddish lines as we approach the Rema. For over four hundred years it has stood, this inconspicuous greystone building. Weeping willows droop over its walls. Moon lady stops at the arched gate, beyond which she does not venture. Her Yiddish verse trails after me while I enter the courtyard: ‘Go away you black devil’. The words hover in the stillness as Moon lady disappears.
It is cool and quiet in the walled courtyard, protected from the winds. We sit on benches awaiting the Sabbath. One by one they pass beneath the arched entrance, the minyan gradually assembling in the waning light. ‘You come from Australia?’, an old man sitting beside me asks. ‘So why didn’t you do something? Why didn’t you tell the world what was happening?’
‘How could I do anything?’, I reply. ‘I was not even alive at the time.’ But my words do not seem to have registered. ‘Why didn’t you do anything? Eh? Why didn’t you scream? Why didn’t you let the world know what was happening to us?’ Only when we have entered the prayer-hall does he cease, for a while, to pursue his obsession.
There is no longer a rabbi in Krakow, and no cantor to lead the prayers. Members of the kehilla take turns at the pulpit. Of the fifteen assembled, several sit in the back row reading newspapers, others hold whispered conversations, while half a dozen or so concentrate on the prayers. Yet a sense of intimacy pervades the hall, and from time to time we unite in a common chorus of amens.
Some way into the service a young man enters the hall. He is tall, lean, his physique sharp and angular, his face pale and tense. He reaches into a pocket for a black skull cap, and hovers behind the back row of lacquered pews, scanning the congregation. He observes the proceedings from the fringes, like a stranger who wants to come out of the cold and close to the fire.
After the service the narrow foyer inside the entrance of the shul is thick with the din and hubbub of quick introductions, cries of ‘Shabbat Shalom’, and rapid-fire exchanges of the latest communal gossip. The young man remains on the perimeter hesitantly, as if looking for an opening, a polite way of entering the animated circle of well-wishers.
When I approach and introduce myself he is visibly relieved at having made some contact. We converse in English, although it is not his mother tongue. He seems reluctant to reveal where he is from, and constantly deflects the conversation away from the issue. He is in Krakow for a quick visit, he informs me. He has arrived today from nearby Auschwitz. He will return on Monday to continue work as a volunteer in the camp museum. There is a small group who do so every year, for several weeks at a time. They sift through archival material, help assemble exhibits, clean and dust, and do whatever is needed. The facilities are undermanned. Workers are urgently required to maintain the camp for the many thousands who come on pilgrimage from all parts of the globe.
It is obvious where he is from, and it has been from the beginning. Now he confesses, with embarrassment. He was born in Germany, soon after the War. His story tumbles out quickly, in staccato-like whispers, as if he wants to tell it before I can judge him. I have to strain to hear him. His father had been a soldier during the War. ‘What did you do, father, during the War?’ And year after year, the same answer. ‘I was a soldier. I did my duty. There is no more to be said.’ But the son had stumbled upon clues, documents, photos. He had made enquiries, talked to family acquaintances, and had pieced it together. Father had been an SS man. He had served in Poland. He had worked in Auschwitz. ‘What did you do, father?’ The questions became more insistent. The answers were always the same. ‘I did my duty. I was a soldier. I had orders.’
‘If only he would have admitted it. That would have been at least something. And mother. Always a hausfrau. She had seen nothing, known nothing. Merely maintained a household while her husband was away on duty, for the Fatherland. I grew up in a house of denials and secrets.’
The son atones for the father. He goes on a journey to Israel. He lives in Jerusalem for two years and works among the elderly, as a nurse’s aide. Since then, for several years now, he has journeyed to Auschwitz with a group he has formed — the sons and daughters of former SS men. Together they make the annual pilgrimage to atone for the crimes of their elders: ‘I cannot comprehend how an Auschwitz could have existed. It eludes me, constantly. But I will continue to work there. We must maintain it for everyone to see what our elders once did.’
We keep talking in the courtyard, long after the others have gone. Feigl Wasserman, the caretaker of the Rema, has turned off the lights and is locking the synagogue doors. ‘I cannot comprehend how they could have committed such deeds’, Werner muses, as if conducting aloud an inner dialogue he has pursued for years. ‘But in the work, in my travels throughout Poland, I escape my father’s cold silence, my mother’s pursed lips and, for a while at least, I am free of the shadow that has clung to me since birth.’
Feigl Wasserman ushers us through the arched gate into Szeroka Square. I shake hands with Werner, and he disappears into the darkness. From Moses unto Moses, there had never been such a Moses; and his shrine, within the walls of the Rema, stands enveloped in silence, mute witness to the shadows flitting through the crumbling tenements of Kazimierz and beyond, not so many miles from here, in a town called Oswiecim.
Feigl Wasserman guides me from the synagogue. The moon is bloated, approaching its fullness, and in its light can be seen the names of streets glued to tenement walls on wooden plaques: Jakuba, Isaaka, Jozefa, Miodowa, Krakowska, legendary streets of Kazimierz, Jewish quarters since the fourteenth century; and at this hour, after the Shabbes service, families would have been assembling in their homes, about to eat the Shabbes meal.
We enter an apartment block and ascend several flights of stairs. On the first- floor landing, on guard in front of an apartment, an emaciated dog barks and howls. His fury echoes along the corridors as we ascend to the higher floors. There are three sets of locks on Feigl’s apartment door. When it is finally opened, the Sabbath candles can be seen burning upon a table which stands just inside the entrance. We are home at last: Shabbat Shalom.
The royal city of Krakow is veiled in mist and rain, a steady downpour which persists for many hours. The streets of Kazimierz are overflowing. The gates to the Krakow Jewish cemetery are locked. Nearby stands a three-storey brick building. I climb the stairs to the first landing. Windows overlook the graveyard. Ivies, creepers, wild grass, and tombstones seem entangled in a single dripping mass.
Ascending the stairs is an old man. His face is yellowed, the pallor of parchment, his bullish neck sunken between the shoulders. His eyes are squinting as he draws closer, scrutinising me with suspicion. My Yiddish greeting reassures him somewhat, although he keeps his distance as we talk.
I am never quite sure, during this first encounter, whether he is playing a game of some sort, or if he is indeed, as he claims, the caretaker of this burial ground. ‘My name is not important’, he insists. ‘It is enough that I am alive. In my life I have had more luck than joy! He is an enigmatic creature, the old man with the waxen face, and reveals only carefully chosen glimpses of himself. Suddenly he grabs my hand and pulls it to his cheeks. ‘Here! Over the left eye! Can you feel the empty space? Beneath the skin? There are no bones there. And here, at the back of my jaw, there are pieces missing. In my life I have had more luck than joy.’
After indicating that he lives in an apartment on this floor, the old man leads me downstairs to a back door which opens directly onto the cemetery. I offer to share my umbrella. ‘It’s not necessary’, he says scornfully. ‘I am an old soldier. I was for many years in the Soviet army. We fought in mud, snow, and bitter frosts. I don’t need umbrellas. The heavens are merely spitting on us.’
On the ground floor there is a large hall in which bodies are prepared for burial. Passages from the scriptures circle the upper reaches of the walls. ‘This is where we all come when all is said and done’, mutters the old soldier. ‘Our bodies are stripped, cleaned, tidied up, carried through the door and, so, it is over; we become mere memory. The memory fades and is transformed into history. In time the history is distorted, denied, impossible to believe, and we are reduced to absolutely nothing, zero, not even a figment of the imagination.’
The caretaker leads me over mud-splattered paths to a segment of the cemetery wall. On it can be seen an extensive mosaic, pieced together by survivors from fragments of marble and granite, with cracked names and epitaphs — the remains of desecrated tombs which the Nazis had intended to use in building roads. ‘On this wall you see the whole meshugas’, claims the old soldier. ‘We spend our lives breaking each other’s bones; then we try to patch up the mess. I too was patched up. I left Krakow in 1939, fled to Russia, joined the army, drove tanks, struck a mine, and awoke on an operating table in Moscow. The best doctors worked on me. They assembled the bones, a piece here, a piece there. I am like this mosaic. Yet I was the lucky one. I left Krakow a community of 69 000 Yidn, returned six years later with half a face, and was greeted by one huge burial ground. In my life I have had more luck than joy.’
Oblivious to the rain, the old soldier continues to spin tales spiced with sarcasm and spite, although as he talks a tinge of warmth, a fatherly tone, creeps into his voice. Yet he remains guarded about his name. ‘I am a mosaic’, he says. ‘Take a letter here, another there, and you have my name. If you wish, you can call me “der vant”. And what can one do with a wall? It provides protection, and to your enemies you can say, “Go beat your head against the wall!”‘
A middle-aged couple carrying yellow chrysanthemums walk along the flooded paths of the cemetery. They stop by a grave and set to work. Weeds are removed, the stone wiped clean of dust, the marble surface polished. Oil lamps are lit and arranged with flowers by the base of the tomb. A pair of hands held up in a gesture of blessing, engraved on the headstone, indicates that here lies a descendant of Cohanim, the priestly caste.
Today is the tenth anniversary of David Schaffner’s death and, by chance, I have become a participant in the occasion. His son Henry claims it is no coincidence that we have met at this time. He sees life as a series of interrelated events, all of which have significance against a wider scheme of things. ‘There is no random chance’, he claims, as he tends David’s grave, ‘but patterns: some evil, others beautiful. The goal of life is to intuit beyond the apparent chaos an infinite order of things, a higher intelligence at work.’
Henry’s flat is on the Royal Way, in Ulitza Grodzka. The building is six-hundred-years old and stands near Rynek Glowny, the mediaeval market-square that occupies the centre of the walled city. Henry and his Polish wife live in two small rooms. Everywhere there are clocks, piles of clothing, and short-wave radio equipment. The clothes are repaired by Mrs Schaffner to augment her husband’s sickness pension. The clocks sit on tables, mantelpieces, bookshelves and cupboards. Others hang on walls, while grandfather clocks squat on the floor. On the hour, every hour, bells chime, cuckoos fly out of cages, trumpets blow, and drums beat. One clock, disguised as a painting of an idyllic rural scene, comes to life with chimes synchronised to the movement of buckets being drawn from a well by village women.
Clocks are one of Henry’s two grand passions. He collects and restores them. He scours market-places, remote hamlets, antique shops, and will travel many miles to follow up the slightest rumour that a clock is languishing somewhere in an attic or barn. He has transported them in taxis, buses, trains, and on foot, back to the cramped apartment in Ulitza Grodzka. His father had been a clock-repairer and had passed on the skills to his only son. ‘Clocks are a constant reminder’, Henry affirms, ‘that there is a way to create order out of chaos. No matter how insane the world may seem at times, the chiming of a clock reminds the executioner, if only for a moment, that he too will one day be forced to move on.’
Henry’s other great love is the short-wave radio which sits on the living-room table. It is a massive apparatus, always awake, crackling in the background, lights blinking a multitude of signals, the occasional voice filtering through with a call for ‘Hotel Sierra’, Henry’s radio code-name. He is in regular contact with operators in seventeen European countries. They send each other cards and letters. Many can be seen stacked high on the mantelpieces, between clocks. ‘Hotel Sierra’ shows me a card he has received this very day from Viking Radio in the Shetland Islands. They had made contact for the first time a fortnight ago. The card is inscribed with the motto: ‘Vikings raise the wind on the air’, and beneath is printed their anthem:
On distant seas their dragon prows
Went gleaming outward bound.
Stormclouds were their banners;
Their music, ocean sound.
The radio card of ‘Hotel Sierra’ features a drawing of Krakow’s walled city, against a background of red and white, Poland’s national colours, inscribed with the motto: ‘Though we are miles apart we are not strangers, but friends who have never met.’
Today is the tenth anniversary of the death of David Schaffner, who lies buried beneath a vase of yellow chrysanthemums. In the kitchen of a six-hundred-year-old apartment on the Royal Way, near the heart of the walled city, I listen to the bare outlines of his life. story, told between the chiming of countless clocks and the faint voices of radio operators from all corners of the continent.
David was born in Krakow in the last decade of the nineteenth century. During the First World War he fought in the Polish army. Taken prisoner, he was sent by the Russians to Siberia. On his return he left his native city and settled in Germany. It would be safer there, he believed, far from anti-Jewish pogroms that had flared up in Poland at war’s end.
His son Henry was born in Germany fifty years ago. During the Kristallnacht pogrom, on November 9, 1938, Nazi stormtroopers broke into the Schaffner home. They rampaged, looted, and overturned David’s extensive collection of antique clocks. ‘Time stopped’, says Henry, ‘and for the next seven years we were continually on the run, seeking refuge, a place to hide.’
After deportation from Germany the family made their way back to Krakow. Within three months, the Nazis had invaded the city. When the Jews of Krakow were driven from their ancient quarters in Kazimierz and herded into a ghetto on the opposite banks of the Vistula, David urged his wife and son to escape. They hid in a village not far from the city. With the help of local peasants they survived.
David Schaffner was shunted from camp to camp. Somewhere within that vast network of terror, doctors of the Reich used him in their experiments. They pulled apart his immune system as one would take apart an antique clock. But they were not so concerned with reassembling the parts.
At war’s end the Schaffhers were among the few Krakow Jewish families to return. David remained a sick man, his constitution irretrievably broken. He passed his last years silently immersed in restoring clocks. ‘It is no coincidence we met today’, insists Henry. As a result you are recording my father’s story. Every being craves recognition, someone to bear witness. Only then can a soul be finally put to rest.’
‘Hotel Sierra’, keeper of clocks and guardian of the airwaves, one of the last members of the oldest Jewish community in Poland, rides the waves of time and space in a landlocked apartment on the Royal Way. He receives messages from distant kingdoms, restores timepieces, and creates order out of chaos. ‘This is the least I can do to combat evil forces’, he claims. ‘Heed the passage of time, listen carefully to a story, a cry for help, and restore that which has been damaged or broken.’
Feigl Wasserman is small and rotund. Her greying hair remains strong, and is tied in a series of buns which sweep upwards to a rounded summit. She ties her hair as she does everything else — with precision, care, and a sense of symmetry. As caretaker of the Rema she keeps watch over its dwindling congregation with a stern eye. ‘They are useless’, she declares. ‘They cannot do anything by themselves. They need a mother to look after them.’ She dusts off their coats, adjusts their ties, scolds and fusses and, at closing time, bundles them out of the synagogue.
Between chores she sits in the courtyard and chats to tourists who come to see the tomb of Moses Isserles. In return for advice and information she receives tips. American dollars, in particular, are most welcome. The visitors relieve her isolation and she is bemused by them, especially travellers such as myself. ‘What are you looking for?’, she asks. ‘You think you can bring the dead back to life?’
In the evenings I return to her apartment. On the kitchen table stand rows of candles which she makes for synagogue services. When she retires to bed she moves the telephone to within arm’s length. Calls from her two children are always imminent. There is a daughter in Israel, a son in Russia. She often talks about her grandchildren, shows me photos, describes their many virtues. Except for Shabbes eve she remains at home every evening, alone, awaiting the next call.
‘Why don’t you join them?’, I ask her. ‘And who would look after my husband’s grave?’, she replies, removing the crumbs from the table. When there is absolutely nothing left to clean or dust, she sits by the telephone and knits. ‘He was a pious man, my second husband’, says Feigl. Fifteen years ago he was invited by the Krakow congregation to become the sexton and cantor of the Rema. With their two children grown up and married, Feigl and her husband moved from their native Russia and took up the post in Krakow. And the first husband? That is another story altogether; to tell it, we need a cup of tea, several slices of almond cake and, if you wish, a glass or two of vodka.
The year is 1941. In a village somewhere within that vastness called the Red Empire, a man says farewell to his wife and one-year-old daughter. He sets off with his Red Army unit and vanishes from their lives. As the Nazis advance into Russia, the village is razed. The woman and her daughter move from town to town, always one step ahead of advancing armies. To recount the details of that epic journey would take many hours. Let us just say they survived but, despite Feigl’s many attempts to locate him, it seemed as if her husband had disappeared without trace.
In 1950 he abrupdy reappeared. He had been badly wounded, he explained. Shrapnel had lodged in his lungs. For many years he had been dangerously ill: hospitalised, listless, without any interest in life. Finally he had regained enough will to insist that, with whatever strength remained, he would search for his wife and child. And you think this story is unusual?’, Feigl adds with a shrug. And indeed it now seems I have been listening for months to one common tale, with slight variations, a common chorus from which individual voices emerge to take centre stage for a moment, before retreating back to the wings.
‘We were reunited for a mere ten months’, continues Feigl. ‘His lungs were on fire until the day he died. I was seven months pregnant at the time. It was only after I raised my children that I remarried. And when my second husband died, two years ago, I decided: enough, no more wandering, this is where I will end my days.’
Her knitting needles move fast. A pattern emerges. There is a touch of steel in Feigl Wasserman. ‘It is not wise to dwell too much upon the past’, she warns me. ‘Do your job and stay one step ahead of trouble.’ She is sharp, shrewd, just a touch angry, extremely wary, and very kind, in a motherly fashion. The keeper of the Rema, protector of the tomb of Moses Isserles, Feigl Wasserman is a wise and irritable babushka, mother of the last congregation of Krakow Jewry. ‘Do not dwell too much upon the past’, she insists. ‘It will be of no practical use.’
On the wall there hangs a portrait of Jessica and Shylock, the merchant of Venice. His face is suffused with fatherly love; Jessica is radiant. Monika stands in front of the painting and stares at it intently. Her eyes are large and wide open. They blaze with such intensity that other features emerge slowly, as if advancing from the shadows. She is plump and wears a cotton dress with fading floral patterns. It hangs down loosely to her ankles and verges on shabbiness. Her face is a balloon, the cheeks tinted with rose patches which flare into fiery blotches when she becomes excited. At moments she relaxes into a childlike smile, and the permanent dimples in her cheeks deepen into rounded troughs. But most of the time she remains taut, alert, with her eyes taking on an existence of their own as they flit nervously between fear and extravagant hope.
I am never quite sure whether the story she is telling is true or the fantastic fabrication of a disintegrating mind. It does not seem to matter either way. The core of what she is recounting burns with something that extends beyond fact and fantasy. It is the myth by which she lives, the obsession which induced her to study the Hebrew language and scriptures, and to acquire a passion for a people who had almost vanished from the soil of her native land. Her passion had been disciplined into a vocation and had provided her with this temporary niche in life as an assistant in the Krakow Jewish museum.
The room in which we are talking is a garret in the museum, which in turn is housed in the Alte Shul. It sits above a narrow wooden staircase that spirals up from a cold, cavernous prayer-hall in what had been, for over five hundred years, a house of worship.
Construction had begun in the late fourteenth century, and the Shul was completed in 1407. It is a low building, squatting intact off Szeroka Square; and, from a distance of a mere fifty metres or so, it seems perched on the edge of the horizon, about to sink out of sight. On an adjacent side of the square stands the Rema, where I had first met Monika on Shabbat. She was swaying in the courtyard in her shabby dress, her eyes glowing, while the men were praying inside. ‘She is a meshugene’, Feigl Wasserman had whispered. ‘There are enough lunatics here to make up their own minyan. Their heads are full of wild dreams and phantoms. Some of them claim to be Messiahs but can’t even do up their shoelaces.’
She was twelve years old at the time, Monika tells me, living in a village on the outskirts of Katowice. She had been taken on a school excursion to the Auschwitz camp museum.
‘There were no Jews in my village, although I had heard stories about a time, not so long ago, when they had lived crammed together in a neighbourhood by the stream. In the museum I saw Jews for the first time, in photos. For months I could not shake off the image of naked women running in fright towards death, trying to protect their dignity with their hands. Not long after, I became aware of the rumours. Whispers echoed through the streets of the village. “Your mother is one of them. You are the daughter of a Yid.”
‘Father laughed when I told him. He could not understand what had led me to imagine such a story. Mother remained silent. I felt they were both concealing the truth. I detected a fear in their eyes. When I persisted they became angry, especially father. Yet there were people in the village who told a very different tale, and my soul burned.
‘Mother died when I was sixteen. I followed the Jewish custom I had read about in books. I tore my garments, and for seven days I sat on a low stool in mourning. By the seventh day I felt so light, like a child, an embryo in my mother’s womb.’
Monika tells her story with a fervour which betrays a relentless compulsion. She fluctuates feverishly in mood, one moment caught up in a fear, naked and naive in its transparency; the next, swept along by a longing so overwhelming that she breaks beyond fear into a state of exaltation. As her story unfolds, her passion assumes an hallucinating quality which draws me into a private world of shadows and luminous visions. Before me, in a garret where the elders of the kehilla once discussed the affairs of their people, stands a woman who walks a tightrope between revelation and despair.
‘After the period of mourning was over, I searched for a house of prayer, an active Jewish community. There was a shul in Katowice where a handful of people would gather on Shabbat. When I first heard their Hebrew chants, I recognised them instantly as my mother tongue. Among those who attended the shul I found one who was willing to teach me. In his apartment I felt more at home than in my father’s house.
‘Whenever I returned to the village I would plead with father. He remained resentful. Sometimes he broke into a rage. “Do not insult the memory of your mother”, he would say. “Do you think I would marry into that race of heretics and Christ-killers you have fallen so in love with?”
‘For three years the devil danced in our house. We lived in perpetual distrust. But I persisted. I would light and bless the Shabbat candles despite his disapproval. In time the glow of the candles softened our home. It soothed father’s heart and dissolved his simmering rage, until one Shabbat night, without warning, the story I had longed for emerged; and as he told it, I saw for the first time in years a gentle smile play on his lips.
‘When the Nazis were about to evacuate the Jews of our village there had come to our house a man known to the family. He had begged them to hide a daughter of his. She remained in the house while everyone she had known in childhood disappeared. The villagers knew where they had been transported to. The secret had seeped into the countryside. In the not-so-distant town of Oswiecim, factories of death were at work. After the war father had married the girl. A love of sorts had evolved between them in her years of hiding; and besides, there had been nowhere else for her to go. She took on his beliefs, converted, and never again mentioned her origins.
‘That was all he ever told me. But it was enough. In the remaining year of his life he rarely spoke. I accompanied him to church on Sundays, while on Friday evenings I continued to light the Shabbat candles. When he died I left the village, and I have never since returned.’
On the wall there hangs a portrait of Shylock and Jessica. His face is suffused with fatherly love. Jessica appears radiant. Monika stands in front of the painting and stares at it intently, as if seeking within it an idealised view of herself, the reflection she longs for, a unity between father and daughter, a reconciliation of the warring factions within herself. This is the vision to which she clings. Without it there is no place for her on this scarred landscape; without it she stands alone in a no man’s land forever shrouded in shadows.
In the evening I ask Feigl about Monika. ‘Who knows who she is?’, she replies. ‘A Polack? A Yid? A meshugene? She speaks a few words of Hebrew; she works day and night in the museum. She comes regularly to the Rema. When the men are at prayer she stands in the courtyard and sways. She is not quite one of us; yet she does not seem to be one of them. Who knows? And what is so strange about this? We are all tainted by madness here. When you visit Oswiecim you will see why it is we spend our lives looking after museums and graveyards.’
Like a shadow, I move through the camp entrance under the infamous words, ‘Arbeit Macht Frei’. The sign is smaller than I had expected, partly obscured by a background of trees. The black letters carved in steel weave and twist as if dancing in the air. Welcome. You have nothing to fear. Work liberates.
Just inside the entrance stands a massive kitchen complex, and beside it plays the camp orchestra. Flowers are in full bloom outside the manager’s office. The finger, gloved in white, points left or right: instant death, or death on the instalment plan.
Auschwitz was no makeshift camp made of timber where the job had to be done in haste, out of sight, beyond memory and conscience. Auschwitz is of solid brick and mortar, with blocks several storeys high, constructed to house a hospital, research scientists, permanent camp personnel. It was to be a durable feature of the Reich, a continuing enterprise with an assured future. Its barracks now serve the purposes of display. A museum of the impossible exists here.
In recent months I have come to know many levels of silence. It is a language with an extensive vocabulary. There are silences which echo ancestral presences; silences in which it is possible to observe the slightest movement of dust, an insect in hiding, a pod floating from a dandelion with the faintest promise of rebirth; and the awesome silence of forest clearings where mass executions took place against mute backdrops of stunning beauty. Yet here, in the headquarters of the Reich terror network, the vocabulary of silence reaches beyond its own limits. It overwhelms with the sheer force of numbers: and the fact that here, lived and worked a company of technicians and bureaucrats who went about the task of efficiently and quickly annihilating over a million human beings.
The scope is too vast. I can only register glimpses. At random. Electrified wires. Watchtowers. A wall where twenty thousand were executed. Cellars one metre square where prisoners stood without light for weeks on end. Rooms in a hospital where experiments were carried out on infants. Each glimpse offers an insight into an eternity of suffering.
There are children bearing flowers, schools on excursion. The flowers glow: golden chrysanthemums and marigolds, blood-red roses, emerald-green ferns. Guides repeat grim stories in a babel of languages. Yet all I hear clearly is the beating of my heart, the tread of my own footsteps, and the rustle of clothes against a backdrop of infinite silence.
There remains just one crematorium standing in Auschwitz. I am struck by how small and innocuous it looks. The only harsh feature outside is the chimney, which juts upwards in a jagged thrust towards the heavens. The impact is softened by trees and lawns which have been planted around it.
Inside: a dimly lit cave. Trolleys, which had conveyed the bodies along rails directly into the flames, stand still, as if frozen on a tightrope in time. At the entrance to one of the gaping ovens burns a single candle. A wreath of fresh flowers lies beside it. Glued to the the oven door is a sheet of paper which is headed: ‘Voices of the Children Saved from the Ashes.’
Written for the most part in cool anger, the notice lists demands for retribution, increased reparations, and the apprehension of war criminals. But it is only the final pledge which fully resonates within me. It is a miracle of poetry; a slim but potent reminder of my goal in coming here. The Voices assert: ‘We promise to show our children where their grandparents hugged us for the last time.’
As I walk back towards the entrance I feel alert, nerves stretched taut like finely tuned wires — antennae ready to pick up the faintest of signals. I pass the block of apartments where the commandant had lived. There are potplants on several window-sills. A woman trudges home with a bag of shopping and disappears into the building. A car is parked in the driveway. A man exercises his dog. It is bizarre to see the rhythm of normality beating in Auschwitz.
Moving between rows of barracks I catch sight of a ring lying on the ground: a silver band with a black stone. The ring fits easily. So often I have seen the tattooed numbers on the lower arms of family friends — their indelible signature from the kingdom of darkness. It seems appropriate to have found this token, a permanent reminder of my brief stay, the black stone of Auschwitz. Yet I feel uneasy. Does it belong beyond the perimeters of this sinister universe so tightly contained within barbed-wire fences? Should I carry with me a constant reminder of the power of evil? Why be so obsessed with maintaining the memory?
It is late afternoon. The tour groups have departed. The museum is about to close for the day. Above the camp entrance leap those words which make such a mockery of reason. The silence is a vortex drawing me back towards the first intimations of clarity. I approach the fence, hang the ring on a barb of wire, and walk out of Auschwitz.
It is three kilometres from Auschwitz to the sister camp, Birkenau. This was the killing field, the end of the line. The tracks are now covered in weeds and are rusting. They snake towards a towering red-brick structure known as the ‘Gate of Death’. A lookout rises above a spacious arched entrance. The tracks continue into the camp past a sprawl of barracks constructed to house over 200 000 inmates at a time. Several kilometres on stood the gas chambers and crematoria. Only the ruins remain, and a lake in which, it is said, ashes still float to the surface. Here, thousands could be disposed of in a single day; as they were, day after day, month after month, the victims conveyed by train from countries throughout the expanding Reich.
The sky darkens. A row of poplars stand guard behind a monument on the far edge of the camp, the leaves softly rustling. The air is cool, penetrating, chill. In the distance the ‘Gate of Death’ fades into night, enclosing a field where so many precious souls were wrenched from life.
Krakow bursts from the mists into a glorious autumn day, as if revealing its beauty for the first time. The Royal Way threads into the walled city through St. Florian’s Gate and proceeds along what was once a much-travelled trading route. Merchants, pilgrims, adventurers and foreign armies were drawn to the renowned marketplace in the central square, and beyond, up a steep ascent to the summit of Wawel Hill. Overlooking the Vistula River loom the palaces of former Polish kingdoms. Underground, beneath Wawel Cathedral, the vaults of the royal crypt contain tombs of kings, bishops, and eminent dignitaries. It is too impersonal, grandiose, too cold, this citadel of royal corpses. I descend to the familiar streets of Kazimierz and to the Krakow Jewish cemetery, whose crumbling stones seem far more accessible.
The flowers on David Schaffner’s grave have withered. The front door of the caretaker’s apartment is opened by an elderly woman. Her greying hair is tied back tightly into a bun. She glances at me warily, retreats into the apartment to consult the hidden presence within, and returns minutes later with a welcoming smile.
He is seated in the kitchen, hunched over a table beside a desk lamp which sheds light over a transistor radio in an advanced state of disarray. Screws, nuts, wires, and strips of plastic lie scattered about. The old soldier probes the innards of the transistor with miniature tools. He is, in his sceptical, hard-bitten way, pleased to see me. ‘I’m just playing, passing time’, he says. ‘What else is there to do?’
His Polish wife hovers around us quietly. She prepares tea and sandwiches with slices of salami and tomatoes. ‘At least she doesn’t expect me to be a millionaire, as most Poles do. And there is always something to eat, a clean shirt to wear.’ She smiles faintly at his words. There is an obvious bond between them, a softness that could be called love, despite … or is it because of his wary cynicism?
‘I’m just playing out time in this mad world’, the old soldier muses. ‘People torture and kill each other. They don’t know what to do with their insatiable desires. Yet we all end up there.’ And he gestures towards the window through which can be seen the object of his remarks — a burial ground of decaying stones fading in the evening light. ‘Azoi iz es’, he says in his sing-song Yiddish as he attempts to reassemble the transistor. ‘That’s the way it is.’
The bus is climbing upwards, ascending foothills which swell from the Vistula valley, well beyond the walled city and cobblestones of Kazimierz, far above outer industrial Krakow barely visible in a veil of smoke, lumbering into the Carpathians past fields of radiant greens, landscapes flooded with sun, steep slopes criss-crossed with haystacks; and with each passing mile I feel lighter, more exhilarated. Herds of goats and sheep move slowly on the upper reaches. Multi-storey timber farmhouses with intricately carved facades rise amidst vegetable gardens and fodder-filled barns. Interminably upwards the bus moves, towards mountain peaks looming in the distance; and it is not fast enough, nor high enough as yet, to tame the wild images dancing in my mind.
We spill out of the bus into the streets of Zakopane. The air is startlingly crisp; the resort town teeming with tourists, backpackers, farmers; the streets crowded with jeeps and four-wheel drives. I am caught unawares by this sudden gust of affluence, and I keep moving, beyond the town limits, along country roads, onto narrow paths that weave through forests of conifers, of evergreens among autumn annuals engulfed in crimsons and gold. The sun is moving downwards, touching mountain peaks now well within reach. I look out upon an ocean of swaying trees. They give way to barren, rock-strewn slopes which stretch steeply towards summits and beyond, into skies of blue clarity, beyond suffering and despair, beyond past and future, beyond obsession and hope, and far beyond all trace of that blot in a distant valley, that ugly smudge of darkness called Auschwitz.