A Child of Hollywood Encounters Auschwitz--and Himself

BLUE SKIES

This past summer, during the century's final July, I traveled with my wife to Auschwitz. I had not been to any of the camps before and was filled with trepidation by this visit to the site of what Churchill the greatest crime in history. I had two particular fears. The first was the adequacy of my response. The closest I had come to the Holocaust was the year I spent at the Yivo Library, then at Fifth Avenue and 86th Street, doing research for a novel on the Lodz ghetto. The frightening aspect of that experience was not the way my heart stopped when confronted by a myriad of afflictions but how it pumped all too callously along. It seemed that, in order to get through these accounts of suffering, to be able to think about and shape them, I had drawn a psychic shutter between myself and the fate of the Jews. Once such an iron shield is deployed, however, it is not so easy to remove. All the horror I had labored to keep from my Holocaust novel--which in fact emerged with a certain lightheartedness, even friendliness, in its tone--now began to rowd the pages of my next book, which soon became filled with amputations, autopsies, disinterments, torture. Even the life I continued living became heavier, darker, flatter, and not-to-be- enjoyed. I had, it seemed, played an ironical trick on myself. I had made a pact with my emotions not to feel, but had forgotten to set a date at which the arrangement would end. I was like the figure of legend who asks for immortality but neglects to request perpetual youth, or the man who puts on a mask he cannot remove, a parable for the plain fact that in time we all get the faces we deserve. The very powers I had bargained for--clearness of mind, objectivity, control--became the source of my own malaise.

If anxiety over affect, of the lack of it, was the first reason I was reluctant to visit Auschwitz, the second was the fear of what impact the camp would have upon my imagination. The first story I can remember writing--this was freshman year at University High School in Los Angeles--was set in South America. A crowd gathers in a public square. Over the next few pages it swells, both in numbers and excitement. All faces are turned upward, to where a balcony juts from the third floor of a palace. Finally a door is flung open and a small figure, dressed in brown, strides toward the railing. His hair is sliced left to right across his forehead. On his lip, a modest moustache. From the assemblage below, a cheer, which grows to a roar as the figure stretches forth his right hand. Viva! cries the multitude. Viva, Hitler!

Where on earth, or at any rate California, with its skies of perpetual blue, did this symbol of evil come from? After all, for me the Second World War was essentially a matter of Japanese. The paper drives at Brentwood Elementary, the bacon grease stored in tin cans, the barrage balloons off Santa Monica Pier, even the sudden vanishing of the old gentleman who smoothed our garden with his bamboo rake--all these were precautions against a threat from the Pacific, where treachery had already descended upon our nation out of the peaceful heavens.

Not only were Germans absent from my childhood, so were Judaism and Jews. Neither I nor my brother Ricky was bar- mitzvahed or set foot inside a temple. We celebrated Christmas with a tree whose star of Bethlehem grazed our eleven foot ceilings, and Easter with chocolate eggs hidden in the sofa cushions, not to mention a dinner with what may well have been a glazed and clove-studded ham. In the public schools of California I played a shepherd during the nativity pageant and piped out the mysterious words--myrrh, roundyon, the three kings orientare--of the carols, just as in prep school later I bellowed the more lucid Onward Christian Soldiers.

Yet all the indoctrination of a Chrisian Culture (how bright that star in the heavens, how moving the wise men and their gifts, how sweet the animals about the little halo-headed fellow before whom all dropped to their knees) could not have had what I believe was a profound affect upon me had I not possessed some hidden psychic affinity for a religion that stressed forgiveness for prodigal sons and had I not been a son, myself, of such resolutely secular parents. In this my mother and father were typical of an emancipated second generation hell-bent on sparing their own children the kind of orthodox regime they had had to undergo themelves. What was atypical, and decisive, was the position my father and uncle held in the film industry. Together these identical wrote Arsenic and Old Lace, The Man Who Came to Dinner, Strawberry Blonde, Casablanca and dozens more. By the mid-Thirties, when Phil and Julie arrived in Hollywood, the men who ran the studios had decided upon such a stringent policy of ethnic cleansing that throughout the whole of the Second World War the words "Jewish" and "Jew" appeared in not a single film (with the sole exception, it pleases me to say, of the "Epstein Boys'" Mr. Skeffington). I suppose it is not surprising that the words were rarely spoken in my family, either. If Julie and Phil were busily creating the American dream in, say, Yankee Doodle Dandy, their children had little choice but to join the great national audience of white, upturned, homogenous faces that made up the home front of American culture. Which brings us back to the question of how Herr, or Se¤“or, Hitler made his appearance at the end of my first short story. Is it possible that after all I had noticed something hidden in those war-time films? Or heard a few whispered remarks about the dinner table? It's not unlikely that I had glimpsed, either in Life, or in the newsreels that preceded my usual diet of cartoons and westerns, some blurred image of what would later become familiar photos: a bulldozer at work on a mountain of corpses, the surviving wraiths peering through the wire strands. Were there ovens? Chimneys? Yellow stars?

The truth is, I had always known--in the same way that everyone knows, from childhood on, the laws of gravitation. What goes up must come down. From childhood? I might have been born with an innate grasp of the fate of the Jews. What we learn later, the formulas for the mass of objects and the square of their distance, only confirms what we carry within us like the weight of our bones. Hints, hushings, inflections: these pass by a kind of psychic osmosis from child to child and from Jew to Jew. I have not mentioned one more thing that may account for the gravitas of my first piece of fiction. My laughing father had died less than a year before I wrote a word. I have always believed that every writer's true subject matter is essentially a transformed version of the earliest years of his life. Freud gives the example of E.T.A. Hoffman, who claimed that all his images and metaphors came from a single two-week journey in a post-chaise, while "still a babe at his mother's breast." In other words, one's vision and voice emerge from what has always been unconscious or what has become repressed. For reasons I cannot fully grasp I have, from that first story on, spent my career conjuring the Holocaust if not out of thin air then from mere images, mere words. I have a friend, a famous Holocaust writer, who refuses to write his autobiography--a true tale of this century, a child saved by Gypsies, horse thieves, prostitutes, criminals, while everyone else in the world attempted to kill him--because he fears that the unearthing of the facts will destroy his fiction. Now I was about to see actual barbed wire and barracks, the chambers, the ovens. To what extent--this was the fear that haunted me--would these hard facts overwhelm my childhood and deflect these imaginings?

VIENNA

On the way to Auschwitz my wife and I stopped in Vienna, which I had last visited exactly forty years before, in the summer of 1959. On that occasion, fresh from Vincent Scully's legendary History of Art course at Yale, I'd stood rapt before the imagery of Christendom: here St. Ursula with her arrows; there a dragon, its humanoid hands clutching, its reptilian teeth gnawing, the lance that spills its entrails. No Cimabue was too perturbing, no Gr“newald too grotesque. I merely noted the growth of perspective, the iconography of an apple, how filled and empty spaces were distributed, the realism of the devil's haunches, the devil's claw. I remember spending an entire day at the Cathedral of St. Stephen, admiring everything from the scales of its rooftop--half diamondback rattler, half the zig-zags of a rug for prayer--to, in the catacombs, the criss-crossed bones of citizens and saints. Now Ilene and I took the elevator up that same steeple, picked out the ferris wheel above the far-off Prater, and hurried back out the door. I am no longer subject to cruxifixations: I can bear neither the beheaded Baptist nor the kneeling St. Denis under the ax. Yale had failed to teach us upon whose heads those streams of blood were flowing or those last judgments made. I am uneasy about imposing moral categories upon works of art and know that I am impoverished by no longer being able to see through twenty-one year-old eyes; but there is no escaping the knowledge of whose necks, figuratively or otherwise, lie beneath the heel of St. George. There was more art to see before resuming our journey east. First came an exhibition of anatomical art, the K"“rperwelten, in which actual corpses, organs intact, had been subject to the plastination process of a Doktor Professor Gunther von Hagens. These were no mummies in boxes but bodies in life-like poses--playing chess, leaping hurdles, extending exposed tendons for a shake. One man held up his own skin, as if were little more than a raincoat, while other corpses were sliced thin as prosciutto or exploded to reveal the relation of part to part. Through it all I kept telling myself that this was only the culmination of a tradition, be it art or science, that stretched from Da Vinci and Vesalius through Eakins. Yet something kept reminding me--that dangling skin, the pads of feet, the poor penises, and above all the revolving exhibit of deformed fetuses, pin-headed, flat-headed, or with no head at all--that this was the tradition of Mengele, too. Compared to the elbowing crowds at the K"“rperwelten, the Kunsthistorisches Museum was oddly empty. What few visitors there were tended to collect in the room with the Bruegels, though I was the only one to stop before the Bethlehemitischer Kindermord. There were plenty of corpses here, too, all of them children. The snow-covered rooftops and snow-filled streets, the horsemen with spears and axes, were more reminiscent of Bruges and Antwerp than any village of the Middle East. But the greatest sense of dislocation, in time as well as space, was created by the way the eye was drawn backward, inward, upward, past the crowds of wailing women, the romping dogs and patient horses, past the babe in swaddling at the center--a contra- nativity, an anti-manger--and past the soldiers who block escape to the rear, all the way to the sturdy Flemish church. The point is that this catastrophe belongs not to the sixteenth-century and not to the Roman era, but to every epoch. Certainly such round-ups occurred in my lifetime upon the great avenues, the Kartnerstrasse, the Opernstrasse, the Getreidemarkt, outside this museum, and in the streets of Lodz, Lublin, Lvov. The same doors were battered down as in this painting; surely a similar father begged and somewhere a mother, unbalanced by the stiffening corpse across her knees, adjusted an earring. Look: there is even a besieged official who shrugs: "orders are orders, what can I do?" The only difference between the massacre of the innocents in Bethlehem and that in twentieth-century Europe is that Herod murdered only children under the age of two.

On the morning before our departure from Vienna Ilene and I stopped off at the Freud Museum, Berggasse 19--with 10 Downing Street and 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, the most famous of addresses. Here, in the rooms where Freud lived and worked, were his couch, his antiquities, the photos of colleagues and kin, as well as Jofi and L“n, the family chows. A penholder, a hairbrush, a deck of cards. Everywhere were the photographs of Freud himself, smooth-shaved and bearded, bespectacled and not, with and without cigar--steadily growing older, turning into the archetype of the father figure that has dominated much of the thought of this century. He has been just such a figure for me as well, not merely as a wielder of authority but by the way he became linked in my mind with the Epstein Boys through the common exercise of what I probabaly should not call their Jewish wits.

To explain: photograph number 265 at the Sigmund Freud Haus depicts the facade of number 19 with a swastika hanging over the front door. I knew that the premises had been looted several times by the SA and that Freud's daughter, Anna, had been arrested and held by the police for a day. Before Freud could obtain his exit visa ("The enchantment of the new surroundings", he wrote to Max Eitingon upon his arrival in England, "make one want to shout `Heil Hitler!'") he was forced to sign a declaration to the effect that he had been correctly treated by the German authorities and allowed to work in freedom. Freud signed, with the proviso that to the prepared statement he could add a single sentence: "I can heartily recommend the Gestapo to anyone."

When in 1947 Jack Warner testified before the House UnAmerican Activities Committee, he produced a ludicrous list of subversives, consisting primarily of those with whom he had contractual disputes. It included Philip G. and Julius J. Epstein. ("Those guys," said Warner, "are always on the side of the underdog.") Not long afterward J. Parnell Thomas, the head of HUAC, sent the twins a two-part questionnaire. Question one: "Have you ever been a member of a subversive organization?" Question two: "What was that organization?" To part one the boys dutifully answered, "Yes." To part two they wrote, "Warner Brothers." They never heard from the committee again.

MIGRAINES

Ilene and I left the museum only an hour before we had to arrive at the railroad station. A light rain had started to fall. We opened our umbrella. I remembered that in photo 265 it was also raining and that a woman, beneath her "Regenschirm", stood in virtually the same spot we paused in now. I looked up at the street sign. The double "s" in Berggasse had become a single letter. I shifted my gaze: now there was only one "g". I stared at the storefronts, the placards, the signs on a passing bus. No word was complete. There was a hole in every one. What was happening? Could the rain be washing the script away? Then I recalled that I had had a similar moment of confusion--at the time it had quickly grown to panic--twenty years before. Now I realized I was suffering from a migraine, only the second of my life. Already the aura--a frieze of chevrons in a vaguely deco manner--was gathering at the periphery of my vision. The visit to Freud's home, through which the Germans had traipsed the very springtime that I was born; the rain, which was falling on me as it had on that spectral passerby sixty-one years before; the journey that Freud had taken to the west, the train upon which I was about to embark to the east--had all these things conspired to affect the vessels in my brain?

I could not, in front of this address, get away with such a pinched analysis. Hadn't the blurring of my vision to do with Freud--or, rather, with the way I had blurred him and my father in my mind? After all, it was Freud who noted that every joke has three participants: the one who tells it, the one who hears it, and the one the joke is upon. With Freud the butt had been fascism, the Gestapo, and ultimately Hitler himself. With my father and uncle it had most often been Jack Warner (when the mogul unleashed his goons on a picket line at the studio, Julie and Phil campaigned to have the Warners' motto changed from "Combining Good Picture-Making with Good Citizenship" to "Combining Good Picture-Making with Good Marksmanship"). But we have already seen how the joke, when I told it, was on me.

In 1979, when I experienced my first, frightening migraine, the book I'd been working on at the Yivo library had just been published to a good deal of controversy. This is the blurb that my publishers received back from a celebrated Holocaust historian: "Not only did Hitler kill six million Jews, now Leslie Epstein comes to dance on the graves of the dead." My father died in 1952. My brother and I, then aged thirteen, did not go to the funeral. Instead, a friend of the family took us to see "The

Lavender Hill Mob." We laughed our heads off. There was Alec Guinness attempting to flee with his suitcase full of golden statuettes, as if he had stolen my father's, and everyone else's, Academy Awards. At the end of the comedy, however, the hero is led off in handcuffs, a victim of the production code that in those innocent days insisted that crime not be portrayed to pay. I preferred my weekly ration of cartoons, in which the characters, no matter how greatly endangered--blown sky-high one moment, flattened by a fall from a cliff the next--have nine lives. Was this the legacy of the Christian culture in which I had been reared--Jesus, too, manages to live another day--or did I suspect that, by ignoring the proof of my father's death, he might return to us in the guise of his identical twin? No loss, to a child, is irrecoverable.

"No dancing on the graves of the dead!" this is the slogan of the young resistance fighters in that same Holocaust novel. They're warning the residents of the ghetto not to go to a play ("Macbeth", as it happens) while their people are suffering. Was this meant to be a red flag waved in my own direction? For going to the movies on the day my father was buried? For writing--and in a tone so friendly and glad-to-be-alive--a novel about those millions of victims, in some manner ancestors, too? One would have to be a resistance fighter in a different sense, one defined by the man whose house I now stood dizzily before, to untie the knot of such questions. My second attack, so clearly entangled with the first, lasted the classical twenty-one minutes. That left us just enough time to catch the train to where more distant fathers and forefathers had not been permitted a single grave--lest such a resting place suggest that their wandering had at last come to an end

CROSSES

We drove the eighty-odd kilometers from Krakow to Oswiecim by car. The closer we came to the camp the more roadside shrines there seemed to be--or the more I began to take note of these plastic pietas and bleeding hearts. In the reception area there were a number of posters for sale, but the one that caught my attention was of a length of barbed wire twisted into a crown of thorns. I was, I suppose, on the alert for such images because I had been following the church's attempts to Christianize or, more exactly, Catholicize Auschwitz (which followed similar attempts to Communize and nationalize the camp in earlier decades). Maximilian Kolbe, a priest who had volunteered to die in place of someone else, and Edith Stein, a convert and nun, are both on their way to sainthood, even though none of the other victims was given the opportunity to make Kolbe's sacrifice and Sister Benedicta was not killed as a Christian martyr but because she was born, and remained, a Jew.

I was particularly on the lookout for the cross before which John Paul II had celebrated the mass that--because it was held at Birkenau, because it identified the suffering of Father Kolbe with that of Jesus, and because the pope chose to speak of "six million Poles," not Jews--marked the apotheosis of the camp as Calvary. That cross now stood in the garden of the former Carmelite convent, hard against the boundary of Auschwitz and fully visible from within it. Ten years ago, in July of 1989, an American rabbi stormed the walls of the convent, both to uproot the cross and demand the departure of the nuns. When I read of that event in far off Massachusetts I found myself not only wishing the rabbi--his name was Avraham Weiss--godspeed, but regretting that I was not there, whether in caftan or striped pajamas, to aid him in his task.

It's been a long time, apparently, since "Onward Christian Soldiers." My conversion had little to do with religion--if anything, it was bound up with the absence of faith in my life. Had I been raised differently, with a yarmulke, say, instead of the red and white cap of the Pacific Coast League Hollywood Stars, I feel certain I would have rebelled against Judaism in any form. But neither Rabbi Weiss nor any of his brethren would be pleased by what rushed in to fill the vacuum. For I am one of many who have made the more or less conscious decision not to allow the kindness of America to accomplish what the long line of killers from Haman to Hitler could not. It is bad enough that the Polish government had once tried to efface the sufferings of its own citizens (when I heard that the mayor of Warsaw had won a wager that he could dedicate the Ghetto Memorial without once mentioning the word "Jew," I decided to write the whole of my Holocaust novel without once writing the word "German"); but the idea that the church now sought to de-Judaize the very spot that its teachings had helped to create was not to be borne.

If Paul had remained Saul (how our people change their names: "Sooner or later people are gonna find out you're Jewish," Jack Warner told another Julie, Garfinkle-Garfield, "but better later"), and if Constantine the Great had never hallucinated a cross in the sky--that is, if the religion of Jesus had remained a minor sect and not become a major heresy--the Holocaust could not have occurred. The Jews have lived in Asia as long as they have in Europe and I am not aware of a single one who was killed because he was not a Hindu or Sufi or even a Turk. But those were not chocolate eggs that the folk of Europe went hunting after hearing their Easter sermons. I do not wish to claim that because of the lives the Jews were forced to live under Christendom--ostracized, segregated, libeled; the victims of crusades, inquisitions, and that final round-up in Rome right under the nose of Pius the Mum--the Holocaust was nothing more than the most deadly of such pogroms. The church might persecute the Jews, but it never called for their extermination. How could it when, as the least friendly of the Apostles remarks (John, 4-22), the salvation of Christians can come only from that accursed people?

Accursed, indeed. For I do not think it can be denied that Judaism is for Christians a terrible burden. "The Jews killed Christ!" So the words of the priests in their Easter sermons. But that was not the basis of their grudge. It was Freud, yet again, who noticed that the most virulent anti-Semites were the newest Christians, often brought to the faith under compulsion, still longing for a nature that was animated, a God on every branch and every breeze. "Turn the other cheek?" Unthinkable! "No sex with my neighbor's wife?" Unnatural! "Love 'him' instead?" Intolerable! What such neophytes ("One may say," comments Freud, "they are `badly Christened'") do not want is what their new religion demanded; and what they do want--and I be no means exclude the buried wish for human sacrifice--is precisely what that religion forbade. "You killed Christ!" echoes the Cossack as he prepares to crush the skull of the Jew. But what he means is, "You gave us Christ!" Freud, one last time: "The hatred for Judaism is at bottom hatred for Christianity itself."

It took the whole of the morning and part of the afternoon to make our way through Auschwitz I. We saw many of the images familiar from films and books: the rooms filled with human hair, the landscapes of spectacle frames and mismatched shoes. All these things, of course, had been carried the few kilometers from Birkenau, Auschwitz II, and, along with the mountains of suitcases, sewing kits, wooden limbs, metal bowls, the toothbrushes, hairbrushes, clothes brushes, shaving brushes, shoe brushes, belonged to Jews. The rest of Auschwitz I, however, emphasized the suffering of the Poles. Their pictures hung in the hallways. The rooms where they were interrogated, tortured, imprisoned, the very wall against which they had been shot--all these had been carefully preserved or restored. I can only hope that my response--that mixture of sadness, anger, and fellow-feeling that makes up human empathy--was adequate to what I was shown.

But how to respond when we came to the undressing room and gas chamber, with its two brick ovens? I knew that the original gas chambers had been destroyed and that this was in the main a reconstruction, with a false chimney and false vents for Zyklon B. It did not matter. It was enough that the furnaces had been made from the original parts. The greater horror hung about one of what the Sonderkommando called "pushers," a metal construction used to force the gassed corpses into the flames. It seemed, this thing, as dense, as full of gravity, as a collapsed star. It was without geometry, not round, not square, not a plane, not a box, the ultimate utilitarian object. Nothing on earth looked like this--that is, nothing now existing, because what sprang to mind were photographs of Little Boy and Fat Man, the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. These devices--asymmetrical, neither cylinder nor sphere, studded with wires, looked like the freaks, the sports of nature, they were. I reached out my hand to touch the metal. I thought it might be warm, as if it possessed a kind of memory; but it was without temperature, just as it was without any other property, save for a barely perceptible sheen of ineradicable grease.

Towards the end of our tour of Auschwitz I, Ilene and I found ourselves walking down an upstairs corridor past the rooms of various Kapos decorated by oddly childish paintings--a steamship, a hill with flowers--each one done by an artist prisoner. There, at the end of the hall, through an open window, I saw the cross with which John Paul had celebrated his mass twenty years before. Like so much else it had been moved from Birkenau. The nuns, providentially, were gone; I could make out the corner of their convent well off in the distance. Perhaps because of the angle at which I viewed it, perhaps because it was set into the center of a sunken garden, the cross seemed smaller than its twenty-six feet, and less imposing than I had feared. More likely I had been conditioned by what I had already seen. I am not referring to the hundreds of photographs (how beautiful Czeskawa Kwoka, aged thirteen, in her off-center hat) of murdered Poles or to the dungeons in which so many of them had been forced to stand back to back, but to a single cell. That was where a resistance fighter, Lt. Stefan Jasiewski, had been held for execution. Let me ask: if you had seen the crude calendar, the simple marks, by which he counted his remaining days, and seen among them the scratch of a cross, two perpendicular lines, with which he had comforted himself, would you not--and would you not, Avraham Weiss--be moved toward a certain charity, too? Tolerance has its logic. If we allow this prisoner his cross, rabbi, must we not also grant his co- religionists whatever solace, or hope, they might derive from the larger one that stands at the center of the sunken garden?

TREES

To visit Auschwitz is inescapably to subject oneself to what I believe is called cognitive dissonance. One stands atop ash and bone but cannot dismiss thoughts of the next day's travel, the start of what may be a sore throat, and what one is to have for dinner. At Birkenau, whose reason for being had been the murder of Jews, it was particularly difficult to attend to the claims of the dead through the pulsebeat of what remained so insistently alive. The sky, that summer afternoon, was thoroughly blue. Wildflowers waved in the play of the breeze. A butterfly tumbled by. So did white moths. And zig-zagging bees. Cicadas, locusts, crickets--a Jew does not know the names of such things--made a whir, paused, then a buzz. Thus encompassed, we began our tour.

What we saw first was the rail spur, whose tracks veer straight through the infamous gate house, the one with the roofed tower at its center. From that perch we looked out over either another planet or what has been described as the anus of this one: acre after acre of chimneys, thousands it seemed, each in an orderly Germanic row. These were what was left of the barracks that had been plundered at war's end by Poles who wished to rebuild their own homes with the wood. Following the tracks, we came to the flat slab of concrete that had been the unloading platform for the transports. Here was where Mengele waved his finger--left, and the elderly and ill, the children and their mothers, went at once to the crematoria; right, and the able bodied were marched off to be shaved and disinfected and made ready for the work that would either kill them outright or, together with diet and disease and the abuse they bore, so reduce their physical and moral energies that they too would soon be fuel for the ovens.

Now the platform was deserted--indeed, the whole vast expanse of Birkenau had hardly any visitors--save for two blond-headed children, twin boys, who jumped in play from concrete to rusted rail and back. Naturally enough I thought of their fate had Mengele greeted them on this spot. I thought, too, of my own twin sons; of Ilene, herself a twin; of Julie and Phil. Twins are a great theme in my life, spanning three generations, making up much the greater part of what to me is most dear. Yet I contemplated these romping boys with dispassion, examining them with the same bemused interest that everyone takes in the phenomenon of the single egg that splits in two.

That sense of dissociation, I experienced it as a kind of dumbness, stayed with me as I walked on, through grasses and ferns--daisies, were they? Corny forget-me-nots? Jews do not know the names of flowers, either--from site to site. Two of the crematoria--disrobing rooms, gas chambers, ovens--had been blown to pieces, one by the Sonderkommando in a desperate act of revolt. To me they were no more than pits filled with rubble. Nor was the Memorial, a series of grand, if not grandiloquent, rectangular shapes, more affecting. The communist government had meant to build a "Monument of the Martyrdom of the Polish Nation and Other Nations," and in its abstraction and facelessness--above all in the way the Hebrew and Yiddish plaques took their place as but two among two dozen more--it succeeded. I understood that it was outrageous to force the Jews to take their place among "other nations," other peoples; but much as I sought to summon it, outrage, along with every other emotion, remained beyond my grasp.

How did I come to be so well-armored? Where was the fellow-feeling I had managed to muster for the unfortunate Poles? Were these sights "too" familiar? Had I dwelled so long with imagery that I could no longer respond to the material of real life? I had feared the impact of this day upon my imagination, but I had assumed the effect, if any, would be gradual and show itself primarily in my work. Now, trudging on, past methane pits and the occasional Star of David that marked a spot where human ashes had been unearthed, I felt something like a return of the numbing affectlessness that had descended upon me two decades

before.

Then I looked up, surprised--or, to be more accurate, "aesthetically startled", the way one is by a Magritte painting in which a cloud-filled canvas is superimposed upon an actual sky. Directly before me, as if hung on an easel, was an image known to everyone who has interested himself in the Holocaust. It was a huge enlargement of one of the two surviving photographs that the Auschwitz Sonderkommando had managed to take of themselves at work. Across the entire lower middle ground lay a mass of naked corpses, some foreshortened, feet forward, like Mantegna's Christ, most jumbled together in an undifferentiated mass. Above them, erect, stood four Jewish men, each wearing a light shirt, dark trousers, a cap. A fifth, at right, was bent over, tugging at a body, trying to dislodge it from the pile. At center, two of the Sonderkommando dragged a corpse by the arms to the fiery pyre in the background. The two remaining men stared downward, as if to choose whom next to throw to the flames. All are turned away from the smuggled camera, not unlike the gleaners in a Millet, at work in the wheat. In the background five slender trees mimicked, with their trunks, the upright men, just as their full foliage--it must have been summertime, probably 1944, when the ovens had been overloaded--echoed the clouds of smoke that billowed upward and off to the right, a line of movement counterbalanced by the men, who rose from right to left. For a brief moment I examined the enlargement that hovered before me much as I have here--there are five narrow isosceles triangles, sky, trees, smoke, men, the earthen foreground, each pointing in a different direction, like pennants tossed in the wind--and just as I did the Cimbabues and Gr“newalds, and yes, the Mantegnas, after my course in the History of Art.

Then, oddly, the photograph seemed to transform itself, to erase itself as an image and become part of a larger landscape. In a sense it grew wider, as if set in the panoramic mode. For there, to my left, was the plain, even pleasant cottage, beneath whose camouflage these very corpses had been gassed; and to my right the grove, no less pleasant, in which they had paused, removing their clothing for the showers they thought awaited them. But the photo, by now a sort of cyclorama, grew in another dimension as well. With a start I realized that the trees I saw "in" the photograph were the very ones I saw "behind" it. I could match them limb for limb and branch for branch, every idiosyncratic turn of a trunk, every notch or bulge in the outline of the crowns. Only these trees were larger, thicker, taller, fully mature. To glance from their portrait to the trees themselves was like watching a strip of time-lapse film. Title: "History."

And in that glance the feelings I had suppressed returned. What I saw before me was what Proust has called "a species of optical illusion," a "fragment of time in the pure state." As Marcel, both the man and author, had himself experienced, when the "habitually concealed essence of things is liberated [then] our true self which seemed--had perhaps for long hears seemed--to be dead but was not altogether dead, is awakened and reanimated. Now, at Auschwitz II, this melding of past and present, of image and reality--all that I had read and thought and seen, encapsulated in a single photograph, with the evidence of these woods, the authenticity of living limbs and leaves--restored something that had been buried within me. "Poor Jews," I thought, looking at the doomed men about their task. And then, lifting my eyes: "Poor witnesses. Poor trees."

Warum?

The tour of Birkenau was nearly over. We emerged from the grove and moved along the path that separated the remains of the men's and women's barracks, heading--in the reverse direction the Jews had taken--back toward the unloading ramp. I looked over my shoulder, to the gate house where our visit had begun.

Then I looked again. For just as the trees in the photograph had been matched by those that stood behind it, this building was mirrored by an identical structure that stood perhaps a hundred yards off--identical, I quickly grasped, but for two things: no tracks ran through its center and there was a Christian cross at its top. This structure, which had once housed the SS and camp administrators, had been taken over by the citizenry of the nearby town of Brzezinkza. Living trees? This was a living church! All the forbearance I had experienced in regard to the Poles and their religion vanished in an instant. I had no difficulty in feeling outrage now. Indeed, I was filled with much the same sort of revulsion that must have animated Rabbi Weiss. This was, as Churchill had said, the epicenter of the greatest crime in history; but what he did not say, and what the presence of this triumphant cross all but denied, was that the Holocaust was just such a crime because it was committed exclusively against the Jews.

Exclusively? What of the Poles, whether intellectuals or churchmen? What of the Soviet soldiers? What of the Gypsies? I did not, in my moment of fury, forget or deny the innumerable sufferings of these people. Yet the fact remains that the Jews were hunted down for different reasons and with a different degree of thoroughness and intensity than any other people at any place or at any time. No citizen of Poland--not Father Kolbe, not Lt. Jasiewski, and not the sad and beautiful Czeskowa Kwoka--was thrust into Auschwitz simply because he or she was Pole. Whether resistance fighter, petty criminal, believer, or simply the object of a mistake, every such victim was accorded what in the world of the concentration camp was the ultimate luxury: an explanation.

But there was no rationale for what befell the Jews. In the first known document of his political career Adolph Hitler developed what he called an "Anti-semitism of reason." There he speaks of the Jews' materialism, of their "dance around the golden calf," and their "lust for money and power." But if the Jews were consistently portrayed by Hitler's own propaganda machine, and in the psyche of western culture, as the force that controlled the world's finances from behind the scenes, they were no less attacked for being adherents of their blood brother, Karl Marx. This clash of irreconcilable attributes--banker and bolshevik, capitalist and Communist--underlines as much as anything I can think of the irrational nature of the response to the Jew: on the one hand cosmopolitan and sophisticated, on the other provincial, a disease-carrying beggar; incapable of responding to spiritual values and yet guilty of abstracting the earthy instincts of the folk; aloof, cliquish and foreign, while simultaneously assimilating, insinuating himself into the center of society, boring from within; the essence of all that is at one and the same time medieval and modern.

The degree of incompatibility in these qualities might lead anyone to suspect of those espousing them not merely the sort of motiveless malignity that Coleridge attributed to Iago's loathing of Othello, but a hatred of logic itself. In Auschwitz, as in all other camps, those in power took the deepest delight in demonstrating to the Jew that his punishment was not for any deed he had committed but for some quality in the sap of his being. The senseless of daily existence (the exact number of buttons to be sewn on one's shirt, the angle of the cap upon one's head, the tautness of the blanket upon one's bunk), the absurdity of one's labor (the hole dug for hours that was then filled in for hours more, the pile of rocks carried all morning to the left and in the afternoon back to the right), and above all the ubiquity of mood, whim, and the disproportion between cause and effect best symbolized in the tick of Mengele's finger--all these things combined to remind the Jew and perhaps even more his master of what lay at the core of Fascist mentality: the meaninglessness of life. When Primo Levy finally asked his tormentors ""Warum?"", why was he being tormented, the answer--which recalls, in its force and succinctness, that given by the first of all murderers, "Am I my brother's Keeper"?-- was "Hier ist kein warum."

Which is to say that the Holocaust is unique for only one reason: because the Jews are unique. Their singularity derives in part from simply having lasted so long, just as, in various Native American religions, an aged boulder through sheer perseverance takes on a certain venerability and holiness. In part, too, as I have already discussed, the Jews' entanglement with Christianity has marked them off from all other peoples. But it is not in relation to another religion so much as by their belief in their own that the Jews have shaped the nature of Western thought. I do not know whether or not the Jews have been chosen to be a light unto the nations; I do know that the nations have behaved toward the Jews with that same animosity that darkness feels toward light or that, in an image I wish were my own, flour must feel toward the yeast that will not allow it to subside.

And what is this yeast, so bubbling, so insistent, so difficult to tolerate, but the force of imagination? I do not think it an exaggeration to say that the war of the Germans against the Jews was a war against certain qualities of the Jewish mind, and that, to twist the famous aphorism of Heine, before the mobs in Berlin and Munich and Dresden could burn the Jews, they first had to burn their books. What is in these minds and books that bedevils so many who come in contact with them? I think the hated element is the continuous exercise of what Coleridge, once again, called the primary imagination: the "repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I Am." It is the Jews who took the imaginative leap of comprehending out of an empty whirlwind, a burning bush, "The I Am That I Am". It is the Jews who substituted the "story" of Abraham and Isaac for the reality of a father killing a son and a son killing his father. If in some measure Christianity longed for a return to the original form of sacrifice, it was German paganism that made that hidden wish a fact of life. And it is the Jews, too, who have maintained in their finite minds a belief in the infinite; when that belief, that supreme fiction, which is that we matter, that "existence has meaning", became a rebuke to our age's countervailing faith, which is that everything is possible, then those finite minds, and all that they held within them, had to be destroyed.

WIND

Ilene and I boarded the Inter/City express, Krakow/Warsaw, and some thirty hours later took off on a Cross Air flight to Zurich, there to connect to a plane direct to Boston. After only twenty minutes in the air the pilot informed those on the right side of the cabin that they could look down on the city of Lodz, the unnamed location of the Holocaust novel I had written two decades before. I was securely buckled in on the left, however. Nothing below but a patchwork of tan hedgerows and tan and brown fields. I plucked up the in-flight magazine, but, once again, all the letters were blurred. Tears? Not tears. Another migraine? If so, I now knew the reason. In just three weeks I'd have to take another flight, this time to Los Angeles, where Uncle Julie would be celebrating his 90th birthday.

"Celebrating" was not, I supposed, the word for it, since two years earlier he'd suffered a massive stroke while flying eastward to be the grand marshall of the Penn State homecoming parade. Since then he'd been confined, often asleep, to his bed. I knew well enough that, though he had done as much as any man to help Americans form a sense of themselves ("I stick my neck out for nobody"), he had always remained, in his deepest being, and in the most important ways, a Jew. Once, when Jack Warner approached the boys about changing "their" names in order to advance their careers, they politely refused. Then they stole a piece of stationery from Jack's office and wrote the following letter to the handsome young actor Don Taylor, a fellow Nitany Lion whom they'd just brought out to the studio:

.awoff

Dear Mr. Taylor,

All of us at Warner Bros. are looking forward to

a long and fruitful relationship with you under

your new name of Hyman Rabinowitz.

Sincerely,

Jack L. Warner

.awon

Don died last year, and almost all of Julie's other pals are gone as well. High over the battlegrounds of Europe I already felt a growing apprehension about my trip to California. I experience that whole generation, once so lively and charming and gay, much as the middle-aged Marcel does all those whom he had known in his youth, and whom he rejoins many years later at the party of the Princesse de Guermantes. Indeed, were it not for "Time Regained," the volume in which that meeting takes place, I am not sure I could deal with the shock of my own confrontation with the past. In that sense Proust's book stands before me in much the same way that the photograph of the Sonderkommando did at the clearing before the fully grown trees. And of course for me, as for Marcel, the underlying pain of such an encounter is the realization, each and every time a surprise, that one is oneself growing old.

In California that generation I looked up to, often literally, those actors and writers and directors and agents, the beautiful women around them, the constant ring of their laughter--all of these bright and high-spirited people now stand huddled at the edge of a continent, as if at the edge of cliff. They are, as Marcel observed, bent, as if the dresses of the women can no longer be freed from the tombstones about which they have become entangled. Their heads, too, are bowed, as though "nothing now could check the momentum of this parabola upon which they were launched." Often enough I feel against my own skin the wind, or perhaps it is a giant paw, which seizes first one and then another of these figures, like dolls of pumice stone, and hurls them down.

No point, while suffering from my own little stroke, in trying to read. I would have to wait the full twenty-one minutes. Rest, then, on the pillow. Watch the shapes of the clouds. This was but the first of many flights that would take me back to where I had begun.

Leslie Epstein's memoir about visiting Auschwitz, "Pictures at an Extermination," appeared in the September 2000 issue of Harper's.

Published in Biblioteka Alexandria Online with author's permission