Passover

I am now in Poland on a train headed for Auschwitz. Not directly, but eventually.

That's a strange thing for me to write. I was tattooed by Auschwitz at ten or eleven in the early '60s when my synagogue showed us the documentary Let My People Go, and I lost my innocence. As I got older, I learned just how crucial the railroads were to feeding the furnaces at Auschwitz. And now I ride these rails; am I hearing the same clack-clack... clack-clack ... clack-clack Jews heard then?

Since landing in Hungary I've read some accounts of the war and Auschwitz by notable Hungarian writers who survived it. Their accounts bring to light not simply the death of those camps, but the living in them; how people survived, and under what terms and conditions. I've also read reviews of those works that elaborate even further on the complexity of the social and economic machinations of the concentration camp.

What emerges from these writers is a picture much less black and white then I remember seeing in Let My People Go. In that film people, Jews, were either dead or rescued at the 59th minute of the 11th hour. They were either rotting, muscleless, rubbery corpses laying in tossed heaps, or as shrink-wrapped skeletons peering out hopefully and hopelessly from behind barbed wire.
The presence of absolute victim, the presence-by-absence of absolute evil.   

But the picture that emerges for me now some forty years later from Imre Kertész, György Konrád, István Deák, is not less representative of victim and victimizer but more nuanced about who was what, and why. Maybe even to what degree.

When I went to Berlin a few weeks ago I traveled in ignorance, conflating all Germany with Hitler's Final Solution. As a rational human being, I knew that such over-generalizations are indefensible, but as an equally irrational being I never bothered to learn otherwise: all Germany was evil. Period. 

Once in Berlin, though, and owing to a highly informed non-Jewish German Judeacist, Irene, I discovered that at least from the German side of things, such an over-generalization is in itself a form of heaping, an indiscriminate ditching of everyone German. 

Irene has used the term "little Schindler" to tell of the Germans -- how many I don't know, though to my mind a number is irrelevant -- who at great risk to themselves thwarted Hitler and his Final Solution in whatever ways, large or small, they could. Irene said that someone figured it took the coordination of twelve Germans to rescue one Jew. That's a complicated chain with many breakable links. 

And yet these little Schindlers succeeded. They may not have risen to the level and legend of of their namesake, Oscar Schindler, made known to the world by Stephen Spielberg in Schindler's List, but even so, their efforts saved a handful of Jews here, and a handful of Jews there, fully knowing that to have been found out would have meant prison or death. And acknowledgment of the little Schindlers does not account for those individuals who may have hidden a neighbor, a friend, perhaps even a total stranger. Like the little Schindlers, they, too, were "part" of Hitler's Germany. 

The question why some Germans went the way of Schindler while others didn't can't be answered here. All I can say is that some did, and because some did, a blanket condemnation of Germans is insupportable. Anyone seeking the truth must accept it in total.

It would be nice to be able to stop there, on a redemptive note, but the stories surviving the camps as revealed in the above-mentioned writers, and others, tell of uncomfortable incidences of Jewish-Jewish exploitation and oppression, sometimes in the service of Nazi-Jewish extermination. Apart from the simple yin-yang, German-Jewish portrait of camp life most people hew to -- or at least I did -- , inmate populations were oftentimes highly hierarchical, both politically and economically. Imre Kertész tells in his memoir Fateless that as a boy alone in Auschwitz he was completely shunned by other inmates and left to his own peril because he was a Hungarian Jew and not a Polish Jew. István Deák, in a review of Kertész and others in The New York Review of Books, cites that the Jews who stripped camp arrivals of their possessions often acquired a considerable booty from the process, happy booty at that. These Jews awaited the trains eagerly. So, Jews turned on and in their own. 

More unsettling still: as children only consumed food and produced nothing, they were of absolutely no use to the Nazis and -- once the killing machine reached its peak efficiency -- children would step off or be lifted down from the freight cars and get marched directly to the gas chambers. Mothers holding their young child's hand would be sent to the chambers along with them. And so there were reports of mothers abandoning their children, walking away to secure their own lives while relenting to the inescapable fate of their children. But there are also stories of older women, knowing what awaited a mother, furtively snatching the hand of a child away from its mother and going to the gas chamber as that child's "mother" instead, so sparing the younger woman certain death. 

How do we account for all this, all this capitulation to evil and all this refusal to capitulate? We know what happens in the moment: a decision is made, an act committed, a past sealed. Whatever chapter it may comprise, it becomes an entry to the official biography of one's life. But what leads up to that decision? What in our lives sends some of us one way, and others of us the other way? What, or who, has prepared us for that moment of crisis? 

***

I am on a train to Auschwitz and it will be Passover when I arrive. For those who don't know, Passover is the Jewish holiday that commemorates the story from the book of Exodus when the Egyptian Pharoah, having not succumbed to the first of God's nine plagues, is about to suffer the tenth: the slaying of all the non-Jewish first born (males). To protect Jews from God's wrath against the Pharoah, the Israelites are instructed to slather lamb's blood on their doorposts so that the Angel of Death, spotting the blood, will not descend but pass over that house and on to homes not so marked. The Jews did this and were spared; the Egyptians were not; and the Israelites were set free.

As I walk through Auschwitz, I will be thinking about death and its agents. The unfathomable number of lives ended there, and the unfathomable number of lives whose coordinated efforts put them there or resisted, and sometimes succeeded, in putting them there. Auschwitz is but the last stop; the rail lines to it begin many miles away, from many different directions, laid by many hands.

Was it the same Angel of Death that flew over Europe as flew over Egypt? For whatever inscrutable reason, did he this time seek out the lambs blood not to spare, but to sentence? How much more complete would his work have been were there not those with no lambs blood on their doors hiding Jews inside, shielding them from his mission?

As I walk within the death camps, I will be conscious of the irony of visiting Auschwitz on Passover.