DIDN'T WE MEET AT ACHAU?

GREENBERG, BARBARA

IDN'T WE MEET AT ACHAU? A STORY BY BARBARA GREENBERG Marcia Gagnon seizes my hand and presses it against her bosom to let me feel how furiously her heart beats. Marcia is moved — deeply deeply...

...Really, there's no need...
...This child had a past she never spoke of but the neighbors whispered...
...Don't you see what's going to happen when you're found out...
...Iam a survivor...
...The room where the Russian soldiers stood against the wall to be measured so the SS could shoot them in the backs of their heads through a slot in the wall...
...And this child, if she is not cruelly punished, is forever jealous of those who are...
...She has a cousin in Fresno, California...
...Did you see the floorboards...
...Goot eef-ening, Mee-sus Miller...
...No lament for holiness...
...And the chimney...
...He is living with a woman now - a lovely woman and she makes him happy...
...And the underground room with the hooks in the ceiling...
...But in which direction...
...I took a pair of shoes from a girl, she was lying in the snow, she was not quite not-alive, she was not yet faceless...
...She asked for the name of my concentration camp...
...The stigmata and pudenda of his past are buried...
...Hilda's smooth blond hair and placid smile had saved her...
...she says...
...The young man honors me with a radiant smile...
...We reproach her for it, but she persists...
...This is wasted on me...
...And my bones were ground to fertilizer...
...This...
...he asks...
...This satisfies my interrogator...
...It looks like the entrance to an underground train station...
...Marcia is a kind, responsive woman...
...1 used to speak German...
...No," I say...
...All atrocities are contained in the one Atrocity...
...And Leo is saying...
...which infects and reinfects a skin graft that has never really "taken" and will never heal...
...Except confessions...
...Did you know that...
...Seldom am I mistaken about faces...
...A pale muscular man emerges from the door marked HERREN...
...He knows more about atrocity than any of us...
...I am a man who remembers faces...
...He spat in my face...
...I carried corpses...
...They used to call this the Street of Blood...
...Weil das Fraulein eine Judin ist...
...And I recall for my fellow-passenger the gentle Hilda, the fair exquisitely-mannered Hilda, who was only nine or ten when she arrived in 1941 at the Taylor's house across the street from mine...
...You will not tell me which...
...He said he'd heard I'd been at Belzec, too...
...He defines himself as a liber- ated priest...
...Did you look closely at the ovens...
...a real money-maker...
...I suggest that it's time to hear from Ingrid...
...Sitting cross-legged on the ground near the iron gate of Bu-chenwald — Jedem Das Seine — is a slim young man, an Oriental, barefoot, dressed in worn dungarees and a dusty black sweatshirt...
...I must discover what it is that draws me to you...
...I realize that he is not here resting, nor is he waiting for any one or any thing...
...Stop," I tell him...
...Every gland in his body is a miracle...
...We have many fine cathedrals for our visitors...
...Only a moment more, Fraulein...
...No, she insists, she is not Jewish, certainly not Jewish, she is sympathetic toward the Jewish people but she is not one of them...
...Even Jewish churches...
...The wind has tape-recorded everything...
...At the mouth of the Jewish shrine I say...
...Buried...
...I promise you...
...I tell this priest that I am not, as I advertise myself, an actual survivor of the Nazi concentration camps...
...and Marcia begins to cry...
...You regret nothing, except...
...He says, "But your life is a lie...
...But now, among the poplar trees, I view him clearly for the first and only time...
...Nobody would have had the wit to invent them...
...You also recognize my face...
...No matter...
...Because it is impossible to choose, we advance to the water's edge, then retreat to the dunes...
...And yet nothing I am - we are - is ever solved in health or death...
...Leo says that In-grid's poetry is flawed by its dependence on body imagery...
...His hand is a tourniquet on my wrist...
...Margot has a Mrs...
...I'd like...
...1 try to wash it down with beer...
...No, no," he says...
...I've seen everything there is to be seen...
...as if years ago, from the other end of the world, we had set out simultaneously in opposite directions, confident tha"t this meeting would occur because the world is round...
...I should have said that in you I behold one of the Hebrews, a daughter of Zion, a Jewish person...
...He belong here...
...That I am, in fact, a native of Providence, Rhode Island...
...Did I know a Sadie Something-or-other at Auschwitz...
...I told her I never was at Auschwitz...
...Many different kinds of churches...
...Thomas says, "We can't let this group be infiltrated by madmen...
...He thinks I'm a Kapo...
...My eyes, which are dark and dry and haunted, meet his, which are moist and bright and blue...
...He says, "To live in the past is dreadful enough, but to live in a borrowed past, in a false history...
...We'll call it Camp...
...Escaped...
...We have to help him...
...I recognize the Street of Blood...
...Forty hooks in the ceiling...
...Are you sure...
...Possibly a Polish installation...
...I told her Ravensbriick...
...Beasts were planted in my uterus but failed to grow there...
...That in the years of holocaust I was a schoolgirl in Providence, saving foil wrappers from cigarette packages, knitting squares for soldiers' afghans, collecting newspapers with big black headlines because there was a war on...
...Sometimes, with the right kind of sunset, you can actually see the flames still shooting from the chimney...
...Ingrid hands each of us a copy of her latest poem and reads it aloud...
...Because I have finally learned to absolve everything...
...The decent people of this world will point their fingers at you and call you a liar, a survivor of nothing, an inventor of horrors, a Jewish guilt-peddler, a mother of Christ-killers...
...He left the Church two years ago...
...I'd like to give you this...
...You betray the real world...
...She cornered me at a Sisterhood meeting...
...She (for I now recognize her as a woman) is walking into the wind, against the wind, and there are only the two of us on this beach...
...Does the Fraulein like castles...
...She stuffs a handkerchief into her purse and shuts her purse assertively to prove that she is done with crying...
...Then...
...We look so much alike, this woman and I (two reddened faces framed by fur-trimmed hoods), that the smile with which we acknowledge each other is the ironic kind of smile one makes into a mirror...
...The past should not be spoken...
...Mother of Christ-killers," he repeats, pointing...
...Her name is Use...
...She was born in Austria...
...I have forgotten how to speak German...
...In a "normal" accent which is now foreign to me, I enunciate the strategy of my life...
...That in 19511 was touring Germany, chatting with former German soldiers, all of whom could swear that they fought for Hitler against their will, and only on the Eastern front...
...My seatmate on this transatlantic flight is a middle-aged man who seethes like an adolescent philosopher...
...Come back again on a stormy day...
...Gittel leads him away...
...What would you like...
...he says, wagging his index finger...
...He seems not to understand what is expected of him...
...Hello...
...only concrete outlines: and at the site of the hangman's post, although the hangman's post has been replaced b\ a memorial birch tree: and at the crematorium, although the crematorium here is modest, only three small ovens: and at the gas chamber which is nothing much to look at and which, by some accounts, was never used at all...
...Ingrid admits that the essence of the Experience is beyond her capacity as a writer...
...Ingrid says she's trying to find a publisher for her survival poems...
...Jewish, then...
...Ingrid collects the filth that she collects...
...I would give my right hand for the privilege of hearing confessions again...
...He says, "You are a stupid person...
...You're evading the present...
...I was born in Poland...
...At least we should give him a bowl < soup...
...I am an American...
...And my ounce of fat was processed into soap...
...You ought to stay until sundown and have another look at the chimney...
...To me your face is very familiar...
...Each of us arrives alone except Gittel...
...She says she hasn't felt this way since Gone Willi The Wind...
...I slept with a guard and it gave me pleasure...
...Not with a group...
...but not now...
...Certainly not," says Margot, who has returned to her knitting, who is knitting a yellow sweater with a six-pointed star on it for her miniature schnauzer...
...I say...
...I tell her: I was not spared...
...she murmurs, half questioning...
...Back home in Pittsburgh where she teaches the violin to schoolchildren, she is known as a person of humanity and culture...
...Gittel, how could you...
...My head was shaved...
...I saw it...
...I admit to my confessor that yes I have divorced my normal life, yes I am a fraudulent Lazarus, yes I am drinking blood from other peoples' wounds...
...And these are actual photographs...
...she asks...
...Em judisches Fraulein...
...Yet you have been in Germany before, have you not...
...Thomas says, "I met a man who'd been through hell at Belzec...
...He is an ancient black man, very bent, very withered, and even his skin has lost its patina, is the color of as...
...which refused to be obliterated...
...I'm a survivor of Buchenwald...
...I speak only English...
...Margot, close to tears, is wailing, "Oh, that poo man, that poor sad man...
...We who had dark curly hair and sullen mouths would not be saved...
...France...
...I say, "Yes, in a sense everyone is a survivor of the camps...
...Something had happened over there but no one remembered what...
...I was not spared...
...which is a number she knows...
...A survivor like me...
...I am one of them, I tell her...
...And when he becomes aware of my presence, he looks up with a broad smile of greeting...
...We must respect the wishes of a guest in our nation...
...But he has his atrocities confused...
...nicht wahr...
...Then, when I fail to respond...
...At the Christian chapels, and at the Jewish shrine of remembrance...
...Yes...
...Lawd, hov ah suffered...
...You betray your own people...
...Perhaps it did...
...he was reborn two years ago...
...He, too, is here alone...
...My teeth were mined for gold...
...Like the gate itself, he is simply here...
...He makes no objection when I call him "Father...
...Mark says he adores Ingrid's poems...
...I say, "When I was here last...
...Fraulein...
...That after the years of holocaust I sighed and went to college...
...studied German...
...Simon, unaware of us, sits on the floor in the center of the room rocking back and forth...
...Mark bows deeply in front of the umbrella stand...
...I, too, could not remember...
...I remind my confessor that in the beginning, and so for ever after, I was a Jewish child...
...I ask him, is there nothing he regrets...
...She and her family escaped from Austria in 1939...
...Because, the world being as it is, certificates of innocence are issued only to the victims of evil...
...A STORY BY BARBARA GREENBERG Marcia Gagnon seizes my hand and presses it against her bosom to let me feel how furiously her heart beats...
...It was unkind of me to bring her here...
...Actual...
...This from Mark...
...The past is meant to be consumed, to be buried in one's person, to be carried down the gullet cheerfully as if it were good meat...
...I vill tell you about zee holo-cust...
...Perhap she persists because of our reproaches...
...Never in the days before I became a survivor was I as alive as I am now...
...And you...
...You are a survivor...
...I assure my companion that I have never set foot in his country until now...
...I tell her...
...Ahhh...
...A survivor like you...
...Have you seen everything...
...He pauses near a potted plant, examines the population of the beer garden, settles his gaze on this table where 1 sit alone, then strides across the room and lowers himself with military grace into the chair next to mine...
...Some day you'll be discovered...
...I regret nothing," he says, but the fingers of his right hand travel the length of his jacket lapel, remembering an absent crucifix...
...Holland...
...Bitte...
...And the castles of religion...
...Again and agair We turn on Gittel...
...speaks English, and with an accent purer than my own...
...I think you are deceiving me...
...I will see him again, later, in my photographs of Buchenwald, with barbed-wire shadows scribbled on his face...
...Which I accept, even as Marcia begins to rub her collarbone, feeling the loss already...
...I was not spared...
...Good...
...She is insane to have brought him...
...Gittel's Simon blinks his eyes re peatedly as if he has been living for a long time in a mouse hole an has no familiarity with lighted rooms...
...Do you think the rest of us like believing in concentration camps...
...But he goes on, unheeding...
...I never speak of the past...
...And when that happens, the world will turn against you...
...It boils and stinks and fertilizes nothing...
...Alone...
...The man is insane, we say...
...Any number can play, the more the merrier...
...I will guess - tell me if I am correct - that you have lived some time in a country near our borders...
...Something along the lines of Monopoly with dice and chance cards...
...I say, "Does he think you're a C_____11" "No," says Thomas...
...The world contains nothing but survivors...
...I tell him, "Like you, I've been reborn...
...And Ingrid say ing, "But we can't just send him away...
...I told her it was east of Fresno, California...
...And, rolling up the left sleeve of his sweatshirt, he turns his arm toward me so that I may read the number, the documentary proof of his survival...
...Marcia is moved — deeply deeply moved — to be visiting Dachau for the first time in the company of a genuine survivor...
...Austria...
...Surely a Jewish child is guilty of something...
...Tonight we have to deal with still another of Gittel's survivors Simon is his name...
...A lady not only beautiful but wise...
...I wish...
...Just one like you...
...By what grace of God were you spared...
...Marcia crosses herself...
...studied Kant and Nietzsche...
...she sa\s...
...In the furthest reach of my vision is a figure walking toward me, toward which I am walking...
...Yes," I say in loving-kindness...
...I forget that you do not speak our language...
...Lawd, how ah suffered in dei Nazi concentration camps...
...I will guess that you were detained for a time in one of our labor installations...
...which was tattooed on her forearm...
...And where on earth was that, she wondered...
...Exactly as you please," he says, smiling at his own courtesy, a civilized shark in an aquatic ballet...
...Nobody knows de trouble ah've seer De hunger and de thirstin, Lawd and all de tortures, and all de woi ries in dis wooly head...
...I have constructed in myself a giant cistern to contain that history: sputum, urine, vomitus, effluvia, feces and the private mud in which I dip my fingers daily, tasting and smelling, bathing in the simple fact of it...
...She is trying to tell me something...
...Marcia's hand is at her throat...
...Simon's litany breaks off mid-sentence and again he looks around the room, dazed and blinking...
...I will make another little guess...
...You're crass, too," says Margot...
...Has she perhaps visited some castles on the Rhine...
...Here, with a false confession of weariness, we decide to rest a while...
...Of course...
...A guest in Germany should understand that our homeland is her castle...
...continues to cry as we walk along the Appellplatz where the barracks used to stand, although there are no barracks now...
...Now excuse me...
...Mark offers to drive Simon back to whatever place he came from...
...Everything...
...We all tell Thomas that he has nothing to fear, but we are not convincing...
...A silver cross on a silver chain...
...You'll hear the trains on the tracks and the . prisoners in the box cars and the SS and the dogs and the rats and the furnace...
...Gittel is always bringing someone with her...
...It's crass...
...When we meet, it is as if each of us has finally arrived at an appointed place...
...No sense of loss...
...studied Mann...
...This tale you tell, this incredible imposture, this act of cowardice...
...But the young man persists...
...I prepare myself for more of Marcia's tears: none come...
...Listen," he says...
...One should draw strength from the past in order to bring about the future...
...And the examining room...
...Sprechen Sie nicht Deutsch...
...And so am I." I grant him this...
...Yes, Jewish...
...Miller game," says Leo...
...Have you been through the camp...
...Perhaps you are being modest...
...It had been the greatest show on earth, no doubt, but I'd arrived too late, I'd missed the production, the actors had removed their grease pamt, the asbestos curtain was irrevocably down...
...That he and I have never met...
...Did you come with a group...
...I was shot in the back, I was chewed to death by dogs, I was starved to death, I was beaten to death, I was buried alive, I was gassed alive and cremated...
...Then it reallv happened, didn't it...
...Surely you know a little German...
...his blond wig newly pomaded and combed down onto his forehead as if it were meant to hide the swastika, as if the swastika would permit itself to be hidden...
...I received my mother's ration of soup and drank my mother's life...
...I told him I didn't want to talk about it, but something about the way I said it struck him wrong...
...A little vomit slithers on my tongue...
...I tell him that I, too, noticed the ash...
...I drink to the future," he says, releasing my arm, reaching across the table for my half-full glass of beer which he raises to his lips and, in a single manly swallow, drains...
...I have seen him somewhere before...
...This delights him...
...I am a survivor of Auschwitz...
...in the Dachau museum of horrors...
...I smile at Father Blue-eyes...
...Above it, on the blanched skin of my arm, tattooed numerals confirm a history...
...You, so busy with this fakery, do you ever think of the real survivors...
...Then you'll hear the sounds of the past...
...Entschuldigen Sie mir, American lady...
...Then I expose to Use the number which is burnt into the inner surface of my arm...
...I am waiting to be absolved...
...Even my silence serves his secret purpose...
...There is no need to keep the past in the front parlor like a body at a wake...
...Fraulein...
...Look...
...Painted red because of the blood, you know...
...Yes, I know...
...I don't like the Mrs...
...There's still some ash in one of the ovens...
...He is astonished with himself...
...In the night a Jewish child cries to her father, "I'm sorry I did it," not knowing what "it" is, but wanting once and for all to be spanked senseless...
...Every breath he draws is a celebration, he says...
...It is the same for you, yes...
...Miller story...
...Gv tel whispers something in his ear Now he remembers...
...But, as I try to stand, he grips my wrist in a way which is not brutal-no, not that - but as sure of its power as a hand on a steering wheel or a dog's leash...
...And Thomas, al most shouting, "Somebody get him out of here...
...I stripped the bodies bare...
...Perhaps we should walk along together...
...I've seen the castles...
...Gittel says, "If Simon leaves, I leave," and we answer her with silence, fencing her in with our silence until she bends down and helps the old man to his feet...
...How fortunate that we've met," I say, abandoning my European accent for the first time in years...
...What...
...What about them, hah...
...Or Ludwig's castles in the mountains of Bavaria...
...I tell him...
...A day comes when I am walking along the seashore in early winter, walking with the wind at my back, re-experiencing the ocean as if it were the past: the ocean, the past that has never stopped happening...
...Hilda had been smuggled out...
...It takes just one witness like you to discredit all the others...
...In the museum now...
...What difference does that make...
...That was an odd coincidence, she said...
...All of us fear for Thomas and for ourselves...
...I was not spared...
...I played the harmonica...
...De hur ger and de thirstin, Lawd, and a] de tortures____" Gittel, incredibly, defends herself, defends Simon...

Vol. 2 • December 1976 • No. 3


 
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