Florian's Gate (28 page)

Alexander steered Jeffrey around and began walking away. “Where was mercy when I needed it? Why were my prayers not answered?”

Jeffrey fought against his rising sense of dread. “Where did they take you?”

“I have a favor to ask,” Alexander said in reply.

Jeffrey turned to face him. “Anything.”

His discomfort was plainly visible. “This is a most difficult matter, but I need your help, I'm afraid.”

“All you have to do is ask, Alexander.”

“Ah, but you do not know what it is that I wish to request.”

“It doesn't matter,” Jeffrey replied flatly.

Alexander inspected him, said, “You are indeed a friend.”

“I'd like to be.”

“Very well.” He took a shaky breath. “I am called to face my past. And because I know no other way to say it, I shall confess to being afraid to face it alone.”

“You want me to go somewhere with you?”

“If you would.”

“Sure. When do we leave?”

“Tomorrow at first light. I wish to have this done and behind me.”

Jeffrey nodded. “I'll go over and leave a note for Gregor.”

“Thank you, my young friend. Your strength will be most needed.”

“May I ask where we're going?”

Alexander gave him a haunted, empty look. “Auschwitz.”

CHAPTER 13

The two-lane road to Oswiecim, as the town was called in Polish, had neither lane markers nor road-signs. They passed through village after small cluttered village, the stretches in between lined with chestnut and oak and silver-leafed birch. At times their branches reached up and over the road, weaving a green canopy through which golden sunlight flickered and streamed.

The slow-moving traffic held their speed to less than forty miles an hour for most of the way. Dark-fumed trucks thundered around horse-drawn carts, old men pushing wheelbarrows, sedately bouncing buses, and boxy East European cars. The only transport refusing to obey the unmarked speed limit were the newer Western cars, which powered around other vehicles and blind corners with aggressive madness.

Signals of newly planted capitalism sprouted alongside the way in the form of dilapidated buses converted into roadside cafes. Only the multitude of
Kapliczki
—shrines with a Christ or Madonna and child—bore fresh paint. Often someone was kneeling in prayer before them; always they were encircled by wreaths of newly planted flowers.

Alexander said nothing from the moment he seated himself in the car to the point when they arrived in Oswiecim, the village where the Auschwitz concentration camp memorial was located. He sat with shoulders hunched and face pointed slightly to the right, seeking to keep himself hidden from the driver beside him and from Jeffrey behind.

They passed the city-limits sign for Oswiecim. Kantor stirred and sighed the words, “It is indeed a heavy day.”

Their way took them along two sides of a mile-long wall constructed from concrete blocks framed with steel girders and railroad sidings. It was topped by rusted steel pylons and coiled strands of barbed wire. Every fifty meters or so, a
guard tower's peaked roof and blank windows stared down at them from beyond the wall.

They pulled into a vast parking lot where several dozen buses vied for space with taxis and private cars and mini-vans. Hundreds of people, most of them teenagers, milled about under the leafy shade trees.

Alexander seemed blind to all but his own internal world. He rose from the car with the slow trembling of an ancient man, blinked at the sky, murmured, “Why is there sun?”

Jeffrey moved up next to him. “I'm sorry, I didn't—”

“There should be no sun here. From this place the light should be forced to hide its face.”

Jeffrey touched Alexander's arm. “Are you sure you want to do this?”

Alexander drew himself erect with an effort. “Come along, Jeffrey. My past is calling.”

As they passed into the reception hall, a sign covering the entire left wall announced in seventeen languages that no child under the age of thirteen was allowed past this point. Alexander stood before it for a time before saying, “The Nazis were not so considerate.”

The hall was lined with broad-framed photographs: multiple barbed-wire fences; a nighttime view of the infamous entrance gates; an Orthodox Jew in prayer robes and tefflin saying Kaddish; flowers strewn in great piles on and around the ovens used for cooking down the bodies; a snowy winter dawn casting gloomy light over the central prison square; a black-and-white sea of forks and spoons that at first glance appeared to be a pile of glinting bones.

Jeffrey halted before a poem posted at the door leading out to the camp. It read:

Electric wires, high and double
Won't let you see your daughter
So don't believe the censored letter of mine
Since truth is different,
But don't cry, Mother
And if you would like to seek your child
Look for the ashes in the fields of Birkenau
They'll be there, so look for the ashes
In the fields of Auschwitz,
In the woods of Birkenau,
Mama, look for the ashes, I'll be there!
Monika Domlke
Born 1920

As they walked into the green park bordering the camp, Alexander began, “In the morning of August 12, 1940, about a year after the German invasion, I walked down to Florian's Gate. The plaza there held a sort of unofficial market, a place where people gathered with things to buy or sell. I was looking for a pair of pants and a pair of shoes. Things were getting steadily worse, especially with respect to supplies. It was becoming harder and harder to find food and simple things like clothes. So that particular morning I went by myself on the streetcar to Florian's Gate.

“It was not a licensed market, so many sharp city people would wait there to take advantage of people coming in from the countryside, looking for wares they could not find in their villages. For example, a man would stand with one shoe held high up over his head until someone came by and asked how much for it. He would perhaps reply, two hundred zloty. They would bargain, and settle on maybe one hundred and fifty, the man would ask for the money, then hand over the one shoe. The country fellow would ask for the other shoe, and the man would say, ah, you want to buy
two?
Why didn't you say so? That will be another hundred and fifty zloty. A lot of small-time shysters like that operated around the gate. I suppose that was why the Nazis chose this place to make one of their sweeps.”

They arrived at the looming metal gates. Jeffrey paused to look down the gravel path running between double rows of
fencing and concrete pylons. He stood there a moment, willing himself to turn to steel, harden himself against whatever awaited him inside. Then they entered.

To his left were several red-brick barracks. To his right was the wood and brick camp kitchen. The camp itself was neat and orderly and incredibly silent given the number of people walking the paths. The loudest sound was that of wind rustling in the tall trees. Jeffrey walked the rock-lined path and felt grateful for Alexander's droning voice. Otherwise the silence might have smothered him.

“That particular morning, as the trams approached that side of town, they were being stopped by the German police—the
Schutzpolizei,
not the Gestapo. It was the first time this had happened in the city, the very first time. Eventually the Polish people came to call such sweeps by the name of
Lapanka,
the trap. But that morning it was too new, and there was no name. All we knew was that the tram was stopped and we were forced to get off.”

The renovated prison blocks were red-brick two-story, utterly featureless constructions. Jeffrey followed Alexander's lead and stopped in front of one labeled
Block 4—Extermination Exhibit.
As he climbed the stairs with Alexander, he imagined the walls to be weeping blood.

“They started checking documents,” Alexander continued, leading them down a bare whitewashed corridor. “I had documents, not real documents, saying that I was a gardener's helper. Documents saying one had work were most important. They looked at them and told me to step aside, along with several dozen other men. A few minutes later these covered trucks arrived and we were loaded up. We were not told anything, nothing at all. Not where we were going, or why we were selected, or how long we would be away. Nothing.”

The first room showed wall-sized black-and-white photographs of the transport story, remarkably clear in their frozen portrayal of agony on one side and stiff military indifference on the other. Trains expelled masses of people; children
stared with frozen fear at the camera, or were hustled through barbed-wire gates, or clung to their mothers' skirts, or wailed in timeless terror.

Alexander walked beside him, viewing everything, seeing nothing. “I cannot say I was particularly scared. Age certainly had something to do with it. I was sixteen at the time, you see, and at that age your own death is something quite difficult to imagine. It is very hard to look further than that day, or that week, to what might lie beyond, or what might be on other people's minds.”

The next barracks greeted them with a sign that said in French, Russian, Polish and English:
This barracks houses all that remained of the victims' belongings and was found after the camp's liberation.
Jeffrey entered the first room, and found himself facing a wall of glass. Beyond it stretched forty feet of brushes. Shaving brushes. Hairbrushes. Shoebrushes. Toothbrushes.

“We were first taken to old Polish military barracks near the city,” Alexander went on in his ceaseless drone. “On the way, I wrote a note to my mother on a scrap of paper, putting down her address and saying what had happened, that I was taken by the Germans and I didn't know where I was going or why, but that I would try to let her know. I threw three or four of them out from beneath the canvas covering on the truck, and the remarkable thing is that my mother received every one of them. I learned later that people picked them up, read the address I had scribbled, and took them to my mother. Every single one. When we left the barracks and were taken by trucks to the railroad station, I wrote several more, just dropping them outside the truck on the road. Again she got every single one.”

In the next room was another glass wall with yet another pile, this one of metal bowls. Thousands and thousands and thousands of bowls.

Another room, another glass wall, another display—this one of crutches and prosthetic limbs and back braces. A
wooden hand made for a child, with fingers perhaps two inches long, reached out to Jeffrey across the years.

“At the station they put sixty or seventy of us into a cattle car. At that time they weren't taking women to Auschwitz, only men. We had one container with water, and another for waste, with straw on the floor. It was a most unpleasant voyage. It was extremely crowded, and it stank horribly. There were Germans with machine-gun placements on the roofs of each car, and every time we came to a crossing where the train stopped, some people would try to escape. The Germans would machine-gun them, then go out and pick up their bodies and throw them back into the cattle cars with the rest of us.”

Upstairs there were no rooms, just one long hall with glass walls to either side. Half of the entire floor was filled with shoes. Men's, women's, children's, babies' shoes—piled to the ceiling in a broken array of lost possessions and lost lives.

“We arrived at Auschwitz on August 15, 1940,” Alexander continued. “They divided us up into rows of five and began marching us toward the camp. At that time there was only the one camp. Birkenau had not even been started yet. So we were marched across to the main camp, and through this big iron gate. Above the gate was written in big iron letters the words
Arbeit Macht Frei
—‘Work makes you free.' So all of us thought we had been conscripted for a labor camp. It was still early enough that the truth about Auschwitz was not yet publicly known, you see. Perhaps there were rumors floating around, but they had not made their way down to the ears of a sixteen-year-old boy. Or to my fellows, for that matter. It did not even occur to us that we were being brought into an extermination camp.”

The second floor's other half was given over to suitcases, turned upward to shout the names of those unable to claim them. Frank of Holland. Birmann of Hamburg. Ludwig of Baruch, Israel. Eva Pander of Recklinghausen. Gescheit of
Berlin. Else Meier of Cologne. Helene Lewandowski of Poland.

“So they brought us into this central square. I suppose our transport held fifteen or sixteen hundred people. It took a very long time for them to process us. We had to go to one place where we had to leave all our clothing. Everything. Then to another place where they shaved us completely. Our heads, our bodies, everything. Then we were forced to bathe, and then given these Auschwitz pajamas. That is what I thought of them, those striped camp suits. We were left barefoot.”

At the end of the chamber, diagonal to the suitcases, was a deep narrow display of baby clothing. Jeffrey simply had to turn away.

“Already some pretty terrible things were happening right there and then on the square. It appeared that the Germans wanted to see how people reacted to various situations. We had not eaten for twenty-four hours. So what they did was set out twenty or thirty large loaves of bread, heavy Polish bread, and then tell the people to come forward and take some. But every time people stepped forward, the Germans with their heavy boots and guns would beat them. The soldiers were laughing and joking as they did so, treating it as great sport. Still, because the people were so hungry, some would try to grab a handful, and they were beaten very badly.”

Another downstairs room had two glass walls. One displayed Jewish prayer shawls hung from wooden frames whose outstretched fabric cried for attention. The second held a cobwebbed mass of eyeglasses, their thousands of lenses gathered in the case's forefront to peer silently into Jeffrey's aching heart.