In Paradise: A Novel (12 page)

H
E NEEDS TO SORT OUT
crumpled feelings before joining the others at Birkenau; perhaps he’ll feel better if he pays his respects at what may have been the final station of his mother’s cross. The last prisoners in the Cracow ghetto, he has read, were transported to Auschwitz-Birkenau in August 1942, so Emmeline Allgeier and her mother and young sister (known as “Peek,” according to his father) would have arrived before the railway was extended through the tunnel into the camp and the platforms built to accommodate the horde of Jewish prisoners from Greece and Hungary. Before that, they would have been off-loaded at the original terminal, the so-called
Judenrampe
, which must still be out there in the buffer zone between the
Lager
and the town. Somewhere a spur must branch off from the main line; the junction can’t be very far from where this farm road crosses the tracks.

Just beyond that point, he follows a broken disused road that roughly parallels the tracks; it passes north along a wall of thorn and bramble, emerging eventually in an abandoned railway yard of frost-split broken concrete paving and wind-banged rusty sheds. Here, sure enough, a spur splits off from the main line in the direction of the
Lager
. In the fork, still monitoring the junction, stands what looks like a defunct whistle-stop, a nondescript blockhouse of dirty industrial concrete with one cobwebbed broken window.

Across the yard where the spur disappears into the overgrowth, he enters a narrow lane between walls of thicket. Glimpsed through the branch tops, a slow freight rumbles past on the main line. Farther on, around a wooded bend, the lane skirts a cluster of knocked-down dwellings overwhelmed by weed trees, saplings, hawthorne—presumably one of the condemned rural communities in the no-man’s-land surrounding the new camp, torn down and scavenged by those famished prisoners for its wood and bricks. Not far beyond, the spur reappears on open ground—the original terminus, the
Judenrampe
. On the tracks, still coupled, stand two short-bodied red cattle cars, darkened by weather.

The wooden cars sit oddly high above the platform (the children, he thinks, and the elderly and the disabled must have landed hard) and the bolted doors evoke at once the doors in the SS photographs of the disgorged cargos, the confused figures amidst piles of old suitcases and bundles and the knapsacked children whose yellow stars, deathly white in those old prints, loom so large on the dark suits of those little boys wearing neckties and knickers, the better to make a favorable impression at their destination.

N
OT A STONE’S THROW
from the cattle cars, a sulphur-yellow cottage with orange-red tile roof squats on bare clay. On its farther side, a brick patio still under construction has a matchless prospect of Birkenau’s main tower, a mile away across low swampy ground crisscrossed by crows. The entrance, like a huge black grotto at this distance, looks more than ever like a cave. In the early days, in every weather, the doomed were driven all that way across that mile on foot, ragged lines of reeling figures dragging those last precious belongings they’d been ordered to bring with them. On some unknown date, perhaps not long after his own safe arrival in North America, Emi Allgeier and her mother and her little sister Peek must have walked that road.

A young man clutching a blueprint appears around the corner of the house, and seeing Olin, grins. But Olin turns on him, exclaiming, “My God, man, why in hell would you wish to live in such a place?” He is pointing at the Cave, the tower, the red wall.

The young man stares at this intruder who dares berate him in archaic Polish. His face closes. Stolid, he considers the death camp tower and the gate.

“Mirek? Oh hell. Listen, I’m sorry.”

“Because it’s cheap,” says Mirek. He points at a second cottage under construction in the trees beyond. “Good mortgages out here, too.” He rolls up his blueprint, heads for the other house, not looking anymore at the guest of Poland.

F
ROM THE
J
UDENRAMPE,
the rails disappear into thorn thicket. Finding no path, he walks an earthen dike across the meadow to the new paved road from Oswiecim that comes to the
Lager
by way of a high bridge over the tracks farther down the line. This dike crossing the low ground must be the path taken by his mother and her terrified family, and this
knowing
undoes him, striking down the last of his dispassion.

Emerged from the tunnel, he hurries down the endless platform, gaining on the stragglers as they draw near the memorial terrace between crematoria. From a distance, seen through the gauze of a light snowfall, those dark amorphous figures trudging in that same direction might be the prisoners of long ago, herded toward the wood.

L
EADING THEM THROUGH
the broken gate of #2’s steel fence, the beatific cantor Rabbi Dan is singing in sweet tenor a hymn adapted from the Psalms,
“Pitkhu li shaarei tzedek; avo bam, odeh Yah . . .”
Whispering, Adina translates for Olin’s benefit (“Open for me the Gates of Righteousness, I will enter through and praise the Lord”) as they make their way around the ruin to join a service on the farther side. Invoking the Prayer for the Dead, the congregants surround a rain-filled pit which after fifty years of weather is a greasy pool heavily matted with green-yellow duckweed. Into this pit in the early days, so he has read, the ash produced daily in this single building from an estimated fourteen thousand corpses was dumped before a market for commercial fertilizer could be developed. (“A criminal waste,” hisses Earwig, tossing a scrap of brick into the pond. But he has sense enough today to mutter his ironies under his breath.)

Apparently Father Mikal has forsaken his welcome in Oswiecim to attend this ceremony. On behalf of a Jewish-Christian reconciliation society in Warsaw, he steps forward to express stiff formal hope that their ecumenical retreat in this “Golgotha,” as His Holiness called it on the great occasion of his visit, will help to heal any last schisms between faiths in “our new Poland.” He spreads his arms wide in blessing as the congregation murmurs in approval, and appears discomfited when Sister Catherine steps forward unbidden as soon as he steps back. Olin and Adina exchange a worried glance: the novice’s intense expression signals her opinion that the priest’s pro forma speech at the ash pit of Birkenau’s main crematorium had been inadequate.

The novice sinks onto her knees in the wet snow. In a taut voice, hands lifted in prayer, she begs the Lord’s mercy for those Christian Poles who abetted the oppressors in their hideous cruelties to the Jewish people and the sinful indifference of those high prelates of the Church who knew the truth, yet out of prejudice and cowardice and—worst of all—indifference, failed to protest or attempt to intervene.

Here Sister Ann-Marie forsakes her with a chirrup of dismay, roiling the congregation in the commotion of her flight, but Georgie Earwig, a rare grin lighting his face, is raising clasped hands above his head, and even austere Adina Schreier smiles approval as Catherine, glancing just once at the priest, concludes in a resolute pure voice, “In coming here, may we humbly offer our great sorrow that this dreadful thing was done by Christians in a Christian country.”

The priest glides forward to hover like an avenging angel at a point just off her shoulder; he bends low to speak into her ear. But surely he must know from her demeanor, Olin thinks, that not even a papal edict would suffice to still that voice.

In the silence, Olin lifts his hands, thinking to defend her with applause, but her eyes have found him and her bleak gaze stays him.
I am destroyed
, it says. For a near minute, head sinking to her breast, she remains kneeling in the snow. At the very least, she has gone too far and has frightened herself badly.

A year ago, according to Adina (who has picked the simple brain of Ann-Marie), Catherine was suspended from her teaching ministry and her novitiate for questioning the papal ban against the ordination of women priests. Under the terms of her provisional reinstatement, this public criticism of the priest entrusted with her spiritual guidance makes her vulnerable to another bad report. And this from a man, Olin has noticed, who during his own prayer never touched knee to the muddy ground and is now retreating into the congregation as if to separate himself from a heretic’s ravings.

Rising at last, Sister Catherine is approached by Moishe T., the lone
Ostjude
survivor. Tottering forward, the lachrymose old man takes her hands and peers into her eyes for second after second before turning to the gathering without releasing her. In a thin, scratched voice, he testifies that what he has just heard is the first heartfelt repentance from a Roman Catholic he has experienced in all the years since his own deliverance from hell fifty years before.

When finally old Moishe lets go and moves away, Catherine stands motionless, pale and trembling in the cold, as if a wand must be waved or an ogre slain to break the spell and set her free. Olin longs to go forward and hug her.
Hey, great idea, boy! Go make things worse for her, why don’t you?

Now Priest Mikal is there again. Ignoring the novice, he raises his palms high to command attention, then asks permission to correct a certain inference made here today, that most Catholics in Poland collaborated in the Nazi evil. On the contrary, he says, drawing a paper from his pocket, many would have agreed with the spirit of this leaflet circulated in Warsaw in September 1942, when the stain of a huge genocide was already spreading through the West. That he quotes it from memory suggests to Olin that he has resorted to it often.

The world observes this crime more terrible than any seen by history—and it is silent. The massacre of millions of defenseless people is taking place amid a universal, ominous silence. He who does not condemn condones! We do not have the means to act against the German murderers, we can save no one, but we protest! This protest is demanded of us
by God.

The brave young Catholic who risked her life was imprisoned here in late 1943 but was freed by Russian soldiers a year later: her miraculous survival should be understood by persons of true faith, adds Priest Mikal, as a manifestation of the Lord’s great mercy.