Lone Star (42 page)

“Why didn't they build a crematorium here?” Yvette asked in a much quieter voice.

“Because they learned from Birkenau,” Johnny replied, “that the ovens were not as economical or efficient as the burning pits. After Stalingrad was lost, and the Nazis realized they were on the clock, they quadrupled their efforts. It's not a coincidence that most of the six million Jews died after the Soviets held Stalingrad in January 1943. No time to futz about with ovens.”

“Hannah is right, though,” Denise said. “What are we going to see here if there's nothing to see?”

“Well, there is something to see,” said Johnny. “There is the leveled field in the middle of nowhere with woods all around it. There is a cemetery. And I brought with me a schematic layout of the camp. I'll show you some of how it happened.”

“Isn't there anything there?” Brett pressed on. “Any gas chambers, barracks, station,
anything
?”

“No,” said Johnny. “Nothing but the cemetery. You'll have to imagine the rest.”

They walked. The woods were dark, even at noon, and smelled of rotting plants, sappy pine needles, undergrowth. Chloe became afraid. If ever she might have had a nightmare about a death camp, she couldn't have conceived of anything more frightening than walking four kilometers deep into the empty woods to a forgotten farm where nearly a million people had died.

“Where is everyone?” Denise asked. “Yesterday there were dozens of people at Sobibor.”

“Not here,” Johnny said. “I came here once in the middle of winter, and there was no one here then either.”

“Well, perhaps that's because there's nothing to see,” Brett said.

“I disagree with you, Brett,” said Artie. “I strongly disagree.”

“You have to decide for yourself that question,” Johnny said. “It's probably a philosophical one. Why do you walk up Via Dolorosa to Calvary? Is there something to see? Why do you go inside the Roman Colosseum? Anything there? Gettysburg?” he asked. “Now there's a field for you. Is that all you see when you tour Gettysburg?”

“I get your point,” Brett said, amending. “But couldn't they rebuild some of it so we could imagine it better?”

“They left it as the Germans left it,” Johnny said, “because they thought that would be more telling.”

“Who did you come with in the winter?” Chloe asked him.

“My father,” Johnny replied. “Everything was covered with deep snow. It was deathly quiet.”

“Like now.”

“Quieter. No birds. No insects. No other people but me and him. All you could hear was the dead.”

“Johnny, stop,” Yvette said. “You're making us shiver.”

Chloe didn't want to continue walking. She turned to glance at Mason slightly behind her, at Hannah and even at Blake, who kept his eyes away from her, wouldn't look at her directly. Hannah was pale and slow, and definitely looked as if she didn't want to continue walking. Blake had his arm around her. Mason caught up and squeezed Chloe's hand. “We have railroad ties across our pond. We go there all the time.”

“It's not this.”

They played there as children and teenagers, running on the tracks, pretending the train was just around the corner, and they had mere seconds to jump to safety. That wasn't this. That was child's play. Literally. They skipped on the ties. If you misstepped onto the pebbled sand, you lost. There, they balanced themselves on the rusty rails, pretending they were Olympic gymnasts. Not here. There was no rail here. The tracks had been long demolished. Only the symbols of tracks, ominous wide black ties, ran alongside the path they doggedly trod on. How far was four kilometers? Why did it feel like a day on the trains? Blake wasn't taking any photos. Neither was anyone else. Everyone just wanted to get through it.

Johnny pointed ahead. Finally the clearing.

They walked out into an open field shaped like a polygon, the size of a football field. It was dotted with sharp jagged rocks of varying sizes, like an ocean shore at low tide. In the middle stood a much larger stone, a giant mushroom, cleaved through the center. They stopped, huddled, took a drink of water, looked around while Johnny got out his maps. After a short break, too short by the sounds of Hannah's under-the-breath whining, they
resumed following Johnny, while he told them about what once stood on this ground.

“What you bear witness to here,” Johnny said, “are the best qualities of the German personality corrupted by the terrifying distorting mirror of Hitler's Reich. Accuracy, attention to detail, frugality, cleanliness, all good traits in a nation of hardworking people, were instead applied by Hitler to a crime against mankind. The barracks they built right in this corner for their own living quarters were constructed in an orderly line, as if on a well-planned street. They planted birch trees along their walking paths for aesthetic pleasure and some shade. They carefully leveled the roads with white sand from the nearby quarry. They built comfortable laundry facilities for themselves with well-constructed steps leading to the basin. They even built small fountains for the woodland birds. They had a bakery, a barber, a storage shed, a fuel station. There were gardens, flowers, a little petting zoo! They played music, sang sentimental songs, took pictures of one another. Their natural inclination toward order, toward maps and plans and schematics, was worked out to the last detail.” Johnny smirked. “Except for small problems here and there,” he said. “For example, they didn't have delousing facilities at Treblinka. They had to send the clothes they removed from the Jews to Majdanek for delousing with Zyklon B before shipping them off to Germany.”

“They didn't have Zyklon B here?”

Johnny shook his head. “Only at Birkenau and Majdanek. Here they used carbon monoxide, the exhaust fumes from an internal combustion engine. The efficiency in Treblinka was such that the Germans were able to kill more than a thousand people at once. This tiny place whirred at maximum operation for only a few months in 1943, and yet with these limited facilities, no crematoria, and gas chambers much smaller than Auschwitz, they still managed to kill nearly a million people. Just think about the fury and single-mindedness with which they approached the task entrusted to them.”

“It's impossible!” Artie exclaimed. “The logistics alone are impossible.”

“And yet.”

All Chloe wanted was to turn around and run back to the van. She clasped her flowers. She had promised her grandmother. Moody, crazy like a fox. She must have known what the children would see here before they grew up and became adults. As Chloe meandered through the jagged rocks to the large mushroom-shaped stone structure, she didn't think the Poles needed to make it into a proper memorial. This graveyard almost without markers had a sure and absolute stamp of death in every knowing tree branch, in every falling needle, in every flattened ounce of its loamy soil.

Johnny caught up to Chloe and Mason. “To make the façade as real as they could,” Johnny told them, pointing to the edge of the field, “they built a fake train station, and spent extra time on it, so that the soon-to-die didn't panic any more than they needed to. It was all about maintaining order. They painted a clock on the fake station, which permanently read six o'clock.” With his words, Johnny kept drawing for Chloe invisible things with material weight. “They painted words with destinations. Warsaw, Bialystok, Vilnius. The camp was small, as you see, and they mined the perimeter, and fenced it in, and then fenced off separate sections within the camp. Such as the small cabin with a Red Cross flag on it, where the old and the sick and the weak were taken immediately and shot through the neck above the pit where a fire smoldered. Farther along the fence, only a few hundred feet away, concealed from everything else by fake shrubbery, were the excavation pits, where the ashes and bones of the burned were rolled in wheelbarrows to be buried. Where the
Sonderkommandos
lived, they fenced off that area, too.”

“Who were the
Sonderkommandos
?” Yvette asked. The rest of the group had caught up with Chloe and Mason.

“Good question,” said Johnny. “They were the unlucky Jews to whom fell the task of turning on the gas, of pulling the
gold teeth out of their dead brothers, of removing the jewelry, of carrying the bodies one by one on stretchers to the raised platform onto which they placed them, and of throwing more wood on the fire underneath them.”

“What did the Germans do?”

“Supervised. They didn't like to get their hands dirty. They hated uncleanliness.”

“What happened to the
Sonderkommandos
?”

“Burned with the rest. Replaced by new
Sonderkommandos
.”

They all stopped at a large stone monument with a crack in it like a schism.

Chloe looked around the flat, drab field, the distant trees.

“Everything is out in the open,” Blake said. “I just don't understand how they could have hidden what they were doing from the people they were killing. It seems so hard to hide the truth.” He seemed stuck on this particular point, the deception.

“In the long term, yes,” Johnny said. “But in the short term anyone can do it. As I said, they constructed ingenious fences. A barbed-wire fence, camouflaged with long branches of pine. The fence was six feet tall, so when you were naked and stooped in shame, your eyes to the ground, you didn't see the fire grates and the excavation pit. The Germans placed a flowerpot in front of the entrance to the gas chamber. There was a guy, an SS standing guard, whose sole job was to make sure the pot always had fresh flowers in it, to make the entrance to the showers more hospitable. The Jews were told that after their shower, they would get a hot meal and a ticket out. Chloe, do you want to put down your flowers here, on the place where the flowerpot was?” Johnny asked. “We're standing over that spot. We know this because a Treblinka survivor built a very good model of the camp, which is now in the Holocaust Museum in Kigali. They're hoping to move the model here, if ever they open a museum.”

“Kigali?”

“Yes, Kigali. Rwanda.”

“There's a Holocaust Museum in Rwanda?” Blake asked.

“Apparently a very good one.” Johnny pointed to another area in the far corner of the field. “After the Jews got off at the fake transit station, always accompanied by jaunty, uplifting music from a live orchestra, just like in Birkenau, they shuffled to the undressing square. There was no selection process here as at Auschwitz. Everyone went to the same place—the flowerpot. But to get to it, the Jews had to walk the last distance naked down a narrow walkway called the Tube. It was about four meters wide and eighty meters long, hidden by the pine branch fences. The Germans called the Tube
Himmelfahrtstrasse
. The Road to Heaven. Chloe, let's put your flowers down. Do you want to? You're holding on to them as if you don't. Maybe Blake can take a picture for your grandmother.”

Blake resentfully lifted the Olympus to his face. Chloe could see he didn't want to be told what to do, by Johnny of all people.

“Or I'd be glad to do it,” Johnny said.

“I'll do it,” Blake snapped. Carefully, Chloe placed her roses on the ground near the mushroom stone, next to a menorah and the star of David, alongside other dried and wilted flowers. Chloe knew all too well how long graves can remain unquiet, singly or collectively.

After a few minutes of silence, they left the monument and walked away to explore. Chloe kept hoping for other people to come join them, so the place wouldn't feel so eerie, so tremblingly spooky.

“How long was the camp running, Johnny?” Chloe asked him.

“Treblinka opened on July 22, 1942. The first train arrived the next day, July 23. During the first few months, it took the Germans with their disorganized Ukrainian workers about four hours to kill half the people on the train. But as they expanded the gas chambers, they reduced the time between arrival and excavation pit to ninety minutes. After they became a model of efficiency, they were able to liquidate the entire twenty-car train in four hours. While the last of the Jews were being gassed and
burned, another fifty Jews washed down and cleared the train, which then left Treblinka to make space for the next one already waiting.”

“Why did it close so much earlier than Majdanek?” Denise asked. “Yesterday you told us the Germans barely cleared out of Majdanek before the Soviets arrived.”

“Yes, Treblinka closed nine months earlier, in October 1943.”

“Why?”

Johnny shrugged. His guitar case rose and fell. “All the Jews were dead. The job was done. So they mined everything, leveled it to the ground, filled in the pits, razed the buildings, carted away the rubble. The fence was gone, the station gone. They planted some new trees, built a fake farm, right over the fake station, planted some fake crops, and hired a real Ukrainian to live here and keep the locals away.