Too Many Men (60 page)

The Mercedes that was waiting for them was a medium-size Mercedes.

“This is not such a big one what the other one,” Edek said. “That’s true,”

Ruth said. She felt she was becoming a connoisseur of Mercedes.

“Do you want to sit in front with the driver?” Ruth said.

“No,” Edek said. “This time I will sit with you.” They got into the car.

There was something soothing about the plush comfort of a Mercedes, Ruth thought.

T O O M A N Y M E N

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“You are going to the Auschwitz Museum?” the driver said.

“No,” Ruth said. The driver turned around. “We are going to the Auschwitz death camp,” she said to him. “Could you remember that?” The driver nodded. Edek looked uncomfortable. “What is it such a big deal what he calls the camp?” he said. “It is still the same what happened there.” Ruth didn’t answer. She wished she wasn’t so bothered by what anybody called it. It seemed so petty next to anything else connected with the camp.

“I’ve brought some water with me in case we get thirsty,” she said to Edek. She showed him the water she had packed in a bag, together with some bananas and pears. Edek looked at the bananas and pears.

“What for did you bring so much fruit?” he said.

“It’s only four pears and four bananas,” she said.

“You are not going to be hungry in Auschwitz,” Edek said. “You do not eat in the hotel where there is such a good buffet. You think that you are going to eat in Auschwitz?” He shook his head.

“I brought some chocolate for you, too,” she said. She took out a block of Wedel’s semibitter dark chocolate.

“Thank you,” Edek said. He still looked bewildered.

Ruth understood her father’s bewilderment. After all, they weren’t setting out for a picnic. She had realized when she started to pack the pears and bananas and chocolate that she associated Auschwitz with starvation, and it was hard to separate that association from the present. She didn’t tell Edek about the dried apricots and dates in her backpack. She had felt as though she were packing for a trek through the Himalayas, or somewhere equally difficult to get out of in an emergency. It was a strange thought for her to have, as the Himalayas were as far removed from anything in her life as it was possible to be. She knew that they were mountains. Mountains in Kashmir, Tibet, and Nepal. But that scrap of knowledge was the only thing she knew about the Himalayas.

“I’ve hired a guide to take us through Auschwitz and Birkenau,” Ruth said to Edek.

“You did hire a guide?” Edek said. “What for?” he said. “We don’t need a guide.” He looked offended. As though Ruth had invited someone who would intrude on what was his terrain. Ruth understood his concern.

She had hesitated before hiring the guide, but the thought of her and Edek

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wandering around Auschwitz trying to identify what could never be identified had frightened her. Somehow a guide had made Auschwitz seem tra-versable.

“I could walk there with my eyes shut,” said Edek.

“I know,” she said.

“Especially Birkenau where I was most of the time.”

“If you don’t like the guide, I’ll tell him to leave,” Ruth said.

“Okay,” Edek said. “Maybe about the main camp at Auschwitz we will learn something from this guide.”

Ruth wondered if her mother had talked to Edek about Auschwitz.

Ruth had assumed that Rooshka had, but every time Ruth mentioned something about this time in Rooshka’s life, Edek didn’t appear to know.

Maybe when Edek and Rooshka found each other again, after the war, what had happened to each of them was the last thing they wanted to talk about.

“Mum was in Auschwitz,” Edek said. “And I was in Birkenau.”

“I know,” Ruth said.

“They was two miles apart,” Edek said. “And there was not much news between the camps. I could find out nothing about Mum. I did not know if she was dead or alive.” He shook his head. He looked miserable. Ruth felt worried. Maybe she shouldn’t have brought him here. Maybe this whole trip had been a mistake.

“Are you all right?” she said.

“I am all right,” he said.

“We don’t have to go,” she said.

“We are on our way already,” Edek said.

It was a forty-minute drive to Auschwitz from Kraków. Ruth looked at her watch. They must be halfway there. They had passed two road signs to Auschwitz. Both signs said AUSCHWITZ MUSEUM. They passed another one: AUSCHWITZ MUSEUM, 30 KILOMETERS. “Death camp” was clearly a term to be avoided in Poland. They drove in silence. Ruth wondered what Edek was thinking about. She didn’t want to ask. She was glad that he was able to be quiet. Auschwitz was a place you didn’t want to be catapulted into in the middle of conducting a series of jocular conversations. Catapulted out into.

That’s what they all had been. All the Jews. Soon she and Edek would be there. Quietly, of their own accord.

T O O M A N Y M E N

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Ruth felt hungry. She got out a banana and ate it. It was a sweet, ripe banana. It tasted good. She had brought a separate bag for the banana peel.

Edek looked at her. “The whole time we been in Poland you don’t eat. You eat compote and bird stuff,” he said. “Now, on the way to Auschwitz, you are eating. Sometimes I think you are crazy.”

“Maybe,” she said. Edek was smiling. Ruth knew he didn’t mean crazy, crazy. Lunatic crazy. Just crazy beyond what seemed the norm to him. She ate another banana.

“We are arriving at the Auschwitz Museum,” the driver said.

“The Auschwitz death camp,” Ruth said.

“Yes,” the driver said. He turned off the road. “I will wait in the car park for you,” he said.

All Ruth could see from the car was car park. A large, already crowded car park. There were coaches and vans and cars and taxis parked in the car park. It was not what Ruth had expected to arrive at. It looked more like a car park for Disneyland or another theme park. Groups of drivers were standing together, smoking. Busloads of tourists were alighting from streamlined coaches. It was a disturbing sight. “I described us to the guide,” she said to Edek.

They got out of the car. Edek straightened up and looked around him.

“It does not smell,” he said. He sniffed the cold air. “The smell is gone,” he said. “We did say the smell would never go away.” They walked toward a sign that said MUSEUM ENTRANCE. Ruth looked up. They were in front of the entrance gates to Auschwitz. The
ARBEIT MACHT FREI
sign was just in front of them. She gasped. The wrought-iron sign woven across the top of the gates looked so small. In photographs it always loomed so large. An image that had presided over so much horror. An image so blatant in its mockery. These gates, this sign, had seemed monumental to Ruth. They had signified so much. A symbol of so much that was impossible to comprehend. Ruth was shocked at how small the gates were. Almost domestic in scale. Average industrial-size gates. They were too small, she thought.

They should have been bigger, for all the damage they had wrought. She had expected them to almost touch the sky.

She stood and looked at the sign.
ARBEIT MACHT FREI
. Freedom Through Work. What a joke. The freedom had been in death. If death was a freedom. She started to cry. She couldn’t bear the proximity to these gates. She

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wanted to run away. “There is nothing to cry about today, Ruthie,” Edek said. “It did already happen. It is too late to cry.” But she couldn’t stop.

Tears poured down her face. How could they have fed so many people through these gates? How could they have ushered them through to their death? Shepherded them in. Assembled them for an assembly line, where they were stripped and packed and dismantled and shipped to the sky. It had just been a job for the Germans. A job they carried out in a workmanlike, if harsh, manner. They were hard workers, the Germans. They did what had to be done. This slaughterhouse was far more efficient than most of the world’s abattoirs.

Images of long lines of Jews filled Ruth’s head. Long lines of Jews on the unloading ramp in Auschwitz. Small children holding their mother’s hands.

Babies being carried. Sisters clinging to each other. Mothers and daughters trying to stay together. She wept and wept. Edek started to cry. They stood in front of the
ARBEIT MACHT FREI
sign and wept.

Ruth tried to pull herself together. “We won’t get very far,” she said to Edek, “if we disintegrate before we’re even in the gate.” Disintegrate.

That’s what had happened to all the Jews. Their bodies had disintegrated.

Disintegrated into charred remains. Sharp fragments of bone, pieces of teeth, bits of gristle, deposits of minerals, unidentifiable particles of organic matter. Dehydrated and blackened remains. The shavings and shards of people. The ash that was left of the Jews was dumped in the Vistula River.

It almost choked the river.

“I am not going to disintegrate,” Edek said.

A man walked up to Ruth and Edek. “Rothwax?” he said.

“That’s us,” said Ruth.

“I am your guide, Jerzy Branicki,” he said. Jerzy Branicki looked okay, Ruth thought. He was about seventy and had a sensitive face.

“I’ll go and buy the entrance tickets,” Ruth said to Jerzy.

“You do not need to,” he said. “It is not necessary to pay to go into Auschwitz.”

“That’s good,” she said. The irony of paying to get into Auschwitz had not escaped her.

“My daughter is not saying good because she can’t afford it,” Edek said.

“Jerzy probably understood that,” Ruth said.

“Of course,” said Jerzy.

T O O M A N Y M E N

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“I did just want to make sure,” Edek said.

Ruth looked at her father. He seemed quite wide-eyed to be where he was. As though he couldn’t quite believe it. She was having trouble believing it herself. A slight drizzle of rain began. Ruth was glad it was a dull gray, wet day. She wouldn’t have wanted to see Auschwitz in sunshine. A sign near the front entrance of the building said AUSCHWITZ MUSEUM. Ruth was furious. Why did everyone insist on using the word “museum”?

“Why can’t they just say death camp?” she said to Edek.

“It is a museum, inside,” Jerzy said. “There are exhibits on display in the former death camp.”

Ruth said to him, “This is not a museum. The Museum of Modern Art is a museum, the Museum of Natural History is a museum, the Guggen-heim Museum is a museum. This is not a museum. This is a death camp.”

Jerzy shrugged his shoulders.

“What does it matter what it is called?” Edek said to Ruth. “It is still the same place.”

“It is easier for people to believe it is something else, something abstract, if it’s called a museum,” Ruth said. “They can forget that it was a place for the slaughter of human beings.”

“Which people, Ruthie, is so interested in Auschwitz?” Edek said.

“Look at how many visitors are here today,” she said.

“Those what do come here know it is not the Luna Park they are going to visit,” Edek said. “It does not matter what they do call it.”

Inside the first building, there were signs to the public toilets. And a cafeteria. Of course, museums needed cafeterias, Ruth thought. The cafeteria sold drinks and sweets and cakes and several hot dishes, including sausages. The whole room smelled of food. There seemed to be something wrong about a cafeteria in a place of starvation. Several Polish schoolboys were jostling at the counter of the cafeteria. They were buying cans of Coca-Cola.

Ruth and Edek and Jerzy began to walk. Jerzy started to give them statistics about the prisoners. “Would you mind if we walk quietly,” Ruth said.

“We’ll ask you if we need any questions answered.” Jerzy looked momentarily annoyed. Ruth didn’t care.

Everything in the former death camp looked so clean and neat. Almost nondescript. Nonthreatening. As harmless as the average, standard housing

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development that it resembled. A sign of a skull with the word “Halt” and the Polish word for halt,
stój
, was the only sign of anything ominous. Jerzy hovered around Ruth and Edek. She regretted that she had hired him.

Ruth had a copy of the official guidebook to Auschwitz with her. It was published by the State Museum in Oswie˛cim, the town renamed Auschwitz by the Germans. The guidebook, where Ruth had first seen that guides were available, stated on the inside front cover that the museum was open but no guide service was provided on days when “mass manifestations announced by the radio and press take place.” What did they mean? Ruth thought as she walked through Auschwitz. Manifestations of what? A manifestation was the indication of the existence or presence of something. The existence or presence of what was the guidebook referring to? No lice had survived, no fleas. Were they expecting manifestations of ghosts or wraiths or spirits? These would hardly be announced in the press.

Ruth and Edek and Jerzy walked along one of the central paths. The path was lined with brick barracks on both sides. The cleanliness and neat-ness was disorienting. Auschwitz, cleaned up and turned into a tourist venue, looked like an ordinary, English working-class estate. Ruth was disturbed by the absence. The absence of dirt, filth, stench, stink. The absence of cruelty. The absence of suffering. She’d expected to see the suffering in the air, on the ground, in the walls, and on every fence.

The museum was closed on twenty-fifth of December and on Easter Sunday the small guidebook had said. Ruth had wanted to write to the publishers and point out that the death camp they referred to as a museum was never closed even for these most holy of Catholic holidays.

Block 10 was being restored. The restoration work looked like the renovation of any middle-class dwelling. There was scaffolding around the building and ladders and workers’ tools. Block 10 was where Mengele and the other SS doctors performed medical experiments on Jewish women.

Ruth stopped outside Block 10. It looked like such an innocuous building.