The Many Writings of

I know it's been an age since I put any new written material on the web site. Here is something that deals with my recent experience at Auschwitz in August 2009.

Gravity is higher in Poland. Everything feels heavier there. The simple act of walking feels laborious; each step takes effort. The sorrow of millions has sunk into the earth of Poland and clings to your feet like iron and glue. Nowhere is that feeling greater than in the ground of Auschwitz.

I had been afraid of the place all my life. It was the stuff of my childhood nightmares – recurring dreams of relentless pursuit, capture, and death – long before I heard the ghoulish stories or saw the gut-churning photos taken by meticulous Nazis of their gaunt victims.

I have other connections to Poland. I married a Polish woman. We adopted a child from a sour-smelling orphanage in the northern Polish town of Mrongovo nearly twenty years ago. When she graduated from high school, a feat in itself considering her disabilities, her one request was to meet her birth mother, a nearly toothless retarded woman who lives in a filthy, overcrowded room in a hamlet not far from the orphanage.

Honoring our daughter’s request was going to take money we didn’t have, so we had to make the most of the trip. One of my wife’s relatives was to be married in late August, so we timed the trip to coincide with the wedding. We would do our Polish relatives great honor by coming from America to attend the ceremony and lavish reception. To get the cheapest airfares, we opted for dates that left a week between meeting the birth mother and the wedding.

“What would you like to do? Is there anywhere you’d like to go?” my wife asked. Without thinking, I said, “I want to go to Auschwitz.” A puzzled look came over her round face. “Really?” she asked. “Yes,” I said. “Okay,” she said. “It’s very near Krakow, in the south. Krakow is beautiful - a medieval city. I think you’ll enjoy it.”

“I won’t make you or the kids come with me to Auschwitz,” I said.

“Don’t be silly,” she said. “I was there twenty-five years ago, but I’ll go with you. We all will.” And so it was set.

In the months before the trip, I had the recurring vertiginous feeling that I was about to do something that might kill me, like base-jumping off a sheer cliff. I told friends where I was going, and most of them reacted much like my wife had. “Really?” they’d say, with that same puzzled expression my wife had worn when I told her. Their puzzlement mirrored my own. Why, I asked myself, do I want to do this? It wasn’t like dancing with the devil. No, it was more like sitting down for lunch with him. It was like calling Freddie Krueger and asking him out for a date. Just the name of the place – Auschwitz – made my stomach turn inside out. Every time the word came out of my mouth, every time I announced, “I’m going to Auschwitz,” a certain queasy incredulity crept through me. An illogical yet very noisy part of me wasn’t at all certain that I could or would survive close proximity to something so horrific. Even though the death camp is now a museum and the tormentors and their victims are dead and gone, I was terrified and confused at my impulsive decision to go there.

On the outskirts of Oswiecim, the Polish town from which the Germans extracted the name Auschwitz, traffic on the two-lane road was bottlenecked at a traffic circle. We inched forward for miles while I anxiously scanned the landscape for something I’d recognize from photos. All I saw, aside from traffic, was green fields, gentle hills, and patches of woods. Then, a road sign indicated a turnoff for the Auschwitz-Birkenau museum. My heart gave a jolt as I remembered that it was really two separate places, two killing fields instead of one. Birkenau, or Auschwitz II, was the larger, more efficient extermination camp, built after the Nazis had streamlined and perfected their mass murder and disposal techniques at Auschwitz.

The road signs for the museum were becoming more frequent, with arrows and directions I couldn’t read, and my heart sped up as we passed each one. I briefly considered calling off the excursion, just saying forget it and heading on to Krakow. Finally there was a sign directing us to a parking lot half-filled with cars and tour busses. I was mildly surprised that other people would come here, as I had, on purpose, and that we would not be the only ones walking the grounds. What surprised me more was that the death camp was not out in a field, isolated somehow from civilization. It abutted a quiet residential neighborhood, the apartment buildings across the street facing the stockade fences and guard towers.

It was a warm, sunny day – not the kind of weather I associated with the grimness of the place or its purpose. The last English-speaking tour had already left, so we could wander about at our own speed. I wondered how someone could work as a tour guide there, treading that unnaturally heavy, sorrow-laden earth and recounting the horrors that had taken place on a daily basis. It seemed like an awful job.

Seeing the infamous wrought iron gate, with the morbidly ironic words “Arbeit Macht Frei” – Work Makes You Free – over the entrance, made my stomach clench. What little I’d eaten that day was threatening to eject itself onto the dirt road that led through the gate. Determined to capture the essence of our trip, I’d borrowed a video camera, and I forced myself to zoom in and linger on those three words. I had the sudden sensation of having walked through this gate before, as a tattooed and starving prisoner.

I looked around me. Despite the people moving about, there was a stillness and silence to the place, a combination of the respect of those visiting, and something else, something that hung there like an invisible blanket, dampening sound. As I panned, I framed my wife and two daughters, and another chill went through me. I was in this terrible place with my family, as I felt, at that moment, I had been before, but in that time before we had been torn from each other and led off to agonizing deaths without dignity.

My shoes crunched on the gravel as we moved slowly from one neat, numbered brick building to the next, each one holding an inventory of calculated humiliation and death. I could feel that strange gravity pulling at my feet, as if the blood and sorrow that had so thoroughly soaked this earth clung to each step.

In between two of the buildings in one corner of the camp was a courtyard. At the far end, built against the brick wall connecting the two buildings, was the execution wall. I guess it had been erected to protect the brick behind it from the impacts of the thousands and thousands of bullets that had first passed through bodies. Thick on the ground in front of it were flowers, candles, votive urns, and messages of regret written in dozens of languages.

Standing in front of that ugly, obscenely practical bullet-stopping barrier, the force of that strange, increasing gravity rose and pulled me to my knees. I sang a prayer in a choked and tremulous voice. That same heaviness pulled the tears from me and I sobbed, not caring who might be watching me, my tears spattering on the dusty brown earth, joining the uncounted millions that had been shed here. I picked up a small stone and held it for a moment, feeling its warmth and weight, and put it in a crack in the execution wall, where it sat among dozens of others, tiny signifiers, markers of apology. A part of me was amazed that I could be in this place, surrounded by it, that I could touch with my hands its evil artifacts and still be breathing, still be alive. The voices of the dead rose in a ragged chorus, a dry sussuration that seemed to say – “Make it right.”

Make it right? How could any one person make this, this terrible wrong, right? I looked up to see the tall, graceful linden trees that stood just outside the walls, rising up to remind me of the world outside them and the beauty that stopped short at the lines of razor wire, as if in mute and absolute refusal to participate in what had happened here. Not even weeds grew in this ground, perhaps held in check by that fierce gravity.

At last I stood, struggling against the grip of the earth. I turned to see an Italian church group, led by a priest, which had gathered behind me as I knelt and was now singing a mass in honor of the slain. The plaintive melody, carried on dozens of soft voices melded with the whispers of the dead. With heavy, shambling feet, I edged around the crowd and cleared the yard between the buildings.

I found my family sitting in the sun, waiting for me, concerned frowns on their faces at my red eyes and runny nose. “Are we done?” their looks seemed to say. I took my wife’s hand and we visited several more of the orange brick buildings, all turned into museums of the unspeakable where everyday objects took on a terrible resonance for their sheer numbers. Fourteen thousand pairs of shoes, occupying an entire floor, mountains of suitcases, hair brushes, pots and pans, crutches and prosthetic legs, eyeglasses in tangled mounds of wire and broken glass, prayer shawls – heaps of shrieking evidence wrenched from their murdered owners - evidence of evil beyond my dimming comprehension, evidence of the cold, methodical cruelty of the murderers themselves. The hot lava of rage and sadness felt ready to burst from my chest.

We walked down one of the long dirt and gravel streets between the orderly rows of buildings and the double rows of electrified barbed wire. At the end of the street, the short, square smokestack of the crematorium stood out against the clear blue sky of a perfect summer afternoon. The weight of my body seemed to increase again as we neared the thick-walled building that also housed the Nazi gas chamber. The holes in the roof into which the poison gas had been poured had long ago been plugged. Next to it stood the gallows where the head of the SS had been executed after the war, and I was fiercely glad that his last sight had been of his own handiwork. I wondered if he had been proud at the last, or if he had felt bitterness, knowing that he had failed in his carefully calculated and catalogued attempt at genocide. I hoped that it had been the latter.

The door stood open, an ugly black hole that sucked in all life indiscriminately, and rendered it into gritty, mordant ash. It was a vortex, and had its own gravitic center, with a pull even greater than the earth beneath it. I entered the dark space, caught in the grip of its magnetism, seized with the sudden chill held in by the thick gray walls. Down a short hallway, a sharp left, and I was standing in the epicenter of hell, lit by two dim ceiling bulbs and a dozen votive candles in the center of the floor. No sound entered from the outside, and the only sounds in that place were the soft reverberant shuffles of our shoes on the rough concrete. The whispering voices of the legions of the dead were loud here. “Make it right!” they insisted. As I stood in the sepulchral silence, I had the vision of people, families, parents and children, old and young, forced naked into this horrible room until it was stuffed to the walls, clinging to each other and crying out as they died, still standing. I died here, I thought. My family died here. We all died here in fear and helplessness. There were not enough tears in the world for this. How was it possible to make it right? The dead would not be raised, nor would they be restored.

And then I was standing in another space, staring into the grated mouths of cold, open ovens. On steel tracks leading to the charred openings were black cast-iron gurneys, gleaming in the semidarkness, each just wide and long enough to hold a human corpse. They were purpose-built, these evil fucking machines, crafted only for the efficient disposal of the freshly dead. The whispered imprecations of the slain had become a roaring in my ears, and the roiling lava in my chest rose and gushed out as scalding, bitter tears. “I’m so sorry,” I said to the dead as I forced my leaden body back out into the light, “I’m so terribly sorry, but I cannot possibly make this right.”

I found a spot in the open air and sat heavily. My body shook and the magma of tears refused to stop and my family held me and let me sob. “It’s okay,” they said. “No. No, it’s not okay,” I said.

As we left Auschwitz, I could feel my body beginning to lighten, although the tendrils of vague recollection, like a mist, clung to me. I could still hear the rustlings of the dead. They stayed with me, those quiet rustlings, and they invaded my dreams. They would wake me each night, when the night itself was at its most somnolent, and I would lie awake, bathed in sweat, listening to their inchoate scratchings. I would stare into the darkness, feeling again that aching gravity, that insistent downward pull. It seemed impossible to continue to live and breathe and still contain the terrible scope of this willful wasting of precious humanity. My heart felt as though it might stop beating at any moment from the sheer enormity of this wrong, and my sadness and anger threatened to overwhelm me at odd moments. I could barely bring myself to speak of it, and when I tried, my trusty voice would spasm and squeak and I could only express myself through what seemed like a never ending supply of tears.

The dreams continued. Some were the vivid, panicked dreams of my childhood – pursuit, capture, and death. Some were new. I’d look down at my arm and see a row of crudely drawn numbers etched into the skin, surrounded by pale blue veins. These visions invaded my waking hours at odd moments –brief disconnected flashes that left me stunned and blinking back tears that hadn’t been there only seconds before.

I called my friends and asked for help, an act as unfamiliar as flying. Reaching out and admitting my pain was a clear violation of my life’s rules, in which everything was always okay if anyone asked. I told them the truth, that I was in strange and hostile territory, and needed them. Underneath the night sweats and the disorienting panic, something was happening to me. The numb space in my chest, the place that I was aware of only when it ached, was beginning to pulse with a new insistence, demanding my attention.

What was this? Ever since I could remember, this place where I assumed a heart lived had been clad in its own hard containment. But something, some piece of the shell had cracked, broken somehow by the terrible hammer of Auschwitz. I had, after all, prayed for most of life to have the thick wall around my heart melt, to feel love and pain and joy, to feel the lush pulse of life as it ran through me. And it was finally happening, but I felt mostly terror and confusion rather than the warm connectedness to all of life that I had envisioned as the result of an open heart.

And it came to me, with the help of my angels, my healers, my friends, that in order to dissolve the steel around my heart and the rage inside it, I had to forgive all that I had seen, all that I had felt, and all the fury I had brought into this life from that last terrifying inferno.

The awful sadness that I had brought home like an extra piece of luggage was not, in itself, the lesson. I had been afraid to let go of that sadness, fearing that I would somehow lose the lesson, whatever it was, in the process. Pieces of it, that sadness, had been forming and reforming in my mind since we, my family and I, had walked together out of the death camp. “But this time, you walked out, and you all walked out together,” one of my friends reminded me. “You’re here now. You don’t ever have to go back there again, even in your mind. Just remember that. This time you walked out. Now you need to forgive. You need to forgive God, and yourself, and everyone else.”

She was right. This time I had walked out, and freedom from a lifetime of dimly remembered soul pain was at last within my reach. All I had to do was forgive. Everything. Everyone. Always. That alone, I realized, would make it right. That was the lesson. Without it, life would be nothing but unendurable rage and grief. Gradually, the dry chorus of the dead would cease, but the task would remain.
 
PS:
Because I know a little bit of history and still, despite myself, watch the news, I am aware that genocidal atrocities didn’t end with Hitler, and although the death camps remain as nauseating reminders to the human race, we continue, on a daily basis, to countenance crimes against humanity on an epic scale. Right now, somewhere on this sorry orb, one group of people is doing its best to grind another group of people into dust, motivated by the same ignorance and hate that created Auschwitz. The power of darkness, the viciousness of which we all seem capable, is on constant display. The killing fields are everywhere, and the blood of innocents continues to saturate the earth. Forgiveness seems to be a monumental, ongoing, and nearly impossible task, yet I know it must be so. Without it, we are an unredeemable world of savages.