A Brief Stop On the Road From Auschwitz (7 page)

So I piece fragments together. If you’re registered as delivered to Auschwitz on August 26, you must have boarded the train at Radogoszcz on August 25 at the latest, possibly a day or two earlier. It’s only just over two hundred kilometers to Auschwitz, but in the Europe of human transports the railroad tracks are overused and the trains overloaded. Sometimes the trains grind to a halt for hours or even days. Some passengers
survive the journey, others do not. Some remain human beings, others do not. So much has already been said about those days and nights in the cattle cars to Auschwitz. And so little. The Germans have no intention of letting anyone survive to say anything, and those who survive don’t know what to say to be believed.

You’ve said nothing, and I have nothing to add.

The only thing I can say with some degree of certainty, thanks to the SS list at Ravensbrück, is that you board a train at Radogoszcz that delivers you to Auschwitz on August 26, 1944. But I don’t know if you’re registered as delivered the same day you get off the train onto the ramp at Auschwitz-Birkenau or not until a few days later. After all, the vast majority of those who get off the train from the Łódź ghetto are never registered because they’re immediately sorted to one side (the left) to be murdered in the gas chambers and incinerated in the crematoriums, all traces of them expunged. The few who are not to be murdered just yet but are to be used as slave labor first have to be sorted again, assigned numbers, and registered as delivered. This must surely take time, possibly several days. If that’s the case, then another fragment can be slotted in, a registration card from a later stop on the journey, which says that you’re in the ghetto in Łódź until August 20, 1944, and in KL Auschwitz from August 21, 1944. That means you’re in KL Auschwitz for a number of days without being delivered. Assuming it’s necessary to make all the fragments fit together.

But that isn’t necessary at all. In this context it makes absolutely no difference on precisely which day you reach Auschwitz. Your journey has no timetable and no direction. You have no exact dates behind you and no exact dates ahead of you. On your journey, exact dates have no function.

It’s me they have a function for. I’m the one who needs them. I’m the one who needs every fragment that can possibly be procured, so I don’t lose sight of you. A fragment that can’t be erased, edited, denied, explained away, destroyed. A date. A list. A registration card. A photograph. The exact names and numbers of the days when your world is liquidated.

Because that’s what’s happening. These are the days when your world is liquidated. When the places and people in whose care you made the world your own are wiped from the face of the earth, blotted out of history, and expunged from memory. The last days in the ghetto are the last days when it’s still possible to experience your world by smelling its scents, hearing its voices, touching it, missing it, fantasizing about it. The ghetto’s a doomed world, a world of gradual degradation and destruction, a world of ever more unrealistic hopes, kept alive by increasingly implausible euphemisms, but it’s a world that still has a past and a future. Just beyond the deadly fences of the ghetto, basically within walking distance, are the house at 36 Piłsudskiego where you grew up, the school you went to, and the places where your cheeks flushed, your eyes glittered, and your dreams were woven. The town’s no longer called Łódź but Litzmannstadt, and the streets have been given German names instead of Polish ones; the houses and apartments where two hundred thousand Jews recently lived have now been taken over by Germans, and little by little all links to the past are being severed, and all links to humanity. So yes, your world is about to be wiped out, and day by day the ghetto is dying, but in apartment 6 at 18 Franciszkańska, near the corner of Brzezińska (which the Germans have renamed Sulzfelderstrasse), there are still some of the people who populated that world, and some of the objects that furnished it (nothing valuable, the Germans have stolen all that,
piece by piece, but still), and maybe a boxful of the links that consolidated it, and no doubt somewhere the photographs that immortalized it. Still living there are your father Gershon, your mother Hadassah, and your youngest brother Salek, and a short distance away, at 78 Lutomierska (Hamburgerstrasse), in apartment 29, your big brother Natek and his young wife Andzia, and in number 26 at the same address Andzia’s father Majlech and mother Cywia. And somewhere out there, most recently heard of in Warsaw, your eldest brother Marek, who is also called Mayer. And with the Staw family in apartment number 3 at 18 Franciszkańska (Franzstrasse, the Germans have decreed), a very pretty girl two years younger than you called Halina or Hala, but more properly Chaja, and more affectionately Haluś or Halinka, and on whom you have a teenage crush, and who’s sharing the apartment’s single room with her father Jakob and her mother Rachel and her big sisters Bluma, Bronka, and Sima. In the kitchen there’s yet another family. In the kitchen of apartment 5, on the third floor, lives Hala’s eldest sister Dorka with her husband Jeremiah and their son Obadja, born on April 2, 1939, and still a baby when the ghetto is closed to the outside world on April 30, 1940.

Of course, your world can look like this only during the first days of the ghetto, when the two hundred thousand Jews of Łódź have just been forced behind the barbed wire, into
das Wohngebiet der Juden in Litzmannstadt
, and when nearly all of them are still alive and the transports haven’t started yet and the dawn streets aren’t lined with the previous night’s bodies, with people who starved to death or died of typhus or killed themselves, and when the whole thing still seems too unreal to be true. Yes, this is what your world looks like when its root fibers are still attached to living people and memories and it’s
still possible to draw a family tree with an ever finer tracery of branches to ever more distant names, places, and stories, and no one yet knows that whole family trees can be chopped down and whole worlds liquidated.

On July 25, 1943, your father Gershon dies in apartment number 6. On July 26, 1943, Jeremiah, Obadja’s father, jumps from the window of apartment number 5 on the third floor and succeeds, not without difficulty, in killing himself. On November 10, 1943, your youngest brother Salek dies in apartment number 6.

I also have their birth dates. Gershon is fifty-six when he dies, Jeremiah forty-two, Salek nineteen. I also have the exact dates on which Rosenberg after Rosenberg is dispatched from the ghetto for onward transport. Rosenberg’s a common name in the ghetto, where it’s spelled with a
z
instead of an
s
.

“
Ausg
. 10.3.42 Tr. 35” is written after the name of the porter Idel Rozenberg, who lives in apartment number 25 at 51 Sulzfelderstrasse (Brzezińska) and was born on 1.1.1897.
Ausg
. means
ausgeliefert
, dispatched for delivery, and Transport 35, like all the other transports of 1942, goes to the gas vans, the mobile gas chambers in Chełmno.

The list doesn’t include this detail, but I know it’s so.

On March 15, 1942, weaver Majer Hersz Rozenberg, who lives in apartment number 3 at 4 Kranichweg (Żurawia), is dispatched on Transport 31.

On March 25, 1942, schoolboy Mordela Rozenberg, who lives in apartment 10 at 1 Fischstrasse (Rybna), is dispatched on Transport 36.

On September 1 and 2, 1942, the ghetto’s hospitals are emptied and the patients dumped into military trucks. Some are dumped out of the windows. Some try to run away.

Between September 5 and 12, an
Allgemeine Gehsperre
or general curfew is proclaimed: everyone is ordered to stay at home and no one is permitted to have guests and one block of apartments after another is forced to give up the old, the sick, and the children. Within two weeks, sixteen thousand people are dispatched from the ghetto, never to be heard from again.

On September 4, 1942, Chaim Rumkowski makes a speech.

I hope you don’t hear it.

I hope nobody at 18 Franciszkańska hears it.

I don’t know what anyone can hope for after hearing it.

But at the same time, I want everyone to know what Chaim Rumkowski said in his speech of September 4, 1942. So that everyone will know what sort of place it is that you’re leaving behind when you board the train to Auschwitz in August 1944 and your world is liquidated.

Or is it already liquidated now?

It’s a quarter to five in the afternoon and the sunshine is glaring and the day is still hot and loudspeakers have been set up in the square outside the fire station at 13 Lutomierska Street, and Chaim Rumkowski makes a biblical speech, without euphemisms. Or perhaps a speech with biblical euphemisms.

At any rate, a speech that cannot be misunderstood.

Or a speech that must be misunderstood if your world is not to collapse at once under the weight of its monumental futility and be liquidated on the spot.

“Fathers and mothers, give me your children!” says Chaim Rumkowski.

His white hair is tousled, his movements slow, his voice broken, but his words cannot be misunderstood, so they must be misunderstood.

He has received an order from the Germans to dispatch all the underage children of the ghetto.

And he is also to dispatch the old and the sick.

At least 20,000 Jews are to be dispatched.

He has come to inform the ghetto that he has decided to give the Germans what they demand. To “bring the sacrifice to the altar in his own arms.” To “cut off the limbs to save the body,” with his own hands.

Yes, those are the words he uses.

And says that if he doesn’t offer up the sacrifice, the Germans will destroy them all.

But that if he does, some people will be saved.

What is there to misunderstand?

Chaim Rumkowski doesn’t want to be misunderstood. Not this time. This is what he says:

What more is there to say? Only a misunderstanding can maintain the world in which such a speech can be made. Chaim Rumkowski misunderstands nothing. The children, the sick, and the old are to be delivered up in order to be killed. This you must all understand. It cannot be misunderstood.

Nor can it be understood. The world in which something like this can be understood is a world no one in your world can imagine. Between your world and the world where parents are exhorted to sacrifice their children, children their parents, and the healthy the sick, there is a chasm that reason cannot bridge.

Only misunderstanding and lack of imagination—this is how I see it—can keep your world together after September 1942.

The inability to imagine a place like Chełmno. At one end of a manorlike building, “the castle,” the entrance to the changing room and showers, at the other end the way out to the trucks that are docked to the outside wall, their airtight compartments snugly fit to the door openings. The biggest is a Magirus truck, made by Deutz AG in Cologne, which in 1942 has been declared a National Socialist model company, and which can load 150 living human beings. The two smaller vehicles, an Opel Blitz and a Diamond Reo, can load from eighty to one hundred each. Once the compartment has been fully packed, the smallest children sometimes packed on top of the adults, and the airtight doors
bolted, the driver turns on the ignition and attaches an exhaust pipe from the diesel engine to the cargo area/gas chamber, and within five to ten minutes the cargo has been asphyxiated. Then the truck is driven to a camp in the Rzuchowski Forest, four kilometers away, where the dead bodies are unloaded, stripped of jewelry and gold teeth, and burned to ashes. After ten minutes of airing, the truck is driven back to “the castle” to get ready for the next load. Between September 3 and 12, 1942, a total of 15,859 people, young, sick, and old, are dispatched from the ghetto in Łódź and delivered to the gas vans in Chełmno.