I Sleep in Hitler's Room (16 page)

Americans like ice in their sodas. Every German knows of this strange American habit, even in Dachau.

But enough about gas and ice. I didn’t come to Dachau to learn about American gas and American ice. Let’s listen to the people.

Else, the mom, came to Dachau in 1966, on June 1. Got to be exact: June 1. I love it!

We have a little chat.

Why Dachau?

“My husband worked in Munich and houses here were cheaper.”

Did you and your husband know the history of the town before moving in?

“Yes.”

Was it a consideration, a reason perhaps not to move in?

“No.”

It would be reasonable to assume that a few of the people who lived here in 1966 lived here during the war as well. Did you ask them, talk to them about what happened here during the war?

“No.”

Why not?

“We had other problems.”

Do you regret not asking?

“No.”

We are in Jürgen’s house. Else’s son, Jürgen is a lovely man. He had an encounter with Jesus Christ some years ago, he says, and was “born again.” Bodily, though, he was born here, in Dachau.

At what age were you aware of the story of Dachau?

“Ten. When we learned history in school.”

And until then you didn’t know anything?

“No.”

What did you feel when you first realized?

“I was shocked.”

Can you describe this shock—like, what did you do?

“Nothing.”

Did you go to papa and mama and say, Where the heck do we live?

“No.”

Why not, if you were shocked?

“I don’t know.”

Do you know anyone here whose parents or grandparents were part of the Dachau operation?

“Only one lady, who’s already dead.”

Nobody else?

“No.”

Did you ever ask around?

“No.”

I have no idea why, but I get a little upset with this guy and I push him.

From the perspective of an outsider, it seems to me that you just don’t want to know, that you don’t fucking care, excuse my French. From a foreigner’s perspective, this sounds horrible. Agree or disagree?

“Agree.”

Anything to add?

“Years ago I was born again, and years ago I also realized that I have to protect the Apple of the Eye of God, the Jewish people. And I do my best.”

But you still don’t want to know who of your neighbors’ families were involved in one way or another with Dachau KZ?

“No.”

Why not?

“I focus on one thing.”

Are you serious?

“What I am saying is that I want to look into the future and not think of the past.”

Can you move forward if you don’t know where you’ve come from?

No answer. He gives me the silence treatment. Maybe he’s actually a Carmelite. Go figure. Anything is possible in Dachau.

I don’t know why, maybe it’s all those watchtowers of Dachau that get to me, but I don’t let this go by. I go on, try my best to squeeze out whatever is inside this man and have him lay it naked on the table, his table. I push harder, using his faith as a tool to get to him

You are a religious man. May I remind you that the Bible is full of stories, all with minute details . . .? For example: In Genesis you can read about this man who is the son of that man, who himself is the son of another man who is the . . . Is this correct?

“Yes, that’s true.”

But you still don’t want to ask anybody anything, you want only to follow the Bible as your guiding light. Is that correct?

“Yes.”

Here’s the Bible, giving you an example of how to behave, but you refuse. True?

“Yes.”

Why?

“I have no answer.”

Don’t you really?

“No.”

Would you like to have an answer?

“I don’t know.”

Would you like to know?

“Maybe I don’t want to know.”

Why don’t you want to know?

“This is the problem, yes.”

And what is the solution?

Jürgen’s eyes get wet. He breaks. The confident man that I met only half an hour ago is now a broken man whose parts lay naked in the backyard of his house.

“I look into the mirror and I don’t want to see it.”

Why?

“It’s not a nice picture.”

Give me a better answer.

“It’s going to be me, staring at me from that mirror. And I don’t want to see it!”

Those people are you?

“Yes.”

Them?

“Yes.”

They are you?

“Yes.”

The Nazis.

“Yes.”

It’s hard to look at his face now, he looks like a criminal caught red-handed. His wife, Barbara, hugs me tight. Why is she hugging me? She should hug her husband! “Sorry,” she says, “sorry. Sorry for what we did to your people. Sorry.”

That’s Germany. Reporting from Dachau, the town.

As I leave Dachau, this “motto” refuses to leave my head: “There is a path to freedom. Its milestones are: obedience, honesty, cleanliness, sobriety, hard work, discipline, sacrifice, truthfulness, love of thy Fatherland.”

You really think, Rabbi Helmut Schmidt, that after twenty-five hundred years all this will be forgotten? It’s not just the killing of people, Rabbi Helmut. It’s the way it was done. Nobody, ever, will do a “better” job at murdering. Ever. Or as cynically.

Murderers, murderers everywhere,

Nor one murderer to see.

I need my Half and Half now, Giovanni di Lorenzo. We have things to discuss. But Giovanni is half a world away. He is in the north of our German planet, I am in the south.

I opt, by practical necessity, to meet a Jew instead. Nine thousand in the Orthodox community of Munich, let me see one of them.

Jews, Jews, everywhere . . .

“Hard work” pays, and I get me a Jew: Jacques Cohen, of Cohen’s Jüdisches restaurant. The famous Jewish restaurant, established in 1960.

Is there Jewish life here? I ask him.

“Bar mitzvah, bat mitzvah, so people can show off how much money they have, and that’s about it.”

Who are the people who come to eat at your restaurant?

“The goyim.”

Why do they come here?

“They like Jewish food.”

And the Jews?

“They go to McDonald’s.”

Jacques tells me that he loves Henryk Broder, the German Jewish journalist. “He is a Jew with no fear or shame, a Jew who says what he thinks.” What makes him think of Henryk Broder eludes me. Jacques likes to spend time in his restaurant, pondering the big issues of life.

It’s hard to be a Jew, he says, nobody loves the Jew anywhere. Worse is to be a Jewess, he considers, because on top of carrying the burden of being hated she also has so much work. But the worst, he abruptly adds, is Austria: more anti-Semites there than anywhere else.

What does it mean to be a Jew?

“Nobody ever asked me this question.”

What is it?

“What do you mean ‘What is it’?”

What does it mean to be a Jew—

“Religion. The religion.”

Are you religious?

“No.”

Are you Jewish?

“Yes. I am proud to be a Jew.”

What is it?

“You break my head. I don’t know.”

Since most of his customers, he says, are not Jewish—though I don’t see anyone around, Jew or not, as this place is totally empty—he feels the need to introduce them to basic Jewish ideas and customs. On the tables of his restaurant are cards explaining Jewish law and custom. For example, what is ‘nonkosher wine.’ Nonkosher wine, according to the cards, is a wine made from rotten fruits.

Really, Jacques?

“Yes.”

I thought that nonkosher wine was wine that was touched by a non-Jew. That’s the real deal, isn’t it?

Well, Jacques is not so stupid to write stuff like that, no matter what kosher law says.

“I don’t have to write everything,” he muses.

Judaism, Munich-style.

Here’s another card. It’s a Combo Offer card. Go to the museum and eat Jewish food for a Special Price.

I don’t feel like eating anything now, and so I go to the museum.

I am at the Neue Pinakothek. I don’t know what the name means, but the building looks cool. Not only that, but there’s also a special tour today. It’s called Traces of the Third Reich at the Pinakothek. The people here, I see, can’t get over that period. Should I join them? Hey, why not? I’m a tourist, and tourists do things like this. Tourists and a tour call for a lecture, at least in this country. The lecturer today is an artistic-looking woman who tells of the bombardment of this museum during World War II. I hope she forgives me, but after Dachau I don’t feel much sympathy. My fellow listeners, very fine Germans if one can judge by the way these people are dressed, don’t share my feeling and seem very moved indeed by the tragic bombardment story. Yes, it would probably be better if I felt like them, at least I wouldn’t be so bored now. I lose interest somewhere near the beginning of that Reich and get captivated instead by the paintings in front of me. Many Marys here, in case you’ve never been to this museum, one sexier than the other. If only the Jews knew how sexy they are—or were!

After the virgins come the warriors. Here’s a painting called
The Entry of king Othon of Greece into Nauplia
, by Peter von Hess, dated 1835. Amazing details. Each person in the crowd is captured in a unique mood, every person’s eye movement and bodily expression is gloriously detailed, and each of the ships, and every shape of stone and cloud, every instinct of animal and every detail of weather—all masterfully recorded.

And here’s
The Park of an Italian Villa
by Oswald Achenbach, circa 1860. It looks like a simple painting, but it’s bewitching. The shades and shadows the painter is playing with are just outstanding. You start looking at this painting and you become a prisoner of it.

Wait. Where is the Third Reich group?

Oh, here they are. Far from the Virgins and Warriors. They are in the private collection room of Reichsmarschall (Nazi Germany’s highest military rank) Hermann Göring’s. I join them and try to glean from the paintings a perspective into the man and his character. But then I realize, thanks to the guide here, that some of these paintings might actually have belonged to Jews. Too bad. I was just on the verge of creating an unbelievably genius theory that relates the connection between a man and his paintings, and this guide destroyed it all in one sentence!

Yes. As hard as it is to believe, Hermann was a little thief.

I leave the Nazis and the Jews and move on. Here is
View of Arles
by the poor Vincent van Gogh. He must have been in a good mood when he painted this one, using such lively colors and spirit. Not far from him is Claude Monet’s
The Bridge at Argenteuil
. There’s magic in it, especially his portrayal of the harshness of the industrial versus the softness of green grass.

I think I should become an Art Critic. For the life of me I can’t draw a straight line, not to mention a circle, but I’m so good at Criticism! Really. I’m serious!

I’m getting so lost in my thoughts and writing that I fail to see the guard next to me. I think he doesn’t like that I’m standing here and writing. Too many visitors stop to see my iPad. This creates unfair competition.

Where the heck are my Third Reichers?! Maybe they are in the restroom.

I go there, just in case.

Now, here’s something interesting: instructions on how to wash your hands.

The leaders of this institution, and the government bureaucrats who finance it, have obviously concluded that Munich museumgoers are not well informed in the art of washing their hands after nature’s call. People need instructions. Yes. Every restroom here has them. For those who, for religious reasons, don’t read in restrooms, there’s a big instruction sheet next to the faucets. There are many steps involved, in case you didn’t know, when washing your hands. Put hands under running water, my dear, because otherwise the water won’t come to you. Hard to understand? Here’s an illustration of it. Yes, true. Under an image of running water, you have this instruction: Hold hands under running water. Image of soap, then: Rub your hands with soap for twenty to thirty seconds. Image of hands, then: Also between the fingers. Image of hands and running water, then: Then rinse thoroughly. Image of hands and a paper tissue, then: Carefully dry hands.

The city of Munich, or the state of Bavaria, is of the opinion that Munich residents are certified idiots.

I want to find out on my own.

Next to the magnificent Theatinerkirche (Theatiner Church) there’s a little Biergarten. Here people come to drink beer, stare at the church, look at each other for hours on end, schmooze with no limit, or contemplate life while sipping this or that alcoholic beverage.

Werner is one of them, a handsome Bavarian man who sits and drinks his white wine all by himself. What is Werner thinking of all alone at this time of night? Love. What else! “Ten years ago I fell in love with a Jewish lady from America” who came to visit Munich. He showed her the town, they had a nice time, but nothing intimate happened. She went back. But when she got home, she found another woman in her bed. Her husband, that poor man, miscalculated when his wife would be back. But she didn’t, and she divorced him and invited Werner to join her in her lonely bed. What a beautiful life awaited Werner! The Jewish lady, what a surprise, was a very rich lady. Like all Jews. She lived on Park Avenue. Where else? And then one day she threw a party. And she invited her friends. Jewish friends, of course. Rich, if you doubted. And one of them, a Jewish beauty straight out of
One Thousand and One Nights
, in his description of her, invited Werner to an exclusive restaurant. Jews do that sometimes. Werner couldn’t refuse. You don’t refuse beautiful Jewesses. It’s not polite. And he got caught. How not! Those Jewish ladies, you’ve got to be careful. And that was the end of the romance.

Jewish ladies, Werner tells me, live on Park Avenue, and they are all irresistible.

Poor Werner. He could be living today on Park Avenue, with the rich Jewess, but instead he drinks wine by himself in Munich and schmoozes with a traveling male Jew.