Spring Will Be Ours (63 page)

Elizabeth drew in and reversed. She followed him towards the waggons, and the men standing with their arms folded, talking. From the doorway of a cottage a woman and child were watching; behind the cottage were square brick houses, with flat roofs. A pylon soared above the apple trees. Jerzy walked over to the men, and began talking. He photographed them, waiting for the machine to start, and then it did, without warning, and they jumped, ran towards it and began loading the straw into the chute. Hens picked their way amongst the dusty piles of chaff. Jerzy and Elizabeth stood watching for a while, then went back to the car.

‘They said the machine had stopped working at midday,' said Jerzy, as they drove off. ‘It's now after six? Six hours, waiting … the machine is collectively owned, and apparently there are power cuts without warning almost every day. Three hundred hectares of land was taken by the Party last year, and the wheat in their fields is just rotting, unharvested. To think that Poland used to be a great agricultural country. One of the men said: “They show us on the television how much there is of everything – where is it? There's no beer or orangeade to drink when we come in from the fields, sometimes there's not even anything for the evening meal.”'

Half an hour later, they were on the outskirts of Kraków. They followed the guidebook directions for the campsite: it was very large, and stood high above the city, dominated bizarrely by an enormous cross. Litter scattered the scuffed grass between the tents; there was not a single pitch to be had. They drove off again, down into the city centre; the tourist office was still open, and two smiling girls with long shining hair recommended a tourist hotel some ten minutes'drive away, and booked them a room.

By now it was quite dark. There was not a single working street light; they drove very slowly, across intersections without working traffic lights. In the intermittent glow from a café or shop window, they could see that many of the pavements were badly cracked, or had slabs or half-slabs missing; as in Warsaw, there were few people about.

The hotel was at the top of another hill, reached by a twisting road. They thought of Zawierce, and prepared themselves. This hotel was different. On the forecourt of what might once have been very good officers'barracks stood a number of foreign cars; the women who came out of the front doors were so expensively dressed that Elizabeth felt like an unwashed scruff in her jeans and tee-shirt. They carried their bags inside, and were eyed by a brisk waiter in a cream jacket. The receptionist was a blonde, very pretty girl, who gave them their key and pointed out the restaurant. Elizabeth thought suddenly that they might not be able to afford it.

Their room was on the ground floor, spacious, with two soft beds and tall windows overlooking a garden at the back. But even here, the furnishings had a look of making do about them, and the lights were very dim.

‘I must have a shower,' said Jerzy.

‘Me too.'

The shower was a little way along the corridor. They padded past expensively suited foreign businessmen, clutching their spongebags. Naked, they stood in the chipped bath, and turned on the shower-head. There was a gush of scalding water.

‘Ouch!'

Quickly they turned the tap towards cold; a few lukewarm drops were spat out, then stopped. They turned again, and waited, standing back. Nothing. Ten minutes'irritated twiddling of taps and knobs yielded only drips and spluttering in the pipes. They gave up, washed in the basin, dressed again, and went out.

At the door to the restaurant they skimmed through the menu. It was indeed very expensive, and they were fairly sure, by now, that few of the dishes would actually exist.

‘Let's go and see some night life. There must be something.'

There was a large open-air café near the main square, where musicians in folk costume played violins all round the candlelit tables. They ordered a bottle of red wine, and sat drinking; every now and then, one of the violinists came over and played especially for them, before playing for the middle-aged Americans at the next table. Most of the other tables seemed to be taken by tourists; the waitresses wore checked aprons and a lot of make-up; they moved swiftly, taking orders indifferently. Later, Jerzy and Elizabeth walked through the streets looking for their car. They passed large nineteenth-century apartment blocks, tenements, where dimly lit flights of stone stairs curved upwards and inwards past peeling plaster walls.

Elizabeth yawned, and almost tripped over a broken paving stone.

‘Are you safe to drive?' asked Jerzy.

‘I don't think so. Are you?'

‘I'll try.'

They wove their way up the hill to the hotel. In their room, as they undressed, Jerzy said: ‘I think we've got enough money for two nights here. We can explore Krakow quite well, before we go down to the mountains.'

‘Good.' Elizabeth stood at the basin, brushing her teeth.

‘Also we're not very far from Auschwitz.'

Elizabeth stopped brushing.

Auschwitz in German. In Polish: Oswięcim, which was what the signpost indicated. The car park in front of a long low building selling books and postcards was packed with coaches, many from Holland and Germany. There were foreign cars, as well, queuing for a place. Groups were assembling with guides; Elizabeth and Jerzy found a parking space and walked by themselves round past the bookshop to the main entrance.

They stood before the gate famous from dozens of history-book photographs, looking up at the rusting wrought-iron words hung in an arc across it:
Arbeit macht frei
– Work brings freedom. Ahead, on grass, on either side of a long path, stood rows of red-brick two- or three-storey buildings, with narrow black-boarded windows. They looked very ordinary, like barracks, or perhaps some kind of farm building, to store grain. A group of men in shirtsleeves and women in light cardigans and summer dresses stood round a Dutch guide, listening. Jerzy and Elizabeth walked on.

Some distance from the rows of brick buildings was the museum. They followed a long, slow-moving queue down an entrance corridor hung with line upon line of black and white photographs: men and women, not easily distinguished because all their heads were shaved, and almost all were dressed in identical striped shirts, like pyjama jackets. The faces were gaunt, the eyes beneath the stubble of hair stared at the camera from great hollow sockets, as the visitors moved past.

At the end of the corridor the queue moved into a series of large rooms. The walls were hung with charcoal drawings and more photographs: skeletal figures lay in bunks, limbs flung outwards, eyes closed, mouths gaping; some were huddled up, arms round their knees, heads bent. At one end of one room, behind glass, was a pile of possessions, reaching almost to the ceiling: battered brown suitcases with labels from towns all over Europe; heaps of scuffed thirties shoes; children's shoes, with small buttons at the side; watches, clothing, broken toys, purses; thousands of pairs of horn-rimmed spectacles; yellowing dentures. Behind another glass-covered recess was a mountain of hair.

The queue moved on; people were talking in low voices. There were more photographs: of workshops where skeletons sat sewing; reproductions of secret sketches of the dying; of Commandant Hess, whose children had played in a well-kept garden on the borders of the camp, and been very happy here. At the end were the pictures taken on liberation: shaven-headed men, women and children crowding behind a wire fence, staring.

‘It wasn't just the Jews,' said Jerzy, as they walked out into the sun. ‘That is something you have to know. Millions of Poles died in the camps. Russians, too.'

They walked on, to the shell of the crematorium: here, when the bodies had been dragged from the gas chambers, they had been burned, the smoke drifting over the town nearby.

At the end of the camp stood a monument, an ugly towering heap of black blocks of stone, erected from all nations of the world. At its base were plaques in nineteen languages, each bearing the same inscription: ‘Four million suffered and died here at the hands of the Nazis, 1940–1942.' In June, three months ago, the Pope had knelt here. Then he drove on to Brezinka-Birkenau, a part of the camp two or three miles away, where the prisoners had arrived by train. There, before a crowd of a million, he had celebrated mass, and in his homily called upon the crowd to remember Maximilian Kolbe, the saint of Auschwitz, who had gone into the starvation cell to save another man, still alive in Poland.

It was mostly women who were kept at Birkenau. The road to reach it ran past hayfields. Elizabeth and Jerzy parked the car, and walked past a wooden watchtower through the gateway. From behind the netting and barbed-wire fence a man with a scythe stood watching them. There seemed to be no other visitors. Here, the buildings were single-storey, like long cattle-sheds, with tiled roofs, eight dark windows on each side, two at each end, usually just a single door. At the end of the long main path stood another watchtower, made of brick, high enough to observe the whole camp. Jerzy and Elizabeth moved off the path, and walked across the scythed grass. There was no museum here, no photographs or remains or belongings: just a few notices, and the rows of empty buildings.

They stopped at one, at random, and went inside.

On broken stone-flag floors two-tiered wooden bunks ran along each wall. Each bunk was about five foot by five; on each, at the end of the day's work, up to eight women had groaned, and tried to settle, gnawed at by hunger, and lice and typhus. Terrible fevers had raged through the camp; the women vomited in here, or staggered outside. They tried to sleep on these wooden shelves, and tried to die.

Elizabeth walked slowly past them. She heard Jerzy's footsteps at the far end of the building, and then he went outside again. When she reached the end, she turned, and stood in the silence. Shafts of sunlight came through the cracks in the boarded windows, and through the open door. The tall unspeaking figure of a naked faceless woman seemed to be in here, not a ghost, not a spirit, simply a presence, which Elizabeth knew she would try to paint one day, somehow there in the pale yellow light, between the grey wooden stalls.

The warm scent of hay drifted through the doorway. She went outside and found Jerzy, waiting for her. Poppies and tall daisies grew in the long grass which had not yet been cut; outside one of the rows of buildings, quite close to them, a little group of people was having a picnic.

There were two plump women in sleeveless cotton dresses, and three men. From where Jerzy and Elizabeth stood watching them, it looked as if they were eating hard-boiled eggs.

‘Do they work here?'

Jerzy was photographing them. ‘They must do. They can't be first-time visitors. They can't be.'

They walked back towards the square gateway; the man with the scythe stood watching them again, as they went out, got into the car and drove away. Elizabeth, in the passenger seat, closed her eyes and saw faces staring at her, thousands of faces with dark defeated eyes, and a little group of people, with a picnic on the grass.

‘Is it true that the Poles are anti-Semitic?'

Jerzy flushed. ‘No.'

‘People say they are. I read somewhere that Begin had said he'd never set foot on Polish soil again.'

‘In the Middle Ages,' said Jerzy coldly, ‘under a liberal king, Poland was the refuge for every Jew in Europe. It was the one safe country.'

‘Why do you sound so angry?'

He flushed again. ‘I don't feel angry. Not exactly. I just can hardly talk about it without churning inside.'

They were driving south, heading for the Tatra Mountains running along the border with Czechoslovakia. There were three more days left before they had to return to Warsaw.

‘I want to talk about it,' said Elizabeth. ‘We never have. When I told a Jewish friend from art school that I was having an affair with you, she didn't like it. She said a lot of Poles were anti-Semitic, that there were stories about how the peasants near the camps had turned in Jews to the Nazis, had actively cooperated.'

Jerzy slammed on the brakes, and the car screeched into the roadside.

‘Listen,' he said, ‘you tell Mama that! Or any of my family, any Pole. And they will tell you that the penalty for hiding a Jew in occupied Poland was death. The whole family was shot, or sent to the camps, no questions asked. And despite that, for every story about a peasant turning in a Jew there are stories about people who risked their lives to hide them. There was a resistance movement in Auschwitz, did you know that? No. Well, there was, of course there was, people were smuggled out, and hidden by Poles. The AK helped the Jews in the Ghetto Rising in Warsaw. There were bastards before then who exploited them, who made fortunes by smuggling in food at sky-high prices – but to blanket Poland with “anti-Semitic” is just not
right!'
His hands on the wheel were trembling.

‘For heaven's sake,' she said. ‘We're not even talking about anything which touches you personally.'

‘None of my neuroses, you mean. It “touches me personally” just as much, to think of you thinking things like that.'

‘I didn't say I thought like anything, I just
asked.
Surely I'm allowed to ask?'

There was a long pause. Then Jerzy restarted the car and swung it out on to the road again.

‘We're talking about something which neither of us has any experience of, aren't we?' he said. ‘There was a witch-hunt in the sixties, here – a persecution of the Jews in the Party after all the university troubles in 1968, but that was whipped up by the Russians, by Khrushchev, because there had to be a scapegoat. Thousands left then – I think some good friends of Wiktoria's did. She's not anti-Semitic, for God's sake. Anyway – there's that. There is the war. And in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries there were pogroms – but then Poland was under Russian rule. There may be Jewish blood on Polish hands, but there is also Polish blood lost for them. I can't bear it if you think anything else.'