A Return to the Concentration Camps: Part I

It was my second trip to Poland. It was my return to the concentration camps. But on this occasion, I was walking hallowed grounds with a survivor of four concentration camps and a group of young New York Jews determined to keep the memory of the Holocaust alive.

When I first met the barrel-chested, eighty-year-old Leo Zisman, I was sitting in the Jewish Enrichment Center’s classroom in New York City, finishing my dinner.

“I don’t know where to begin…” Leo told the class, but like a tsunami that retreats toward the horizon before tearing down the shoreline, he transformed from an uncertain speaker to one that would ruin our appetites with just a few words. Within minutes he described the destruction of his city, Kovno, Lithuania, the murder of his family, and the end of his freedom.

Leo, a self-described wild child, was always testing the limits.

When his family was rounded up in the ghetto, Leo’s father told him to run. He obeyed and the Nazis set two dogs upon him. They tore at the seat of his trousers, but the unfettered youth stopped, picked up a stick, and smashed each dog across the snout, forcing them to retreat back to where the Nazis loaded his family onto cattle cars.

Even in Auschwitz, Leo was obstreperous. When his transport arrived, they were marched toward the gas chambers. Sensing the end, the other boys asked him, “What do we do now?” He found it ironic that they would turn to him for guidance, considering he was the youngest, but he offered his suggestion: “Let’s sing Ani Ma’amin.” I Believe. As they neared the gas chambers, Leo led the chorus. The Germans couldn’t understand what was happening. “Who are these boys?” they asked, but the paperwork for their transport had gone missing. At the last minute the misplaced papers or choral rebellion caused the Nazis to divert Leo’s group to the showers instead.

This past July, the JEC, the organization that had offered the classes back in New York, led thirty-five participants to Europe. The trip was the final exam for our “Holocaust Mini-Masters.” Leo and his wife joined us.

We arrived in Warsaw, Poland, and yawned off the jetlag; Leo, whose hair had gone completely white, except for a triangular patch of orange set like a goatee in his beard, bounded through the city fueled by both vehemence and excitement. With both a prepaid phone and eyeglasses slung about his neck, he shouted, “Come on guys,” ushering us from tragedy to tragedy almost seven decades later.

At every site-from the last remnants of the ghetto wall to the Jewish cemetery–he asked us the same questions over and over again: “Why didn’t we resist? Why didn’t we communicate with the other ghettos?”

Inside the cemetery, as we lined up on the walkway that suspended us over a sunken mass grave, nobody had an answer.

“I don’t have the words to say… Why didn’t they have the opportunity to have names and to have children?” he asked of the myriad bodies below us. His face reddened, his eyes fogged with tears. “We don’t even know who they are.” He recited the Kaddish, something we would say in Majdanek and Auschwitz, too. It seemed, at the time, that it would be the theme song of our trip.

While the group walked ahead, I asked him how he felt being here.

His eyes narrowed. “If I had a machine gun, I could kill all of them, the Germans. But when I see blood I faint. I can’t explain it. I hate all of them. Those sons of bitches.” He stopped to gaze upon the stones, most so withered that the Hebrew writing looked like runny paint, and then turned to me, speaking with a voice desperate to hold back tears. “I saw a German take a baby, maybe a month old, and rip it up like a chicken… Why didn’t we fight back? We’d have more than six million more.”

I couldn’t remove the image of the baby from my head. We went to the old town for lunch. I ate, but like a person disgusted by the contents of their plate, who scatters the unappetizing fare to the edges, I was troubled by the contents of my mind and tried to slide the image of the baby out.

En route toward the bus, I spotted a street vendor selling wooden statues of Orthodox Jews clutching gold coins. There were more off-color Jewish collectibles in Warsaw than actual Jews.

We left for Lublin, a city with a Jewish population that doubles, or even triples, when a group like ours arrives. Within ten minutes I found a swastika in the main square.

That evening we walked to the Yeshiva, a building whose exterior resembled a ransacked tenement, to welcome in Shabbat. Despite its neglected exterior, the temple was full of newly installed wooden pews that were flanked by beautiful jade-colored columns. I listened as Hebrew filled Lublin. On our walk back to the city center, riders in passing cars and patrons at some biker bar shouted things at us. Our security guard told me “Not nice things.”

The next morning, unbothered by Lublin’s hospitality, we returned to the Yeshiva. Rabbi Lawrence, one of the young trip leaders who put passion into every word, asked us: If you woke up one morning and had the opportunity to press a red button to change religions, would you?

Aside from resistance to the metaphor, the general consensus was no.

But the red button did more than confirm our Judaism, it brought out the stories that had reserved everyone’s spot on this trip. There were grandchildren of survivors and Jewish partisans. One girl, a baptized Colombian, discovered that she was Jewish later in life, after her teacher requested that she research her lineage. “I finally understood why my grandmother always said to never use the pot for sancucho”–a pork dish–”to boil milk for the coffee.” Two participants had immigrated to New York from the Ukraine when they were teenagers and faced more anti-Semitism than any of us New York Jews could fathom. Another girl explained how, at a young age, she could never understand why her first cousins were Christians, while she was Jewish. But she eventually learned the consequences of her grandparents’ need to press the red button while living in Nazi-occupied France.

But in the end, even if we wanted to, we could never push the red button because to the world we would always be Jews. Yet, we didn’t want to push a button because we were proud of our identities, proud to carry on what the world almost allowed Hitler to erase.

In the dining room, Mr. Zisman rose and shouted “Helloooo,” unintentionally mimicking his namesake, the Uncle Leo from Seinfeld, though his salutation possessed more accent and humor. (That address would act as a conversation-stopper throughout the trip as if it were the shofar on Rosh Hashanah-Shhh. Listen. Leo has something to share.)

“Let me tell you why I didn’t push the red button,” he said. I wanted to carry on the Jewish people, he told us. Then in his very excited way, Leo singled out the Colombian girl who had recently learned of her Jewish ancestry. “Here’s what she’s gonna do,” he announced to everyone. “She’s gonna marry a Jewish guy and I’m gonna give you my address and you’re gonna invite me and I’m gonna come… This is what it’s all about. By the end of this trip we’ll need half the number of rooms,” he proclaimed, playing an early matchmaker, making our rabbis blush and his wife glare, though she understood his fervor for increasing the Jewish population.

The next morning we drove a few minutes from Lublin, and from the main road we saw concentration camp Majdanek. Everyone fell silent. Barbed wire was stitched through the cement columns that circled the camp and the guard towers looked newly vacated. A mother pushed her baby in a stroller along the camp’s exterior.

Hundreds of apartment buildings painted in the cheery pastels of Miami Beach loomed in the very near background. Their terraces faced the black barracks, the gas chambers, the crematorium of Majdanek. Every morning, I thought, breakfast at Majdanek.

We went inside to watch a film and passed the gift shop where they sold Majdanek posters, coffee mugs praising Lublin, and stickers that warned “Baby in the car.”

As the film played, I searched for images of my grandparents. They had both been imprisoned there. One image displayed two corpses at the bottom of one long pit, which the Nazis would eventually fill with 18,000 Jews during Aktion Erntefest, and then exhume and cremate the bodies a few weeks later. This was the camp that had claimed my grandmother’s father and brother.

I watched the film and thought of the newly hatched bird from P.D. Eastman’s “Are You My Mother?” who leaves the nest in search of his mom, asking dogs, cars, and power shovels if they’re his mother. My book was “Are you my family?” and I questioned every picture, every fleck of dust that blew with the winds. Were those lifeless souls in the film, at the base of the pit, my kin?

But unlike a children’s book, there’d be no resolution.

We entered the camp and marched straight to the gas chamber, which Rabbi Lawrence described as “relatively small,” since it was used to kill only 80,000 people. It could hold about three hundred at once, he said. In the space between the people and the ceiling, the Germans had tossed in infants.

Inside the chamber, the walls were stained blue. I traced my finger along the rough floor where victims who had lost control of their bodies had emptied their bowels and vomited before they perished. When we exited a cold breeze had swept in. Lawrence told us how nothing went to waste–human hair was used for insulation and human skin was stretched into lampshades.

We entered the barn-sized structures–photographs lined the walls, a few possessions scattered about were meant to symbolize the thousands murdered at Majdanek. Brushes, keys, worn suitcases, cracked mirrors, shoehorns, toothbrushes, prayer shawls, shofars, and dolls. A case of dolls. And tangled human hair.

One room housed only shoes. Thousands of shoes in head-high cages. The path between them was like a parted sea and the pressure of the shoes against the metal cages seemed strong enough to snap the welding and suffocate me in footwear. Amidst the endless browned leather sat one of the reddest shoes. It reminded me of the child in the red coat from the film Schindler’s List, whose little body was tossed onto a pile of corpses just like the shoes.

Leo stood outside the barracks. He was angry at how benignly Majdanek presented the Holocaust.

“They are not showing the real picture,” he fumed. “Why not her?” he kept asking, referring to a girl from the film that we had watched a half hour before. “Why did she die? When we go back, what should we do?”

That question stuck.

We walked toward the crematorium. Someone behind me said, “Calling them prisoners, ugh. They didn’t do anything wrong.” The sound of chirping crickets in the high grass flooded the camp. Our guide pointed out bone fragments in the dirt.

Behind the crematorium were the killing fields, where the Nazis machine-gunned my family and 18,000 others into pits on November 3^rd, 1943. I touched the earth above the death pits as if that would raise my great-grandfather or my great-uncle. But they were no longer below ground as decomposed bodies. They had been swept across Poland as ashes. Some of the ashes, however, were collected and mixed with earth to sit like a giant anthill beneath a UFO-like mausoleum with a message chiseled into the frieze. Translated it reads “Let our fate be a warning.”

It was another way to say “Never Again.” I thought about some of the genocides since the Holocaust-Cambodia, Rwanda, Darfur, the Congo. “Let our fate be a warning” and “Never Again” sounded as truthful as the Nazi slogan printed at Auschwitz’s entrance–Arbeit Macht Frei–Work sets you free.

We recited the Kaddish.

As everyone boarded the bus, I stayed with the ashes and stared out at the green fields and wooden camp. Like a director I tried to set the scene of Majdanek with the stories that I knew. That’s the gate that both of my grandparents had walked through every day, where they received their daily lashing. There was the fence that Grandma had tossed bread over to her withered brother, who was unable to reach out for it and received near-death blows as a consequence. Where had Grandma pushed the wobbly wheelbarrow? I thought. Where had the five potatoes fallen to the ground? Where had she been whipped into bloody unconsciousness? Where had Poppy stood when he was selected to go to Auschwitz? After being selected by the Nazi with a clipboard, why had he exchanged coats with his friend who was not picked for transport? How could he have risked his life–to swim through the crowd of emaciated bodies, to find the Nazi who was taking down coat numbers–to get his friend aboard the cattle car? I searched the camp for that moment in time.

When I boarded the bus, an iPod plugged into portable speakers began to play Matisyahu’s “One Day.”

“Sometimes in my tears I drown,” the singer lamented, “but I never let it get me down.”

I tried to digest those words as well as Leo’s question: “When we go back, what should we do?”

Majdanek followed us as we left Lublin for Krakow.

***

Stay tuned for Part II of this story. You can follow me on Facebook or Twitter for the update.