Death camp visit shows the worst of humanity
By Leonard Pitts Jr.
The Miami Herald (Florida)
August 15, 2005, Monday
AUSCHWITZ, Poland _ Birds sing in the treetops of hell.
It is a discovery you keep making, one that keeps taking you by
surprise as you walk in Auschwitz-Birkenau, Belzec, Treblinka,
Tykocin and other sad and solemn places where 6 million Jews were
murdered in a bacchanal of cruelty that ended 60 years ago.
Birdsong. You keep looking up, noticing it here as you never would
elsewhere. You might call it a hope song, proof that life’s circle
will always, eventually, round the corner toward healing.
But the hope song feels out of place. Like the neat lawns covering
what once were fields of mud and excrement. Like the hotdog stand
that sits near the front gate of Auschwitz. There is something
jarring about birds singing in the trees that overlook these places,
something incongruous about melodies of God in workshops of the
devil. About life going on, stubbornly, regardless.
This “interfaith pilgrimage” to Polish Holocaust sites has been
organized by the Remember Committee, a project of the Charleston
Jewish Federation of South Carolina _ one of several
Holocaust-memorial European trips for Americans each year. The 25
sojourners include teachers, a dentist, a lawyer, an insurance agent,
and this Miami Herald reporter, an African American drawn here by a
belief that there are connections between what happened to the Jews
in Europe and what happened to the Africans in America, that they are
but different manifestations of the same inhumanity.
The central figure on the tour, though, is not the reporter, the
dentist or the lawyer. It is the survivor. His name is Joe Engel, he
is 77, and he spent two years on the verge of death.
You wonder: Did birds sing in the trees when the train delivered him
to Auschwitz in 1942? Did they sit warbling in the high branches as
Josef Mengele, the infamous Nazi “doctor,” flicked his thumb right or
left, life or death, for the benumbed Jews who stood lined up for
judgment? Did they fill the air with song as bigger, stronger boys
were sent to die while Engel was sent to “live” in a charnel house
where skeletons staggered about the business of dying and human
remains drifted down in flakes from the crematorium chimneys like
some evil snow?
Or did even nature fall silent with awe?
“Mengele was there,” says Engel as the group enters Auschwitz. He is
pointing to a spot near a metal archway with a sign that reads Arbeit
Macht Frei. A lie no less cynical in German than in English. “Work
Makes One Free.”
Of 2,000 new arrivals who came to Auschwitz that day, says Engel, the
Nazis selected 200 to be housed at the camp. “The rest of them, they
send them to the gas chambers. But in 1942, they didn’t have no gas
chambers then. So what they done, they dig ditches and they force the
people to go into the ditches, with kids and everything else. They
spread gasoline and they threw in some firebombs and that’s the way
they went to their deaths. You could smell the flesh.”
Walk on. Auschwitz is crowded today. Students on school trips,
mostly. Then Engel stops and points to a black cinderblock wall in a
courtyard between two of the two-story brick structures that housed
the Jews. Flowers and candles hug its base.
“Over here, this was the death wall,” he says.
Meaning the spot where Jews were summarily executed.
“This was a high point of the day for the SS,” adds Lara LeRoy,
director of the Remember Committee of the Charleston Jewish
Federation of South Carolina, which has organized this memorial trip.
Engel nods. “This was fun for them,” he says.
Joe Engel is the kind of old man who routinely turns up in newspaper
profiles as spry, meaning that he gets around well and doesn’t
fatigue easily. His English remains a work in progress, even after 50
years in the United States. “German” is pronounced “JOY-man,” “gas”
comes out “guess.”
“You should know,” he warns apologetically, “mine English a little
..” Pause, rephrase. “Broken English, I was a professor,” he says..
He is an irrepressible man. Which makes it easy to forget that, even
though it’s been 60 years and this is his fifth return, it is hard
for him to be in these places. Then you ask too probing a question
and he looks away, toward the tower where the guards once stood.
He says, “It’s no picnic talking about it, you know?”
But he does anyway. “It’s all right,” he reassures. “I don’t mind. I
want the people to know, especially the young people, to prevent
another Holocaust. I don’t care who, whatever you are, things like
that should never happen.
“We survivors thought, after the war, there’s no more wars. That’s
the end of everything. But you can see now what’s going on. People
still killing people and everything. Things didn’t change.”
Across a gravel path from him, school children on a field trip are
crowding into one of the buildings. “Some of them don’t believe,”
says Engel. The memory of one in particular rankles him. “I was in a
school and we talked about it and she rised up and she said, ‘I don’t
believe you, what you said. How could one human do it to another one
like this?’ I said, ‘You don’t believe me? I take you to the place,
so you can find out, you can see for your own eyes.’ You couldn’t
convince her. You got people now said the Jews made it up.”
Auschwitz, where 1.2 million human beings were killed, is not just
one place. There were dozens of sub-camps and three main camps. The
first, called simply Auschwitz, could, if one were willing to
overlook the guard towers and the barbed wire, pass for an Ivy League
college campus, with its weathered brick buildings and lanes shaded
by trees that were not there 60 years ago.
The second main camp, a short bus ride away, is Auschwitz-Birkenau.
It was the intake camp through which prisoners first passed. There is
a shock of the familiar when you see it, because you’ve seen it
before in movies _ “Schindler’s List” and others. The barracks are
long and low-slung and there’s that iconic archway beneath the brick
guard tower where train tracks enter the compound. Sixty years ago,
they carried boxcars full of the doomed. You will not mistake this
for a college campus.
Where Auschwitz is a museum, its barracks plastered with historical
pictures and artifacts on display, Auschwitz-Birkenau is history
largely unadorned, unprettied, unfussed with. The Germans might have
left just an hour ago. The barracks are dank and shadowed, the stone
floors rough and uneven. The rubble of two crematoria sits as it has
for six decades, one destroyed by the Jews in an act of rebellion,
another by the Nazis in an act of cover-up.
“Anybody who wasn’t here can’t believe what we went through inside,”
he says. “You know a lot of books been written about it, a lot of
movies been made about it, but nothing came close to what’s been
going on here in the death camp, Auschwitz-Birkenau. Maybe if I
wouldn’t be here, I wouldn’t believe it myself. ‘Ah, what human being
can do it to another one for no reason?’ The only guilt they had,
because they were born Jews. This was the only guilt.”
A woman who is not with the pilgrimage group stands listening. There
is horror on her face.
“Every morning,” says Engel, “you could see hundreds of skeletons.
Not human beings, just skeletons. Bones. The only thing you saw was
bones and a big nose. We used to pick ’em up and they used to take
’em to the gas chambers over there.”
At this camp, as at almost every stop of the tour, LeRoy asks some
member of the group do a reading _ a poem, an essay relating to the
atrocity that happened on this spot. Then the Jews in the group say
Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead. In English, it says, in
part:
“Glorified and sanctified be God’s great name throughout the world
which He has created according to His will. May He establish His
kingdom in your lifetime and during your days, and within the life of
the entire House of Israel, speedily and soon; and say, Amen.
You are struck that there is no lamentation in the ancient words.
There is no woe or why. There is only praise.
That night, after Sabbath dinner, you return to the Hotel Eden, off a
cobblestone courtyard in Krakow. Tired and jetlagged, you read for a
few minutes, then fall asleep.
In the morning, when the group gathers, one of Joe’s cousins nudges
you and shows you pictures of what you missed. They are of Joe at a
party, some street festival a few members of the group stumbled onto
the night before. The music, you are told, was good, the wine flowed
freely. Joe _ “I’m a professional bachelor,” he likes to say _ is
seen dancing with a stunning young blonde in one picture, sandwiched
between her and her equally-attractive friend in another.
It occurs to you that no one knows how to cherish life quite like the
man who has felt the imminence of death. Six million people died in
the Holocaust for being Jewish. Five million more for being
homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, communists, or simply opponents of
the Nazi regime.
There is _ the word is unavoidably ironic _ something bloodless about
the numbers, repeated now for six decades. There is something in them
too large for minds and hearts to comprehend, too abstract to truly
grasp.
Roughly 3,000 people died in the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and it is
remembered as one of the most traumatic days in American history.
Eleven million people dead is a Sept. 11 attack every single day for
10 years. It is New York City dead. And Washington, D.C., dead. And
Atlanta dead. And Dallas dead. And Pittsburgh dead. And Miami dead.
And not just dead. Nor even just murdered.
Slaughtered. Butchered. That’s what it was.
A boy at Belzec who had sand pushed down his throat with sticks.
Babies thrown from hospital windows in Lodz, and a young SS man
making a game of how many “little Jews” he could catch on his
bayonet. Women in Auschwitz subjected to an “experiment” in which a
cement-like fluid was pumped into their uteruses. A woman in Przemysl
whose baby was torn from her arms by an SS man who, according to a
witness, “took the baby into his hands and tore him as one would tear
a rag.” And nameless millions suffocated standing up in train cars
too crowded to allow corpses to fall, shot in the brain, tumbling
into graves they themselves had dug, inhaling poison gas in dark
stone rooms.
This is how they died. Butchered. Slaughtered.
Why? Someone once asked this of Mengele.
“Here there is no why,” he said.
___
A klezmer band is playing in a restaurant on the Jewish quarter in
Krakow, where members of the interfaith pilgrimage have just finished
dinner. Several members of the group are engaged in a spirited debate
over how the world should respond to genocide. Then the band goes
into “Havah Nagilah,” the celebration song that has become a Jewish
folk standard, and Joe is up dancing with a woman from the group and
even the debaters have to silence the debate and clap in time,
because you can’t not clap when “Havah Nagilah” plays.
The old man dances as if his bones were made of joy.
No member of the band playing the Jewish song is Jewish. That’s
because there are virtually no Jews left in Krakow. Even here, in the
Jewish Quarter. The synagogues are maintained, but nobody worships in
them. The ancient cemetery is open, but tourists far outnumber
mourners. Before the war, there were 60,000 Jews here out of a
population of 250,000. There are less than 200 now.
Still, the old man dances to Jewish music in a place where all the
Jews are gone. Where there is no rabbi. Where the last bar mitzvah
was before the war.
And you wonder: What is it that gets into human beings that makes
them feel they have the right to deny or annihilate other human
beings for the sin of difference? Slaughter the Jews because they’re
Jewish, enslave the Africans because they’re African, murder the
Armenians because they’re Armenian, the Tutsis because they’re
Tutsis, the Kurds because they’re Kurds, the Sudanese blacks because
they’re Sudanese blacks.
Where does that come from? Why is the lesson never learned, even at
the most ruinous cost?
Graffito spotted on a wall in the Jewish quarter: Juden Raus. Jews
Get Out.
As Chris Huszczanowski, the group’s guide, puts it, “The
anti-Semitism in Poland is a very special one. The anti-Semitism
without Jews.”
You question him, thinking something has gotten lost in his imperfect
English. He repeats himself with emphasis. “Without Jews,” he says.
“Show me, visiting, traveling through Poland, small village,
medium-sized city, a city without any synagogue, any shul there. They
never seen Jew. But you have grafittis on the walls. Like Mogen
David, the David Star, (intertwined with) the gallows.”
“Havah Nagilah” plays on. The old man dances on legs of abandon.
Two days later at Majdanek, a death camp on the outskirts of the city
of Lublin, 15-year-old Jan Rydzha, a high school student, pauses in
his morning’s labors to talk with a reporter. He and a group of his
fellow students are engaged in a class project, using hoes and hands
to clear the foundation of a barracks. Old wash basins and
receptacles for human waste are taking shape, hacked out of the tall
grass.
The reporter has asked Rydzha whether young people here are really
taught about the Holocaust. “In Poland, we have quite a full
education about the Holocaust,” he replies in flawless English. “Not
only about the numbers and the statistics, but about generally the
human tragedy that went with it.”
But Rydzha says he wonders sometimes if the message gets through to
all those who visit Majdanek. “For example,” he says, “in the
barracks, you can actually find some graffiti and some text written
in black marker on the bunk beds. To me, that’s total disrespect and
I just can’t believe who would do that.”
Kasia Zych, who is 18, finds it hard to believe what happened in her
hometown 60 years ago. “It’s huge and enormous and it scares me.”
And to the people who say it didn’t happen? The teenager with death
camp soil on her hands says, “I think they should read more books and
maybe even come here and see it with their own eyes. It happened.
Happened. I think people who say Holocaust never happened are stupid.
They have small intelligence.”
There is a display at Majdanek you would show such people if you
could. It is not the gas chamber where live canisters of poison gas
are still in storage. It is not the glass display case filled by toys
stolen from dead children of long ago. No, it is the shoes.
They fill Barracks 52, row upon row of them in cages made of chicken
wire and wood. Close. Touchable. How far back does this barracks go?
Fifty feet? Sixty? More? The shoes stretch virtually the entire
distance.
You start walking between rows of footwear piled taller than you are,
passing by sandals and slippers and work shoes, black leather dusted
gray by age and time. You move through a forest of things once worn
by children and old men, women and girls, long ago, when they were
living. The air is stale. There is no light beyond that from the sun
which enters through the door in front. The shadows eat it greedily.
It is silent in here, still but for the sound your feet make against
the floorboards as you move further down the row, deeper into places
where sunlight does not follow. Soon you cannot see. But you can
feel. The weight of shoes piled high all around you. The accusation
of their emptiness. A chill rises through you. You keep walking.
It is like walking into death.
___
“Before the war, was very bad for Jews,” Joe Engel tells you. He is
sitting in his bus seat, a few rows from the front. “The anti-Semite
was very bad. Before the war, had the market, Tuesday and Fridays.
Had people with signs, and they’d sit by the Jewish stores and they
told them not to go into Jewish stores. I still remember they said in
Polish, ‘Don’t buy from the Jew.’
“Listen, was very bad. Exactly like the Americans treated the colored
people. Especially in Easter,” he adds. “A Jew was scared to go out.”
He was 12 when the Nazis smashed across the Polish border. “When they
came in, they destroyed the city, they made us wear a Star of David.
You couldn’t walk out on the sidewalk. You had to walk in middle of
street. We had no place to live, so we decided to go to Warsaw.”
They walked for two days. Ended up spending a year in the Polish
capital, living with family. “One room,” says Joe. “At nighttime, the
floor was not big enough for everybody to lie down in the same time.
So we had to take turns lying down on the floor to sleep.”
By 1942, Joe had been deported to Auschwitz. He remembers it as a
series of beatings. Beatings for not moving fast enough. Beatings for
trading food. Beatings for entertainment.
And that was hardly the worst of it. “When I came home from the day’s
work and they saw my bed, for some reason, wasn’t made up like should
be, and it was in the winter time, cold, they make me undress, naked,
and they put me outside and they make me kneel and they took some ice
water, cold water and pour all over you, till you got stiff, almost
frozen to death. They took you inside again.”
Nor was that the worst of it. The worst of it, he will not speak.
To this day, he is not sure why or how he was chosen to live. Nor why
or how he did.
“I’ve been asking a lot of people,” he says. “I would ask the rabbis,
all kinds of people, how come I survived and my parents didn’t
survive. How come you had people there, very religious, they never
sinned in their life, even in the camp, they prayed and prayed, and
after awhile, they sent them to the gas chambers for no reason. And
everybody was expecting a miracle, a miracle from God, but the
miracle never come.
“For me, was a miracle. But for the rest of the 6 million Jews, was
no miracle whatsoever.”
Joe Engel lived in Auschwitz for two years and four months. In
January of 1945, with the Russian army closing in, the Nazis ran,
sweeping before them 58,000 prisoners _ Engel among them _ in one
last march. Most of the Jews were murdered en route. Engel survived
to be herded onto a train. Destination: Germany.
“Was cold,” he says, “was open, no food, no water, nothing. And you
could see peoples dying like flies from the cold weather, freezing to
death. So I told myself, You know, when it’s going to get dark, I’m
going to take my life in my own hands. If I survive, it’s OK. And if
I don’t survive, I don’t have to suffer, you know what I mean? ‘Cause
suffering is more than anything else. The punishments they give you,
it’s worse than death.
“So I said, the hell with it. As soon as it’s going to get dark, I’m
going to jump the train. So, was high snow. And soon as it got dark,
I jumped. They stopped the train, they was looking, and I was under
the snow. They had eight, 10 foot of snow. Luckily, they couldn’t
find me. I was under the snow till the train moved.”
He is tired of talking about it now, maybe tired of remembering. You
thank him for his time. He falls silent and doesn’t speak much for
the rest of the drive. The miles grind away.
But a few nights later, standing before the group at a restaurant in
Warsaw, he returns to the story. It finds him on the run, hiding in a
barn under a pile of hay.
“The Germans came in with the bayonets. And they were lookin’ for
people. They sticked all over to find anyone. How many lives a cat
got? Nine? I must’ve had 11. Luckily, they didn’t find me. A couple
hours later, I was still in the barn. The one side was the Russian
army and the other side was the German army. And I was between. And I
was laying in the barn. And the bullets fly in the barn. How lucky
can a man be?”
He lifts his glass, a toast. “So I hope, if we all get home, we going
to spread the Holocaust, to make people know what the survivors went
through, so their kids can live in freedom. They wouldn’t have to
worry for Holocaust. ‘Cause we all one. If we cannot be one and
looking out for one another, the world going to come to an end.”
He is looking at you. You try to tell yourself it’s only your
imagination. But the glance holds too long to be called fleeting. “So
let’s remember all the people,” he says. “They sacrifice themselves
so other people can live and tell the stories. So don’t forget ’em.
Like we was in Auschwitz, you don’t think they were happy to see us
there? I mean the dead ones. ‘Cause anyplace you step, you find dead
ones. You find blood underneath.”
The eyes are still on you. The gaze is steady and direct. “That’s
what it says: Don’t you ever forget me, so long you gon’ live. You
tell this story for us, because we not here to tell this story.”
You nod and promise that you will. But in truth, it’s a promise
already made. You made it in a field of stones, in a dark place
filled with empty shoes. And in a quiet clearing in the woods.
___
There is in the region of Bialystok a village called Tykocin, a place
to which Jews first came in 1522. By the end of the 19th century,
three quarters of the population was Jewish. There are no Jews there
now, but there remains an ancient synagogue. On its walls are words
in Hebrew partially painted over by the Nazis six decades ago. An
attempt to murder memory.
You drive a couple miles out of town, down a narrow road. The bus
stops and you climb off and walk down a trail into the Lupachowa
forest. After a couple of minutes, you reach a clearing. There you
find two monuments, clustered about with candles. Ahead of you and to
the left and right, are three areas marked off by green fencing,
waist high. These are the graves.
On August 24th and 25th of 1941, 1,400 people _ all the Jews of
Tykocin _ were marched to this place, lined up before open pits, and
shot.
Kaddish is said. Then Lara LeRoy asks if anyone in the group has
words to offer from the Christian tradition. You struggle for
something to say. But the mind quails, the moment passes, the people
move on, each to their own thoughts.
And then the song comes. It is an ancient melody that might be called
the African-American kaddish, a song you often hear black people sing
when pain is present and loss gouges the heart. You are not a singer,
but you sing anyway.
Precious Lord, take my hand,
Lead me on, let me stand
I am tired, I am weak, I am wan
Through the storm, though the night
Lead me on, to the light
Take my hand, precious Lord
Lead me home
You walk about this killing place feeling them, the old men, the
boys, the mothers with babies in arm. Look back down the path along
which they walked to their deaths. Stand under this cathedral of
trees where they stood, waiting for the gunshots.
What did they say? What did they think? Was it here that a little
girl pleaded for her life, promising “I won’t be Jewish anymore?”
Does it matter?
You sing the African-American kaddish over and over. You can’t stop
yourself. The song won’t leave you alone, but you don’t mind. Because
when you sing it, there is no woe or why. There is only that immense
peace that comes from knowing God is nigh. The words lift from you
like weight.
When my way grows drear
Precious Lord, linger near
When my life is almost gone
Hear my cry, hear my call
Hold my hand, lest I fall
Take my hand, precious Lord
Lead me home
A young woman from your group sits on the ground near one of the
killing places, weeping in agony. You’ve never talked to her, don’t
know her name. You sit next to her, put an arm around her shoulder,
say nothing. After a moment she leans against you, sobbing
inconsolably.
You hum “Precious Lord.” The woods are still. Birdsong drifts down
from the trees.