My Holocaust Read online

  And she never did date a non-Jew, so far as they knew. In any case, soon after she entered college, her romantic life became a mystery to them, off-limits as a subject. She did, it is true, bring home a number of gentile boys, but this was “purely platonic,” as she put it—“We’re just friends.” She knew them in connection with her activities to end the persecution of Christians throughout the world. “There’s a Christian Holocaust going on as we speak,” she declared at dinner in the presence of one of these guests, “and as a Jew who could have been turned into a lampshade, I cannot in good conscience remain a silent bystander.” She brought home a Chinese graduate student who described how he had been beaten and tortured because of his membership in an underground church. She brought home a Sudanese lab technician whose family members had been burned or sold into slavery for practicing their faith. As they narrated their stories at the table, she listened raptly, her eyes moist, her mouth slightly open, even though she had surely heard them before. “Any guy who wants her will have to show torture marks,” Arlene said. “What for is she fooling mit the goyim?” Maurice complained to Norman. “Where you think Hitler got all his big ideas from about the Jews, tell me that? And the pope, you should excuse me, his holiness, what was he doing during the war—playing pinochle?” “They’re trying to hijack the Holocaust,” Norman wailed. “Christians are not—I repeat, not!—acceptable Holocaust material. This is where we draw the line.” They tried to wean her from this new fixation by offering her a partnership in their business—complete control of the Women’s Holocaust portfolio: abortion, sexual harassment, female genital mutilation, rape, the whole gamut—but she wasn’t buying. “The Christians are the new Jews,” she said. “Christians have a right to a Holocaust too. Since when do Jews have a monopoly? That’s the problem with Jews. They think they own it all, they never share.” So they broke down after all and offered to take on the Christian Holocaust as part of their business, however alien and distasteful it was to them—to have her create and head up, in fact, a new department devoted entirely to this area. “Forget it,” she said. “You guys are too compromised and politicized for me. You’d sell out the victims for the first embassy dinner invitation.”

  The last time any member of the family had seen her was a few days after she called to tell them that she would be entering the Carmelite convent near Auschwitz as a postulant, and since it was a contemplative, enclosed, “hermit” order, she would not be available much afterward for visitors. She insisted that though she would soon become a novice and then eventually take vows, she would always consider herself to be a Jewish nun. They should keep that in mind. They were not losing her. They should not despair. It was decided that Arlene would go alone to see her. She accepted the mission despite her frequently voiced resolve never to step foot in that “huge cemetery called Poland—it’s no place for a live Jew; this back-to-the-shtetl heritage nostalgia trip is obscene; these grand tours of the death camps are grotesque.” The day after Nechama called, Arlene flew to Warsaw.

  When Nechama converted to Catholicism, she had told them that this was a necessary step toward the fulfillment of her “vocation,” but they should know and understand that, like the first Christians, she remained also a Jew. “What you mean?” Maurice had demanded. “Are you mit us or against us, are you a goy or a Jew? You can’t have it bot’ ways. You can’t have your kishke and eat it also! Better you should for a little while just make believe like you’re a Catholic—then finished, fartig—it will be just the same like you did it.” Norman wanted to know if this was some kind of Jews-for-Jesus deal, but no, she said, it was in the best tradition of the early Church fathers. Norman then made the hopeful point to the family that nowadays maybe you could be both a Christian and a Jew, just as you could, as everyone knew, be both a Buddhist and a Jew—a Jew-Bude, it was called, something pareve, nothing to get excited about, neither milk nor meat.

  Even so, her conversion was a devastating blow, though not entirely unexpected, given her increasing immersion in the Christian Holocaust. After college she had worked full-time for the cause at its Washington headquarters, and then she had set out on what she called her “pilgrimage,” her “crusade,” to bear witness to the persecution firsthand at the actual sites throughout the world, and to offer comfort and strength to the oppressed. She had been kicked out of Pakistan for agitation and promoting disorder. In Ethiopia she had been arrested, and it had required major string-pulling to spring her, which, fortunately, they were able to discreetly pull off thanks to her family’s position in the world and their fancy connections in high places—“a little schmear here, a little kvetch there,” as Maurice recounted with satisfaction. As it became clearer and clearer to them that she was heading toward conversion, Norman tried to make the case to her that she was far more useful to the Christian Holocaust as a Jew, that her Jewishness was an extremely effective media hook, it piqued people’s curiosity—what was a nice Jewish girl like her doing in a place like this? It made her far more interesting and, let’s face it, bizarre, especially as she was so Jewishly identified, with her family so prominent in Holocaust circles, bringing even greater attention and visibility to the cause. “Besides,” Norman added deliberately, “you don’t have to be Christian to love the Christian Holocaust. When I do the Whale Holocaust, do I become a whale? Think about it, Nechama’le. Think again, baby.”

  From contacts in Poland, they knew almost immediately when Nechama had arrived there. She began a slow circuit of the main extermination camps, stopping for a few days at each one to fast and pray—starting with Treblinka, then Chelmno, Sobibor, Majdanek, Belzec, until she came, finally, to Auschwitz-Birkenau. She called home to say that she had lit a memorial candle in front of the Carmelite convent for a “blessed Jewish nun,” Saint Edith Stein—“Sister Teresa Benedicta of the Cross,” as she called her—who was martyred in the gas chambers there. “Oy vey,” Maurice had said. “She’s talking about that convert Edit’ Shtein? I’m not feeling so good!” In another telephone conversation she made the comment that traditional Judaism provides no real outlet for a woman’s spirituality. “I mean, suppose a Jewish woman wants to dedicate her whole heart and soul and all of her strength to loving God and to prayer. Where is there a Jewish convent for that? Does Judaism even acknowledge the existence of a woman’s spirituality in any context other than home and family?” She took a room in Oswiecim to be near the nuns. “They’re such holy, holy women, it’s humbling and uplifting, both at once. How could anyone ever accuse them of trying to Christianize Auschwitz? It’s just ridiculous. Everything they do, they do out of love.”

  Nechama arranged to have Arlene meet her at the large cross near the now abandoned old convent, the building in which, during the Holocaust, the canisters of Zyklon B gas with which the Jews were asphyxiated had been stored, just at the edge of the death camp. She was already there, praying on her knees, when Arlene’s car drove up. Arlene asked the driver to wait for her; she had no intention whatsoever of visiting the camp. After she finished with Nechama, she would go directly back to Krakow, she would be in Warsaw by evening, she would be on a plane flying out of this cursed country the next morning. As she approached the cross with her daughter kneeling before it, she could see two nuns in full habit posted in the distance. Nechama herself was wearing an unfamiliar type of rough garment—probably some sort of nun’s training outfit, Arlene thought.

  Nechama heard Arlene approaching, and with her back still turned she signaled with her thumb and index finger rounded into a circlet—a gesture she had picked up during a teen trip to Israel—for her mother to wait a few seconds more as she finished her devotions. Then, after placing her lips directly on the wood of the cross and kissing it passionately, she rose to her feet. “Mommy,” she cried, and she ran to embrace her mother. Arlene shocked herself by breaking out in racking sobs that swept over her like a flash storm. Her mascara streaked down her cheeks.

  “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” she kept on repeating.


  “What are you sorry about? Go on, cry. Crying is good for you—it cleanses the spirit. There’s nothing to be ashamed of.”

  “I’m sorry for letting them screw you up,” Arlene sputtered into the coarse cloth of Nechama’s shirt. She had not planned to begin this way, but she could not stop herself now. “I’m sorry for not fighting harder to keep them from poisoning you with their Holocaust craziness. I should have fought them like a lioness protecting her cub. They crippled you, crippled you, they destroyed any chance you might have had to lead a normal life—and I did nothing to prevent it.”

  “Mom?” Nechama pushed Arlene to arm’s length. “Two things, Mom. Number one, I’m not screwed up, and number two, the Holocaust, believe it or not, is the best thing that ever happened to me. It has made me what I am today. I’m proud of what I am. I’m doing vital, redemptive work. By dedicating myself to the dead I bring healing to the world. Do you understand? I don’t want you to pathologize me—okay, Mom? I’m not a sicko.”

  Wiping her eyes with a tissue that she clutched in her fist, Arlene now took the time to look closely at her daughter. Nechama’s face, framed by a kerchief that concealed all of her thick, curly hair, her best feature, was exposed and clear—no makeup, and no sign either of the acne that had troubled her well into her twenties. So convents are good for the complexion, Arlene concluded bitterly. Instead of contact lenses she was wearing glasses with a translucent pale pink plastic frame. The expression in her eyes was serene and benevolent—too placid, Arlene thought, she looked drugged, brainwashed, dead to life. There was a faint mustache over her upper lip; in her new life of poverty, chastity, and obedience, there was no place any longer for the facial bleaching in which Arlene had instructed her as part of the beauty regimen of every dark-haired woman. Around her neck hung a daunting cross made from some base metal. The womanly fullness of her barren hips bore down earthward against her skirts, pulled down inevitably by gravity whether they fulfilled their biological function or not, Arlene could see that. She had put on a little weight—not that it mattered anymore. At least she was getting enough to eat.

  Nechama quickly sensed her mother’s appraising eye, and for a moment she was seized by a familiar irritation that she recognized from the past, from those times when her mother would rate her appearance down to the last fraction of an ounce, and would register mute disappointment. By an act of the will, Nechama shook off this feeling, which she considered unworthy and a vanity.

  “You look nice,” Arlene finally said. She avoided Nechama’s eyes, gazing up instead at the twenty-six-foot wooden cross looming behind them. “So this is the famous cross that the Jews and the Poles are beating up on each other about.”

  “Yes—isn’t it ridiculous?” Nechama said. “I guess I’ll just never understand what Jews have against a cross.”

  The Crusades. The Inquisition. Pogroms. Blood libels. The Holocaust. If she can’t figure out what we have against the cross, Arlene thought, especially when it is planted right in this spot, where over a million Jews were gassed and burned, then she has strayed a long, long way from home, she has gone very far indeed, she is lost to us.

  “I mean,” Nechama went on, “what everyone needs to realize now, if we’re ever going to get beyond this, is that each Jew who was murdered in the Holocaust is another Christ crucified on the cross. When I pray to Him, I pray to each one of them. I pray every day to each of the six million Christs.”

  Suffering and salvation. Martyrdom and redemption. This was not a language that Arlene recognized. The cross cast its long dark shadow over them and onto the blood-soaked ground beyond. The afternoon was passing. Arlene adjusted the strap of the stylish black leather bag on her shoulder and glanced toward the waiting car. More than anything else in the world now, she wanted to get away from here, from this madness that breeds more madness, from this alien sacred imagery that justifies unspeakable atrocities. She wanted ordinariness, dailiness, routine—plans, schedules, menus, lists, programs, things, material goods. “Do you need anything, Nechama?” Arlene asked. “I mean, before I go—like underwear, vitamins, toiletries? Tell me what you need, and I’ll see that you get it.”

  “Oh, I don’t need anything anymore—I’m finished with needing things,” Nechama said, breaking her mother’s heart. “We live very simply here. Other people have needs. They send us long lists of what they need, and we pray for them. That’s what we do. I can pray for you, too, Mommy. Tell me what you need.”

  What did she need? She needed to think and see clearly. She needed to remember everything she had forgotten—or she would soon lose faith that she had ever existed at all. “I need to have you back with me,” Arlene said quietly, in the voice she would use when she would lie down in bed beside her daughter at night, to ease the child into sleep.

  Nechama smiled rapturously. “We’ll pray for you,” she said, and her gaze moved from her mother and the cross above them to encompass her whole world, the two nuns motionless in the distance, and the more than a million dead inside the camp who never rested.

  PART TWO

  Camp Auschwitz

  1

  IN ROOM FOUR, BLOCK FOUR of the Auschwitz death camp museum, as they were brought to a halt in front of the display case of a canister of Zyklon B poison gas with an arrangement of white pellets spilling out like a bridal train, Monty Pincus suddenly slapped his forehead audibly, remembering that he had better telephone his wife Honey in Arlington, Virginia. Moving a perfunctory step or two away from the group, he pulled his mobile phone from the inside pocket of his disheveled iridescent fly-blue suit jacket, stretched by a single button across his prospering paunch, and with his eyes absentmindedly tracing the outline of the inspiring architectural hoist of a Slavic brassiere through the snug fuzzy pink sweater of the guide, Krystyna Jesudowicz, as she went on with her spiel about how between 1942 and 1943 alone almost twenty thousand tons of this pesticide were shipped by the Degesch division of the German monster company I. G. Farben to this site alone in order to efficiently carry out what was classified as a sanitary operation to exterminate Jews and other vermin et cetera et cetera, and casually ignoring the venomous rays of annoyance she focused so personally on him as he raised his voice to the Jewish decibel level required for long distance, he yelled into the phone, “Honey? Honey, I know you’re there! Pick up the phone, Honey! Is something wrong with your brain? Goddamn it, pick up the phone!” He didn’t care how long he’d have to wait on the line before she got up off her fat behind to answer the telephone, or how many times she would force him to redial. This was crucial business touching on the well-being and survival of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. He would charge it to the federal government.

  With his left hand, the one that wasn’t flattening the phone like a muff against his ear, Monty scratched his smudge of a beard and then, through his trouser pocket, he discreetly, as he liked to believe, adjusted the lay of his manhood, shouting the whole time, “Honey, for Christ’s sake, pick up the goddamn phone!”—practically drowning out Krystyna and her decadent Eastern European accent as she carried on with how in the so-called shower rooms, which were actually gas chambers in disguise, this Zyklon B was released from special outlets to asphyxiate the naked prisoners packed inside, children, women, and men, fifteen hundred to two thousand human beings at a time, for which about five to seven kilograms of the chemical were needed, and so forth, piling on the full authority of the numbers. “Is he always so rude?” demanded Bunny Bacon in a voice meant to be heard specifically by the miscreant, glaring at Monty through her oversize eyeglasses with their red frames, enunciating precisely in her strict kindergarten-teacher’s syllables. Norman Messer, at his post beside her, having been stationed there by his father to help ease her through all of this traumatic material to which she was being exposed for the first time, and also, as Maurice said, to “massage her nice so she’ll get mama to give out good,” cleared his throat twice and explained laboriously, “Well, with such a prima donna like our Mon
ty here, it’s a matter of personal policy for him to talk only when someone else is also talking—to maintain his image that he already knows it all.”

  Monty listened cheerfully to all of this with his one available ear, calmly unperturbed and unchastened, taking it all in with a complacent sense of how natural and right it was for him to be the topic of conversation. By way of a token excuse, though, because he knew that Maurice would eat him alive if he alienated this money Bunny, he shrugged the shoulder that was unencumbered by the telephone and held out his arms palms upward in a “What can I do? This is an emergency” gesture, presenting her, at the same time, with his lopsided, crinkly-eyed, guaranteed irresistible grin. He could sense from her exaggerated signs of aversion and her confrontational hostility toward him that he was beginning to win her over, that he would soon have her panting at his feet with her tongue hanging out, ripe and ready to do whatever he wanted, exactly as he had been ordered by Maurice—or, as he was now known, the Honorable Maurice Messer, who in his new position as the presidentially appointed chairman of the board of the Holocaust Museum was hoping to extract a major donation from Bunny’s mother, Mrs. Gloria Bacon Lieb. Monty would have much preferred to have been assigned to the mother. The daughter, with her limp brown bangs and her boyish haircut peaking in a kind of cowlick at the top of her disproportionately small, pointed head, was thick-ankled, pear-shaped, “a little broad from the beam,” as Maurice phrased it rather tactfully, he thought, while the elegantly groomed and sumptuously costumed mother was a babe, the sleek poster girl for money and maintenance, spa and salon, accommodatingly blond, with a willing and attentive look meant for men. But Maurice had decreed, “Gloria, she’s mine. First I squeeze a big one out from her in the name from Husband Number One, the late Mel Bacon, from discount wholesale manufacturing in Third World countries fame, may he rest in peace. Next I work on her for the goods from Husband Number Two, mine fellow partisan and resistance fighter, Leon Lieb, originally from nursing homes until he got investigated by a bunch of anti-Semitten no-goodniks, and after that, like the rest from us wandering Jews since time immemorial, starting all over again from scratch—this time in slum and tenement real estate. Your job is to schmear the daughter, the old maid. Hit the jackpot, Pinky, and God willing, pretty soon I twist the arm from the council from the museum and I make you director.” Only from Maurice who could make him director did Monty tolerate this despised diminutive of his last name, this Pinky infestation, which had tormented him through adolescence, unmanning him, pounding into him the doctrine that, physically, in all his parts, he was the runt, and also intellectually, number ninety-nine in a class of one hundred of his yeshiva high school, legendary for advance distribution to students of the answers to all state and national exams on the principle, which Monty had absorbed in his molecules, that from the religious perspective, officials, authorities, governments, and the like were mere temporal impediments and irritants meant to be outwitted.