My Holocaust Page 5
“Maurice?” Gloria now asserted herself. “Don’t you think you should at least talk to someone in this Auschwitz museum about the condition of this hair? I mean, look at it! It’s a mess. Who knows what’s crawling around in there—mice, lice—who knows what? It’s all matted—ugly! They could at least try to do something with it—don’t you think?—something creative, to make it a little more presentable and attractive? And for goodness sake, in this day and age, why does it all have to be so gray?”
“It is gray because of a chemical reaction in the gas chamber,” Krystyna spoke up, as if a button had been pushed, “the effect of contact with the Zyklon B—diatomite saturated in hydrogen cyanide.”
“Wrong,” came a mellow voice from the other side of the room. “It is gray because it awaits karmic retribution.”
“Hey!” Maurice pounced. “You some kind of a denier, Mac?”
“I am an affirmer—of the universal energy of transcendence,” replied the wacko in the wheelchair.
“As far as I am concerned, fella,” Maurice said, moving in on him menacingly, “you mit your sidekick squatters here are trespassers, pure and simple, and I for one am not going to take it shitting down, so to speak. I’m calling the authorities here right this minute to kick you out but good. This place is not your place, Mr. Whatever-Your-Name-Is.”
“Pop?” Norman whispered as fast as he could into his father’s ear, trying to resist the temptation under the pressure of circumstances of overexplaining, embarrassed to the bone yet again by the old man’s siege mentality, his paranoia, his propensity to make a scene, his provincialism. “Pop, don’t you recognize this guy from TV? It’s Mickey Fisher, the Zen master—he’s a very big roshi, like a chief rabbi. He’s on cable every Sunday morning—Arlene always watches. I’m going to get his autograph. She’ll be thrilled. Maybe she’ll even be nice to me for a day. She does the meditation exercises with him when he’s on the tube. I actually heard from La Switon’s own mouth that he’s here with about a hundred groupies on some kind of interfaith retreat. I think they’ve got rooms right here in the museum. So technically, Pop, I can tell you as an attorney, you don’t have a leg to stand on. They’re not trespassing.”
Maurice took a step or two back, as if to reposition himself on the battlefield of survival, to consider the new facts on the ground, which now encompassed even his own daughter-in-law. “Very nice,” he said to the guru after some reflection, “very nice. Mine son explained me, now I understand everything. So Pisher, tell me—you came here mit a t’eme?”
“Oh, yes! I came here with minds and bodies reborn countless times across space and time, from every land, embracing every color and faith and gender, and yes, also with my personal team, Jake Gilguli,” Fisher motioned to the WASP to his left, “my chief of staff, and,” indicating the pregnant hippie on his other side, “Marano—one name, like Madonna—my personal assistant.”
Maurice’s face went crimson. “I didn’t say team,” he sputtered, “I said”—and here he twisted his mouth grotesquely, stuck out about a third of his tongue while biting down excruciatingly on it with his teeth, and with an enormous spritz of saliva he extracted that almost impossible sound that came so easily to every lisping dumbbell—“theme!”
“Ah, theme! Yes, yes, we also have a theme. Our theme—our teaching, as we prefer to call it—is ‘From Horror to Healing.’ But meditating and chanting now in this space of the unconsoled, I am visualizing enlarging it to “From Hair to Horror to Healing.”
“Why not ‘From Hair to Eternity’?” Monty cracked.
“Maybe it should be ‘From Hair to Maternity,’” Norman put in, not to be outdone by this rival for his father’s love and approval and munificence, as he rather crudely zoomed in on that belly nesting like a great egg in the lotus of Fisher’s personal assistant, this so-called Marano. He could take this liberty, he felt confident, because she obviously did not matter much in the scheme of things, she was expendable, the kind of woman who got knocked up—Norman could sense that.
The roshi went on, separating himself from the illusion of their mockery. “We are seeking awareness by focusing our chakra centers on the breath coming out of our bodies in the letter H, as in the mantras Hair, Horror, Healing, Hiroshima—Holocaust! As in, Ha, Ha, Ha—laughter! We are birthing the bliss of the dead by visualizing their repose away from this space in which their suffering and lamentation are on display, and every eye gazing upon them is an affront.”
“Maurice?” Gloria now spoke up, commanding an audience. “You know, we may consider this guy a little cuckoo and everything he says sounds like mumbo jumbo, but in my humble opinion he does have a point—about this display business? Because what exactly is on display here when you come to think about it—and also in your great big museum on the Mall in downtown Washington, D.C., where all those millions of tourists from all over the world come filing through to gape and stare? Us! We’re on display, we’re exhibit A, let’s face it, we Jews, you and me—Jews being gassed, Jews being shot, Jews being hanged, Jews being electrocuted, Jews being beaten, Jews being raped, Jews being tortured. Don’t you find it all a little bit vulgar and coarse and in bad taste? Do you really think when all is said and done that this is a good thing for the Jews? Do you really consider this a project worth supporting?”
“Gloria, Gloria,” Maurice began, “why you mixing in your pretty little head mit all this mystical shmystical?” But Monty cut him off at once, progressive and canny enough to recognize the importance of at least giving the appearance of taking a woman—and especially a woman loaded in every sense of the word who is flirting with an idea—seriously. “That’s actually very perceptive of you, Gloria,” Monty said, screwing a finger in his ear and then absentmindedly rolling the yield between thumb and forefinger and examining it. “You’ve touched directly on a problem that we scholars have been wrestling with from the beginning. In the end, though, we’ve concluded based on all of our research and analysis that the benefits of presenting the Holocaust to the world and displaying ourselves as victims—of normalizing the abnormal, as it were—far outweigh the disadvantages in terms of the social, historical, and ethical lessons that can be learned about the human potential for evil—and also for good. We Jews have a moral obligation to offer our suffering and humiliation to the world as a cautionary tale, and for the lessons governing future personal and political behavior that can be drawn from it. We must think of the Holocaust, in effect, as the Gift of the Jews.”
“Really?” Norman geared up. “And I always thought it was the Gift of the Germans.” Norman’s face puckered in disgust. The Holocaust as the Gift of the Jews—what a repulsive idea! Another sound bite for the simpleminded, another kernel of instant kitsch from Monty Pincus, King Kitsch himself.
“Your name is Gloria?” the guru now intoned, combing with his fingers through his bushy gray beard, plowing ahead, indifferent to the ego-warped dialectics of the two men, capturing the woman with his piercing, intimate gaze. “Forgive me, but I can sense from your manifestations that you are not a Gloria. You are a Jiriki. From now on, I shall call you Jiriki because of your struggle to find enlightenment on your own power. You have a very special soul, a holy holy soul, Jiriki, I can visualize the karma streams coming from it, I can sense your personal struggle to actualize our vision of the oneness of all living things past, present, and future, whether it be the oneness of all the dead souls here at Auschwitz—Jews, Poles, Gypsies, Soviet prisoners of war, and so on, all equal in victimhood, all one and the same—or whether it be the oneness and interdependence of all the living souls of every faith and color and gender who have come here seeking healing and enlightenment. But it is holy holy souls like yours above all, Jiriki, that we are searching for at our zendo in East Hampton, on Long Island. You know, you really ought to come and visit us there when you get back to the States. You would be our most welcome and honored guest, I promise you. Of course, at the moment, we’re in a temporary trailer, but if you came to see us t
here, I would be delighted to personally show you the architect’s drawings for our new complex, the Center for High Energy Metaphysics, that we’re planning to build, and it would be my great pleasure, I assure you, to escort you on a private tour of the oceanfront property we’re hoping to buy. In the meantime, though—why don’t you come and meditate with us at Execution Wall, linking Block Ten, where sterilization experiments were performed on Jewish women, with Block Eleven, where the Polish Catholic martyr Saint Maximilian Kolbe was tortured? It’s a very interesting interfaith must-see attraction in case you haven’t done it yet, Jiriki—the black wall where prisoners were taken out and shot? You can lay a wreath there. Marano will make one for you from the grass and flowers blooming in the organically enriched soil here at the camp. Please do join us, Jiriki. We will be sitting there in meditation until sunset.”
Gloria was flattered, and torn. On one side was a man appealing to her mind; on the other, a man beckoning to her spirit. And, in the middle, Maurice Messer, the familiar type of man comfortable in his conviction that she possessed neither but whom she was an expert at handling—and he was laying claim. “Well, well, well! Look what we have here! A Buddha schnorrer! Very nice, very nice! So what else is news? You think I don’t know what you’re up to, mister? I’ve been in the fund-raising business since before you could even say yoga, or yogi bear, or yogurt—or Harry Krishma, or Harry Karry, or whatever. It takes one to know one, fella—let me tell you. Gloria darling, listen to me—this guru shmuru knows from nothing! What does he mean—one and the same? Over one million gassed Jews in Auschwitz processed and mass-murdered like a factory is the same thing like seventy-five thousand Poles, most of them political prisoners, given the dignity of being shot one by one at a wall if they weren’t lucky enough to starve to death first? How can you compare? Believe me, Gloria darling, there’s no contest. We Jews win this one hands down! And this so-called Execution Wall, this black wall, this wall of death, or whatever name they want to give to it—I’m telling you, Gloria darling, this wall is not your wall, this wall is special for the Poles and the pope. I got a bigger and better wall for you, and I’m not talking here from the Great Wall from China. The wall I’m talking is your wall, a Jewish wall—the Founders’ Wall in our museum, the million-dollar donors’ wall—your personal wall, Gloria darling, where you can have a personalized plaque of your own, that’s the wall where you belong! Of course you can’t go to this goyische wall mit this gonif—this swami shakedown artist, this yogi used-car salesman! Number one, I made a promise to Leon to take good care from you—so how could I ever explain to him that I let you run around a death camp mit a bunch of meshuga meditators? Number two, you will spoil your beautiful Armani suit from sitting outside on the hard stone floor meditating mit these kooks, not to mention maybe getting piles, God forbid, from the cold and wet.”
“Of course we shall provide Jiriki with a zafu to sit on, compliments of the Center for High Energy Metaphysics.”
“And number three, we have on our schedule next a private tour from the gas chamber, which is a very special treat that doesn’t happen every day to any old schmendrik. Come on, gang,” Maurice called out to the others with the tense and desperate jollity of a social director on a cruise ship, “we’re going to the gas chamber! The limo is waiting by the door.”
And urged on anxiously by Maurice and Krystyna, they were hustled out of the room as Mickey Fisher-roshi and Chief of Staff Jake Gilguli observed them with calm detachment, serenely letting go of the sensation of their reality, unlike Personal Assistant Marano, who lifted her eyes as Norman rushed by and smiled mysteriously. “See ya later, Normie,” Marano sang out in an exotic accent that was totally untraceable to any land or to any language he had ever known.
“Did you hear that?” Norman kept repeating during their one minute drive in the Mercedes on the camp streets from Block Four to the gas chamber just beyond the barbed wire that surrounded the barracks. “How the hell did she know my name? Do I know that aging hippie from somewhere? Do you recognize her, Pop?”
“You’re famous, Norman, that’s what it is, you’re a celebrity,” Monty said, profoundly bored by the long-running performance of Norman stuck in another one of his ruts. “You’re a public figure from your second generation work—what do you expect? You’re instantly recognizable. You just don’t have the luxury of anonymity like the rest of us poor schnooks here. That’s the price you have to pay for fame—sorry. Come to think of it, though, I’m pretty sure I called you by your name in there when we were looking at the hair, like when I said, ‘Shut up, Norman you putz,’ or ‘Shut up, Norman you asshole,’ or something like that—so that probably explains it, okay? All right? Do you think you can finally shut up already?”
But it continued to bother him, he could not stop mulling over it even long enough to lash back at Monty for this mean-spirited sarcasm, this totally undeserved attack. She had called him Normie, not Norman. What could that mean? Did she recognize him from his past, his childhood, boyhood, youth—school, some party somewhere? Had they smoked pot together once long ago in his glorious weed days? Was this Auschwitz trip going to turn into some kind of trip trip? He was so absorbed in trying to figure out the connection—the way it fluttered there so elusively bedeviled him like a filmy web he just could not grasp—that he had absolutely no memory at all of stepping out of the limousine with the others in front of the gas chamber of Crematorium I, or of pausing with the group as Krystyna informed the ladies that the gallows they may have noticed set up opposite the entrance here were used only once, in 1947, to execute the camp’s first commandant, Rudolf Höss, the mastermind who had introduced the Zyklon B in 1941 as a method of killing Jews—for a grand total by the war’s end, according to Höss’s own written estimate, of one million one hundred and thirty thousand Jews gassed at Auschwitz alone.
Was he boasting or something? Norman wondered, as his focus on pinning down this Marano creature was thoughtlessly interrupted by his father puffing up and holding forth—“You know, ladies,” Maurice was expatiating, “this reminds me from when I was a leader from the partisans and fought against the Nazis in the woods.” Norman rolled his eyes. “Pop? C’mon, Pop, there’s no time for this now. We have to get to the gas chamber.” “You should excuse me, Mr. Smart-Alex, Esquire,” Maurice responded defensively to his son. “Maybe I didn’t go to fancy-schmancy Princeton University like you did. Maybe I just got mine degree from the University from the Holocaust. But let me tell you something, sonny boy—nowadays, that’s a very hot school. Everybody and his uncle wants to get in!” Then, turning triumphantly to Gloria and Bunny, for whom his reference to his wartime exploits had been intended, Maurice started again. “Like I was saying before I was so rudely interrupted by mine own flesh and blood here”—and he launched directly into that tale that Norman had anticipated and dreaded, all the more so now since his father had become such a public figure, chairman of the premier Holocaust shop in the world, the consequences of exposure of these lies would have been not only personally catastrophic but also potentially ruinous to faith in the integrity of Holocaust history, deniers everywhere who insisted that the entire Holocaust was a hoax would be given a field day thanks to the old man’s pitiful bragging, for the life of him Norman could not understand what suicidal urge impelled his father to persist in risking everything by telling these pathetic stories. On this particular occasion, Norman realized with dispirited resignation, Maurice had no doubt been prompted, like Pavlov’s dog, by the stimulus of the gallows at the entrance to the gas chamber. It was a preposterous but vintage story, Norman knew from personal mortifying experience as he girded himself to be inflicted with it yet again, packaged and formulaic from overtelling, fantasy wantonly mutated into fact—how, when his father “was a leader from the partisans and fought against the Nazis in the woods,” he had led his band of resistance fighters on a night raid into a hovel in Galicia, dragged the vodka-stupefied peasant off his straw mattress, tied a rope around his fat
neck, and hanged him from a rafter on the ceiling with a warning sign pinned to his filthy nightshirt, “This is what happens to anyone who hands a Jew over to the Nazis.”
“Oh my God!” Bunny exclaimed. “You mean, you lynched the poor guy—without even a trial? Haven’t you ever heard of the concept of due process, of innocent until proven guilty?”
Maurice sighed. Every so often he encountered a specimen like this; his Blanchie called them the PCniks, the even-Hitler-has-rights delegation. Their daughter-in-law Arlene was a card-carrying member of this union—soft-in-the-head sheltered coddled American liberal do-gooder types with absolutely no clue about what was possible on this planet in the department of chaos and horror. Arlene, however, could be dismissed; she did not possess Bunny’s bank account. Bunny, on the other hand, had to be stroked. “Bunny honey,” Maurice pleaded, “the point from the story is to debunk the myt’ that we Jews went like sheep to the shlaughter. That’s all what I wanted you ladies to understand.”
“I guess what my father is trying to say here is that the story needs to be taken as a paradigmatic or archetypal conceit rather than literally or at face value,” Norman enlarged, attempting through abstraction to give the impression that he was making everything clear once and for all.
Maurice did not at all appreciate being accused of conceit, nor did he appreciate hearing another human being, even his own son, decoding what he was trying to say, as if he were some kind of mental defective who could not speak for himself. But before he could mess things up even further with these two naive women by opening his mouth to amplify, and before Norman could go on with his interpretation of the story, which essentially confirmed that the old man was fantasizing, which was the most charitable explication of the text that even these gals might fathom, Monty stepped forward to defend his patron and to straighten things out—with the extra dividend of adding yet another chit to the pile that he would soon call in without mercy. “Of course there was a trial, Bunny. What kind of person do you think Maurice is? He just told you the short version of the story, a little jazzed up maybe to give it some drama, but I can assure you based on the scholarly analysis and survivor testimony on this particular case that twelve peasant volunteers were duly and lawfully summoned so that this fellow could be tried by a jury of his peers. You don’t have to worry; all of his rights were protected. Maurice was just giving you the Reader’s Digest condensed version because we’re in a rush, you know, we still have to do this gas chamber and crematorium in Auschwitz I, and tomorrow there’s still Auschwitz II-Birkenau, which is the real quote-unquote heart of darkness, not a fun place at all, believe me. Touring is hard work, I’m sure you’ve noticed. We’re all tired. You probably want to get back to Krakow to do a little shopping for souvenirs, and maybe to freshen up at the hotel before dinner, so I really do think we ought to get moving. As the writer said, This way for the gas, ladies and gentlemen,” Monty wound up, tossing out that mordant grabber title with his customary casual show of erudition, though he had never, of course, read the Borowski story, as he had also never read a word by the author of Heart of Darkness. Ducking his head winsomely, Monty directed their gaze toward the door of the gas chamber, sweeping his arm flamboyantly like the ringmaster of the circus introducing the next freak and stunt act of the Greatest Show on Earth.