Have You No Shame? And Other Regrettable Stories

Nazis in the Walls: Part Two

I was on a Jewish Teen Tour, with hundreds of other Jewish teenagers from all over the country—somehow it seemed fitting that my first personal encounter with the death camps should also be my first with the Jewish youth of Long Island and New Jersey.  The plan was this: a weeklong whirlwind through the best Poland had to offer. We didn’t bother to get our feet wet with the more minor camps: Treblinka, Plaszow, the hurriedly abandoned Majdanek, left so intact by the retreating Germans that experts say it could be up and running again at full capacity in 48 hours.  These would come later.  Instead, we went straight to Auschwitz. 

It’s the “Space Mountain First” philosophy--don’t fuck around with the Teacups and the Jungle Cruise; go straight for the good stuff and come back if there’s time. And after a week spent methodically pulverizing what little faith we had left in humanity, we would spend the second week visiting the glory, wonder, and triumph of the Jewish spirit that is the State of Israel, and in this way would our parents ensure that we would grow up to be the kind of people that would marry other Jews, send our children to religious school, and after we had built up our medical practices, begin to contribute significant chunks of money to the proper federations and charities. 

I was told this experience would change my life.

We spent a bit of time at first orienting ourselves to our surroundings, recovering from jet-lag, surveying the delicate peer dynamic of our new community.  Predictably, I had my usual trouble with the latter; the social subset that best matched my particular interests—the theater, the sublimity of a well-cut cocktail dress, the life and work of Miss Bette Davis—would not make themselves reliably visible until I reached college, but I persevered, as one must, and soon we were prepared to begin the important business of hysterical weeping.

Which was what I was doing, crumpled against the pillar in the Sorting Room at Auschwitz.  We had walked slowly around the cavernous space, examining the enormous mounds of things that had once belonged to people—the mountain of hair, a chamber crammed with children’s toys.  The faces of even the toughest and angriest among us were streaked with tears, but my wails must have been particularly wrenching (or ostentatious) for almost at once, I felt an arm softly draping my shoulder.

It was Bettina, a tiny blonde woman in her seventies.  Several Holocaust survivors were traveling with us, but Bettina was by far the best loved—and least haunted.  I turned slightly to look up into her kind face, and she wrapped her arms around me at once, cradling me like a mother. 

“Shhh, darling, sha.  Don’t cry like that.  Don’t cry.”

“I can’t help it!” I blubbered.

“I know, sweetheart.  I know.  But not like that.  Listen to me, darling.  You shouldn’t carry our pain,” she said, wiping the tears from my face with a folded Kleenex, slightly damp.  “Our pain is ours.  We don’t need you to feel it for us.”

“But all the people…” I couldn’t stop.  “All the things.”

“They’re just things, bubbeleh.  Just things.”  She gestured towards a huge case.  “And think, maybe some of the people that used those things, they’re still alive somewhere!”

I followed her hand to the case full of empty cans of gas pellets.

“Okay,” she said.  “Not those maybe.  But look.  Those shoes.  Maybe, would you believe it, somewhere in there is a pair of my old shoes?  And I’m standing here with you, darling.  You see?”

“Isn’t it painful here for you?” I asked.  “To be here?”

Her eyes darkened.  “Painful?  Yes, sweetheart, of course.  But I’ll tell you what.  It’s a lot better than the last time I’m here.”