But Enough About You: Essays (19 page)

Jarek gets a key to the gate and we drive to the rail platform where the arrivals got off Eichmann’s transports after journeys of sometimes three or more days, no food or water, packed in so tightly that in summers water from the humidity ran off the ceilings. About 80 percent of the arrivals, those unfit for work, the older men and women, women with babies, children under fourteen, were immediately murdered in the gas chambers. Borowski’s book of stories is titled
This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen
.

We stand where the families were separated. Jarek points. We look and see a dozen deer on the other side of the barbed wire, running down an alley between barracks, white tails going up and down in the ruins as they leap.

On one side of the rail platform was the women’s camp. “When the trains came,” Jarek says, “women would shout to the women arriving, ‘Give the baby to the granny.’ That way you might not be selected for the gas chamber. This was the choice.”

We drive past a small pond of foamy water where they dumped the ashes, to Gas Chamber and Crematorium II. On the maps, these are designated KI, KII, KII, and so on. KII is larger that the one at Auschwitz. Jarek’s uncle lived six kilometers away and told him about the smell. We stand on the ruins of KII, which is more or less as it was after the dynamiting, collapsed onto itself, but the foundations still clear. Jarek points, “Mengele’s laboratory.”

Between KII and KIII is the memorial, a raised terrace of moss-lined granite bricks, a low stone sculpture, and nineteen plaques, one for each language of the people murdered here, French, Greek, Norwegian, Italian, all the rest. The one in English says,

FOR EVER LET THIS PLACE BE

A CRY OF DESPAIR

AND A WARNING TO HUMANITY,

WHERE THE NAZIS MURDERED

ABOUT ONE AND A HALF

MILLION

MEN, WOMEN, AND CHILDREN,

MAINLY JEWS

FROM VARIOUS COUNTRIES

OF EUROPE.

AUSCHWITZ-BIRKENAU

1940–1945

Jarek explains that they changed the wording after Communist rule ended in Poland. Originally, the plaques made no specific mention of Jews. “In Poland then the idea was officially that you didn’t point out one group above the other.” After communism, it was no longer politically incorrect. Ninety percent of Auschwitz’s victims were Jews. Next came Poles, 70,000, then Gypsies, 23,000.

On the drive back to Cracow we don’t say much, my father and I. It leaves you quiet, Auschwitz, even as it impels you not to be quiet about it, to witness what you saw, no matter that it is all by now so well known and documented and familiar. At the airport in Zurich, the front page of the local Sunday paper has a photo from a recent rally in Switzerland, hundreds of shaved-head neo-Nazis, giving the salute.

—
The Daily Beast
, January 2009

I arrived in London a bit after noon, having gotten off the
Queen Mary 2
in Southampton a few hours earlier, so I missed the eleven o’clock two-minute moment of silence. On the way in, I wondered if the cars on the M3 motorway might pull over in observance and would not have been surprised if they had.

But in Trafalgar Square and at Whitehall and Westminster and St. Paul’s, everything did come to a stop. The British observe this sacred ritual every November 11, commemorating the armistice that began on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of 1918.

Walking in the rain to the Cenotaph in Whitehall, I saw that practically everyone in London was wearing the traditional red paper poppy. As you surely know, the symbol derives from a poem written in 1915 by a Canadian military doctor. The occasion was the funeral service for a friend who’d been killed by an exploding shell. The chaplain was unavailable, so McCrae scribbled a few lines, which begin:

In Flanders fields the poppies blow

Between the crosses, row on row.

And conclude two stanzas later:

If ye break faith with us who die

We shall not sleep, though poppies grow

In Flanders fields.

The Great War ended nine decades ago, but seems fresh in memory. When I reached the Cenotaph, with its problematic inscription “The Glorious Dead,” I found the roadway around it entirely with wreathes of paper poppies, many of them personally inscribed. There
were tiny wooden crucifixes, with names inscribed in ink now runny from the rain. If it wasn’t as lavish a floral display as the one outside Princess Diana’s residence in 1997, it was still impressive. I made my belated two-minute observance.

I say “problematic” above because there was so little glory in their terrible deaths. They left us extraordinary and moving literature, most indelibly in the poetry that came from the trenches. The day’s
The Independent
had a moving article by Robert Fisk titled “Language of the Lost,” in which he quoted his own father, a veteran of the war, telling him that it had all been “just one great waste.” A year into the war, Kaiser Wilhelm was asked what the war was about. He’s said to have responded, “I wish to God I knew.”

I had lunch the next day with Sir Alistair Horne, one of Britain’s preeminent military historians. Among his many books is one on the Battle of Verdun,
The Price of Glory
. (That word again.) I remember reading in it the arresting statistic that the ten-month battle was fought on ground not larger than Manhattan’s Central Park, at a cost of 700,000 casualties.

Paul Fussell wrote in
The Great War and Modern Memory
that World War I continues even now to define and determine. Germany was defeated and then driven to humiliation and despair by the draconian terms of the Versailles Treaty. From that toxic soil rose Adolf Hitler, whose Jew-hatred wrought the Holocaust, producing a diaspora and Israel. So the bullet that Gavrilo Princip fired into Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo still ricochets.

The front page of
The Independent
was not entirely given over to Armistice Day, but shared a sad and moving photograph of hearses bearing the bodies of six British soldiers killed in Afghanistan. Beneath the photo was a headline: AFGHAN WAR IS BAD FOR SECURITY, VOTERS SAY.

Nearly half the British electorate now believes that keeping British troops in the same country that humbled Victorian England increases, rather than decreases, the threat of terrorism.

And there was this, just in from our British Prime Minister Gordon Brown Desk. (Mr. Brown seems to get so many things wrong these days that one reflexively inserts “Poor” in front of his name.)
The latest kerfuffle concerns a letter that he wrote, by hand, to the mother of a slain British soldier. Mr. Brown is no doubt a genuinely sympathetic man. He has written two hundred of these letters. The problem was that he told the soldier’s mother that he felt her pain, being himself the father of a child who died at the age of ten days. The loss of a child is a tragedy whenever it occurs. But the mother in question did not apparently feel that the prime minister’s allusion to his own loss was appropriate.

Then there were the misspellings. He got the soldier’s name slightly wrong. His name was “Jamie,” not “Janie.” And either the PM’s handwriting or spelling needs work to judge from the words “cumfort” and “cuntry.”

—
The Daily Beast
, November 2009

Easter Island is—well, put it this way: its closest neighbor is Pitcairn Island. Pitcairn Island, as in
Mutiny on the Bounty
. Which is to say, Easter Island is not near much at all.

To get to Easter Island, or as its inhabitants call it, Rapa Nui, you must go via Tahiti or Santiago, Chile. If you go through Santiago, voyager, beware: Don’t even think of bringing along something to eat. That includes, as one of my unhappy traveling companions found out, trail mix (nuts and dried fruit, notorious purveyors of contagion and plague). She spent two hours in detention filling out paperwork and forking over a two-hundred-dollar fine. A woman in line with her was reduced to tears as she explained to an implacable bureaucrat
that the dried lentils the dogs had sniffed in her bag were for a favorite dish she had come to Chile to cook for her dying mother. She finally exploded: “We got rid of Pinochet—for this?”

It was a longish trip, twenty-eight hours door-to-door. Oddly, for all that time spent in the air and in airports, I crossed only two time zones. I started in Washington, D.C.; Easter Island shares about the same longitude with Salt Lake City. By the time you arrive, weary, sticky, your trail mix forfeit, you really do have a sense of being . . . out there. But also of exhilaration, because you finally made it to Easter Island, home of those strange monoliths called
moai
, the ones you first saw a half century ago on the cover of a book by a Norwegian explorer.

The place to stay is the recently opened explora Rapa Nui (the small e is intentional), also called the Posada de Mike Rapu. The architect is a Chilean who trained in Barcelona, and it shows. I found myself staring up at the ceiling, all bright pine and intersecting planes. (Or maybe it was the martini.)

We clomped off the next morning with our engaging guide Sam, in a light drizzle that soon cleared to a bright, cool day. It’s small, Easter Island, just sixty-three square miles, triangular, and volcanic. Thor Heyerdahl made his fame in the 1950s with his book
Kon-Tiki
, in which he postulated that the island was first settled by aboriginal South Americans. That thesis has since crumbled, and Mr. Heyerdahl is not held in esteem in Rapa Nui. When I asked Sam about him, his handsome face creased into an exclamation of disdain. “Thor Heyerdahl?!” he said. “He wrote so many things that are not true!”

More recently anthropologists have determined that the island’s settlers arrived from Polynesia, perhaps as early as A.D. 450. The earliest
moai
, those distinctive, indeed, unique, Easter Island statuary, date to about 1100.

We hiked through rain-wet brush and eucalyptus groves. Everywhere, there was bright yellow lupine and purple grass. And there in the distance was the “quarry,” Rano Raraku, the volcano cone where the Rapanui carved their
moai
.

As we approached, you could see them: improbable figures protruding from the earth along the slope of the volcano. Sam asserted
that the word
moai
means “face alive of the ancestor.” I liked that, though there are other translations. There are some 887
moai
on Easter Island, 397 of them at the quarry. The Rapanui carved them over perhaps eight hundred years. Overpopulation and dwindling resources eventually brought civil wars, at which point they stopped erecting
moai
and started knocking them over. Since each clan and tribe put up its own
moai
, they became collateral targets in the wars. By the time Heyerdahl arrived, most of the statues were lying on their backs or faces. Many still are, and walking past them, seeing them so forlorn, you think of Shelley: “My name is Ozymandias, king of kings / Look on my works, ye mighty and despair.”

Along a beach not far from the quarry is Ahu Tongariki, a sight to give you a shiver: fifteen immense
moai
standing on a long plinth (the
ahu
), looking like pieces in a titanic chess game. In the 1960s, a tsunami triggered by an earthquake in Chile swept through here and knocked over the entire site. A Japanese company contributed funds to restore the site in the 1990s. It’s haunting, all the more so for Sam’s casual mention that “Rapanui people also practiced cannibalism.” He showed us a petroglyph of a tuna, along with hundreds of carved dots beneath. “Each one,” he said, “represents a dead child.” I didn’t have the heart to ask how they died.

Our days fell into a pleasant routine. We hiked in the morning, then returned to explora for lunch. One day, the staff arranged a picnic under a coconut grove on a beautiful white-sand beach. (Oddly, there are only two beaches on the island.) Afternoons, we did another archaeological-themed hike. By day’s end our muscles felt nicely tired.

They saved the best for the fifth and last day. Our guide was Terry, half American, half Rapanui. If that sounds exotic, another of our guides, Niko, is half Rapanui and half Croatian.

We started at the edge of the island’s single runway. It is more than three kilometers long. Why? It’s leased by NASA for use as an emergency landing strip for the Space Shuttle. It’s never been used for that purpose, but there it is, making Easter Island the ultimate cargo cult, awaiting the great bird that now will never come.

There was a stiff wind blowing from the west as we hiked up the
side of Rano Kau, hearts and lungs pumping. We rested overlooking over a fierce cliff with great ocean swells breaking at its base and exploding into foam. We continued to a cypress grove, then a fragrant eucalyptus grove, and finally emerged 1,063 feet above the ocean, on the rim of the volcanic crater. Below we saw three small rocky islands, furiously assaulted by the sea.

It was here starting about 1600 that the Rapanui held their annual “Bird Man” contests to pick tribal leaders. These were the ultimate in Ironman Triathlons. Contestants from as many as fifty-four tribes or clans would gather. On the appointed days, they would climb down the cliffs from the volcano’s lip, plunge into the sea, swim through shark-water to the islands, then climb—somehow—through the boiling surf and razor-sharp rocks, to the nests of the migrating sooty tern. The object was to return through the water and back up the cliff with the egg intact. You try it.

You can see the petroglyph depictions of Bird Men who actually made it carved into the rocks. They are stirring sights and ones to make you glad that your own life is differently ordered. Bird Man contests continued until 1867, when Catholic missionaries arrived with alternative suggestions for choosing tribal leaders.

On the other end of the island is Ana o Keke, the Cave of the Virgins. Here, young girls were kept out of the sun to “whiten”—as our guide put it with amusement. These pale virgins were the Bird Man’s prize. A kilometer or so from their cave is a porous, resonant stone that was used to signal the keepers of the virgins that a new Bird Man had been crowned. Niko demonstrated, putting his lips to a hole in the stone and blowing with all his strength, producing an eerie blast.