In Paradise: A Novel (3 page)

I
n the mess hall next morning, over hard dark bread with margarine and worn-out coffee, he is caught up on the mission of this retreat by his roommate, Dr. Anders Stern, the “Nordic Jew” with the long loony face. Altogether, Stern explains, some one hundred and forty pilgrims from twelve countries have committed themselves to a week of homage, prayer, and silent meditation in memory of this camp’s million and more victims, and “through personal testimony,” reads the manifesto, “to bear witness lest the world forget man’s depthless capacity for evil if such horror is to be diminished in the future.”

A primatologist and evolutionary biologist with strong opinions on the fatal role of the human species on the tree of life, Anders Stern is one of those perverse intellectuals who enjoy the role of the buffoon. He wears wool britches with suspenders and a peasant’s rubber knee boots and a big manure-hued overshirt. Blue eyes, pale hair set off oddly by black brows; deep furrow lines between those eyes as in the scowls of primitives; that wet red mouth with the out-thrust lower lip that ensures a not quite comic air of grievance. He speaks more loudly than he needs to, overtalks others, interrupts. Belching noisily out of habit, he declares he is attending this retreat in the hope that in all-day silent meditation in a death camp, he might arrive at some insight on mass sadism that could cast light on the evolutionary purpose of so-called human evil—

“
So-called
evil, you say?” a woman’s voice complains. “Evolutionary
purpose
?”

Listening to Stern at the mess hall tables are a number of retreatants, mostly middle-aged and older people, humbly spoken and uncomfortable when noticed. Many are practiced in the silent meditation that is the organizing principle of this retreat and all have at least a scraped acquaintance with the English language. The majority, Stern informs his roommate a bit loudly, are Jews and Christians from Israel, the United States, and Western Europe, most of them German; others include a young Palestinian and a makeshift Tibetan Buddhist from New Jersey named O’Brien. “Unaffiliated” is a Mr. G. Earwig, no indicated nationality, and last-minute arrangements have been made for a late arrival, Dr. D. Clements Olin, Polish-born American poet and scholar, who is not formally enrolled but has attached himself to this retreat to take advantage of the economy of these lean accommodations and their proximity and access to the camp itself.

Dr. Olin is duly introduced by Stern to the retreat’s unofficial “spiritual leader,” nicknamed Ben Lama, a genial, bearded, near-bald psychologist left over from the flower-power days of a psychedelic California youth (“Master of Tibetan Tantra and ex-hippie ex–Orthodox Jew,” snorts Anders Stern, who is much amused by the ecumenical mix here from America).

A
T UNIVERSITY
in Massachusetts, Clements Olin had immersed himself in the literature of the Third Reich and the Shoah. Eventually, he’d been appointed full professor of twentieth-century Slavic literature, with emphasis on its great modern poets—Akhmatova, Herbert, Milosz, Szymborska—and a special interest in the survivor texts; he is presently completing a monograph on Tadeusz Borowski for a university press.

Although he is offered readings and lectureships in Warsaw and is well-traveled elsewhere in Europe, this journey to his native region never seemed to come about until this year, when his father’s sudden death was followed closely by word from his meditation group in Cambridge, notifying practitioners about a pioneer retreat in the winter. Suddenly, with mixed feelings, he was on his way—not “going home to Poland,” he assured his friends and colleagues, no, no, certainly not. True, he would be passing through his ancestral region while completing research on the role of death camps in the work of the ambiguous Borowski, doomed author of the brilliant, controversial
This
Way
for
the
Gas,
Ladies
and
Gentlemen
. Indeed, half the weight strapped into his father’s old valise consists of research notes and outlines, early drafts, paperback volumes of the literature, also galley proofs of a new collection of those excellent Slav poets edited by D. Clements Olin, Ph.D. (His Borowski monograph is not the only reason he has come, but he sees no point in mentioning the other, which he considers sentimental or at least too personal, too likely to invite the wrong sort of attention.) He is here as a researcher, he informs Ben Lama. As a stranger in Poland, with no close family lost in the war, he has no authentic witness to contribute and will probably stay only two or three days.

“A researcher.” Ben Lama nods slowly twice or thrice before murmuring, “I see.” Though he says it pleasantly enough, his “I see” seems a bit cryptic to Olin, perhaps even a mild rebuke, and who could blame the man? With immense archives of evidence and testimony so readily available, Ben must be thinking, what sort of “research” can be left for this poor fool to do? What could his research possibly contribute that has not, long since, with lacerating eloquence, been flayed upon the page?

Olin tends to agree with the many who have stated that fresh insight into the horror of the camps is inconceivable, and efforts at interpretation by anyone lacking direct personal experience an impertinence, out of the question; in the words of the survivor-writer Aharon Appelfeld, “The Holocaust belongs to the type of enormous experience that reduces one to silence. Any utterance, any statement, any ‘answer’ is tiny, meaningless, and occasionally ridiculous. Even the greatest of answers seems petty.” He will never pierce through to the “something incredible” mentioned by that boy Mirek, to that twisted black shrunken “coil of evil” cited by Poland’s great Yiddish writer I. B. Singer. So what can he hope to understand here? He would never dare attempt to name it even if he could imagine such a thing, a bead of illumination glimpsed from a poet’s oblique angle, some fleeting
apprehension
which might clarify, for example, the enigma of Borowski’s abrupt suicide at age twenty-eight, at the pinnacle of his celebrity and just three days after the birth of his first child to his longtime lover.

O
N THIS FIRST MORNING
a film documentary made by the liberating armies will be followed by a guided tour of this base camp, Auschwitz I; in the afternoon and for the next five days, all day in every weather, the retreatants will trek the long mile across the fields to the extermination camp KL Vernichtungslager Auschwitz II to offer prayer at its gas chambers and crematoria and all-day silent meditation on the long railway ramp known as “the selection platform.”

Although Professor Olin is not registered as a participant, he is experienced in meditation practice, and Ben Lama invites him to join the retreat schedule, coming and going as he pleases. This morning, he forgoes the screening on a strong instinct to confront the death camp all alone on this first day, undistracted by the dismay of others.

L
EAVING
A
USCHWITZ I
, he crosses the main railroad tracks, following directions to the outlying farmland community known as Brzezinka, “The Birches”—in German, Birkenau. Years before, Olin’s father had described to him this countryside he knew well as a boy and later as a young cavalry lieutenant, the army stables and broad pastures, the farms, orchards, and shaded lanes of its quaint hamlets. Not until 1940, as reported by Borowski, were those communities razed to create a buffer zone around the camp, with the inhabitants presumably resettled in the confiscated houses of the Jews.

Beyond the tracks, he follows an ice-puddled dirt road through the fields, along a ditch line of hard-cropped winter trees. In the distance, delicate as netting, high fences drift forth through a brownish fog. Soon the hazy outline of the main sentry tower thrusts up from a red wall of end-to-end brick buildings, slapped up in haste in 1942, Borowski wrote, by Russian prisoners from the eastern front before they perished of starvation. Below the tower, like the mouth of an ogre’s cave, an arched railway tunnel bores through the prison walls into the impoundment.

Uneasy, he enters by a broken gate and ventures through. Where the tunnel opens out into the camp, the railway splits into three tracks served by parallel ramps that separate two vast barbed-wired enclosures. Where these platforms draw to a point and end, pale ruins like immense mushrooms lie half-hidden in thin woods.

On the north side, in its own fenced compound possibly a mile across, stand the foundations of what is left of the small city of old stables used as barracks for male prisoners, long ramshackle sheds with black earth floors and missing slats and myriad chinks open to the weather. All but the sheds nearest the entrance had been burned down at war’s end by the Red Army, leaving a wasteland of charred chimneys like black stumps in the wake of forest fire.

Vast emptiness, terminal silence, under a gray overcast withholding snow. “Bearing witness”? Dear God. In the echo of such desolation, what more witness could be needed?
Vernichtungslager.
Extermination camp.
The name signified all by itself a mythic barbarism and depravity.

Could there be seasons in this place or is it always winter? He could be breathing the air of the Dark Ages.

Reading Borowski was Olin’s first exposure to the swarming scenes of terror on this platform, the howls of lost children running everywhere and nowhere “like wild dogs,” the young mother so frantic to be spared that she forsakes the little boy calling
Mama!
Mama!
who runs behind her (“Oh no, sir! He’s not mine!”), casting away the last of her humanity for a few more hours of excruciating life. Who could hear the despair of that child, the cries of all those children being stripped of their brief moment on this earth, without suffering this urge that he feels now, a half century too late, to beat and kick those dolled-up SS pigs into a jelly—

Stop!
To rage this way over dead history is ludicrous. Among the participants in this retreat, the several sons and daughters of defunct SS may well be the most agonized of all, and their ordeal will be stark enough without the unearned indignation of some damned onlooker from abroad who has no connection to the place and no meaningful witness to contribute.

He has faltered, needing to compose himself, find his breath before proceeding. But when he starts forward with intent to walk the platform all the way to those half-hidden ruins in the woods, he stops again almost at once, feeling somehow threatened. In a moment, he retreats, edging backward into the tunnel mouth like some night creature in response to a dim instinct not to expose itself outside its lair.