Lone Star (41 page)

After what?

He didn't say after what. But she knew. After today when he would go to Tarcento and she to Barcelona, and he to Afghanistan and she to San Diego, he to somewhere in his vagrant life, and she most certainly to someplace else. She couldn't look at him anymore. Her mouth twisted sharply in an effort to keep her eyes from welling up. We better go back, she whispered.

They were a few buildings away, in full view of the others, who loitered on the street past the horses, waiting for Johnny's tourists. Everybody's eyes were on them. They walked as slowly as they could.

“Was it okay when Blake came back instead of me in the middle of the night?”

“No.”

“Were you surprised?”

“I wasn't
not
surprised.”

“He insisted he go.”

“That sounds like Blake.”

“I wanted to come back, Chloe. But he insisted.”

“I understand.”

“Was he angry?”

“Yes, but . . .” Chloe didn't know why they were talking about Blake.

I don't know what I want to say, he said. I guess I'm not saying it very well.

No, Johnny, she said. You're saying it perfectly.

You're tearing me from limb to limb.

And you me.

They took the last steps of their glacial amble, closing in on the others. She clutched the flowers to her chest, as if she and Johnny were walking down the aisle of a long church. By the time she realized this, it was too late. But she didn't know how else to carry flowers! Or how to walk next to a tall beautiful boy if not in a ONE-two-and-three waltz, trying not to weep, to look less alive, to want less, to hurt less with bliss and sorrow. One two and three. One two and three. All things are numbers.

J
OHNNY SAID THEY WOULD WALK FOUR KILOMETERS INTO THE
woods. They would follow the old spur of the railroad, the spur that had been built by imprisoned Jews to reroute the trains from the main track in Treblinka village to a field in the remote forests. The sign was still there by the side of the desolate road in the gray flatlands. T
REBLINKA
, the sign proclaimed, announced, shouted, whispered.

They climbed out of the van at the crumbling, run-down train station. Yvette asked if it was still operational.

“Would you hop aboard a train at a station called Treblinka?” Johnny asked. Yvette wasn't sure how to answer that.

Artie helped her. “The answer is no, Yvette. Say no.”

“No.”

“Thatagirl.”

Mason said that maybe the station had been left shuttered, yet standing on purpose and Chloe agreed. Acidly, Blake said, “You
think
?” Chloe and Mason glared at Blake.

“Anyway, as Johnny told us,” Mason went on, “they couldn't continue to use it after the war, could they?”

“Why not?” Denise said. “Tell us, Johnny, you're the tour guide.” Johnny, bless him, had to repeat everything he had told Chloe and Mason on the bus. He did it without rancor, but Mason was peeved for him, Chloe could see that. She gripped her roses
with one hand, and Mason's hand with the other. Aberrantly, she liked that Mason liked Johnny.

“The sign is a replica,” Blake said. “The original hangs in Yad Vashem.”

“Where?”

“Jerusalem.”

Johnny stared at Blake, amused. “That is correct, and it's fascinating,” he said, “that you would know that.”

“I know a lot of crap,” Blake said with a cold shrug and an even colder stare.

Johnny advised everyone to leave their heavy things behind. “Bring your cameras if you want, but I'd counsel against even that. It's eight kilometers there and back. You don't want to be loaded down.” He showed everyone his little Olympus point and shoot. “This is the size of camera you want on long hikes.” Chloe glanced over at Blake and saw that he wanted to pitch his own silver Olympus into the trash. Imagine those two having the exact same camera.

“Can't Emil drive us?” Hannah asked. Chloe poked her to keep quiet. “What?” she said. “I'm just wondering.”

“No, Emil can't drive into the forest,” Johnny said. “Is everyone ready?”

Hannah stared at the path disappearing into the woods. “Why not?” she whispered to Chloe. “Why can't he drive us?”

Chloe hurried ahead to stay closer to Johnny, while doing some math in her head. Eight kilometers was five miles. Two and a half miles each way. Piece of cake. They walked more than that when they went mushroom picking around their lake after a rain. Chloe wanted to whisper that to Hannah, but her friend was in no mood to be chided, no matter how lightly.

They left their belongings in the van, which Emil promptly locked up. He wasn't joining them. He wasn't interested in that stuff, he said, swirling his hand in the direction of the forest. He was going to find some food and have a nap.

“How long, Johnny?” he asked in his regal English.

“At least three hours,” Johnny replied. They fist bumped.

“Three
hours
?” Hannah mouthed in horror.

The group set off.

“What if we have to go to the bathroom?” she asked, loudly, and then to Chloe: “I sort of have to go now.”

Yvette laughed. “The forest is your ladies' room, darling,” she said.

Hannah hemmed and hawed. “Wouldn't that be disrespectful?”

Johnny nodded. “Yes, probably best to go now rather than later.”

Hannah shook her head. “Is he kidding me?” she whispered, hanging on to Chloe's arm.

It was just past noon. There was no one else on the needly path through the woods. “Well, why should there be?” Dennis said. “There's hardly anything here.”

“There are some things here,” said Johnny.

“Does anyone know about this place?” Denise asked.

“Yes. Poland and the Jewish Holocaust Committee are thinking of building a permanent museum here.”

“There's not even a museum?” Dennis exclaimed.

“There's not even a museum,” said Johnny.

“So what's here?”

“Well, there's these four kilometers of the railroad spur. As they rode it in the cattle cars, we're walking it now.” He smirked. “Though I'm sure Hannah would prefer it the other way around, no?”

Hannah colored a little. “I'm fine now,” she said, taking Blake's hand. “Carry on. You were saying there was a museum?”

“Actually, just the opposite.”

“So what's there?” Brett persisted. “A watchtower? A barbed-wire fence? Remnants of the sleeping barracks?”

“Even Majdanek had more,” Denise said. “And it hardly had anything.”

“Yes, Treblinka has less. You'll see.”

“So what are we walking to?” Hannah said. “We're just going to walk down this road, and then walk back?”

“We're walking to what used to be a farm,” Johnny said. “Or what is now a cemetery, if you prefer.”

They moved in single file along the narrow path, except for Hannah and Blake, who brought up the rear side by side. Hannah, despite her bravado, walked like the injured. Johnny strode in front, black guitar case on his back, followed by Chloe, Mason, and then the Arizona tourists. Johnny was the only one with a small backpack. His had maps in it, a compass.

“Not even some barracks left?” Yvette called from the middle. “Barracks are fascinating to see. I'll never forget the barracks at Sachsenhausen and Buchenwald.”

“Living quarters for the Germans, you mean?” Johnny asked.

“No, I mean barracks for the Jews. Like in Majdanek.”

“There were no barracks here,” said Johnny.

“So what are we walking four miles for?” Hannah said from the rear. “A field?”

“Four kilometers, not miles.”

“Same difference.”

“Hannah, shh, listen to him,” Blake said. Chloe was glad somebody had. Though to think: Blake told Hannah to listen to Johnny. Cats and dogs living together.

“Johnny, I don't get it. How can there not be barracks?” Denise said. “There are always barracks.”

“Here's the thing about Treblinka II,” Johnny told them, walking backwards so he could face them. “Treblinka I, a few kilometers away, had barracks, because it was a concentration camp. People slept and worked there at the quarry before they died. But that's not the part we're going to. The part we're going to had no barracks. They got off the train, and three hours later their bodies were burning in the pits.”

Half a kilometer went by in silence.

“Is the burning pit still there?” Yvette asked.

“No. It's gone.”

“But how did they hide the pits from the Jews who'd just arrived?”

“They camouflaged them with exotic landscaping. And they covered the absence of barracks by telling the Jews that Treblinka was nothing more than a transit camp. That they were on their way to better camps elsewhere. A nicer train was waiting to pull in as soon as the dirty one left, and the people had washed and deloused.”

“But couldn't everyone smell the human flesh burning?” That was Blake. He had asked Johnny a question. Treblinka, the great equalizer.

Johnny continued to walk backwards while answering Blake. Chloe was worried for him. Careful, she wanted to call out. Careful. You'll trip, you'll fall.

“Oh yes, Blake,” he said. “The smell and the smoke from the fires permeated the region for miles. Everyone could smell it, everyone knew what it was. But you saw how sparsely populated the few villages around here are. That was the case sixty years ago, too. And most of the villages had gestapo living in them. No one said a thing. What could they say? Excuse me, that smells mighty suspicious. Let's just take a gander at what you have there?”

Blake nodded in grim understanding.

“Maybe they could've complained,” said Hannah.

“To who?”

“Well, I don't know.” Chloe thought Hannah wanted to add that she herself always found someone to complain to.

“No one admitted anything, or wrote anything down,” Johnny said. “The smoke the Nazis didn't acknowledge, and everything else they hid. They wouldn't even allow the driver to pull the locomotive into the camp. He was ordered to put the train into reverse and back up four kilometers. The locomotive remained in the woods while the cattle cars with the Jews were slowly emptied. When they were done unloading, the conductor took the train back to the main spur. He never
saw what was on the load manifest. For all he knew, he was delivering lumber.”

Johnny stared at Chloe. She got uncomfortable and looked away. “Your grandmother knew this,” he said. “Once you come here, you never forget. She didn't tell you about her past? Many survivors don't. It's too heavy and useless a burden for others.”

“She didn't come here,” Chloe replied. “Her friends did. Then they vanished. She searched for them for a long time after the war, she said. She was sure she'd see them again. She didn't believe the stories about Treblinka.”

Johnny nodded, his eyes still on her. “Many people didn't. The Germans demolished nearly all the evidence. For years Treblinka was called the Forgotten Camp.”

“Are there crematoria here at least?” asked Denise. “Like in Majdanek?”

Johnny shook his head. “No. They were burned on a pyre. Well, not at first. At first, after they were gassed, they were buried. But when Himmler visited the camp and saw the black oozing liquid of the decomposing bodies rising up from the shallow mass graves, he became physically ill. He had to be hospitalized. Afterward he ordered that every single body in the pits be dug up and burned. It took a thousand men three months to fulfill his orders. And they didn't get them all. They hoped he wouldn't come back and inspect the camp again.”

“How do you know they didn't get them all?” asked Brett.

“Be patient. I'll get there,” Johnny said with a small smile. “Chloe, your grandmother wasn't the only one who was skeptical. Lots of people maintained that Treblinka was a myth perpetuated by the Jews, nothing more than a vicious lie. Except for a tiny problem: intact bones kept being unearthed near the field we're about to see, for the next—well, until now, actually. They're still being unearthed.”

“We're not going to see bones, are we, Johnny?” Hannah said. “Because I won't be able to stomach that.”

“No, don't worry.” They continued onward.

“I want to underline,” Johnny said, “that the extermination of human beings on this scale is unprecedented in human history. There's been genocide, there's been slaughter, and indiscriminate killing. But there has never been such a pitiless conveyor belt of mass death. For many years no one raised a voice against it, partly because no one believed it, just like Moody.” Johnny blinked at Chloe. She blinked back without breaking stride. He remembered her grandmother's name. He was the boy who seemed to remember everything. Would he remember her?

“The one or two people who had managed to escape,” he went on, “and recounted some of what they'd seen here, were dismissed as kooks and liars. Imagine having several trains a day deliver thousands of human beings and have them all be dead by sundown. Yvette is right. No one believed this was possible. Or that Hitler would be insane enough to divert the vast resources from his war machine, a diversion that many people point to as having cost him the war, which he had started and for all intents and purposes won in 1942.

“But it was precisely in 1942,” Johnny continued, “at the moment that Hitler felt most invincible, that he began his long-planned construction of the six death camps. Operation Reinhard required trains, coal, electricity, transport, and building materials. It needed sand and concrete, bricks and mortar, and weapons—and gas! Let's not forget that someone had to manufacture an enormous amount of Zyklon B, and it all had to be shipped to Majdanek or Birkenau, along with benzene, kerosene, wood, metal, weapons, ammunition, and barbed wire. But the diversion of transport trains was probably most instrumental in Hitler's defeat. Instead of bringing his wounded soldiers from the front to the hospitals, instead of bringing food and arms to the front, instead of carrying materials desperately needed to fight the Soviets in the dead of winter, with Poland directly in the path between Group Army Nord and the unstoppable Red Army, Hitler instead used the trains to deliver millions of Jews to their execution. Instead of using the Jews for
slave labor, he killed them. All of it boggles the rational mind. It's one of the reasons why no one believed the sporadic reports that arose from the camps and the ghettos. Not Churchill, not Roosevelt. Stalin may have believed it,” Johnny said, “but he didn't care. He had his own agenda against Hitler. He was willing to kill twenty million of his men to destroy Germany—and did—because Hitler had betrayed him, not because Hitler was a monster. It was all personal with Stalin.

“The bottom line is that the place we are heading to is unique even among the death centers. The Germans built thirty or forty concentration camps in the occupied territories—and they were all death camps, make no mistake about it. The Jews, and many others, died everywhere. And of course when we see Auschwitz in a few days, the thing that I hope will affect you the most is the sheer size and scope of the slaughter operation there: it had six crematoria and four gas chambers. The Birkenau section was three miles square. An entire twenty-wagon train pulled in comfortably inside it. But even Auschwitz-Birkenau had barracks. What we'll be looking at here is distinct from the others, because what you're about to see had only one purpose. It was an abattoir. It was to kill Jews. The killing wasn't a by-product of this camp, but its reason for being. There was no other business in Treblinka. They were brought here not to work but to die. That's why there were no barracks. They weren't needed.”