Too Many Men (61 page)

“Mengele did his work here,” she said to Edek. Edek shook his head.

“Are you all right in this place, Dad?” Ruth said.

“I am all right,” Edek said.

Block 10 was closed to the public. “Block 4 has very good exhibitions,”

Jerzy said.

“Shall we go there?” Ruth said.

T O O M A N Y M E N

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“Okay,” said Edek.

Inside Block 4, the walls were painted two tones of gray. The stairs had had a marble and concrete composite added to their surface. In the different rooms the floor was painted with enamel paint. There were heating units along the walls. There was an odd primness about the decor. Totally at odds with the brutalities and obscenities that had taken place within the walls.

Ruth wished the visitors to these blocks could experience something of the atmosphere of degradation and humiliation and inhumanity that had existed. How could you feel people’s anguish and terror in centrally heated, newly painted barracks? But maybe nothing could ever replicate a fraction of the atmosphere, a fraction of the events that took place.

Nobody would come here, she thought, if the place was still covered in shit and piss and lice and rats and vomit and ash and decomposing corpses.

The car park wouldn’t be full of tourist coaches. People wouldn’t be looking at the photographs and other exhibits on display in these rooms. These renovations were probably necessary. She had to stop being so judgmental, she told herself.

In front of an exhibit of a can of Zyklon B, Jerzy began to speak. “Why do we present this?” he said. Ruth wasn’t sure who he was addressing this stupid question to. It couldn’t be to her or to Edek, she thought. She looked around. The dozen or so other tourists in this room were not looking at Jerzy. “We give these tours,” he continued, “so humankind can learn.”

“Thank you,” Edek said.

“Poles died here, too,” Jerzy said. “It wasn’t just Jews.”

“That’s a line I’ve heard from quite a few Poles,” Ruth whispered to Edek.

“Shsh,” Edek said.

“My mother-in-law died here and my father-in-law died here,” Jerzy said.

“I am very sorry to hear about that,” Edek said.

“I am sorry, too,” Ruth said.

“My wife was a true orphan,” Jerzy said. “She had to live from the time she was sixteen without a mother and without a father.”

“I am very sorry,” Edek said.

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L I L Y B R E T T

“Polish people tried very much to help the Jews,” Jerzy said.

“I’d like to look at the exhibits,” Ruth said. “Could we meet you outside?” Jerzy looked stunned. “Please,” she said.

“If that is what you want, of course,” he said.

“Why did you tell him, like this, to go?” Edek said.

“I told him politely,” Ruth said. “I don’t want to hear about how much Poles suffered and how no Pole knew what was happening to the Jews. Or the even worse version of history he was just about to start on, which was how much Poles tried to help the Jews.”

“I did tell you we did not need a guide,” Edek said.

“I thought the place was going to be a real mess,” Ruth said. “I didn’t think it would be so cleaned up.”

“They did have to clean it, I suppose,” Edek said.

The exhibits in the rooms were moving. Ruth could see how moved most people were by the piles of old suitcases with names and addresses on them, the photographs of women being driven into the gas chambers, and the photographs of large piles of burning corpses. She looked closely at the bales of haircloth. She knew what it was. It was cloth woven from human hair and used as tailor’s linings for men’s suits.

“That is what did happen to Mum’s hair,” Edek said.

“I was thinking of that,” she said. They both stood in front of the cloth, in silence for a minute.

In the next block, Block 5, there were exhibits of Jewish prayer shawls, shaving brushes, and toothbrushes. The shaving brushes and toothbrushes looked so forlorn, Ruth thought. As though they still hadn’t grasped that they had been separated from their owners. There was a mound of spectacles and a mountain of shoes. Such personal parts of so many people’s lives.

Still here so long after their owners had gone. There were artificial limbs and kilos and kilos of human hair. So many parts and addendums to so many people.

The volume of what was left behind was just a fraction of what had been removed from prisoners in Auschwitz. Quite a few of the visitors had tears in their eyes. “It is shocking,” Edek said to Ruth, in front of the mountain of shoes. Small shoes, large shoes, women’s shoes, men’s shoes, and tiny baby shoes. They were all still here.

Outside, the turbulence present in the exhibits was absent. A trolley on T O O M A N Y M E N

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rails, used for carting bodies to the crematorium, had candles and flowers on it. There was no sense of chaos, no sense of abandonment, no sense of a world gone awry. Where was the unpredictability? The never-ending blows and beatings? The always-changing orders? The rules that never remained the same and were always nonsensical? Where was the world in which everything was unpredictable and nothing could be divined or foreseen? A world where chance encounters could save a life or erase it. A world in which everything was uncertain and nothing was safe. And any news was unverifiable and indistinguishable from rumors. And orders were fickle and capricious. A world in which killing was ordered as an afterthought.

Where was this uncurbed, unchecked, lawless universe?

Where were the endless twice-daily
Appels,
roll calls that served little purpose. They were gone. Gone with the people. What did she expect?

Ruth thought. Mock-ups of beatings and roll calls and barracks crowded with lice-ridden bodies. Mock-ups of men and women leaking with typhus.

Representations of women with mixtures of feces and menstrual blood running down their legs. Was this what she expected?

She expected something more than what was here. She had thought the air would ring with violence and insanity. She thought it would be choked with pain, bewilderment, disbelief, and anguish. She thought it would be clogged and plugged with unsaid farewells. She remembered her mother telling her about her first
Appel
, in Auschwitz. “We did join the other prisoners,” Rooshka had said. “We were ourselves very thin from the ghetto, but we still looked like people. The people in the
Appel
did no longer look like people. They were not round, they were flat, like they were made of paper, not flesh. They stood so still in the
Appel
. There was no sign of life in them. Nobody moved. They stood with their rags hanging on them like broken torn paper puppets. Soon I looked just like them.”

Jerzy was waiting for them outside Block 11, which housed the prison cells within this prison. “Would you like me to tell you about the prison block?”

he said.

“No thanks,” she said. She looked at Edek.

“No thank you,” Edek said.

Ruth walked over to the formerly electrified barbed-wire fence. She

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L I L Y B R E T T

touched it. Nothing happened. She put her face against the fence. She wondered what had touched this particular piece of fence? She knew that pieces of prisoners’ flesh often stuck to the fence after they had tried to escape or to kill themselves. That fence must have looked pretty tempting.

One fling against it, and you were gone.

Rooshka had been ashamed of herself for being able to live through the nightmare of her days at Auschwitz. Ashamed that she didn’t just die. “The best people did die first,” Rooshka had said, many times, to Ruth. “They couldn’t have,” Ruth said to Rooshka when she was older. “Niceness and goodness were not criteria the Nazis were using in their selections.” But she knew what her mother was saying. Her mother was saying that she felt a contempt for herself for surviving all that brutality, all that baseness. Ruth wondered if the fence had tempted her mother. Edek came over and touched the fence. He looked surprised when nothing happened. He touched it again. “Who would believe I would one day do this?” he said to Ruth. Ruth took Edek’s arm.

More tourists had arrived. Groups of people were walking around with and without guides. Most of the visitors looked somber. Still the visitors bothered Ruth. She would much rather have been here alone with Edek.

Several classes of Polish schoolchildren walked by. They were talking and laughing. Ruth was surprised that the teachers accompanying them didn’t ask them to be quiet. Ruth glared at several of the noisier children. The schoolchildren, who looked about twelve or thirteen, were chewing gum and eating snacks. Two boys not far from Ruth suddenly started fighting. A few punches flew from one boy to the other. The teacher who was closest to the boys ignored them.

Ruth strode over to the two boys. “Excuse me,” she said loudly, “this is a burial ground, a gravesite, not a circus.” The taller of the boys laughed, and said something Ruth couldn’t understand in Polish. The teacher just looked at Ruth. “You are disgusting,” Ruth said to the teacher. Her heart was racing. She could hardly catch her breath. What were they doing bringing these adolescent hooligans to this place? For these boys, this was just another trip, just another opportunity to get out of the classroom.

“Ruthie, Ruthie, what are you doing?” Edek said, running up to her.

“Nothing,” she said. “They’re assholes.”

“Ruthie, we cannot fix up anything by speaking like that,” Edek said.

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“We cannot bring back anyone. If somebody does behave badly here what does it matter? The people who are dead are dead. They do not see this bad behavior.”

“You don’t know that,” she said to Edek. Edek looked at her. “Ruthie, darling, the dead are dead,” he said.

“Would you like to go to Birkenau soon?” Jerzy asked.

“Do you think you’re up to it?” Ruth said to Edek.

“I am up to it,” he said. “I will show you my barracks and where I did sleep.”

“Would you like to go to the museum shop before you go?” Jerzy said.

Ruth had known that there would have to be a profit-making section of the Auschwitz Museum business. She didn’t want to contribute to their profits.

“Let us see what they got,” Edek said.

“Okay,” she said.

A fly flew into Ruth’s face and began buzzing around her head. She tried to brush it away, but it kept returning. It was a large black fly. Ruth watched the fly warily. Why was it attacking her? And what was it doing here in winter? She thought flies appeared only in summer. Was this fly lost? Was it supposed to be somewhere else? The fly flew at her again. She tried to flick it away by shaking her hair at it. It flew right back. She felt the sting of its bite on her cheek. The fly, apparently pleased with its successful mission, flew off.

Ruth felt her cheek. It felt hot. She could already feel a swelling. She looked around. There were no other flies in sight. Where did this fly come from? And why did it bite her? Maybe it wasn’t a fly? Maybe it was someone’s spirit. Who had she hurt that would need to get back at her with a bite? She shook her head. She had to put an end to that kind of thinking.

It was absurd to imbue a fly with a spirit. A spirit that belonged to someone else. Poland was twisting her vision. Distorting her beliefs and understandings.

Edek turned and noticed the bite. “Look what you got on your face,” he said. “What happened?”

“It’s just a bite,” Ruth said. “I was bitten by a fly.” She felt her face. She could feel the bite still swelling.

“There was no flies in Birkenau,” Edek said.

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L I L Y B R E T T

“Mum said there were no flies in Auschwitz,” Ruth said. “Mum said she didn’t see one single fly here.”

“No?” said Edek.

“She said there were no flies and no birds,” Ruth said.

“It doesn’t look good, your face,” Edek said. “It looks bad.”

“I’m always allergic to flies,” Ruth said. “To all insects. I swell up twice as much as anyone else. And every gnat, mosquito, or fly anywhere finds me in minutes.”

“You must have sweet blood,” Edek said.

“Plenty of people have said that to me,” Ruth said. She laughed. “But you know my blood is not all that sweet. You know I am not all that sweet.”

“What are you talking about?” Edek said. “Why do you think always that you are bad? You did do this even when you was a girl. You was never bad. You was always a good girl.”

“I felt it was my fault,” Ruth said.

“What?” said Edek.

“My fault that Mum had to suffer so much,” Ruth said.

“That is crazy,” said Edek.

“All children feel it must be their fault if their parent feels bad,” Ruth said. “It’s too hard to understand that it’s not your fault. That you didn’t cause it. And you can’t fix it up.”

“You did fix up a lot for Mum,” Edek said. Ruth was quiet. “She was very happy with you,” Edek said. “It was other stuff she was not happy about.” Tears came into Ruth’s eyes. She didn’t want to cry again. She didn’t want to set Edek’s tears off again. He often still wept for Rooshka.

“Terrible things did happen to Mum,” Edek said.

“I know,” she said. Her cheek was burning. She felt it with her fingers.

She could feel a large blister forming in the middle of the swelling. “I’m not usually bitten in winter,” she said to Edek.

“It does look terrible,” Edek said. “It must have been a big fly.”

“It must have been the commandant of flies,” Ruth said, and laughed.

Edek laughed. “Maybe he was the Generalfeldmarschall Reichsführer-SS

of flies,” Ruth said. “Or maybe there are bigger flies and he was just an SS-Obergruppenführer, a lieutenant general, or a plain old captain, an SS-Hauptsturmführer.”

T O O M A N Y M E N

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Edek fell about laughing. Ruth thought he was going to fall over. She grabbed his elbow.

“What is the lowest this fly can be?” Edek said.

“A second lieutenant, an SS-Untersturmführer,” Ruth said. Edek looked at Ruth’s bite. “I do not think that this fly was an SS-Untersturmführer,” he said, and collapsed with laughter. They both laughed until they cried. Edek had to lend Ruth his handkerchief to wipe away her tears. Jerzy stood behind them silently.