Exodus, Revisited

by Deborah Feldman

  “My younger brother went through a phase when he was a teenager, but I think he’s mostly grown out of it.”

  “What do you mean by ‘mostly’?”

  “It’s how young people do their rebellion here. You know it’s against the law, and it’s considered politically incorrect, so of course that’s the issue that young people will pick as a way of showing they are going against the grain. It makes them cool. But it’s abstract for them; it’s not like they actually know any Jews. My brother is not an anti-Semite; he just makes an offensive joke once in a while.”

  “I would say that’s an anti-Semite, Markus.”

  “Every teenager in Germany is an anti-Semite, then, because that’s what they do now, to be cool. They make politically incorrect statements, to show they don’t give a fuck, and since Jews are a sore topic here, they like to pick at the wound.”

  “Would your brother disapprove of you being with me?”

  “I don’t think so,” Markus said. “But it wouldn’t matter anyway.”

  “It would matter to me,” I replied.

  We slept together on our last night in his narrow bed, neither of us moving from the position we fell asleep in, with his arms wrapped around me and the humid summer air cooking us like chickens on a rotisserie. My head swam when I awoke. Markus needed to return to work, and I had a train to catch to Berlin, where I would spend the remaining week before my return flight. He kissed me on the forehead. “Call me when you arrive,” he said. I nodded and watched him lumber off the platform from my window seat on the train, never looking back once. Whether or not either of us harbored the intention, it would become clear very soon that our relationship had already acquired a life of its own, and neither of us would prove capable of arresting its natural course.

  * * *

  —

  When I arrived in Berlin, I immediately felt as if I had lost that magical sense of orientation that had guided me through most of Europe. Berlin’s sights lay sprawled in every direction, and I felt dwarfed by the scope of the city, beleaguered by its complicated maps, its chaotic layout. The streets were filled with scaffolds and trenches; there was construction happening everywhere. What had become of those orderly arrondissements and neatly delineated quarters that I had encountered in other European cities? Here the river was not something to skirt around via a pedestrian bridge; it was not even a body of water you could easily view in its entirety, the way you could see down the Seine in Paris. Elevated tracks crisscrossed on top of it, and buildings squatted over its narrower parts.

  In my first few days there, I was oddly afraid to leave my hotel room. Markus was no longer at my side, and it was suddenly strange to navigate my life without him. I was staying on the edge of the old Jewish quarter, but it was only when I finally ventured out that I realized that. The old synagogue was a two-minute walk away. It had been perfectly preserved in its mostly disheveled state, with bits of still-intact marble and mosaic cordoned off. I had to go through an extensive security check and a metal detector just to get inside. On the exterior of the building was a plaque that described how the synagogue had been violated and ultimately destroyed. Underneath the description was a line in bold, enlarged letters: never forget. I snapped a photo, and the security guard standing alongside it smiled as if to pose. I wanted to tell him that a smile was inappropriate, but I stared straight ahead instead, pretending I didn’t notice.

  After that I descended into the subway and headed in the direction of the Holocaust memorial, for after all I was in Berlin, the capital of Germany, the main stop on the Holocaust trail, so where else should I have gone? It was a gray weekday morning, the stations were empty and quiet, and aboveground the wide city blocks with their cold contemporary buildings seemed forbidding. Until now I had stayed away from Holocaust exhibits, perhaps not consciously, but I needn’t have worried—the memorials here were brief and succinct. I descended into the underground chamber below the memorial, where the Holocaust was summed up for tourists and schoolchildren. I joined the procession of visitors that passed slowly along its corridors.

  “It happened, therefore it can happen again; this is the core of what we have to say,” read a quote by Primo Levi emblazoned on the wall behind the entrance. Levi had only recently entered my library, but upon doing so had immediately seemed to be the voices of my grandparents speaking to me about the experiences they had never been able to put into words.

  I shuffled in line past the high-definition photograph of the Einsatzgruppen moving among a writhing pile of naked moon-white women, rifles cocked as they shot each one individually, and followed the crowd into a darkened room, the floor of which had a small collection of backlit testimonials from various victims of the Holocaust, collected from postcards or journals.

  Here was a poem by Radnóti Miklós, the Hungarian Jewish poet of whom I now recalled Zoltán had spoken so fondly. It was translated into German and English. I whispered it out loud to myself.

  I fell beside him and his corpse turned over, tight already as a snapping string. Shot in the neck—And that’s how you’ll end too—I whispered to myself; lie still, no moving.

  Now patience flowers in death. Then I could hear Der springt noch auf—above, and very near. Blood mixed with mud was drying on my ear

  —Szentkirályszabadja, October 31, 1944

  I choked on the sound that burst suddenly from my throat. I had to sit down, and the one tissue I had on hand wasn’t enough to mop up the mess of mascara and snot on my face. How vivid and powerful those words were that I felt as if I was lying right there beside him as he died, and it was unbearable.

  Der springt noch auf. My German was good enough at that point to make sense of that easy phrase, “he still leaps up,” and also to recognize it from Imre Kertész’s Kaddish for an Unborn Child: “I leapt up and so to say concealed again after all, ich sprang doch auf, indeed I’m still here, though I don’t know why, unless it was pure chance, the way I was born, I’m just as much an accomplice to my sticking around as I was to my coming into this world—”

  I recognized in Kertész’s words my own inherited inability to reconcile my existence with the annihilation of so many others. There was that old warning from my childhood, the one that asked: Had I paid the debt of my grandmother’s survival that had been transferred to me?

  The other visitors stepped cautiously around me, but I was blind and did not care. I sat in front of the poem until my chest stopped hurting so much. I recalled the intense rage and sorrow I had experienced the first time I had seen those images in the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum as a teenager. It felt just as fresh. Would this feeling ever dissipate or dilute itself?

  * * *

  • • •

  In another room, the names of the victims were being read, with descriptions of how they had lived and died. In the next room was an explanation of the death camps. A little boy around the age of seven sat in one of the audio booths with earphones pressed to his head, listening to information about how Auschwitz was operated. I looked at him in shock: he could have been my own son, and he looked somberly into my red, swollen eyes. You shouldn’t be here, I wanted to say; you’re too young. Was there really such a thing as a seven-year-old boy who needed to be educated about death camps?

  Isaac did not yet know about the Holocaust, and this made me realize that I could not recall a consciousness that did not include it. Did my awareness of my grandparents immediately coincide with my awareness of them as survivors of genocide? Was there ever a moment in which I did not align my identity so neatly and perfectly with theirs, knowing with certainty that I too would have been a target, and still could be if the world lost its mind again before I died?

  In a room off to the side, a group of German schoolchildren clapped loudly but perfunctorily as a Holocaust survivor finished her lecture. As the students filed out of the room, their faces seemed to say, Yeah, another one.

>   I remembered seeing my son’s head when he was born, his wet curls still gleaming blond, and thinking, Thank God, he’ll pass for non-Jewish, before I collapsed back onto the pillow.

  I wrote something in the guest book then, underneath a message from a young Ukrainian student that read, “We must always remember.”

  How can I describe this feeling of being at once alive and wiped out? To be descended from the living and the dead? A part of my soul has been erased. How will I ever heal this wound in my family? How will I tell my son about this?

  I signed my name underneath.

  * * *

  • • •

  At the exit, I found myself in front of a life-size photograph of Bergen-Belsen at liberation. This was the scene that first greeted the dumbfounded British troops when they arrived. They had proceeded to document everything. Here was an image of skeletal women sitting up among piles of corpses as if rising from the dead. It was an unimaginable horror: as far as one could see, a vision of a postapocalyptic wasteland. I stood transfixed before it. My grandmother had witnessed this. She had been there that day, lying in that filth and ugliness and inhuman horror. It would never be erased from her memory. I felt that rage from earlier return like bile in my throat. I left the exhibit and raced up the stairs to disappear into those concrete pillars. Walking down the aisles in between them was spooky; here and there I’d catch the ghostly shadow of some other visitor passing fleetingly between the aisles. They were there, and then they weren’t.

  I stopped in between two pillars and leaned against one of them and let myself cry with the intention of drying up my tears for this trip. Just this once, get it out, and then you’ll be through. There’s nothing left to cry about. None of this is new for you. Someday you’re going to have to stop crying about all of this.

  * * *

  • • •

  That night I woke up in my pitch-dark hotel room at three a.m. after a bad dream. I lay awake remembering the photograph of the Einsatzgruppen. What was it about those men that made them capable of this?

  I called Markus. He was awake.

  “I can’t sleep. Bad dreams.” I told him about the photograph.

  “Can you find it on Google and send it to me?”

  I did.

  “That’s a pretty bad picture.”

  “I feel, for the first time in my life, that I really could murder someone. I am filled with anger, which scares me, because maybe somehow that explains what they did, and I don’t want it to. It can’t. I just remembered something a good friend of mine once told me,” I interjected suddenly. “She’s Jewish too, with a grandmother who survived the camps. She’s from California, very liberal, a lesbian who married a non-Jewish woman. She said she could confront her family with anything—they were so open-minded—but that the one thing she could never do was bring home a German. It’s like this line we know not to cross.”

  I wondered if, in the act of crossing every line that had ever been drawn in front of me, I had somehow failed to draw any of my own.

  * * *

  • • •

  The next day I signed up for a tour of Sachsenhausen, the model concentration camp just outside Berlin. On the trip there, I met a Jewish couple from Park Slope in Brooklyn. The woman was a daughter of Ukrainian survivors. She told me about how she and her mother had gone back to their little Ukrainian village and had been chased out by an angry, drunken mob.

  “How could you let them do that to you, in this day and age? How could you bear to let them get away with it?” I asked.

  “What was there to do? It’s Ukraine.”

  “I would have done something. I wouldn’t have let them treat me that way. The world isn’t like that anymore. They can’t do that to us.”

  She fell silent, her head bowed toward her lap.

  “Do you think there is anyplace in the world where we can go and not experience anti-Semitism?” I wondered out loud. I told her about the conductor slamming the door on me in Rosenheim.

  “You’ve got to be careful of what you speak about in front of the Germans,” she whispered, nodding toward the other passengers. “They’re very sensitive about these things.”

  “They goddamn well should be.”

  “You’re a guest in their country,” she said. “You can’t just go around talking like that.”

  “Like my grandmother was a guest in their concentration camps?”

  “Why are you here?” she asked.

  “I’m trying to deal with this part of my identity, to put it behind me.”

  “That’s impossible,” she said. “You’ll never put it behind you. I’ve tried my whole life.”

  “I think I’m doing okay,” I said. “I believe I can achieve some measure of closure. Most of why I feel so bound up in it is all the secrecy I grew up with. I knew about the Holocaust, but no one ever discussed the details of their experiences. It was as if life before America had been a collective experience, summed up by one word. I need to feel like I know the individual stories; I think that will bring me some peace. I don’t want my grandmother’s story to be diminished by a broad category.”

  There was a beautiful blond man in our tour group. He was Swiss-German, very tall, with a chiseled jawline and hollows under his cheeks. His eyes were cool blue marbles under a golden brow. He didn’t talk much. I invited him out for a drink later; we were staying in the same neighborhood.

  “Why did you decide to visit a concentration camp while in Berlin?” I asked, wondering what someone so clearly non-Jewish and so young and normal-looking would be doing on a tour like that.

  “Don’t you think it’s important,” he asked, “to learn about those things?”

  “It happened to my family. What’s your relationship to it?”

  He cleared his throat and pushed his drink away. “It’s obvious to you, no?”

  “Was your family involved somehow?”

  “No, they were not, but in some way, I think we all feel connected to this event, from both sides. We all participated in a way, even just by being bystanders.”

  * * *

  • • •

  I remembered meeting a German man in my coffee shop back home. Peter was his name; he had been born shortly after the war. “Every German has a story,” he had told me, “of being refused service, or of a door slamming in their face, or of a hand left dangling during an introduction. We take it for granted. But when I was a child in school, history stopped at the First World War. The education about the Holocaust didn’t start until recently, until people felt they could sufficiently separate themselves from the actions of the Nazis.”

  I walked back through the streets of the Scheunenviertel, the old Jewish neighborhood, in the late afternoon. There were some lovely, quiet side streets, with neat rows of beautifully restored homes once occupied by working-class Jewish families, now gentrified by skinny-jeans-wearing residents. I approached a beautiful gated park and then noticed the haunting sculpture at the entrance. This was once the Jewish cemetery, I read. Since the stones had been completely destroyed by the Nazis, it was now a public park. I saw a young mother and her toddler in there, and the little girl was running down the garden path on chubby legs, squealing happily. My heart skipped a beat at the sight. Did that mother know her daughter was running over the desecrated graves of Jews? What kind of reality is this, to raise children on the very streets on which so much blood was spilled and so much havoc wrought?

  I burned with the desire to ask them this but remained silent, watching. It was difficult to admit that I had come here wanting the satisfaction of knowing that this earth was somehow permanently scorched, that it couldn’t sustain a replete life anymore. But here were children frolicking among the ghosts, as if none of it had occurred. To my right, a group of artists were working on a colorful mosaic on the wall of the apartment building next to the cemetery. It was
a happy mosaic of dolphins and butterflies. The banner beside it read the peace wall project.

  Finally, on the way back, I saw my first Stolpersteine, those stumbling stones I had searched for so fervently in Salzburg. I noticed it by accident, embedded in front of an elegant home, four of them grouped together, a name on each one. They were for a family that had lived there. The stones gave the date of their deportation as well as of their death. Yet from above they seemed so innocent, a part of the touristy decor. How chilling it was to think of the people who walked over these stones nonchalantly every day. Even more haunting to think of the people who now built their lives in the apartments that had been systematically freed up for “true” Germans. How could one stand to be around all these reminders? I could never live in Germany, I thought, not when I risked running into memorials around every corner.

  * * *

  • • •

  At the airport, I called Markus. We had not spoken in a while. I had been distracted.

  “I was wondering if you’d call,” he said. “I thought that with our not being together, maybe you felt your passions ease up a bit.”

  “Is that the case with you?”

  “If anything, my passions have increased.”

  “Then why assume that it’s different for me?”

  “I guess we are always afraid.”

  “Do you remember that part in Pride and Prejudice where Darcy tells Elizabeth he loves her against his better judgment, despite the inferiority of her connections, and she’s so insulted?”

  “Mmm,” he said.

  “I guess I love you against my better judgment. Against the part of me that says you live too far away and you’re descended from Nazis, against it’s too damn hard to make this work. I can’t believe I let this happen.”