by Alison Pick
He answers his own question.
“Because it is a time of such great, overflowing joy. We can remember our persecution and move ahead, as well.”
I catch Degan’s eye below me; we share a smile.
At the end of the service the rabbi alludes to the number of Jews killed in Vienna before the war, to the antisemitism that characterized the city. I remember Degan reading to me from the guidebook, about Jews after the Ausschluss being forced to scrub toilets with their prayer shawls. “You might think of this place as relatively evil,” the rabbi says. “And I am not denying that horrible things happened here.” He pauses. “But things are changing. It’s different from before.”
As though to celebrate this, the dance that Jews seem to love erupts, the dancers linking arms in a large adult version of Ring around the Rosie; it always reminds me of a Newfoundland folk dance. The balcony obscures half the circle: I have an aerial view of the bobbing black hats, and the edge of the circle as it turns, heads coming in and out of view like the portion of a wheel visible beneath the fender.
That night, I wake in the darkness from a dream in which Degan has to retrieve something from a toilet. The feeling in the dream, which Charlotte always says is the most important part, is not shame but joy. There is a document in those fetid waters, something from the past, and Degan is the one to fish it out.
Our next stop is Prague. Because of an article I’ve been commissioned to write, we are put up in the Czech Republic’s most resplendent hotel. Our bags are whisked to an opulent suite where chocolates and champagne await. The smell when Degan uncorks the bottle makes me run for the bathroom. I spend the whole day curled on the bed in the fetal position. The lavish buffet is lost on me. I emerge at dinner to eat off the “beige menu”: dry toast, bananas.
“I can’t even enjoy good food!” I wail.
“Be gentle with yourself,” Degan says. “It’s a lot. All of this.” He gestures around at our fancy hotel room, but I know he’s referring to much more, as well.
Since I’m here, I’ve decided to take advantage of the chance to delve into my family history. I leave Degan at the hotel, bundle up and head down into the street, looking for some scrap of Granny’s life before. Thinking of Gumper’s Report from England: “There is no trace of the Bauers and we must assume they are no longer alive.”
It’s mid-afternoon by the time I make it down to the Jewish Quarter. The place is crawling with school groups, teenage boys elbowing each other, laughing about the mandatory kippahs they have to wear. I hesitate in front of a display of Judaica. The vendor tries to explain, in halting English, that the six points on a silk tallit represent the points on the Star of David.
“I know,” I tell her. “I already know.”
I head down to the Pinkas Synagogue, a monument to the Czech Jews killed in the Holocaust. The names of the murdered are written on the walls. Granny visited this synagogue in the 1980s with my cousins. She wasn’t interested in hanging around inside for too long, so they went outside and sat on a wall and she smoked a cigarette. She told them that she imagined her mother, Marianne, had looked after the chickens in Theresienstadt. Unlikely, yes. But the confidence with which Granny said it made it seem true.
Later, when they were getting into bed, Granny said she felt that if she began to cry about everything that had happened, she would never be able to stop and might go mad.
I brace myself and enter the building. I, too, have been here before, but in the intervening decade the monument has been completed, and now every square inch of wall space is covered with names. Each last name is written only once, in bold letters, followed by all the first names in smaller writing. My stomach flutters as I scan the dense script. I find the name Bauer, Granny’s maiden name, and gasp to see just how many of them were murdered. A whole band of different Bauers, with their own families, their own stories. It takes me ages to find Granny’s parents. I run my eyes along the long list and land on the names with an odd mixture of gladness and grief:
Oskar 29 xi 1880—20 1 1943;
Mariana 8 viii 1894—20 1 1943
The memorial does its work and my eyes film over. I touch my belly, both to share the act of remembering with my unborn child and to protect her from it. I take a few deep breaths and try to absorb the moment but am jostled from behind by a group of laughing teenagers; I lose my footing, and when I regain it, Oskar and Marianne have disappeared back into the mass of writing on the wall.
I catch the scent of someone’s body odour and my stomach rebels. I push through the crowds and stand outside, gulping the fresh air. I want to do something else; I want some other, better way to honour them. I approach the beleaguered woman in the ticket booth. “Is there somewhere to go to an actual service?” I ask.
She launches into a rickety English explanation of the various synagogues my ticket gives me access to.
“No,” I say. “A service.”
“Now?”
“For Shabbos. Tomorrow.”
“Oh,” she says. She doesn’t know.
Degan and I decide to get up early on Saturday regardless. The Charles Bridge, flanked by its famous statues of saints, shimmers in the pink light of sunrise. St. John the Baptist, St. Francis of Assisi, the lesser known saints Norbert of Xanten, and Sigismund. We sit outside the locked Pinkas Synagogue, rubbing our arms against the chill. I want to show Degan what I’ve seen, the names of Granny’s parents. Why is nobody here? When I pull out the guidebook, I see that the synagogue is closed for the Sabbath.
“I fumbled it again,” I say.
Degan hugs me. “I’ll visit it when you’re in Plzen,” he says. “Okay?”
I sniffle. I am set to head off to research my article for the travel magazine. “You’ll stay here?”
“I’ll meet up with you on Monday.”
I sniffle again and nod.
“Let’s read the Kaddish,” he suggests. We’ve practised the prayer for the dead in the preceding weeks, going over and over the unfamiliar syllables. Degan pulls out the folded sheet. We read it in halting Hebrew, all the way through. I’m thinking about Lucy’s dream: “Mrs. Liska Pick very much regrets that she is unable to attend.”
The next morning I board the train to Plzen, home to the most famous Czech brewery. The article I’ve been commissioned to write, irony of ironies, is about beer. I am to tour the country’s world-renowned microbreweries, sampling the wares. “Alcohol is prohibited!” my daily pregnancy email warns cheerfully. As if I had a choice. I turn away glass after glass, bile rising hot in my throat.
The tours of the breweries cover hectares of hallways. I race after my guide, through a pea-soup fog of malt and hops. I gag and sweat. It is as though I’m being trained for a marathon, maybe, or for some more ancient relay involving armour, a crossbow and a unicorn.
I keep my hand pressed against my stomach and picture the cells multiplying. I make up a silly song and sing it under my breath: “ ‘My little baby. Oh! My little baby.’ ” It’s a lullaby, and a hymn, and a mantra.
Degan takes the last train from Prague and meets me at the hotel. We lie on the bed and have a huggle. “How were your last few days?” I ask.
He tells me about his own trip to the Pinkas Synagogue. As he talks, I recall how the names covering every square inch of the walls are written in tiny cursive script barely legible to the naked eye. But Degan entered the room, raised his face, and the names jumped out at him, as though Oskar and Marianne themselves were waving hello.
“Wow,” I say.
“I know.”
“I also saw an Irma Pick. That was your Gumper’s sister, right?”
“Really? I didn’t see her!”
Alone in the hush of the room, Degan recited the Kaddish. Whereas when I was there, the place was full of tourists.
We brush our teeth—the toothpaste makes me gag, the feel of the bristles against my back molars, and flossing is out of the question—and collapse into bed. I sleep for thirteen hours, unmoving, like a
corpse. The following day we take the train to Auschwitz.
twenty-three
SEEING THINGS THROUGH THE LENS of cinema is a cliché of North American culture, but all I can think about as we board the train to the death camp is who should score the soundtrack and who the starring actress should be. It’s late afternoon, and a violently bloody sunset streaks the sky. The set designers add a last layer of red. The trip takes several hours, the train left over from the Cold War era: metal, utilitarian, and almost empty. The slow rocking of the carriage makes me gag. The closer we get to our destination, the slower we move. The laboured clacking of the wheels over the tracks is audible: ca-lunk, ca-lunk, ca-lunk. At the penultimate stop, a bald tattoed man in tall lace-up neo-Nazi boots boards. He sits in the seat across from us, eyes forward. As the train starts to move again, I look out the window and see an abandoned gravel lot, and standing at its border, three gaunt children in tattered overalls, holding up their cameras to take our picture.
It is, of course, impossible to travel on a train to Auschwitz and not think of others who did so in different circumstances. It is summer now, and warm, but in her video interview, Vera says that she and her family were sent on December 17. I try to imagine the cold, but my mind trips and falls. They didn’t sit for three days. Her children clung to her. They were jammed into a freight car, with one bucket to use for a toilet for a hundred people. People were sick. People died.
It was night when they arrived. There were SS men, dogs, people in striped pyjamas, Nazis yelling, “Raus! Raus!” “It was a scene from a madhouse,” Vera said. “Yelling. Beating. You didn’t know where you were.”
The men and the women were separated on the platform. I imagine little Eva, gripping the edge of her mother’s dress. What is a five-year-old like? She needs help cutting her meat. A story before bed, the sheets tucked up around her chin. She is bright enough, smart enough to understand the adult world around her. You can see the first signs of the person she’ll grow into, but she still has the smell of a baby about her.
Eva had curls and big cheeks. She was born in the unlucky year of 1938. She held her mother’s hand as they were loaded into the back of a truck. They were beside a woman Vera knew who had been a prisoner for some time. The woman said, “You’re in Auschwitz. We’re all going up that chimney.”
Vera says to the interviewer, “We didn’t understand.”
The next morning they were sent to the showers. Those little spiked nozzles on the ceiling, so portentous. But it was water that rained briefly down on them. Naked, in December, tiny Eva shivering. I picture her thin arms, the way her small shoulder blades would have jutted from her back like wings. The prisoners had been forced to leave their clothes on a peg outside; at the end of the shower, their belongings were gone. There was only a huge pile of other people’s clothes. They scavenged to find something to wear. Vera tears up. “I was glad I found clothes for little Eva. I was so worried she would catch cold.”
Later they stood in line to get tattooed. Vera pulls up her sleeve as proof, to the interviewer, to the part of herself that still refuses to believe.
“Was it painful?”
Vera doesn’t answer. “Eva was very smart,” she says, instead. “Some of the children were crying terribly, but she didn’t cry.” Her daughter understood not to make a fuss, in case compliance could help them.
Vera’s number was 71251.
Her little daughter Eva’s was 71252.
I try to imagine, as though I am there, Eva pulling up her sleeve. The fabric getting caught, bunching up. Maybe Vera had to help her, holding her daughter’s arm steady under the pain. Little Eva clenching her milk teeth while the hot needle burned into her skin.
A five-year-old still likes to hold hands.
Tears roll freely down Vera’s cheeks as she remembers. Midwinter, in Auschwitz, a friend of Vera’s brought Eva a gift. It was a tiny stuffed toy, sewn from a scrap of old cloth. A little mouse.
Vera’s tears are for the smallness of this pleasure, and for its enormity. For the generosity of her friend in the face of the unthinkable. Tears remembering her daughter’s real delight. That her daughter could be delighted in such circumstances. That she will never be delighted again.
When the train stops at Auschwitz, Degan and I are the only ones who dismount. The station is abandoned. We walk around aimlessly, looking for a taxi; the driver we eventually find doesn’t speak a word of English. Only through a crudely acted pantomime of execution, a finger slit across the neck, are we able to tell him where he should take us. Our hotel is located directly opposite the camp gates. We can see the infamous wrought-iron slogan, ARBEIT MACHT FREI—“work sets you free”—from the lobby. The man who greets us at reception has one arm.
Like college roommates, Degan and I fall into the twin beds and a deep, unconscious slumber, and wake to a world where anything could happen. “Maybe we should just forget it,” I say. “Relax in the hotel and watch TV.”
A joke: there’s no TV. And Degan is already putting on his nicest shirt and tie: he wants to dress up to honour my family.
It’s a grey, rainy morning at the world’s most infamous death camp. Tourists of all ethnicities mill about. We join a four-hour English walking tour and are herded around, a mass of humanity, which I can’t help but find ironic. A large man in sweatpants drops an empty nachos bag casually on the floor of one of the barracks. Our guide shows us all manner of gas and execution chambers, piles of shoes, piles of human hair, Zyklon B crystals, graphic photographs demonstrating the results of Dr. Mengele’s “medical experiments.” Eighty per cent of the people getting off the train, we are told, were sent directly to the gas chambers.
Oskar and Marianne were among them.
Vera and her children were not.
Auschwitz, I remember Rabbi Klein telling us, is sometimes seen as the inverse of Mount Sinai. Receiving the Ten Commandments was the time we were closest to God. And here at Auschwitz—I look around at the size of it—when we were the farthest.
I keep the button on my jeans undone out of necessity, periodically touching my belly. “My little baby. Oh!” I hum to our daughter. Degan bends down and whispers, “Hello, little blastocyst.” The movie-set quality of the tour recedes only once, in the face of a display case of baby clothes. Two or three cloth diapers, a moth-eaten sweater and a pair of tiny booties, their owner long flown to heaven’s angels.
I search for Eva’s tiny stuffed mouse, believing I might actually find it there.
At Birkenau we walk beneath the famous guard tower, then down the railway tracks to the gas chambers. This is where the real killing took place.
Eva.
Jan.
Oskar.
Marianne.
We sit against the base of one of the chimneys and, for the second time, recite the Kaddish: “May His great Name grow exalted and sanctified,” I stumble, “in the world that He created as He willed.”
PART III
The truth is the thing I invented so I could live.
—Nicole Krauss
one
AUGUST IS ON THE VERGE of expiring by the time we arrive back in Toronto. Degan will be busy preparing for the new semester, so I fly on alone to Quebec to tell my parents the news. “Why are you smiling?” Dad asks when we see each other at the baggage carousel.
“No reason.”
I touch my stomach unconsciously.
I’ve decided to wait until we get back to the house in North Hatley—a two-hour drive—so I can tell him and Mum together, but as soon as my suitcase is in the trunk of the car and Dad starts easing out of the parking garage, I blurt it out: “I’m pregnant!”
Dad slams on the brake.
“That’ll be twenty-five dollars, sir,” says the man in the booth.
Dad says, “But you just got married!”
“Three months ago.”
“Sir?” the man in the booth says. “There are other cars behind you.”
Dad pays, forgetting his chan
ge, and we move out into the turning lane, his face strained with some emotion I can’t read.
“Aren’t you happy?” I ask.
“I am happy,” he says, and like magic, the smile on his face grows. “I’m delighted! But I wasn’t expecting it yet. I guess it makes me feel old.”
“Me, too. I’m an adult.”
Dad laughs. “When’s the baby due?”
“March,” I tell him.
“I’ll cancel my Taos ski trip,” he says, now really excited, on board and eager to do whatever he can to help.
I fall asleep almost as soon as we hit the highway and wake up, two hours later, in North Hatley. I’ve been coming here my whole life, but the beauty surprises me every time. The fields and farmland, the picturesque red barns giving way to the enormous summer houses nestled in the woods around the water. The lake spills its shimmer of blue below the rolling hills. We pull up our long gravel driveway. Mum comes out to meet us, stands beside the swimming pool in her bathing suit cover-up, with her sunglasses pushed back on her head. I give her a hard hug. “Alison has some news,” Dad says.
She looks at me expectantly, her eyebrows raised, her skin tanned and sun-flecked from hours on the tennis court.
“I’m pregnant!”
Her eyes widen. “You just got married!”
From inside the house the dog starts to bark.
“Three months ago,” I say.
Mum’s face is blank, registering her shock.
“Aren’t you happy?
“I am.” Et cetera.
Those two are meant for each other.
