* * *
We arrived at Treblinka in early September 1944, thirteen months after the day of the uprising. For thirteen months from July 1942 the executioners block had been at work—and for thirteen months from August 1943, the Germans had been trying to obliterate every trace of this work.
It is quiet. The tops of the pine trees on either side of the railway line are barely stirring. It is these pines, this sand, this old tree stump that millions of human eyes saw as their freight wagons came slowly up to the platform. With true German neatness, white-washed stones have been laid along the borders of the black road. The ashes and crushed cinders swish softly. We enter the camp. We tread the earth of Treblinka. The lupine pods split open at the least touch; they split with a faint ping and millions of tiny peas scatter over the earth. The sounds of the falling peas and the bursting pods come together to form a single soft, sad melody. It is as if a funeral knell—a barely audible, sad, broad, peaceful tolling—is being carried to us from the very depths of the earth. And, rich and swollen as if saturated with flax oil, the earth sways beneath our feet—earth of Treblinka, bottomless earth, earth as unsteady as the sea. This wilderness behind a barbed-wire fence has swallowed more human lives than all the earth’s oceans and seas have swallowed since the birth of mankind.
The earth is casting up fragments of bone, teeth, sheets of paper, clothes, things of all kinds. The earth does not want to keep secrets.
And from the earth’s unhealing wounds, from this earth that is splitting apart, things are escaping of their own accord. Here they are: the half-rotted shirts of those who were murdered, their trousers and shoes, their cigarette cases that have turned green, along with little cogwheels from watches, penknives, shaving brushes, candlesticks, a child’s shoes with red pompoms, embroidered towels from the Ukraine, lace underwear, scissors, thimbles, corsets, and bandages. Out of another fissure in the earth have escaped heaps of utensils: frying pans, aluminum mugs, cups, pots and pans of all sizes, jars, little dishes, children’s plastic mugs. In yet another place—as if all that the Germans had buried was being pushed up out of the swollen, bottomless earth, as if somone’s hand were pushing it all out into the light of day: half-rotted Soviet passports, notebooks with Bulgarian writing, photographs of children from Warsaw and Vienna, letters penciled in a childish scrawl, a small volume of poetry, ration cards from Germany . . . And everywhere there are hundreds of perfume bottles of all shapes and sizes—green, pink, blue . . . And over all this reigns a terrible smell of decay, a smell that neither fire, nor sun, nor rain, nor snow, nor wind have been able to overcome. And thousands of little forest flies are crawling about over all these half-rotted bits and pieces, over all these papers and photographs.
We walk on over the swaying, bottomless earth of Treblinka and suddenly come to a stop. Thick wavy hair, gleaming like burnished copper, the delicate lovely hair of a young woman, trampled into the ground; and beside it, some equally fine blond hair; and then some heavy black plaits on the bright sand; and then more and more . . . Evidently these are the contents of a sack, just a single sack that somehow got left behind. Yes, it is all true. The last hope, the last wild hope that it was all just a terrible dream, has gone. And the lupine pods keep popping open, and the tiny peas keep pattering down—and this really does all sound like a funeral knell rung by countless little bells from under the earth. And it feels as if your heart must come to a stop now, gripped by more sorrow, more grief, more anguish than any human being can endure . . .
FIRE IN THE SKY1
The atomic age began on the morning of July 16, 1945, with the detonation of the world’s first nuclear weapon in the Jornada del Muerto desert in New Mexico. As the mushroom cloud bloomed in the desert sky, J. Robert Oppenheimer (1904–67), the director of the Los Alamos Laboratory that designed the weapon, remembered a haunting utterance attributed to the god Vishnu in the Hindu scripture the Bhagavad Gita: “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” Oppenheimer and his team of physicists had unlocked a new, unprecedented destructive power. Three weeks later, on August 6 and 9, 1945, American forces unleashed this power by detonating weapons of similar design over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, incinerating tens of thousands of people instantly, mostly civilians, and killing many tens of thousands more in the months thereafter due to burns, radiation sickness, and other injuries.
No country has ever employed atomic weapons in warfare after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but the specter of the fear that nuclear fire could rain from the sky has haunted every nation on earth ever since. The creation of this killing technology is one of the most frightening ways that modern human beings have enabled themselves to render whole cities into the burning hellscapes imagined by Christian authors throughout history. The infernal analogy was not lost on critics of nuclear weapons. In a lecture presented after winning the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964, Martin Luther King Jr. (1929–68) identified war as one of the great evils confronting the world: “A world war—God forbid!—will leave only smoldering ashes as a mute testimony of a human race whose folly led inexorably to ultimate death. So if modern man continues to flirt unhesitatingly with war, he will transform his earthly habitat into an inferno such as even the mind of Dante could not imagine.”
Japanese survivors experienced firsthand the reality of a nuclear holocaust that Western authors could only shudder to contemplate. Among them was Yoshitaka Kawamoto, who was thirteen years old when the atomic bomb detonated a kilometer away from his school in the Zakoba-cho district of Hiroshima. His escape from the concussive force of the initial explosion and the collapse of his school is nothing short of miraculous. Kawamoto’s firsthand account of the human carnage and personal suffering caused by a nuclear blast is far more harrowing to read than historical accounts of the torments awaiting sinners in Hell because it actually happened. Marking the seventy-second anniversary of the bombing in August 2017, Hiroshima mayor Kazumi Matsui warned his audience: “This hell is not a thing of the past. As long as nuclear weapons exist and policymakers threaten their use, their horror could leap into our present at any moment. You could find yourself suffering their cruelty.”
One of my classmates, I think his name is Fujimoto, he muttered something and pointed outside the window, saying, “A B-29 is coming.” He pointed outside with his finger. So I began to get up from my chair and asked him, “Where is it?” Looking in the direction that he was pointing toward, I got up on my feet, but I was not yet in an upright position when it happened. All I can remember was a pale lightning flash for two or three seconds. Then, I collapsed. I don’t know much time passed before I came to. It was awful, awful. The smoke was coming in from somewhere above the debris. Sandy dust was flying around. I was trapped under the debris and I was in terrible pain and that’s probably why I came to. I couldn’t move, not even an inch. Then, I heard about ten of my surviving classmates singing our school song. I remember that. I could hear sobs. Someone was calling his mother. But those who were still alive were singing the school song for as long as they could. I think I joined the chorus. We thought that someone would come and help us out. That’s why we were singing a school song so loud. But nobody came to help, and we stopped singing one by one. In the end, I was singing alone. Then I started to feel fear creeping in. I started to feel my way out pushing the debris away little by little, using all my strength. Finally, I cleared the things around my head. And with my head sticking out of the debris, I realized the scale of the damage. The sky over Hiroshima was dark. Something like a tornado or a big fireball was storming throughout the city. I was only injured around my mouth and around my arms. But I lost a good deal of blood from my mouth, otherwise I was OK. I thought I could make my way out. But I was afraid at the thought of escaping alone. We had been going through military drills every day, and they had told us that running away by oneself is an act of cowardice, so I thought I must take somebody along with me. I crawled over the debris, trying to find someone who was still
alive. Then, I found one of my classmates lying alive. I held him up in my arms. It is hard to tell, his skull was cracked open, his flesh was dangling out from his head. He had only one eye left, and it was looking right at me. First, he was mumbling something, but I couldn’t understand him. He started to bite off his finger nail. I took his finger out from his mouth. And then, I held his hand. Then he started to reach for his notebook in his chest pocket, so I asked him, I said, “You want me to take this along to hand it over to your mother?” He nodded. He was going to faint. But still I could hear him crying out, saying “Mother, Mother.” I thought I could take him along. I guess that his body below the waist was crushed. The lower part of his body was trapped, buried inside of the debris. He just refused to go; he told me to go away. And by that time, another wing of the school building, or what used to be the school building, had caught on fire. I tried to get to the playground. Smoke was filling in the air, but I could see the white sandy earth beneath. I thought this must be the playground, then I started to run in that direction. I turned back and I saw my classmate Wada looking at me. I still remember the situation and it still appears in my dreams. I felt sorry for him, but it was the last time I ever saw him. As I was running, hands were trying to grab my ankles. They were asking me to take them along. I was only a child then. And I was horrified at so many hands trying to grab me. I was in pain, too. So all I could do was to get rid of them—it’s terrible to say—but I kicked their hands away. I still feel bad about that. I went to Miyuki Bridge to get some water. At the riverbank, I saw so many people collapsed there. And the small steps to the river were jammed, filled with people pushing their way to the water. I was small, so I pushed on to the river along the small steps. The water was full of dead people. I had to push the bodies aside to drink the muddy water. We didn’t know anything about radioactivity at that time. I stood up in the water and so many bodies were floating away along the stream. I can’t find the words to describe it. It was horrible. I felt fear. Instead of going into the water, I climbed up the riverbank. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t find my shadow. I looked up. I saw the cloud, the mushroom cloud growing in the sky. It was very bright. It had so much heat inside. It caught the light and it showed every color of the rainbow. Reflecting on the past, it’s strange, but I could say that it was beautiful. Looking at the cloud, I thought I would never be able to see my mother again. I wouldn’t be able to see my younger brother again. And then, I lost consciousness. When I came to, it was about seven in the evening. I was in the transportation bureau at Ujina. I found myself lying on the floor of the warehouse and an old soldier was looking in my face. He gave me a light slap on the cheek and he said, “You are a lucky boy.” He told me that he had gone with one of the few trucks left to collect the dead bodies at Miyuki Bridge. They were loading bodies, treating them like sacks. They picked me up from the riverbank and then threw me on top of the pile. My body slid off and when they grabbed me by the arm to put me back onto the truck, they felt that my pulse was still beating, so they reloaded me onto the truck carrying the survivors. I was really lucky.
THE SUM OF SUFFERING1
Incarceration is one of the main forms of punishment in the modern United States. A staggering number of people currently inhabit American prisons. In 2013, more than two million adults were being held in federal and state prisons and county jails, totaling almost 1 percent of the resident population (1 in 110). Prisoners often endure violent discipline and repressive conditions with very little administrative oversight. This is especially the case with solitary confinement, a form of imprisonment that isolates an inmate from human contact for twenty-two to twenty-four hours a day, both as a cruel form of punishment and as a way to protect inmates from one another. About eighty thousand inmates (5 percent of the national prison population) currently endure solitary confinement in American penal institutions. For many critics, this kind of extreme physical and social isolation is nothing less than torture. For the inmates themselves, it feels like an inescapable Hell.
In his essay “A Sentence Worse Than Death” (2013), William Blake has depicted the realities of solitary confinement from the inside. In 1987, while in court on a drug charge, Blake attempted to escape. He wrestled a gun from a guard and murdered a deputy before he was apprehended. He is now serving a sentence of seventy-seven years to life for his crimes. But because Blake is considered an especially dangerous offender, he is living out his sentence, and very likely the rest of his life, in permanent solitary confinement. Blake’s account of his twenty-five years in near constant social isolation recalls the suffering of premodern sinners consigned to Hell, but for him the dread and despair of endless imprisonment is a crushing reality. Moreover, the term “solitary” is inaccurate. In his confinement, Blake is surrounded by other inmates enduring the same cruel punishment, whose furious screams and pitiful wailing create an incessant and maddening cacophony. Add to these terrifying sounds the inescapable stench of human excrement, the chronic fatigue caused by lack of sleep, and the severe mental anguish of never-ending loneliness, Blake’s life sentence has become a living Hell. Given the sum of this inhumane treatment, it is little wonder that incidents of self-harm and suicide abound among inmates in solitary confinement.
“You deserve an eternity in Hell,” Onondaga County Supreme Court judge Kevin Mulroy told me from his bench as I stood before him for sentencing on July 10, 1987. Apparently he had the idea that God was not the only one qualified to make such judgment calls.
* * *
What nobody knew or suspected back then, not even I, is that when the prison gate slammed shut behind me, on that very day I would begin suffering a punishment that I am convinced beyond all doubt is far worse than any death sentence could possibly have been. On July 10, 2012, I finished my twenty-fifth consecutive year in solitary confinement, where at the time of this writing I remain. Although it is true that I’ve never died and so don’t know exactly what the experience would entail, for the life of me I cannot fathom how dying any death could be harder or more terrible than living through all that I have been forced to endure for the past quarter century.
Prisoners call it the box. Prison authorities have euphemistically dubbed it the Special Housing Unit, or SHU (pronounced “shoe”) for short. In society it is known as solitary confinement. It is twenty-three-hour-a-day lockdown in a cell smaller than some closets I’ve seen, with one hour allotted to “recreation” consisting of placement by oneself in a concrete-enclosed yard or, in some prisons, a cage made of steel bars. There is nothing in a SHU yard but air; no TV, no balls to bounce, no games to play, no other inmates, nothing. There is also very little allowed in a SHU cell: three sets of plain white underwear, one pair of green pants, one green short-sleeved button-up shirt, one green sweatshirt, one pair of laceless footwear that I’ll call sneakers for lack of a better word, ten books or magazines total, twenty pictures of the people you love, writing supplies, a bar of soap, toothbrush and toothpaste, one deodorant stick, but no shampoo.
* * *
Life in the box is about an austere sameness that makes it difficult to tell one day from a thousand others. Nothing much and nothing new ever happens to tell you if it’s a Monday or a Friday, March or September, 1987 or 2012. The world turns, technology advances, and things in the streets change and keep changing all the time. Not so in a solitary confinement unit, however. I’ve never seen a cell phone except in pictures in magazines. I’ve never touched a computer in my life, never been on the Internet and wouldn’t know how to get there if you sat me in front of a computer, turned it on for me, and gave me directions. SHU is a timeless place, and I can honestly say that there is not a single thing I’d see looking around right now that is different from what I saw in Shawangunk Correctional Facility’s box when I first arrived there from Syracuse’s county jail in 1987. Indeed, there is probably nothing different in SHU now than in SHU a hundred years ago, save the headphones. Then and now there were a few books, a few prison-made clot
hing articles, walls and bars and human beings locked in cages. And misery.
There is always the misery. If you manage to escape it yourself for a time, there will ever be plenty around in others for you to sense; and although you’ll be unable to look into their eyes and see it, you might hear it in the nighttime when tough guys cry not-so-tough tears that are forced out of them by the unrelenting stress and strain that life in SHU is an exercise in.
The Penguin Book of Hell Page 22
