Too Many Men

by Lily Brett

  “I’ve hired a guide to take us through Auschwitz and Birkenau,” Ruth said to Edek.

  “You did hire a guide?” Edek said. “What for?” he said. “We don’t need a guide.” He looked offended. As though Ruth had invited someone who would intrude on what was his terrain. Ruth understood his concern.

  She had hesitated before hiring the guide, but the thought of her and Edek

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  wandering around Auschwitz trying to identify what could never be identified had frightened her. Somehow a guide had made Auschwitz seem tra-versable.

  “I could walk there with my eyes shut,” said Edek.

  “I know,” she said.

  “Especially Birkenau where I was most of the time.”

  “If you don’t like the guide, I’ll tell him to leave,” Ruth said.

  “Okay,” Edek said. “Maybe about the main camp at Auschwitz we will learn something from this guide.”

  Ruth wondered if her mother had talked to Edek about Auschwitz.

  Ruth had assumed that Rooshka had, but every time Ruth mentioned something about this time in Rooshka’s life, Edek didn’t appear to know.

  Maybe when Edek and Rooshka found each other again, after the war, what had happened to each of them was the last thing they wanted to talk about.

  “Mum was in Auschwitz,” Edek said. “And I was in Birkenau.”

  “I know,” Ruth said.

  “They was two miles apart,” Edek said. “And there was not much news between the camps. I could find out nothing about Mum. I did not know if she was dead or alive.” He shook his head. He looked miserable. Ruth felt worried. Maybe she shouldn’t have brought him here. Maybe this whole trip had been a mistake.

  “Are you all right?” she said.

  “I am all right,” he said.

  “We don’t have to go,” she said.

  “We are on our way already,” Edek said.

  It was a forty-minute drive to Auschwitz from Kraków. Ruth looked at her watch. They must be halfway there. They had passed two road signs to Auschwitz. Both signs said AUSCHWITZ MUSEUM. They passed another one: AUSCHWITZ MUSEUM, 30 KILOMETERS. “Death camp” was clearly a term to be avoided in Poland. They drove in silence. Ruth wondered what Edek was thinking about. She didn’t want to ask. She was glad that he was able to be quiet. Auschwitz was a place you didn’t want to be catapulted into in the middle of conducting a series of jocular conversations. Catapulted out into.

  That’s what they all had been. All the Jews. Soon she and Edek would be there. Quietly, of their own accord.

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  Ruth felt hungry. She got out a banana and ate it. It was a sweet, ripe banana. It tasted good. She had brought a separate bag for the banana peel.

  Edek looked at her. “The whole time we been in Poland you don’t eat. You eat compote and bird stuff,” he said. “Now, on the way to Auschwitz, you are eating. Sometimes I think you are crazy.”

  “Maybe,” she said. Edek was smiling. Ruth knew he didn’t mean crazy, crazy. Lunatic crazy. Just crazy beyond what seemed the norm to him. She ate another banana.

  “We are arriving at the Auschwitz Museum,” the driver said.

  “The Auschwitz death camp,” Ruth said.

  “Yes,” the driver said. He turned off the road. “I will wait in the car park for you,” he said.

  All Ruth could see from the car was car park. A large, already crowded car park. There were coaches and vans and cars and taxis parked in the car park. It was not what Ruth had expected to arrive at. It looked more like a car park for Disneyland or another theme park. Groups of drivers were standing together, smoking. Busloads of tourists were alighting from streamlined coaches. It was a disturbing sight. “I described us to the guide,” she said to Edek.

  They got out of the car. Edek straightened up and looked around him.

  “It does not smell,” he said. He sniffed the cold air. “The smell is gone,” he said. “We did say the smell would never go away.” They walked toward a sign that said MUSEUM ENTRANCE. Ruth looked up. They were in front of the entrance gates to Auschwitz. The ARBEIT MACHT FREI sign was just in front of them. She gasped. The wrought-iron sign woven across the top of the gates looked so small. In photographs it always loomed so large. An image that had presided over so much horror. An image so blatant in its mockery. These gates, this sign, had seemed monumental to Ruth. They had signified so much. A symbol of so much that was impossible to comprehend. Ruth was shocked at how small the gates were. Almost domestic in scale. Average industrial-size gates. They were too small, she thought.

  They should have been bigger, for all the damage they had wrought. She had expected them to almost touch the sky.

  She stood and looked at the sign. ARBEIT MACHT FREI. Freedom Through Work. What a joke. The freedom had been in death. If death was a freedom. She started to cry. She couldn’t bear the proximity to these gates. She

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  wanted to run away. “There is nothing to cry about today, Ruthie,” Edek said. “It did already happen. It is too late to cry.” But she couldn’t stop.

  Tears poured down her face. How could they have fed so many people through these gates? How could they have ushered them through to their death? Shepherded them in. Assembled them for an assembly line, where they were stripped and packed and dismantled and shipped to the sky. It had just been a job for the Germans. A job they carried out in a workmanlike, if harsh, manner. They were hard workers, the Germans. They did what had to be done. This slaughterhouse was far more efficient than most of the world’s abattoirs.

  Images of long lines of Jews filled Ruth’s head. Long lines of Jews on the unloading ramp in Auschwitz. Small children holding their mother’s hands.

  Babies being carried. Sisters clinging to each other. Mothers and daughters trying to stay together. She wept and wept. Edek started to cry. They stood in front of the ARBEIT MACHT FREI sign and wept.

  Ruth tried to pull herself together. “We won’t get very far,” she said to Edek, “if we disintegrate before we’re even in the gate.” Disintegrate.

  That’s what had happened to all the Jews. Their bodies had disintegrated.

  Disintegrated into charred remains. Sharp fragments of bone, pieces of teeth, bits of gristle, deposits of minerals, unidentifiable particles of organic matter. Dehydrated and blackened remains. The shavings and shards of people. The ash that was left of the Jews was dumped in the Vistula River.

  It almost choked the river.

  “I am not going to disintegrate,” Edek said.

  A man walked up to Ruth and Edek. “Rothwax?” he said.

  “That’s us,” said Ruth.

  “I am your guide, Jerzy Branicki,” he said. Jerzy Branicki looked okay, Ruth thought. He was about seventy and had a sensitive face.

  “I’ll go and buy the entrance tickets,” Ruth said to Jerzy.

  “You do not need to,” he said. “It is not necessary to pay to go into Auschwitz.”

  “That’s good,” she said. The irony of paying to get into Auschwitz had not escaped her.

  “My daughter is not saying good because she can’t afford it,” Edek said.

  “Jerzy probably understood that,” Ruth said.

  “Of course,” said Jerzy.

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  “I did just want to make sure,” Edek said.

  Ruth looked at her father. He seemed quite wide-eyed to be where he was. As though he couldn’t quite believe it. She was having trouble believing it herself. A slight drizzle of rain began. Ruth was glad it was a dull gray, wet day. She wouldn’t have wanted to see Auschwitz in sunshine. A sign near the front entrance of the building said AUSCHWITZ MUSEUM. Ruth was furious. Why did everyone insist on using the word “museum”?

  “Why can’t they just say death camp?” she said to Edek.

  “It is a museum,
inside,” Jerzy said. “There are exhibits on display in the former death camp.”

  Ruth said to him, “This is not a museum. The Museum of Modern Art is a museum, the Museum of Natural History is a museum, the Guggen-heim Museum is a museum. This is not a museum. This is a death camp.”

  Jerzy shrugged his shoulders.

  “What does it matter what it is called?” Edek said to Ruth. “It is still the same place.”

  “It is easier for people to believe it is something else, something abstract, if it’s called a museum,” Ruth said. “They can forget that it was a place for the slaughter of human beings.”

  “Which people, Ruthie, is so interested in Auschwitz?” Edek said.

  “Look at how many visitors are here today,” she said.

  “Those what do come here know it is not the Luna Park they are going to visit,” Edek said. “It does not matter what they do call it.”

  Inside the first building, there were signs to the public toilets. And a cafeteria. Of course, museums needed cafeterias, Ruth thought. The cafeteria sold drinks and sweets and cakes and several hot dishes, including sausages. The whole room smelled of food. There seemed to be something wrong about a cafeteria in a place of starvation. Several Polish schoolboys were jostling at the counter of the cafeteria. They were buying cans of Coca-Cola.

  Ruth and Edek and Jerzy began to walk. Jerzy started to give them statistics about the prisoners. “Would you mind if we walk quietly,” Ruth said.

  “We’ll ask you if we need any questions answered.” Jerzy looked momentarily annoyed. Ruth didn’t care.

  Everything in the former death camp looked so clean and neat. Almost nondescript. Nonthreatening. As harmless as the average, standard housing

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  development that it resembled. A sign of a skull with the word “Halt” and the Polish word for halt, stój, was the only sign of anything ominous. Jerzy hovered around Ruth and Edek. She regretted that she had hired him.

  Ruth had a copy of the official guidebook to Auschwitz with her. It was published by the State Museum in Oswie˛cim, the town renamed Auschwitz by the Germans. The guidebook, where Ruth had first seen that guides were available, stated on the inside front cover that the museum was open but no guide service was provided on days when “mass manifestations announced by the radio and press take place.” What did they mean? Ruth thought as she walked through Auschwitz. Manifestations of what? A manifestation was the indication of the existence or presence of something. The existence or presence of what was the guidebook referring to? No lice had survived, no fleas. Were they expecting manifestations of ghosts or wraiths or spirits? These would hardly be announced in the press.

  Ruth and Edek and Jerzy walked along one of the central paths. The path was lined with brick barracks on both sides. The cleanliness and neat-ness was disorienting. Auschwitz, cleaned up and turned into a tourist venue, looked like an ordinary, English working-class estate. Ruth was disturbed by the absence. The absence of dirt, filth, stench, stink. The absence of cruelty. The absence of suffering. She’d expected to see the suffering in the air, on the ground, in the walls, and on every fence.

  The museum was closed on twenty-fifth of December and on Easter Sunday the small guidebook had said. Ruth had wanted to write to the publishers and point out that the death camp they referred to as a museum was never closed even for these most holy of Catholic holidays.

  Block 10 was being restored. The restoration work looked like the renovation of any middle-class dwelling. There was scaffolding around the building and ladders and workers’ tools. Block 10 was where Mengele and the other SS doctors performed medical experiments on Jewish women.

  Ruth stopped outside Block 10. It looked like such an innocuous building.

  “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.

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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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  “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.