Jakob Zhugashvili walked into the electric fence around the perimeter of the camp just here, in order to end his life. Margaret’s head, as she spoke, seemed weighted. It dropped toward the ground. Looking at her feet, her eyes grew hotter despite the freezing cold, and her vision buzzed. All of a sudden, here at the camp, everything seemed dreadful. But why was her head so hot? Her eyes were itching. When she looked up, the sky was white.
She looked down again. Under her boots, a woman’s face glowed in the ice. The reflection of the skeleton trees flashed, and the woman down inside appeared bound; it was as though the trees had dug into her. The woman’s hair was chalk-like and her eyes dark.
Margaret reached under her coat and gripped the flesh of her stomach. She pinched hard. She could not afford to lose her sanity here, not while trying to give the tour. She must not. She looked up into the sky.
She led the group to the old infirmary buildings. The customers straggled along behind her in silence. The wind rose, and it sounded like ocean waves drawing back from the shore.
This tour had never been an easy one for Margaret. Early on, she had become accustomed to lying at several points along the way. Or, not lying exactly—omitting, underemphasizing, and sometimes overemphasizing. She was conscious that she did it, but that is not to say she did it deliberately. She had never planned the disinformation in advance. The “lies” had developed over time of their own accord. In each case, it happened like this: one day she looked at the group, looked into their faces, and instead of saying what she had planned to say, something new came out of her mouth, something more pleasing. Because we are creatures of routine and the lie usually went over well (she had only gone over the limit of her customers’ credulity once or twice), on the next occasion it came out reflexively again. She had a guilty conscience about it, but at a certain point it became physically difficult to say anything else—as difficult as doing a backbend after years of stiffness. Then too, it hadn’t started as artlessly as she made herself believe. It had begun because she couldn’t bear the discomfort of trying to tell things in an unshaped way. How much better to make a good tour of it.
Today she started out well enough. She talked about the Jewish children who were deliberately infected with hepatitis. She talked about the SS doctor, Aribert Heim, who pumped gasoline into the veins of inmates to see how quickly they would die, the same Aribert Heim who was sighted not long ago on a Spanish beach, allegedly having lived out his postwar years in South America. She showed the customers where there had been forced sterilizations; she took them to the mortuary and told them that it was here that doctors gave lethal injections to healthy young men who had a complete set of white teeth, so that their flesh could be stripped away and skeletons sold to the universities, the universities who desired perfect specimens; the living humans murdered for the sake of an academic model. Had there ever been—before this—such a motive for murder? She asked this question out loud. She talked about how the prisoners helped one another—when a new arrival came to the camp, a young man who perhaps had a complete set of teeth in his mouth, the old boys knocked out a few incisors, so the man would have a better chance.
All this was true.
But then the next part: “And there was also—” she would start to say. “At the infirmary, there was also—” she would begin. She had tried sometimes like that, early on.
It was not such a big thing. There had been a brothel here. That was all. There was a brothel in the infirmary for the prisoners’ use. She had seen the photographs of the women in narrow beds.
But who would want to know about Himmler’s incentive plan? About the stamps received for efficient labor—the point system—these points that could be traded for the use of a body. Who would like to hear about the young women from Ravensbrück held here in captivity as sex slaves?
Yes, there were some who would. Some had come to learn the truth about the concentration camp. The picture it would have made, however, as far as Margaret was concerned, both for her tour and for her own sake, would be impossible, and that was the central point. What kind of unity would the tour have, what were the people to think? If concentration camp victims raped their fellow victims under the point system, what was that for a story? The women were given a lethal injection after a few months of “service” or whenever they showed signs of venereal disease, and the male prisoners who made use of them knew that.
How was Margaret to continue the tour? Instead of giving Margaret their pious, sympathetic glances, the customers would look about the camp cockeyed. She herself, formerly priestess, would become a rogue. The camp was a temple. Certain things were a desecration. The only thing that belonged here was piety.
She had learned early on: too many tales of horror and she began to think that her piety sounded propagandistic, like a tabloid television show. On the other hand, it clearly would not do to talk excessively of the camaraderie among the Communist inmates, the evenings of “Bella Ciao,” and the radio hidden in the laundry that picked up the BBC; of the “kindness” of certain SS men who had shared whiskey with the prisoners, helped others escape. All in all, then, Margaret was also guilty of omitting “happy” stories, of how, for some, it had not been so bad at Sachsenhausen, because these, too, went against the grain.
And Margaret had noticed something: the ratio between the uplifting stories and dystopian stories became the basis for the customers’ conclusions about the camp, later their conclusions about the concentration camp system in general, and finally the conclusions they reached (usually while on the train back to Berlin) about the Holocaust. Margaret had heard all of them. And because of this, she could not help but become manipulative.
Theoretically at least, she would have liked to give a realistic picture and leave it at that. But there was a problem: there was no realistic picture to return to. No one knew how it had really been. No one could ever know. Even the survivors who had lived to tell the tale did not entirely know how it had been; the experience was too large for that. There are magnitudes of suffering that cannot be held in the mind. So there was a camp, and there was a “tour,” and one was bigger than the other and would always be bigger.
Often she imagined saying out loud what she so often thought.
You want to understand? But here’s what there is to understand: there’s nothing for knowing minds to glean. The more you learn about the camps, the less you know. The more you see this place, the farther away it is. The human social brain wasn’t designed to understand the human social terror, and the more it tries, the more it dies. There are people who notice the unwillingness of this place to curve toward comprehension, and so they deny the camps ever existed. These are people who have no tolerance for guilt and especially no tolerance for the things that guilt demands. So instead they mistake the emptiness they find here for an absence of content. They are wrong; there is something here. There’s more content here than in universities and museums and churches taken together, but you won’t see any of it. All I can show you today is a mirage. This tour is a virtual tour.
But Margaret didn’t say that. She would never say it. It wasn’t in her. She was a social animal with a social brain, and she did not want to begin to try to communicate what little she knew of the deformity, the chemical structure of which would suffocate, slowly, the brain’s chance at happiness—she knew it even from a distance—if it were ever ingested.
As they were on the way to the Jewish barracks the sun came out. Margaret struck up a conversation with the Norwegian couple. The man was a high school history teacher, he was older, and he taught about the concentration camps to the kids. That was why he was here. It also happened that his father’s brother had been sent to Sachsenhausen. The uncle survived, but he came home to Trondheim without arms or legs.
Margaret felt dizzy. The white sky seemed immortal. That’s how she said it to herself: the sky was immortal. She glanced away from the man to the open field. Her eyes lost focus. She saw, on the other side, between two trees
, a great basket swaying from enormous ropes strung high above from the top limbs. The basket, swinging, held a heap of appendages, a head with long grey, mouse-colored hair, a curled human being. Before she had time to blink, Margaret looked back at the Norwegian. When she glanced over again to the field, the basket swinging between the trees was gone. Reflexively, Margaret remembered a few lines—“the sibyl, in her basket swaying, tells the children: I want to die.”
Now she looked back at the group, and they were looking at her inquisitively, for they had arrived outside the Jewish barracks. But when she glanced at the trees again, the sibyl was swaying there. It seemed the thing could blink into existence. Margaret’s ears were ringing, her eyes aglow, and her throat stiff. The group looked at her, waiting.
Unexpectedly, Margaret became angry—angry at their expectant eyes. When the Argentines began to whisper to one another, their sibilant sounds searing her ears, she thought she could feel they all hated her, hated her for not speaking; hated her silence. And all eyes were on her again, the eyes of the seekers, who had come to the camp for the exotic suffering. Looking back at the sibyl in the high basket, she thought she heard yet more whispering and saw a face whose eyes had been removed, who blamed her for her lies, for her tour-shaping. She rubbed her face, convinced of her idiocy, inadequacy, inability to navigate between her visions and poor pandering to the worst of the interested eyes around her.
She drew a breath. She would spare them nothing, she decided, nothing.
“Jewish prisoners,” she began, “were brought here late. They were always a minority at this camp, most others were Slavs and politicals. The arrival of the first permanent group was heralded at the end of August 1939, when all the air vents of blocks 37, 38, and 39—these you see before you—were sealed, and the same thing was done to the windows and the walls, so that no air or sound came out or in. These little barracks were emptied of bunks and tables, and then over a thousand Jewish men were sealed in; only with severe beatings allowed out to the toilets. Soon the rooms were running with moisture and human filth. Sometimes the SS guards came in and told the men to lie down and then ran back and forth over their bodies, apparently for the ‘fun’ of it. One morning a month later, after over a third of the men had died from asphyxiation and starvation, three were found lying outside the barracks. We know from the memoir of a prisoner who wrote about it later: one of the men’s faces was completely destroyed. An eye hung out of his skull, resting on his cheek.” Margaret blinked before she went on. “The Blockälteste reported that in the night the Jews suddenly all said they had to use the toilet at once, and then fell upon the capos and the SS, who ‘defended’ themselves.
“The surviving men, however, told a different story. In the night, SS men arrived armed with legs of chairs, they said, and began to beat them, killing and injuring indiscriminately. In the confusion, some ran out of the barracks, and they were beaten to death.”
Margaret stopped. She blinked again. The twelve closest huddled around, bodies rigid with attention. Margaret’s tension disappeared all at once. She took a deep breath.
“Do you know which version of the story is true?” she asked.
They shook their heads. “No,” came the replies. “No, which one?”
“Maybe there was a revolt of the Jewish prisoners against the SS,” Margaret said. “That would be some kind of consolation, wouldn’t it? To think of a revolt. Or maybe the prisoners were entirely innocent, that’s possible too. That would be some kind of consolation in another way, wouldn’t it?” Margaret’s voice had grown raw.
“Which one is it?” she asked. A slight note of cruelty.
The problem was what to do with truth in matters of the spirit.
“No one knows,” she finally said. “No one has any idea.”
Margaret whirled and entered the Jewish barracks, breathing hard. The tourists had a struggle to keep up with her. Margaret had become reckless in her upset; her movements were quick and lurching. She told them they would have twenty minutes to look around on their own. The group spread apart.
Now, Margaret thought, she would have time to make a plan, to bring herself under control.
At one end of the barracks were the bunks, and the rusty, lidless toilets once used by the prisoners, at the other was a multimedia exhibit. The group trod quickly through the dormitory, that dirty old lumberyard, but soon headed back into the heated exhibition. The charred rooms in the front were even colder than the outdoors; they still smelled of cinders from the arson attack a decade before. Margaret stayed by herself, watching her breath puff out of her mouth. She leaned against one of the primitive bunk beds.
The floor creaked. The bunks creaked. Margaret closed her eyes. She heard—what did she hear?—a tiny scratching sound coming from the corner.
A second scratching sound began soon after the first, as though in canon, this time from a portion of the wall behind the bunks, a little distance away. One mouse in the wall, now two. And then a scratching, scuttling, tunneling—just under Margaret’s feet.
Margaret caught a glimpse of red in her peripheral vision, and turned quickly—it was the English businessman returned. “Aha!” Margaret cried out. She was embarrassed. “I was just noticing the mice in the walls.”
“Mice? Of course, this place built like a cracker tin as it is, there would be no place for a mouse to make a home. No, no insulation here!” He laughed. “Now I have a book in my collection, maybe you would know it, The Death of Adolf Hitler, it’s called, would you know of that one?”
“No, I’m afraid I don’t.”
“A pity really; fascinating book. Hitler had a phobia of cats, it outlines that in detail. And the book also has some interesting words to say about Stalin. The man was in love with Hitler. He used Hitler’s bones—the ones that Zhukov brought back to Moscow—to make combs for his hair, for his moustache, you know. High style, if you ask me.” He gave Margaret a wink. Then quickly he let out a guffaw.
“Really?”
“I’ve always been interested in history. One of my chief interests, I would say.”
Margaret smiled, colored. Without any warning, she darted for the door. She left the man so abruptly he didn’t have time to follow her.
Margaret looked up and down the camp. The man from Norway was outside, smoking a cigarette some distance away. Margaret pretended not to see him. Whether or not Hitler liked cats was the topic in her mind. She had never heard he didn’t. But it made sense to her that he would not. She decided it must be true.
She wandered farther, this thought of cats dangling, distracting, even as she felt a long rope in her head begin to tighten, everything tightening and filling, becoming denser, a feeling of her large body flipping up into her tight, claustrophobic brain like a gymnast on the parallel bars folding into the above.
She focused her eyes with difficulty. Between the trees in the distance was the sibyl swaying in her basket. Her long, dying hair flowed down below her curled body. As Margaret came nearer she could hear the whisper of the sibyl.
Margaret backed away from the trees. But another sound, the rushing sound of scratching, tunneling, running, miniature nails began again below Margaret, only now out here on the great plain.
She walked toward the old laundry building. She saw a forlorn entrance to a tunnel by the door.
A second great, fanning group of barracks had once stood out here on the field. These were all gone now. Margaret could see shadows of movement under the ice-covered snow. Mouse tunnels, invisible when empty, became dark when the mice ran through them, their bodies like smoke.
By the camp prison compound and over at the gallows, the tunnels in the ground were running with darkness. A kaleidoscope of movement began to trickle into her eyes from every direction.
A vast network of mouse tunnels—legions of beasts running just beneath the surface of the sandy, ice-covered, tumbledown, slipshod ruin of a camp. The network was vast, oh, but not nearly vast enough, for each tunnel branched, and then
branched again, exponentially expanding into an enormous city of scamperers, yes—but then, just as at the edge of the world, or the edge of life itself—every tunnel dead-ended at the demarcation line of the triangle that was the universe and the humiliation: the tunnels did not run outside the camp. The work of the mice—the suspected rats, the parasitical beasts—their work was dirty, abject, senseless—and the mice, they were filled with motivation as they ferried scraps here, carried a message there. They ran hither and thither full of assurance of reward. Their scampering was wonderfully glittering, the scuttling speed through the tunnels reminded one of vacuum tubes, the mice drawn rocket-like by the sucking emptiness beyond the end walls.
Margaret tried to calm herself. It was the burden of secrets that was making her crazy, she thought. To have all the pictures playing simultaneously in her head, but trying to follow one single string of speech—it would drive anyone mad.
When she got home to the Grunewaldstrasse, the hawk-woman was waiting for her on the balcony above her apartment, standing in the cold, still and glassy-eyed like a piece of taxidermy. Margaret was afraid, more than she had been before.
And she thought, then, that the alliance was crumbling.
She shut all the curtains and covered herself in the bed. There was no way to visit a place like Sachsenhausen and try to be a Nazi at the same time.
It can hardly be a coincidence that later that very night, unable to sleep despite her exhaustion, Margaret found another quotation from Ello Quandt.
In March of 1942, Ello said that Magda complained to her of what Joseph told her. “It’s horrifying, all the things he tells me. I can’t bear it anymore. You can’t imagine the terrible things he burdens me with, and there’s no one to whom I can open my heart.”
The History of History Page 13
