The drive leading to Adampol Palace

I’ve come to realize I’ll never know what really happened, and I’m trying to make my peace with that.

Did Willy Selinger, Commandant of the labor camp at Adampol, order the SS down on his own people? Harold Werner, a partisan, says he made a phone call. Under oath, Selinger tells a different story, of a cavalry unit shooting his Jewish workers while he was kept under house arrest. No, he doesn’t remember the name of the officer who was watching him, he only met him once.

What difference does it make? It happened seventy years ago. My family lived, the Nazis are all dead. But it whispers in my ear, tugs at my conscience. If he was a good man, his name should be honored. If he was a bad man, well…then a bad man was good to my family.

I’m writing the final installment in my collection of linked stories, and he’s the star, or rather, Willy Reinhart, who is based on him, is the star. You’re supposed to know your character inside and out before you sit down to write. You’re supposed to know what he would do or say in any situation. Surely, you should know whether he is a good man or a bad man.

I have a general outline for the plot, a beginning, a middle, an ending, some metaphors, a couple of clever plot devices. After all, my family lived through it. But here’s what happens. I write ferociously for a few pages, read it over, then crumple it up; I’ve made him sound too much like an Alan Furst hero. I write it over again, altering the angle of the story–and now it’s too cautious.

When I originally wrote to the Nazi War Crimes Archives, I had a list of questions. Who was Selinger? Where was he from? What was his position? What did he look like? What happened to him after the war? What made him want to protect his Jews, when other German officers were clearly monsters?

Adampol Palace

Regretfully, there’s no picture. As I write my stories, I glance at the cover of Peeling the Onion, at a black and white photo of a young, boyish Gunter Grass, smiling craftily at me through a haze of smoke.

Whether I’ve guessed the actual truth or not, I have arrived at the version of the truth that I will write. My Willy Selinger was a decent man living in bad times. He gathered the best workers in the area to his work camp. Instead of jailing them, he treated them like human beings. Due to early successes, he believed he was in control of the situation. If they just worked hard, and if he just kept making deals with the devil, he believed they would survive. Just like Schindler’s List…until the SS swept down on Adampol and killed them all, while he sat helplessly in his handsome house, listening to the gunfire.

That’s my truth…the one I can live with.

Happy Chanukah, to my Jewish and non-Jewish friends alike. Rabbis argue over which is the real meaning of Chanukah; is it the miracle in the rededicated temple, where one small jug of oil burned in the menorah for eight nights? Or does it celebrate the victory of a small, determined group of people over a rich, greedy and powerful nation that wants them to change their ways?

It’s both, of course. We eat latkes this time of year to remind us of the miracle of the oil. My Mom’s recipe is the best, and I’m passing it along. You can thank me later.

As a side note, I should add that during WWII, they were made with discarded potato peels scavenged from the neighbors’ trash. And my father’s family, hiding in the forest, used wild horseradish.

• MOM’S LATKES
• 3 large potatoes (Red, yellow, or Yukon Gold)
• 1 medium yellow onion
• 2 eggs
• 1/2 cup of matzo meal
• 1 teaspoon salt, or to taste
• Oil for frying (Olive oil is particularly yummy, and also more in keeping with the historic roots of the holiday, but use whatever you like.)
• 12 inch frying pan
• Tin pan lined with paper towels, with more paper towels on hand.
• Sour cream or applesauce, your choice.

1. Grate the potatoes, either on a box grater or in a food processor. Squeeze grated potatoes to drain out excess water. Then grate in the onion. (Hint: The box grater will give you more texture, but using the food processor will cut down on time, labor, and tears.)
2. Stir in eggs, matzo meal and salt.
3. Pour 1/4 inch of oil into a frying pan. Heat that sucker up. Flame should be high to start. When the oil is very hot–test it by skittering a few drops of water across the surface and seeing if they dance–gently drop in latke batter, using a serving spoon. With the back of the spoon, gently pat latke down to a sort of flattish round or oval–but not too thin. Depending on the size of your pan, you should have room for four or five latkes. Try not to crowd them.
4. Turn heat down to medium. Like pancakes, flip when they are golden brown underneath. (Just so you’re not surprised, they’re like little sponges. They soak up a lot of oil, so you’ll have to keep adding.) When they’re ready, slip them into the paper-towel lined tin pan. After you’ve filled up the bottom of the pan, add more paper towels and place additional layers of latkes on top.
5. These may not make it out of the kitchen. Devour immediately.

2 Bridges Review has nominated my short story, They Were Like Family to Me, for a 2012 Pushcart Prize! You can download the entire journal (it’s free!) at:

http://www.citytech.cuny.edu/academics/deptsites/english/writers/2bridges/2bridges-vol1no1.pdf

To tempt you, here are the first 700 words.

There were two of them, standing and arguing in front of the oblong patch of grass between the decrepit buildings. They didn’t look like they belonged there; both of them wore new coats, made from fine fabric, well-cut and nicely designed, clearly made somewhere else, where they cared about such things. They were holding a map, staring at the clearing in puzzlement, chattering in a foreign language the old man didn’t recognize. One pointed at the map with a gloved hand, while the other shook his head in disagreement.

“Excuse me,” said the older one in Polish as he passed by. “Perhaps you can help us out.”

The old man was holding a small child’s hand. He was short and fat and out of breath; when he walked, he toddled, just like the little boy. “Are you Jewish?” he said. Though there were no Jews left in Sokal, he had heard that sometimes they came to small towns in Poland to explore their heritage, to reclaim the house their grandfather had lived in, to search for distant relatives in cemeteries.

Both men smiled. “No. Not Jewish,” said the older of the two. The old man peered closer. Now he could see the white clerical collar, just visible over the lapels of his overcoat.

His cheeks reddened with embarrassment. “I’m sorry, Father. It’s just…in this part of Poland, we don’t get many visitors. Usually, they’re Jews. I just assumed…”

The priest waved it off. “Have you always lived here? In this town, I mean.”

“Yes. My parents moved here when I was just a little boy. Where are you from? You speak Polish, but I heard you speaking another language with your friend.”

“I grew up around here,” he said. “But I live in New York now.”

“New York,” said the old man. “I’ve never been west of Warsaw.”

The priest gestured towards the green patch of grass. “Perhaps you can tell me something about this place,” he suggested. “On my map, it says something happened here in 1942.”

“Oh. Yes. Well…” the old man’s gaze wandered. “My grandson…nursery school…” he said vaguely.

“Oh, I’m sorry. Please, don’t let me keep you.” It was a cold day. For warmth, the priest put his hands in his coat pockets. His eyebrows drew together, he fished around inside his pocket until he pulled out a chocolate bar. It had a yellow wrapper with a picture of a little girl on it. “May I?” he asked.

The old man nodded. The priest squatted down until he was level with the little boy, who accepted the candy in his mittened hand. The priest smiled. The child looked back at him with grave, dark eyes.

“You do this every day?” inquired the priest as he stood back up, brushing off his coat tails. The old man nodded. Under his hat, the skin was fragile and thin, like parchment, except for his cheeks and the tip of his nose, which were a startling pink. “You’re a good grandfather.”

The old man shrugged. “My only grandchild,” he replied, by way of explanation.

Now, nothing prevented him from leaving, but still, he lingered. There was something about the priest, his moist dark eyes rimmed with long black lashes. It was the face of a man who had heard many sad stories. Just now, he was gazing with curiosity at the green patch between the buildings.

“It’s my own little project,” he explained, almost apologetically. “Well. Obsession, really. I’m traveling around Poland, Russia, the Ukraine, trying to collect stories of what the Nazis did. Before the people who witnessed them are gone. Things that didn’t make it into the history books.”

The old man’s lips compressed into a thin line. “The history books,” he said contemptuously, dismissing the entire genre. “All they ever tell you is what happened to the Jews. Never what happened to the Poles.” He added hastily, “It’s not their fault, of course. What happened to them was terrible, I’m not saying it wasn’t. All I’m saying, is you never hear anything else.”

The priest nodded. Encouragingly, the old man thought.

Okay, okay. I confess. I am hopelessly addicted to cooking magazines. When my husband asked what he could bring me to while away the time while I recuperated after a surgical procedure, I requested one thing, and one thing only.

Food porn.

It’s almost Thanksgiving, folks. I’m talking full-press, no-holds-barred, too-much-ain’t-enough Martha Stewart here. Give me shiny photos of glossy roasted turkeys splayed provocatively across antique platters; golden corn bread stuffing, studded with sausage and greens, piled in a pristine white porcelain casserole from France; glazed sweet potatoes, sticky with pecans and maple syrup; ruby red cranberry sauce trembling in green pressed-glass gravy bowls; desserts, mounded with meringue and whipped toppings, gooey and stacked a mile high.

I turn the pages slowly, running each recipe over my tongue as I read it. Yes, I think, the six-layer chocolate cake filled with salted caramel filling. Yes, I say to the cranberry sauce with walnuts, mandarin oranges and madeira wine. Yes, yes, yes, I cry to the creamed collard greens, the potato leek tart, the braised bacon and brussels sprouts (I’ll find some way to make it kosher!) and the black bottom banana cream pie.

I still mourn the loss of Gourmet, and I always will. But this year, I can blissfully recommend Bon Appetit’s Thanksgiving special, Saveur’s 28 Great Holiday Sides, Food and Wine’s 65 delicious recipes. As for me, I’m looking forward to brining my Empire turkey the Martha way, circa 1993, then stuffing it with Bon Appetit’s Cornbread stuffing, 2011.

What are you making?

I’m rerunning this post from last year; it’s just so darn timely.

I’ve got an idea for a new reality show; it’s called “Three-Day Yontif.”

Three families, living under one roof, compete over preparations for a three-day yontif, let’s call it, Sukkot. One bathtub, one shower, for twelve to twenty people. Each family is given a different budget. Within that budget, they must decorate a standard 10″ x 12″ canvas Sukkah, buy the children new clothes, as well as buy enough food for six four-course feasts. The food must be pleasing to the eye, varied, and delicious. Points taken away for families who serve on paper. All preparations must take place during the four days following Yom Kippur.

Contestants: Let’s mix it up. One rich family with lots of help, one poor family with lots of kids, maybe an Israeli family that only observes one day.

Let’s throw some wrenches into it! How about the meat delivery that doesn’t show up until the day of the holiday, then left by the delivery man outside the garage door overnight? A freak hurricane, leaving inches of water in the basement that your whole out-of-town family is supposed to sleep in! How about the poopy diaper that needs changing just as the mother has her hands plunged elbow-deep in a vat of slimy meat, in the throes of making stuffed cabbage? The bored children who bicker and leave wrappers, shoes and Wii games around the TV, although their mother needs help vacuuming, laundering, polishing, ironing, and cooking? The child who announces that he has lice, just as the mother comes home from that last trip to the store! Or the child who cuts himself badly enough for stitches, and must be rushed to the ER, seven hours before sundown! So many possibilities.

Other challenges: the emergency trip to Amazing Savings for more aluminum pans, only to find that there aren’t any standard-size lasagna pans left. The rainstorm that destroys one Sukkah’s exquisite, hand-crafted decorations and blows the walls out of a second one. The cleaning lady who quits the day before the holiday. The college-aged daughter who brings a friend home for the holiday, a friend who only eats Satmar schita meat, cholov Yisroel milk, no gluten, and no nuts. Laughs ensue when the sleep-deprived mother has a mental breakdown from all the nonstop shopping, cooking, cleaning, mediating, scouring, soothing and serving, after surviving thirteen of these feasts in the previous two weeks.

What’s great about this show is its portability; I envision a Three-Day Yontif Teaneck, Three-Day Yontif Five Towns, Three-Day Yontif LA, Three-Day Yontif Sephardi Style.

Who would the judges be? The in-laws, of course! That’s the beauty of this game show. No one ever wins.

What are your ideas for challenges?

Ten years, that’s what it’s been. Ten years since we moved out of my beloved New York City to a more family-friendly North Jersey town, ten years since my sister got married, ten years since I learned how to drive, ten years since my daughter started kindergarten, ten years since terrorists flew planes into the World Trade Center one sunny September morning. Ten years since my husband left this message on our answering machine when I was out walking our three-year-old to his new pre-K; “I’m standing at the window in my office building, watching the World Trade Center burn.”

Last week, in the waning days of summer vacation, I took my children to see Ground Zero. We walked through the graveyard behind St. Paul’s and gazed up at the Freedom Tower, a wall of mirrored glass and skeletal beams set against a celestial blue sky. The light was dazzling, blinding almost, at least it seemed that way to me, maybe because the ground we stood upon was once eternally shaded by two tall buildings.

Solemnly, the kids hovered around a photograph of the graveyard taken on 9/11, when it was blanketed in ash and paper. And then it was time to go. There were school clothes to buy, backpacks to fill.

As we strolled back to the car, I thought of the documentary footage they show on TV every year. The massive cloud of ash and smoke like a live, vengeful thing, roiling through the narrow streets, obliterating everything in sight, blotting out the light.

On Sunday night, the tenth anniversary, we will watch the documentaries with the kids, as we do every year. Only this time, it won’t be an event from a foreign country, or from a time long ago. This time, it will be a place they recognize, a park they sat in, a diner they visited, a street they walked, a familiar hole in the sky.

The call came at dinner time. Jon was just back from work, I was leaving to pick up our order at Chickie’s. The voice was gruff, humorous, tinged with a familiar accent. Uncle Phillip, my mother’s brother, and the repository of my family’s stories. “I know you’re interested in these things,” he says. Something was keeping him up at night, did I have a minute?

Of course I did. I rummaged for a pencil and paper. Jon went for the sandwiches.

This is what troubles Phillip. In April of 1942, a transport from Vienna arrived in Wlodawa. Three people were settled in the attic room of my grandfather’s house; a mother, a father, a 12-year-old boy, the same age as my uncle.

Now he’s laughing; “He was a foot taller than me, but he was wearing lederhosen. His name was Hans. Hans! A real German! I didn’t understand a word he said. He kept asking for the close. The water closet! I didn’t know what he was talking about! I showed him the outhouse, in the yard. He’d never seen one before.”

The family kept waiting for luggage that never arrived. They were very rich, he says. Back in Austria, they owned factories. I can hear him smiling. “They adopted me like I was a son. The mother, you should have seen her! So beautiful! This boy was like a brother to me. I looked up to him.” He hesitates. “The first Aktzia was a few months later, on Shavuos. A Friday. On the first day, the SS took away the Rabbis, the old people. It took them a day to gas and burn them, you understand. On the second day, they took the transport from Vienna.”

The transport was mostly women and children, Phillip explains. These were the families of German soldiers fighting on the Eastern front–German soldiers who had married Jewish women. Wlodawa was just over the Bug River from Russia. They were told they were being moved closer to the front so that they could be nearer to their husbands.

The Germans called Wlodawa die Judenstadt, the Jewish State. The implication was that the town would be the Jews’ new homeland. “People wanted to be on this transport,” he says. “I knew another family, a mother and twin boys, also my age. They sneaked onto the train at Strasbourg. They thought they would be safe.”

What they didn’t know was that Sobibor was about to become operational. The Nazis had no use for these Jewish women and half-Jewish children. The transport from Vienna became the first Jews to die in Sobibor.

This is where history and memory meet. I have read about this transport. But Phillip is telling me details that no website has printed, facts that are not in any book. This is not history to my Uncle Phillip. This is his life.

Uncle Phillip knows where, when and how Hans and his mother died. But what is tugging at him, what is keeping him up at night, is what might have happened to the father. The SS took him away some time earlier, probably to question him about the factories, he thinks. Is it possible he survived, is still alive somewhere in the world?

I ask him the for the family’s name. “Hey, this happened 65 years ago,” he says. “I don’t remember.”

I feel a little helpless; I’ve been asked to find the nameless father of a boy named Hans. He’s going to be very disappointed. But, I give it a half-hearted try, punching “Transport from Austria to Wlodawa” into the Google search box.

It comes up instantly. Transport 18, from Wien to Wlodawa. It’s right there on the Yad Vashem website. The dates match, April 27, 1942. And then, I see the list of names.

A chill goes through me as I realize I’m going to be able to find his friend. All I need to do is find a family of three with a twelve-year-old boy named Hans. And sure enough, there they are, on page three.

I stare at it for a minute. It’s not a story anymore. It’s a murdered twelve-year-old boy named Hans Bruell, with a mother named Rosa, and a father named Paul.

I click on their names. And then I have their birth dates, their street address in Vienna. At the bottom of the page, where it says Victim’s status at the end of World War II, is the word Murdered.

There is no date of death. Perhaps the monsters at Sobibor destroyed the records. The people on the Viennese transport all have the same sentence after their names;

X perished in the Shoah. This information is based on a List of murdered Jews from Austria found in the Namentliche Erfassung der oesterreichischen Holocaustopfer, Dokumentationsarchiv des oesterreichischen Widerstandes (Documentation Centre for Austrian Resistance), Wien.

Except for Hans’ father, Paul. He died in Majdanek concentration camp, on September 13, 1942, four months after his wife and son perished at Sobibor.

I call Uncle Phillip and tell him what I’ve found. “Bruell,” he repeats, remembering the name. “So he didn’t survive. I hoped…”

Only three people from the transport of 1,000 survived the war, I tell him. I can hear him grieving on the other end of the phone, but I can also feel that it brings him closure of some sort.

We say goodbye, and I go back to my messy kitchen and my schedule of laundry and summer camp and car pools. But I am undeniably shaken. For one day, yesterday, the Holocaust leapt out of the text books and became real life.

They peep, the chicks, flapping up a cloud of dust with their sienna-colored wings, hopping from one jury-rigged roost to the next in the dog crate I’ve set up for them next to the rabbit hutch. When I throw chicken feed into the crate, they scratch at the ground with their yellow claws, already powerful, though they are only a month old. We don’t want to eat them. A free-range chicken is a bug-fed chicken.

They began their lives as a school project, the Golden Wyandotte chicks that we call Janusz and Spartacus, a clutch of tinted eggs sitting in an incubator in Miss Carol’s classroom. I told her I would take two. Apparently, I am the only mother to do so.

“You took home the chickens?” my cousin says, bemused. “Why? No one takes home the chickens.”

Yes, why? I suppose I could blame the kids; they begged for them, not just this year, but last year, as well. But the truth runs deeper than that. Though I grew up in a city, my grandfather was part of the farming community in eastern Poland, a man who made harnesses and saddles, upholstered wagons and carriages. My grandmother drove a wagon to market to sell butter and eggs. As soon as I was old enough, I took myself to a kibbutz in Israel, where I worked in a barn full of chickens, listening to the Beatles on a tinny radio as I sorted eggs by size and breed.

Perhaps it’s in the blood, this wordless need to be connected to the land, the same primal urge that makes me plant tomatoes and cucumbers in the sunny patches in my yard.

Inside the house, it’s 2011. The kids have finals, I’m working on a portrait, I have to condense two hundred pages of manuscript into something short and punchy. But in the backyard, it’s another century. There’s the timeless coo of brooding hens, the thoughtful ruminating of the rabbits, and heirloom tomatoes taking their own sweet time to grow big and round and red.

This is my final posting in honor of Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day, 2011. The following words are the prologue to my story, A Decent Man. It also happens to be a memoir of my Operation Zachor trip to Poland. For those of you who have been there, I would appreciate your comments.

The American teenagers ranged along the sidewalk, talking and laughing and joking with each other in their slangy idiomatic English. Tall, well-fed, confident, they swung their arms as they took long American strides, comporting themselves with gaudy American ease.

In the gray city of Warsaw, the buildings gray, the sky, the clouds too, the Poles turned their heads to stare at them as they passed. “Zhid, Zhid,” they hissed incredulously to each other, to total strangers. Jew, Jew. In 1979, no one saw Jews anymore, but here was a whole group of them shambling down the streets around the vanished Ghetto, the boys wearing blue jeans with knitted coverings on their heads, the girls in skirts made from the same highly coveted blue jean material.

They crowded together to read the plaque on the monument at Mila 18–they’d all read the book, it was on the required reading list–and then they trekked across the grass to reflect before the massive slate-gray memorial dominating the Zamenhofa side of the park, a bas-relief sculpture of resolute Ghetto fighters.

From there, they went to visit the old Jewish cemetery on Okipowa Street, where a courtly little man with brilliantined hair stopped at various intervals to explain in limpid Yiddish who was buried beneath the weathered headstones.

It was late August, the first yellow leaves were beginning to appear on the trees. There was a palpable air of neglect to the place; here and there, a stone lay shattered in the dirt–pushed over by hoodlums, the old man said through the translator.

Scrubby weeds flourished between the graves. A greenish forest mold crept across the carvings and invaded the pitted stones that were sinking slowly into the earth. The old man gestured at a monument that featured a needle and a spool of thread; Lowy, tailor to the royal Sobieski family. Maurycy Fajans, founder of the first steamboat line on the Vistula, in a large mausoleum made from travertine marble. Slonimski, the inventor. Melczer, the candy maker. This stone, with the carving of the hand putting a coin in the pushka, was Krakauer the grocer, he had a beautiful home on Gryzybowski Square and gave a lot of charity. Esther Kaminska, who practically invented the Yiddish theater. Mauskaupf the neurologist, his daughter moved to America in 1928. Here, Flamberg the chess master, there, Wawelberg, founder of the Technical College. The tour guide, a youngish oldish man in his twenties wearing round wire-rimmed glances, tried to keep up with the flow of Yiddish, but the little man outpaced him, hopping nimbly between the mossy gray stones, speaking fondly of the residents as if they were still alive.

Shuffling behind him, the teenagers grew restless, then bored. There were six girls and six boys, traveling away from home for the first time if you didn’t count summer camp, jet lagged from the overnight flight, and at that precise age where they were easily tantalized by the exquisite quivering nearness of the opposite sex. They began to jostle each other and giggle. After tolerating twenty minutes of this behavior, their leader turned on them.

“I know you’re bored,” he said shortly. “But this is the last man on earth who knows who these people were. And after he dies, no one will know.”

After that, the teenagers were quiet.

They were staying in the youth hostel on Marzcalkowska Street, a dull gray Soviet-era slab in the center of the city. As they plodded into the hi-rise at the end of the day, a sour-faced woman in a babushka and an apron was sweeping the sidewalk with a broom made from a branch and a bundle of twigs. It was impossible to guess her age, she could have been thirty or seventy.

The next day, they took the train to Majdanek. The American teenagers trickled slowly through the barren concentration camp–there were few visitors–trying to accept the reality of the long wooden barracks containing nothing but shoes, another barracks with a wiry landscape of strangely colorless human hair. In a different building, there was a tower of neatly stacked yellow Zykon B cans. A room full of snarled eyeglasses awaited their missing owners. There was a pervasive sweetish odor, an odor no one could identify. Smoke, whispered the guide. The smell stayed in the wood.

With trepidation, they followed him down into the gas chamber, a compact, low-ceilinged room, bare, box-like, with scratched and cratered concrete walls. The American teenagers circulated around the guttered floor, their eyes drawn as if by magnets to the grated vent where crystals of Zyklon B had vaporized into gas. Poisonous green stains bloomed and rollicked across the walls, in a peculiar shade of viridian that was not to be found in nature.

They took pictures so that they would remember it, the incontrovertible evidence of the end product of the banality of evil, and then they filed slowly back out, pale under their summer tans, damp with sweat. Outside, they raised their heads to the sky and took deep breaths. There was something wrong with the air in that room; it undulated like a live thing, crackled with an electric evil, just out of reach, beyond this dimension.

The crematorium was startlingly unchanged, preserved exactly as it was on July 23, 1944, the day the Nazis fled before the oncoming Red Army. The guide pointed out, for those who hadn’t noticed it, the ashes in the open doors of the blackened ovens. Staring out at an empty field, a boy from Cleveland asked about the occasional patches of dark green grass. “Mass graves,” said the guide. “Human fertilizer. This way, we’re on a tight schedule.”

The next day, Auschwitz. They changed trains at Katowice, transferring from a passenger train with first class carriages to a rickety local commuter line. As they pulled out of the station, they stared at a train of slatted wooden cars passing slowly in the other direction, and their guide explained, in a matter of fact way, that most of the cattle cars used to transport Jews to concentration camps were still in service.

The commuter train was standing room only. As it bucked and swayed from side to side, knocking the giggling Americans into each other, the guide murmured that millions of Jews had taken this very same journey forty-five years earlier, on these very same tracks, but without a return ticket in their pockets.

After passing through the gate with its notorious worked-metal declaration that work would make them free, they wandered unsupervised through the cobbled, tree-lined streets. Meandering in and out of galleries in the pretty red brick buildings, surveying photographs, relics and documents in glass cases, it was twenty minutes before they realized they were in Auschwitz.

They toured the walled courtyard of Block 11, where political prisoners were shot. On their trendy Adidas sneakers, they walked up to thick concrete window wells, trying to peer into tiny lightless cells where inmates died of asphyxiation. They trooped dutifully through the small gas chamber, viewing the cart and tracks that led to the small crematorium. No one said it out loud, but it was almost prosaic after the unvarnished brutality of Majdanek.

It was late in the afternoon when they caught the last bus to Birkenau. After depositing them a respectful distance away from the camp, it turned around and putted away.

The American teenagers followed along the disused train tracks. On either side of them, sheaves of gray-green grass rippled like a sorrowful ocean. It was haying time, an archaic-looking machine squatted in the fields. Spread above them in a wide arc, the sky seemed to go on forever, a clear pale cloudless blue.

Soon they could see the peak of the notorious guard tower pricking the sky, the long low structure crouched against the landscape. An arched opening high enough to accomodate a train. On the other side of it, the tracks seemed to converge at some end point in eternity. No one had bothered to etch any lies on the entrance to Birkenau.

The tour group bore right, to a row of barn-sized barracks. More shoes. More suitcases. More glasses. More hair. Also dolls, baby carriages, prosthetic limbs. Here were the bunks–bare boards, planks of wood nailed together, three tiers high, like warehouse shelving. A strip of windows under the rooftop admitted a dim, watery light.

Blinking like bats, the American teenagers emerged from the semi-darkness. Before them lay a vast green and yellow landscape, mowed flat, punctuated by…by what? Hazy with late afternoon sunshine, scores of narrow towers rose into the air, a forest of brown brick stretching into the distance, as far as the eye could see. Baffled, they turned to their guide for explanation.
“Chimneys,” he said. Quietly, for they were on consecrated ground. “Each of these chimneys was a barracks. Each barracks held a thousand human beings. Do the math.”

Impossible. There were hundreds of them, each one standing at the front of a rectangular plot of land like a headstone. It was incomprehensible. Unimaginable. Even to them, and they were standing right there.

The tour was over, he freed them to explore on their own. They had less than an hour before Birkenau closed. They would meet back under the arch in forty-five minutes. If they missed the last bus, they’d be spending the night.

Near the collapsed remains of Crematoria III, or perhaps it was Crematoria IV, a girl sat down on a chunk of exploded masonry. The silence made itself felt here; all enveloping, encroaching on the unreal, and completely unnatural, as if a giant glass dome had been dropped over this part of Poland, for all time. Sounds simply ceased; there were no cars, no crickets, no cicadas, no breeze or birds. The only signs of life were small white butterflies stalled in the dusty summer air, and a large black crow stalking pensively through the grass. She took out her notebook, scribbled down the observation. And then she raised her camera to snap a picture.

Absentmindedly, she fanned herself with her notebook. There was a blister on the back of her heel. With her other foot, she pushed off the offending shoe. The sneakers were new, she should have broken them in before the trip. Sweltering in the heat–there were no trees, no relief from the sun–she lifted the mantle of heavy hair from her neck and snapped a rubber band around it.

One of the boys was toiling purposefully in her direction. He halted before the collapsed entrance ramp to the gas chamber, wrestled a book of psalms out of his backpack. Then he prayed, his lips moving silently with the words. “My mother’s whole family died here,” he explained afterwards. He fumbled with his camera, gave up, shoved his hands in his pockets. His eyes were red, tears clung to the base of his lashes. “She’s the only one who survived.”

“I’m sorry,” she said. She struggled to remember his name.

“Daniel,” he said helpfully.

“Julia.”

“I know.” He was tall, with a pleasingly deep chest, a shock of dark hair, and pretty ocean-colored eyes. She might be on a Holocaust tour, but she was still a teenaged girl, and she noticed these things.

“What about you? Did any of your family…” he left the jagged end of the question dangling in the amber August air.

“No. They were in hiding, mostly.”

He nodded. Together, they contemplated the wildflowers growing between the broken concrete. Suddenly he smiled to himself.

“What?”

He looked faintly ashamed. “Oh…I was just thinking of what my mother would say. ‘Phhht, her family didn’t suffer.’”

When she laughed, her irises were striped gold and brown, like polished tiger eye. “Hm,” she said.“I don’t know about that.”

It was a long walk back to the entry gate, he offered to carry her knapsack. With the sun edging down toward the line of trees, there was an autumnal chill in the air. The bus was late. While they waited, they bought packets of postcards in the souvenir shop, a portfolio of guard towers and barbed wire fences set against a background of fiery sunsets.

This morning, I went to hear my friend’s mother speak at my kids’ school. She’s striking, a petite blond woman with high, perfect cheekbones, startling blue eyes, always elegantly dressed. Even now, she has the regal bearing of an Old World aristocrat.

She suffered through the worst of what World-War-II-era Poland had to throw at the Jews. I heard her describe German fighter planes flying so low she could see the pilots’ faces as they fired at fleeing refugees. In a low, pained voice, she spoke of the loss of her home, her imprisonment in the Lodz ghetto, the cruel, sad death of her mother. She explained what starving felt like, she described the ice that formed on the walls of their unheated apartment, and on her little brother’s face. She described the cattle car that took her to Auschwitz. The strange ghostly men in striped clothing who hissed at her father that he should kill himself rather than get off the train.

I thought about my mother’s stories. Heroic Polish farmers, Partizans, Nazi protectors. They’re almost thrilling. And everyone survived.

My father’s story isn’t like that.

Dad is from Podbuzh, or maybe it’s Pydbych, I don’t know, it doesn’t seem to exist anymore, at least, I can’t find any pictures of it, a small town on the eastern Polish border. When it became clear which way the wind was blowing, his family slipped away into the dense forest. They hid in bunkers dug into hillsides, in holes excavated under houses. Along the way, heartbreaking and heroic sacrifices were made. Hiding in the shadows with three of his children, my grandfather watched helplessly as his wife, my grandmother, was kicked to the ground and dragged away. When there was no room him in the bunker’s latrine trench, my seventeen-year-old uncle shoveled earth over his father and brothers and gave himself up to the Nazis waiting outside. When the SS trained their guns on my great uncle Aron, engineer and master builder of underground bunkers, he made a break for it, counting on them to shoot him. If he was taken alive, he knew, they would have tortured him until he gave up the locations of every hiding place he’d built. And there are stories so shattering that even I, one generation removed, cannot get them past my lips.

After the assembly, one of the teachers got up and spoke. Ninety-five percent of Poland’s Jews were killed in the Holocaust, he said. Though the survivors were marked forever by the war, he continued, they went on with their lives, raised normal children, had normal grandchildren.

Normal? I thought. Is that what we are? What a strange word.

I think it was then that I cried