Railway in Birkenau

Photo credit: Sig Other

Auschwitz

It’s the stairs I’m struck by.  From the first floor to the second, they’re terribly worn - warped and wobbly from years of use.  We’re walking through the barracks and around the grounds of Auschwitz and I’m struck not by the numbers or the stories but by the stairs.  Auschwitz is made of three parts: the original camp which was a former Polish army base, Birkenau which was built exclusively as an extermination camp and Auschwitz 3, the labor camp, which no longer exists.

As we travel from Auschwitz and Birkenau I ask about the stairs.  I worry I’m not clear – I don’t know how to ask what I want to know.  Agnieska, our young Polish guide, understands immediately.  The wear, she tells me, is not from the footsteps of concentration camp victims – she knows that’s what I was thinking.  It is not from any of the 80,000 shoes that represent a mere fifth of those who perished.  The wear is from the shoes of visitors.  “Remember,” she tells me, “the victims were here only five years.  Visitors have been coming for over sixty.”  Millions of feet stepping where victims stepped – tens of millions of visitors tracing the footsteps of one million victims – tracing but not fully getting the picture.  I find comfort in the wear of the stairs of Auschwitz – comfort in the familiarity of dips and grooves.  I’m not sure why.  Maybe its knowing that so many have come to see – so many have come to try to understand – so many have come to remember.  Or maybe it’s just that I fixate on the worn stairs and find comfort in the familiar amidst the unfathomable. 

Agnieska doesn’t go into the room with 80,000 pairs of shoes.  It’s the thing she cannot tolerate.  The display of shoes, to her, is the most upsetting sight.  It isn’t the shoes that bother me.  It’s the wax.  Across the hall from the shoes is another room with a display of brushes and combs on one side and a case holding tins and tins of wax and shoe polish.  Shoe polish is something you take with you when you believe you are leaving home to build a life elsewhere – to live in a place where you want to look presentable, build a new community, celebrate family birthdays and anniversaries and weddings.  Shoe polish is not something you take with you when you believe you are leaving home to die. 

I ask Agnieska about herself – how she chose this job.  I know she is not a Jew and I am struck by her youth – such a young woman to choose such a serious job.  Her grandmother, she says, was sent to a labor camp in Germany during the war.  As a girl, Agnieska would listen to her grandmother’s stories and became obsessed with the holocaust and so she studied history and Hebrew and became a guide so that the stories would continue.  She speaks with great pride about her country – about the Polish people and how they suffered during the war.  The camps, she is quick to point out, were not just for Jews.  The Poles were the first prisoners of Auschwitz along with a few hundred Jewish intellectuals.  As she speaks we walk slowly down the gravel road of Birkenau and snow begins to fall.    

The barracks of Birkenau are lined up in neat rows, as they would be in any army base.  They’re made of brick or wood.  Row upon row of standing barracks followed by row upon row of ruins – skeletons of chimneys and outlines of buildings that once were - all precisely stacked up on either side of the long road to death.  Past that, the woods – dense and beautiful – a sharp contrast to the haunted foreground.  It is stunning in its simplicity, in its austerity, in its quiet. There are no signs blinking “death to the Jews”, no splashes of blood on the walls, no emaciated skeletons reaching from the dark.  There are only barren buildings, scant photographs and the chill wind whistling between buildings once stuffed with humanity waiting for extinction.  It is the familiar of this place that is so striking - the absolute everydayness of it.   Sig Other notes that it is shockingly ordinary.  Without thinking, I say it is actually beautiful in a way.  He looks at me funny and walks on.  I feel odd, using that word in this place.  But it is, in a way.  Or rather, stunning.  It is orderly and ordinary and stunning in its simplicity.

Auschwitz does not bring you to your knees in the moment.  There were no tears shed as I walked the long road that runs parallel to the railway track that leads from the entry gate of Birkenau to the memorial erected between the ruins of the gas chambers number two and three.  Auschwitz sneaks up slowly – etching itself indelibly in your brain and cutting deep into your chest where it lives forever as a haunting memory of lives not lived.  

Hail to the Snotty Chief

I marvel at the brilliance that is seventeen.  Seventeen means you can drive yourself, it means you can drive your siblings and your friends, it means you are old enough to self-regulate to a certain extent.  Seventeen is accompanied by a fair amount of adult freedom and responsibility.  It is also accompanied by a fair amount of insecurity and uncertainty and the emotional swings that come with adolescence. 

Our seventeen year old, our Child One, has all of these things.  She has lot of that adult freedom.  She’s incredibly responsible and she comes and goes as she pleases.  But she is not adult.  She can’t vote.   She can’t drink (not that she wants to).  She is still, legally, a minor.  Seventeen, I’m often reminded in spite of her poise and maturity, is still quite young.  Take, as case in point, a moment with her earlier this week. 

Child One had given a brilliant speech at a fancy Beverly Hills fundraiser a week prior.  She was a little nervous.  Her voice was maybe pitched a bit higher than normal.  She held her head maybe a little more awkwardly than she might otherwise.  But only those of us who know her best were aware of any of these flaws.  The rest of the room saw her as brilliant and articulate and composed – a performance belying her few years – a performance worthy of a well-educated, secure adult.  After her speech, several admirers approached – people who had never met her before – people impressed by her ability to speak with such command at so young an age.  One man, a rather wealthy and powerful businessman, asked her where she intended to apply to college.  And then he told her she could do anything – he told her she could be the next President of the United States.

This may seems silly – a grand statement from a complete stranger to such a young girl after hearing one speech on a Wednesday night in a ballroom in Beverly Hills.  But the man meant it.  And why not, really?  Why shouldn’t Child One be anything she wants to be, even the President of the United States? 

The excitement of her speech behind her, Child One re-engaged in the rigor of her daily life - she continued to obsess about schoolwork and SATs and college apps and internship and her senior project.  Bedtime continued to come too late and mornings began too early and as anyone who lives a busy life can tell you, Child One started to break down.  It started with a stuffy nose and deteriorated to a low grade coldy/flu bug.  Our brilliant, strong, vibrant girl turned into a weak, sleepy, snotty little kitten. 

And then last night, after anxious tossing and turning, after hours of organizing and re-organizing and sheep counting and white noise, Child One succumbed to the adolescent side of her seventeen year old self.  Child One did, as she had when she was a tiny girl, what every small child does when they can’t self-soothe – when they can’t put themselves to sleep.  Child One crept into our room at 3am and crawled into bed next to Sig Other.  “I can’t sleep,” I heard her say.  “Shhhh,” Sig Other soothed, patting her head, “stay here and I’ll put you to sleep.”  Within three minutes, Child One was snoring soundly.  So there we were – me, Sig Other, Beta Dog and Child One – all jammed into bed together.  I knew that Sig Other wasn’t asleep – I knew he was trapped in an awkward twist, one arm under Child One, one around her back but neither moving so as not to wake the sweet girl.  And I certainly wasn’t asleep, kept awake by the drone of the buzzsaw of Child One’s snotty snore.  But neither of us would speak, lest we wake the sleeping child.  And so I looked across the bed, past sleeping Beta Dog, past wakeful Sig Other and over at the now blissful Child One and I thought to myself, “oh look – there she is – the future President of the United States.”

Ground Control to Major Domo...

I love rich people.  I don’t mean people who are financially secure or people who don’t worry about paying for college or retirement or even people who have more than one home.  I mean really rich people.  The kind of people with staff.  Not nanny or housekeeper staff.  But full-time, round the clock, take care of everything staff.  The kind of people who have a major domo.  I met one of those people the other night at a dinner party meant as a social networking function for business women.  I pulled into a fancy property through a fancy gate, handed my car off to a well-dressed valet and was met by a suited gentleman who introduced himself as “the Major Domo of the household” before whisking my coat and handbag away to a closet the size of my bedroom. 

Major Domo.  Sig Other’s fantasy – someone to organize the house, keep the pantry well-stocked, fix the little heres and theres that fall apart, stop working or otherwise fail to function at their highest capacity, someone to bathe and care for the beasts and finally, to bring Sig Other coffee and the paper in bed.  The latter task we sorta figured out.  The papers arrive via internet onto Sig Other’s bedside companion, the iPad.  And most days (though I confess not EVERY day) coffee is delivered to him in bed by yours truly with a smile and a little dance.  In fact, most tasks on the list of things that would be otherwise handled by the Major Domo are, in fact, handled by me.  This is not to say I am without help.  It would be ludicrous to suggest that I work full time AND manage to do every household task on my own.  I have housekeepers and a gardener and pool man and even a part time assistant (though I desperately miss my last household assistant who doubled as a brilliant manny to Child Two – he was as good at Rock Band and Halo as running errands). 

And yet I still consider it a great failing of my personal and professional life that I have no truly rich friends – no friends to offer up their vacation homes or whisk us away on the jet to their Mediteranean-moored yacht or private Italian villa.  I’m not entirely sure how I’ve managed twenty plus years in a city full of rich people and have not one single stinking rich friend.  Don’t get me wrong.  I know some rich people.  I’ve been invited to some rich peoples’ houses.  But I don’t have any friends who are truly rich.  Truly, sick money, filthy nasty full-time staff rich.  Child One has failed us in this manner.  She has lovely friends from her fancy private school.  But none of them has fancy rich parents.  None of them have vacation homes that they want to invite us to so we can all spend grand holidays together in exotic locales with delicious food and indulgent wines.  Child Two has failed us as well on this front as he is simply not terribly social. 

But lately, it doesn't seem to matter much.  Lately, Sig Other and I have reasoned that we would be, in fact, very bad house guests.  We’ve realized that being guests in someone else’s home, no matter how fancy, is not actually our idea of a good time.  We like hotels where there is room service and maid service and a certain level of assumed privacy.  And we like our own home where there is actual privacy.    So the idea of really rich friends with fancy vacation homes may be a terrific fantasy, but in practice would serve us not at all.  A major domo on the other hand…

Soldier of Fortune

Child two is a killer. Well, not really. But he, like many boys his age, has a penchant for guns and martial arts and first person shooter video games and all things violent. He does karate three days a week.  He’s a purple belt and works with a bowstaff. And every Sunday, Child Two plays a vicious day-long game of paintball at a place called “Field of Fire”.  Field of Fire lives just off the I-5 near places like Magic Mountain and that horrid place the boy had his birthday party with bad pizza and worse ice cream and lots of video games and go-carts.  But Field of Fire is not a place of kiddie parties and ice cream cones.  Real men go there.  Real men who drive real trucks and come to the game fully loaded with gear and guns and team t-shirts that say things like “Hitmen” and “Hellfire”.  And Child Two loves its.

Child Two, in his Monday through Saturday life, is the same gentle, sweet boy he always was.  Nothing has changed in his general persona.  He is still kind.  He is still thoughtful.  He is still smarter than the average bear.  And he is still a wee bit socially awkward.   He’s a little shy really.  And sort of dreamy.  When he was a very small boy he would stand on the soccer field mid-game and sort of stare into the sky.  Zoning out?  Maybe.  But Ex-Wife and I preferred to think he was thinking Deep Thoughts.  Now that he’s older he spends his weekdays diligently attending to homework and engaging in his Hebrew studies.

But on Sundays he transforms.  On Sundays, he becomes a well-armed, well-prepared soldier on the battlefield of paintball strategy.  On Sundays, he becomes “Nate Dog.”  I didn’t know about “Nate Dog” until I did drop off a few Sundays ago.  Ex-Wife has bourne the burden of drop-off for the past few months but there was a day she was unavailable and so Child Two asked, albeit sheepishly, about whether I could take him.  “I know you don’t approve,” he started, “but would you consider taking me to paintball this weekend?”  SO sweet was the request, so innocent and wide eyed that I could do nothing but agree to ferry the sweet boy to his favorite weekend activity. 

Sunday morning arrived, boy geared up and we hopped in the car and headed north.  We arrived at the land of paint and honey bright and early.  The theme from “Deliverance” popped into my head and involuntarily out of my mouth as we swung onto the dirt road leading to the parking lot.  Child Two chided me and shook his head.  “It isn’t a redneck sport,” he said, although I’m not sure he knows what that means.  I pulled up between two rugged Ford trucks and Child Two hopped quickly out of the car, grabbed his bags of gear and ammo, and sauntered immediately off in the general direction of the slowly gathering crowd.

I noticed he wasn’t particularly interesting in me hanging around – in fact, he was sort of ignoring me.  And I noticed that rather than place his bags of gear on the tables set up for gamers, he swung them onto the back of a bright yellow truck made dim by mud and gave a nod of greeting to the man – the grown man – who was clearly the truck’s owner and was, in that moment, seriously engaged in donning pads and protective gear and cleaning his guns and laying out ammo for the day’s battles.  “Hey Nate-Dog,” the man nodded, “wassup?”  Child Two – whom I had never heard referred to as “Nate” and is most certainly NOT a Nate-Dog in my book – merely nodded a “hey” and proceeded to join the man in his war prep efforts.

I walked over to the shack to sign waivers that release the battlefield purveyors of any liability and then went over to say goodbye.  “Bye,” he said, barely looking up.  He didn’t want me to stay.  He didn’t really want to acknowledge that he’d been dropped off by a parent at all.  He didn’t need me.  My heart, in that moment, cracked a tiny bit and soared all at the same time.  Child Two was growing up.  Child Two would no longer be the boy who needed a parent around all the time.  Child Two was becoming a young man who had figured out a place for himself in a world of men – a strange world of men but a world, nonetheless.  I drove off, humming the tune from Deliverance and smiling to myself ever so slightly.

Last weekend I dropped the boy off again, this time with two of his friends.  They’re teenagers, older than Child Two by a few grades and awkward in the way adolescent boys on the brink of manhood are.  The teenagers were greeted by the burly crowd with a “look there, the girls are back in town.”  But my boy got a nod of respect, a rub of the head and a “Hey Nate-Dog, wassup?”

We tease Child Two that he's in training to become a soldier of fortune. That paintball and karate will combine to provide a skillset most useful to a mercenary.  Not a bad business, perhaps, in this modern world.  The irony, of course, is that his sister is thinking of majoring in human rights. Sig Other and I fantasize about a future where brother and sister meet on the battlefield – Child Two the strategic leader of men fighting to protect an oppressed people, and Child One as an aide worker or war correspondent covering the event.  They will reunite and hug and laugh as they did as small children, and then go on to continue the fight – each in their own way. 

Sing Like You Really Mean It...

Growing up, I never really understood why people went to church although everyone I knew did.  I thought it was perhaps because they felt guilty.  I grew up in a neighborhood of Catholics and Mormons and Born Again Christians. So I assumed they were all going to church on Sunday to confess, to take communion and to be absolved of the guilt of their bad behavior from the previous week.  And this may have been true.  For some of them.  But it may also have been true that some of them went to church for reasons having nothing to do with guilt or bad behavior or obligation.  Maybe some of them went to church because they just liked it.

Lately I’ve been going to temple every week.  It started because Child Two has Hebrew school on Saturdays.  In the beginning, Sig Other would drop the boy off and go for his morning ride. But every now and then, Sig Other would have a conflict and I would do the drop off.  Child Two is just a little boy (though he’s almost as tall and certainly outweighs me by now) and I so felt it right to walk him in.  And once in a while, I felt compelled to stay a while. 

Week after week I’d go for drop off.  And once in a while turned into more often than not.  And I’d end up staying.  At first it was just an hour.  Then it was two and then longer and then time and time again I’d find myself staying for the whole service.  Temple on a Saturday morning can be fun.  It’s terribly social.  There’s tea and sometimes snacks and often a group of folks sitting around outside chatting and avoiding the services entirely.  And sometimes I’ll join them.  Sometimes I’ll mill back and forth between the inner and outer worlds.  But lately, more often than not, I find myself hunkering down.  Lately, more often than not, I find myself really engaging – following along and yes, even singing like I really mean it.

For most of my life, I made fun of people who sing like they mean it.  It was a joke to me.  “Oh,” I’d say when being told about someone earnest, “does she close her eyes when she sings?  Does she sing like she really means it?”  To me, singing like you mean it indicated a kind of weakness.  Singing like you really mean it was for people whose hearts bled, who were evil do-gooders, who looked right in your eyes when they spoke and pledged sincerity at all times.  Those people, I was convinced, lacked irony.  They didn’t share my innate cynicism.  They were, I decided, simple. 

But here’s where it gets kind of messy.  Here’s where inherent cynicism clashes with conventional action.  Standing in synagogue, joining a congregation with voices lifted in song can be moving – can transport me to a place of deep emotion – to a place some people could call – even I would perhaps call “spiritual”. 

I hate to admit – I hesitate to bend to definition I would find abhorrent, but the truth is there are times I find standing in temple, singing with a group of people sort of spiritual.  I sing in Hebrew – I don’t really know the words or what they mean – but I’ve heard them so often now I can sing a transliterated version of prayers and understand they all basically say the same thing – God is great, God is fabulous, God should be held in awe.  And I sing and I know I don’t hold these beliefs in the literal sense of the word but I do feel something – I feel transported, I feel elevated and moved and deeply emotional.  I feel like I’m praying. 

Praying.  What does that mean.  Here’s what Wikipedia says about prayer:

Prayer is a form of religious practice that seeks to activate a volitional connection to a god or spirit through deliberate practice. Prayer may be either individual or communal and take place in public or in private. It may involve the use of words or song. When language is used, prayer may take the form of a hymn, incantation, formal creedal statement, or a spontaneous utterance in the praying person. There are different forms of prayer such as petitionary prayer, prayers of supplication, thanksgiving, and worship/praise. Prayer may be directed towards a deity, spirit, deceased person, or lofty idea, for the purpose of worshipping, requesting guidance, requesting assistance, confessing sins or to express one's thoughts and emotions. Thus, people pray for many reasons such as personal benefit or for the sake of others.

AH HAH!!!  That’s it.  I stand in shul and close my eyes and sing like I really mean it because I’m PRAYING.  And it’s ok to pray even though I can’t say for sure that I believe in God.  It’s ok to pray even though I may not be praying to God at all.  Maybe I'm praying to connect to a lofty idea.  Maybe I'm praying to confess or to express a thought or emotion.  Maybe it doesn't matter at all why i'm there as long as I know that it really is ok to sing with my eyes closed – to sing like I really mean it.

Last Tango in... Auschwitz?

Sig Other and I like to travel abroad on Thanksgiving.  Very few Americans are willing to give up their turkey and football and stuffing and pie and leave the country over the Thanksgiving holiday.  Americans are definitely traveling then.  But they’re flying to Detroit or Atlanta or Peewaukie or Portland.  No one expects Americans to leave the country during the four blessed days of patriotic celebration.  We’re meant to be stateside, snug in our fireplace-fueled homes stuffing our faces with dry bird, constipating stuffing and oversweet tubers topped with sticky sweet sugars.  We’re not expected to be in Marrakesh or Paris or Rome.  But those are the places Sig Other and I have gone for the past several years.  No ten-day minimum, no black out days, no holiday premiums.  Because Thanksgiving isn’t a holiday anywhere else in the world.

So this year, we thought “Argentina”.  Where better to head than South?  What more enticing than the land of Tango and Dulce du Leche?  We spun fantasies of warm wind brushing over bare skin as we shopped for leather and planned our late night dinners in the lively city of Buenos Ares.  But plans are not always easy and logistics conspired to make the notion of traveling such a long way for such a short time entirely unattractive and seemingly untenable.   Our ever-efficient travel agent had, however, already done some early legwork and we were committed to a particular airline.  Thus our trip would be restricted to the destinations on that particular airline’s hub.  Tahiti was sold out.  So were Paris and Amsterdan.   London reminded me of work and Hawaii was just.. Hawaii.  And then there was Prague.  We could get to Prague pretty easily, Sig Other had never been there and was, after all, of Czech descent.  He wanted to take the children to Prague to show them the Jewish ghetto with its famous cemetery and I thought how long it had been since I’d last visited the beautiful city and got excited about seeing how it had changed over the last decade.  And so we decided.  And so Prague it is.  Tickets are booked and we’ll soon be on our way.

Prague, it turns out, is quite is near Brno, the birthplace of Sig Other’s father.  And as Sig Other has never been to his father’s hometown, we’ve added that as a destination as well.  And Brno is not terribly far from Auschwitz where Sig Other’s grandmother and great aunt perished during the war.  And so that is a destination now as well.  I tried to throw my grandparents hometown in as well but was told that, in addition to the town being in the opposite direction, my grandparents hadn't perished in the holocaust and therefore did not get a place on the itinerary.  This, Sig Other pointed out, was a trip about his dead family members.  His family perished in the war.  Mine did not.  Therefore his family history would take precedence.

So somehow, due to inconvenient layovers and ill-fated mileage transfer, our sunny, sexy sojourn to the South has become a chilly trek through Holocaust history.  We’ll end our trip in Vienna where no one we know died and I have promised Child Two a trip to the Hotel Sacher Wien for a taste of its famous Sacher Torte (mit schlag of course!).  But I’m still trying to figure out how my trip to learn tango turned into a tour of the dead Jews of Eastern Europe…