Kent Leatham

Jehanne Dubrow

Holocaust Studies (an excerpt)

Week One

How to pack for a death camp? Or even speak of packing for the trip?—with the predictable dark joke of one-way tickets on a train and a shower at the journey’s end.

I take a plane from New York to Warsaw, a bus ride, a car, and then, I’m there. The first night in my new bedroom blurs with jet lag. A bed, a table, a cupboard, a thin curtain to cover the window, and a view of the highway. This is my home for the next eight weeks, a town that most people know for its neighboring death camp. In my journal, I write that it’s both real city and metaphor. But there’s no metaphor in the first meal I eat: bread and butter and cheese, a glass of black tea, tomatoes fanned out across the plate. I almost write, tomatoes bleeding on the plate, but such language would color what tastes like an ordinary meal.

For two months, I work in a museum, giving tours to visitors who come from almost anywhere in the world but Poland. I am here to help tell the history of the Jews of one small, Polish town. These Jews no longer exist. They are the sand at the bottom of the Vistula River. They are sepia photographs on a wall. In my duties as tour guide, I point to the torn pages of a siddur suffocating inside its glass case. I tell the story of a tarnished chanukiah that a Polish farmer dug up from his fields. I sleep at a boarding house, paid for by the German government and staffed with German volunteers, eighteen- and nineteen-year-olds who have chosen to work near the death camp as an alternative to military service. They keep good records, marking arrivals and departures in a cloth-covered ledger. The local women who guard the front desk don’t smile when I wish them good day, Dzień dobry, with the Polish I learned in childhood two decades ago.

Each day, groups of students visit from Cologne, Dusseldorf, Stuttgart, come to learn about the Shoah, to debate an inheritance of guilt and responsibility. Workshops are led by Catholic priests. In the evenings, the German teenagers take turns knocking a small, hollow ball back and forth across the ping-pong table. They drink from green bottles of beer while watching the World Cup. A girl hammers out Für Elise on an out-of-tune upright.

The Scholar

I should begin with her, the first of my American coworkers. Attacked and nearly murdered five years before, she woke from a coma to discover that the testimony of survivors—Wiesel, Levi, Delbo—reflected her own sufferings, like a cracked mirror shining back at her from sixty years ago. Those long afternoons in her hospital room, in between the nurses’ rounds and the awkward visits of friends who stuttered then looked away from her bruises, the Scholar read, devouring books like The Drowned and the Saved, as if the assault had left her hungry for words. Five years later, as I walk the rooms of the museum with her, I wonder to myself if she feels completed by the imaginary bite of lice on her scalp, the touch of blue-black tattoos, the stench of feces and burning fat.

She likes to repeat that quote from the Talmud, the one Spielberg made famous in Schindler’s List—He who saves a single life, saves the entire world. We argue, after she tells me that her pain should weigh as heavily on the scale as six million’s. She has faced her own Shoah, her own un-asked for torture. She points to her forehead; the white edges of a scar are proof that a man once broke her head against the sidewalk. When the bandages had finally been unwrapped and she had learned to walk outdoors without flinching at birdsong, her study of the Bible became a new career. She remained a good Christian but shared in the agony of the Jews. There is redemption in suffering, she tells me as her mouth twists into a jagged line.

The Scholar gives her own version of survivor testimony during tours of the museum. Has she heard of Benjamin Wilkomirski, the man who transformed his childhood into a fake Holocaust memoir, convincing the world that he had lived through Majdanek and Birkenau, convincing himself of his own Jewish soul? I watch as the Scholar fingers the hem of her cotton blouse, pulling at invisible threads—the tassels on a prayer shawl only she can see.

Week Three

This is a small town, with small-town prejudices. An American Jew has no business living here, not even for two months. If, like me, her hair is dark and curly, her body more rounded than a Polish woman’s, her skin tinged olive; she will feel the touch of blue eyes following her progress through the marketplace. Vendors study her hands as she counts out złoty coins to pay for a kilo of Italian plums. Old women watch her split apart a piece fruit, the careful way she bites into the green and purplish flesh. Pink babies in their strollers seem to study her with distrust. They have learned to recognize the stranger. Perhaps difference is as simple as geometry. Circle, circle, circle, triangle. Christian, Christian, Christian, Jew. Difference is the child’s game of duck, duck, goose.

The Historian

Or maybe I should begin with someone else, another colleague. On the streets, among the Polish pedestrians, she clutches her bird-arms to her sides. I try to imagine her history but can only come up with what she has hinted at: a childhood of bologna and Wonder Bread sandwiches, Kraft Macaroni & Cheese, and Sunday school. In the sunlight, her face is pale as mayonnaise. Her spine curves like a question mark-curve. I picture her huddling in corners or bending forward to scrutinize fragile books. She lifts a magnifying glass to her eyes. Her hands are fair, as though she always wears white gloves.

During our eight weeks in Poland, she talks about her someday conversion to Judaism. Rubbing her palms together, as if to wash away invisible crumbs, she describes her plan to visit the mikvah where she will take the ritual bath, cleaning her skin of its First Communion and the ashen cross of Palm Sunday. She will step from the water, shimmering in her new strangeness—the Orthodox Jew, a part of the modern world and yet not.

Until then, it is enough to study other Jews, especially the victims, the ones who cry their terrible, broken stories on videotape, willing to be transcribed if only to be heard. She covers her hair with a scarf and wears a long-sleeved dress on Shabbat. She can be identified as devout through a gesture at the entrance of a room, the nervous fluttering of her hand from the silver mezuzah back to her lips. I watch her standing with the Hasidim who sometimes hurry through the museum as part of their Shoah tours of Eastern Europe. The Historian smiles when she speaks with the Orthodox, whose English is tinged with the vowels and consonants of native Yiddish, the mamloshn, an accent so precious it should be displayed under glass.

On a field trip to a nearby town with one of the few remaining Jewish communities in Poland, she reads from the Torah. Holding a yad, she leads the silver pointer across parchment with a historian’s worship of artifact, an eye toward taking notes. I want to shout, a Jew isn’t made through study alone! I want her to know about the Golem of Prague. Legend describes how a rabbi shaped the creature from mud and prayer, molding the giant’s body into life through the work of exaltation. Soul.

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