The Holocaust Kid Read online

  What’s six minutes? Where has he to rush? The grave. So he is tight. He knows. The Talmud says: A miser is like a mouse, which lies on coins. But if he has a dollar in his pocket and spends it, not for luxuries, but for what they need, he has tears in his eyes because he knows he has less. I’m too old to change. Five minutes, almost.

  Money. That’s the only real thing there is in this life. All the rest is for philosophers and rabbis. His foot taps the base of the parking meter. Let them count how many mangled angels’ limbs can fit on a pinhead. Any fool could shoot a bullet through the most brilliant brain. He was a nothing and yet he lived. Was it God who chose him to make a fool of them all? Tap, tap.

  The one they called Pushkin because he recited love poems, writing with match carbon on his arm. Murdered. With money you could buy time, a shtickel bread, soup like from a sewer. Tap, tap. He would have killed for it. Not to die. And now he lets the moments burn like kindling. Fool! Thou scarest me with dreams, and terrify me through visions: so that my soul chooseth strangling, and death rather than these my bones. Time is money. If only he had as much money as he has time.

  He grasps his stomach, chronically constipated so that each movement of his bowels is an ordeal. Genia humiliates him, gives him no privacy, bursting in on him as he tries, so painful, pressing his hands on the sides of the seat, pushing, squeezing his sphincter, which aches to empty. Nothing. It stays inside him like all the hatred he felt, growing harder, the insidious turd. Tap, tap, tap.

  Why died I not in the womb? Why did I not give up the ghost when I came out of the belly? Why did the knee receive me? Why the breasts that I should suck? Job’s curses boom in his ears as he waits for the time to run out in the goddamn parking meter. Why is the light given to a man whose way is hid, and whom God hath hedged in?

  They have bread on the table. That’s what matters. Bread, not death. I will not die. He had said it so many times, he believed it. Though everyone else died. He had craved bread the way others hallucinated messiahs. Black pumpernickel, rye, sourdough, oh, challah, sweetest of breads.

  How his father salted the Sabbath challah with a silver minaret shaker, breaking off a piece that he shared with them all. His brother Yacob’s paunch was like a pickle barrel. Heniek smiled. Praying in his white tallit with the navy threads, a black satin yarmulke covering his bent head. Yacob’s rhythm was sluggish, a devout but lazy swishing like water in a beaker, reciting the prayer by rote. Heniek had stood next to him, long-legged, sharp-featured, severe in the bones of his shoulders, holding his back like a steel door.

  Flicking his wrist, Heniek peers at his watch, eyes trekking the second hand’s orbit. Four minutes. Why didn’t he finish with it already? Tap, tap. Drop the quarters in the slot. He shakes his head, unwilling to give in.

  Once, he had been a cheder bucher, destined, perhaps, to follow his famous zeyde, Rebbe Avraham Rubinsky of Redomansk. He had imagined his days spent as he had seen his grandfather with his cabalistic computations, numerology of the faith-keepers: to sanctify all that existed, even the serpent. His grandfather’s impeccable finger, smooth as a baby’s, moving slowly down the page as if it were Braille, as if he could feel the black seraphim of the Hebrew characters.

  / / /

  I cry to you, Blessed One, my Rock. Do not be deaf to me. For if you are silent, I shall go down to the pit like the rest.

  Grandfather Rebbe Avraham Rubinsky recited David’s psalms from memory. “Have mercy upon me for I am withered away. O Lord, heal me for my bones are vexed.” He was called Avraham Tehillim Zager. His zeyde, the psalm-sayer, had opened his heart, all his senses and God’s tongue filled him with an ecstasy Heniek would never know. When his grandfather was too weak to pray, he held onto the bima with the Torah scroll, the black Hebraic characters oversized for the cantor of the synagogue. But he couldn’t see. His eyes slivers of blue, new moons floating in a milky sea.

  The thin vessel of his grandfather, his fingers glass thimbles, shivered as they sent him to the right, the line with the other grandmothers and grandfathers. They would be taken to sanitariums in the green mountains where the fresh air would restore them.

  How instinct raw as a fang had flung Heniek from the death march into a dank gully in the woods. He had watched them continue, Yacob, still innocent of his brother’s abandonment. He couldn’t call to him. Three minutes more. I am banished from my home, God, famished.

  In Auschwitz, there wasn’t to eat or sleep. Sanity was a piece of soap. They wanted to fill us with horror toward our own flesh. How he did hand-to-hand battle with despair, which would have reduced him to Musselman, the breathing dead whose backs were rounded like beasts of unbearable burden. The first ones to go. They wanted to get rid of all the useless eaters. Beautify the human race.

  In Auschwitz, he lit four matches instead of yortzeit candles and recited Kaddish for his parents, his two beautiful sisters, Rutka, the proud one with the long braid wound around her head, and the younger, small-boned and delicate Perele. Yacob was still alive, he heard, though in a different part of the camp. The matches had burned. He let them brand his neshuma. His soul.

  B48356. A good number. It meant they wanted us to live so we could work. The ones without numbers went straight to the gas. Why should they bother with them? Luckily, I was in the kitchen. I could trade scraps. Arbeit Macht Frei.

  Heniek, I am called. Henry in English. You took me to the wilderness to slay me. The knife glinted like a rabid dog’s teeth as you raised your hand. Why did you stop as I lay bound on your altar of wood, barbed wire around me? Lay not thine hand upon the lad, neither do thou anything unto him: for now I know that thou fearest God, seeing thou hast not withheld thy son, thine only son from me.

  Avinu Malkenu. You don’t exist. Our Father, Our King. You never existed. There is no You even to discuss. A psycho screeches “Gene Krupa lives!” You. You. What’s You? Nothing. A void filled with lies. Liar! It makes him crazy.

  On Riverside Drive, a man in a brown toupee like an animal on his head approached. “You are Heniek, no? Had you a brother, Yacob?” He nodded. “In Auschwitz?” So? “I thought it was you. It’s okay, you don’t recognize Yonkileh. I was younger then, with a physique.” He laughed at his own belly after near-starvation and dysentery. Nu, Heniek had mumbled without affect. “You remember how it was snow on the ground? None of us had what to wear so we wrapped newspaper on our feet. They marched us to a farmhouse with chickens making so much noise. The cellar where the farmer kept his potatoes, there was no air, so the potatoes wouldn’t rot. That’s where they put us to die. Except me, and I don’t know if you remember, Marek. We forced our mouths to the crack under the door. That’s how we breathed. Yacob, I’m sorry to say it, he was in the back.”

  No! He should let Yacob rest in the silence of his bones. No grave. None of them. Left to die like trash after a picnic, everything empty, layers of skin flapping like plastic bags. Finished.

  Heniek turns to watch the kapo across the street. She is writing in her black notebook. She could destroy him if she wanted to. He checks the parking meter. It is over. But he remains standing as if frozen another minute, will not give them the satisfaction. Then he drops two quarters into the slot. When the light turns green, Heniek looks in both directions, then crosses the street to return home. Though I left years ago, I follow behind him.

  THE BIG H

  “I hesitate to speak tonight about the subject of the Symposium. It is one of such horror that despite the fact that it happened so many years ago, I believe we still turn away from it in horror; except for those brave poets, writers, artists, and musicians who have dared to look into its depths and depict the reality of Auschwitz . . . ”

  The Right Reverend Paul Moore, Jr., Episcopal Bishop of New York, gave the keynote address to the first interfaith Holocaust conference. Auschwitz: Beginning of a New Era. It was 1974.

  “I believe that we tread on holy ground tonight. This too I hesitate to touch. I take off my shoes lest by walking on it I s
omehow destroy the fragility, the holiness, of that ground. I am referring to our sharing, as fellow human beings, the strange glory of innocent suffering, the strange glory of heroism, which came out of the stories of Auschwitz.

  “This innocent suffering is a strange thing in our creation, and Auschwitz may well be its greatest symbol. Perhaps there is some mystery of atonement here. Perhaps this cosmic power of the Holy Innocents can be a means by which we become one. And so I bow down and worship before that innocent suffering and innocent death.”

  For hours, I had been sitting in a hard wooden pew at St. John the Divine, recrossing my legs on the padded kneeling platform, surrounded by carved figures of devotion. I glared at the black Book of Common Prayer with its golden cross, thinking of how my mother recoiled at the sight of crucifixes. “Let him burn on his cross,” she spewed as she scrubbed her oven, waxed her linoleum.

  Poles got drunk on Christmas and Easter, my mother told me. Once as she was returning from a sleepover at her cousin Clara’s, two soldiers chased after her, calling, “Zyd!” Jew! Whore! She ran as fast as her skinny legs would take her. Please! She kept running until they caught her.

  “You Jews live like pigs. Look how filthy the street is. Clean it,” the smaller man commanded.

  “I have nothing to clean with,” she whispered.

  “Use your dress,” the one with the pistol said.

  “Heavy shit, huh?” I whispered, nudging Christine, who sat next to me, listening intently.

  Born Catholic, married to a Jew, Christine couldn’t get enough of us, our food, our writers, our Yiddish expressions. She called herself a Judeophile, a Jew hag. “I had never met a single Jew in Winnipeg,” she once told me. “You were such a revelation to me!” Despite my repeated instruction, Christine pronounced kvetch as if it had two syllables. She met my eyes momentarily, then shifted her attention reverently.

  Sure, I too was awed, felt outclassed, outcast, having imagined the Holocaust mostly my own bogeyman and a handful of survivors, my parents and their foreign-accented cronies from the DP camps. There was a write-up on yesterday’s editorial page of the New York Times.

  There is, in fact, no way to abolish from the mind the demons of what this symposium called “the Nazi machinery of death.” The numbers branded on the arms of death camps survivors have not faded with the years. Neither must the shame of those who so branded their fellow men, women, and children be allowed to fade from memory, lest the forces of darkness once again find humanity offguard against man’s capacity for evil.

  Yes, it was sublime. I gazed around the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. Laser-thin beams bisected tall stone columns in the darkness, illuminating slivers of exquisitely tinted glass. Tapestries of Calvary. The pulpit surrounded by filigree of latticework, glowing in the light like summer raindrops. First-class, five-star real estate.

  I thought of the drafty shtibel on the second floor of a tenement on 158th Street, where my father prayed. A torn fiberglass curtain separated the men from the women, who peered hungrily through the holes. I could see my father, his cheeks glowing as he dovened, swaying back and forth, his lips moving silently.

  As I sat in this crypt with its nativity statues, so tender, all I could feel was a cold hatred of all the insidious privilege here. Everything so tall and silent. I hated them for their generations of family, of a lived history, for “My great-grandparents came over on the Mayflower.” My parents came over with hundreds of dirty, despised DPs on the General Hersey. A distant organ’s note reverberated in the nave.

  He could have been the president of a university in his dark, bell-sleeved robe. This could be graduation. From the white alabaster pulpit, Bishop Paul Moore’s voice rose, swelling to fill the cathedral.

  “So let it be. Let it be. Let us listen with our hearts and with our souls to the cries of anguish. Let those cries and let that vision not be wasted, and let us take it up once more so that the very things which for so long have been barriers between Christian and Jew, between brother and sister, may now become a means that binds us together.”

  He paused dramatically, modulating to a stage whisper. “For the time is short, very short.” Then his voice rose again, “I am grateful to all those who will lift up for us something of this vision.”

  Bowing his head, the light glinted in tiny arrows off the strands of his fierce silver hair. Was this deus ex machina or what?

  Dean James Morton greeted the bishop as he climbed down from the pulpit. Of the younger, hipper clergy school, he wore a crewneck sweater over his collar, his wry smile a tad worldly.

  As Dean Morton began his introductions, Christine leaned over and whispered, “When did he say you could read?”

  “After everyone else.”

  Earlier that day, I had approached him. Dean Morton was not happy about my request to read my poems, but reluctantly agreed I could follow the scheduled speakers. Now I held my sheaf of poems on my lap, fingers tapping the black cardboard binder, tapping two-three-four like a piano exercise.

  “Aren’t you terrified?” she asked.

  “It’s more terrifying not to read them.” I looked at her, smiled to dilute my nerves. Tap, tap.

  I was a medium, Houdini of the Holocaust, which transmitted itself through me, the uncut umbilical cord of my mother feeding me blood images vivid as they were terrifying. Spirits of the dead cried out of me.

  My parents sought the anonymous quiet of Washington Heights, except in the close quarters of others like themselves, there being safety in silence and invisibility. But I strove for recognition. It was like the gift of light and life.

  Besides, the Holocaust was mine—except for the survivors. It was an exclusive club. No Johnny-come-lately academic, theologian, or artist should be allowed to cash in on my private cache of suffering and obsession.

  I was born on the other side, lived my first year in a German Displaced Persons camp. I would show them what it meant to have one’s kin extinguished in history’s bonfire, and the only living family singed at their source so all that released itself with the exuberance of nature came slow and with great difficulty.

  I would show the ones in cozy chairs in Holocaust Studies like Uly Oppenheim at the Postgraduate Center, radical prof/prophet with long gray hair and well-fitting jeans. He had read the day before from his seminal study in survival, Our Bodies, Not Our Souls, a collection of interviews with women who shamefully admitted their enforced prostitution in Nazi brothels. Now he sat across the aisle, slumped in his seat, occasionally jotting on a small leather-bound pad.

  I noted the gaggle of Guggenheim and Fulbright fellows, Library of Congress poets, recipients of National Endowment for the Arts grants who in search of the loaded metaphor like a Saturday night special—pull the trigger and scorch—dredged up a fandango of barbed wire, black boots, and Nazi lampshades. What did they know besides their bleeding footnotes?

  The Holocaust was mine alone to bear. That’s why they had to hear me. I’d show all these merchants what it meant to suffer, or to be so close to it that you got a dose.

  I turned to Christine. Her eyes were filled with tears as she listened to a dark-haired man in a yarmulke speak about Israel’s legacy. “Our land was created from the ashes and we must never forget that,” he declared. “Not for a moment. And we must teach our children and their children . . . ”

  Next, a dour, middle-aged former nun stood in front of the gallery. “We must look at the very roots of Christian theology,” she began stiffly. “And there shall we discover the roots of Jewish hatred.”

  God, I had never heard so much talk of suffering, sacrificial lambs, martyrs, and unspeakable horrors mounted in such a scholarly drone.

  Dead time. Time of the dead. The silence thick with howling. Dead time. Bed time. I don’t want to go to sleep.

  I heard applause, looked up to see a famous American poet from Boston mount the pulpit, his silver hair winged victoriously on either side of his head. He read from his latest book, Auschwitz Sonnets,
inspired by his visit to the concentration camp.

  “He’s the last speaker.” Christina pointed to the program. “You’ll be next.”

  “Oh.” I looked around the cathedral, the large, silent audience.

  “Nervous?” she asked.

  I shook my head, but my stomach revolted. Two-three-four! Two-three-four! Cold fingers rapping the binder. Tapping.

  Polite applause.

  He joined the other speakers in the front pew. Dean Morton had stepped down. He was shaking hands, thanking people. He hadn’t said anything yet. I peered around myself. He said he would. He had to. I waited. Patiently. I was waiting for Dean Morton to announce my reading.

  People started getting up, putting on their coats. Then Dean Morton walked up the aisle, past me, unseeing. The speakers followed behind him.

  “He said he would introduce me!” I cried. More and more people were leaving. “What should I do?”

  I couldn’t believe it. Once again, a Jew abandoned by the Church. He had said I could read!

  With all my ambition and grit, grinding my teeth so my jaw ached with longing, I wanted to do it. Tell their story, which was mine too. Remember. Yes. Get it out like some web-fingered demon child.

  Our parents survived to bear witness. We, in turn, must be their attestors. Testify!

  “What can you do?” Christine shrugged.

  If I was truly the Holocaust Kid, living for it, saving myself like a virgin bride for the occasion of my deflowering, now was the time. I was in love with the war, memorized every detail, milking it for all its horror. I wanted to be there. My father’s Auschwitz, my mother’s Czestochowa. To burn in the purifying fires.

  “Them’s the breaks, kid,” Christine added sympathetically.

  “No!” I cried, rising, climbing over her legs.

  Someone would hear me, dammit. This was my moment. I would stand at the pulpit of this church and recite my poetry. I ran up on the stage, clutching my black cardboard binder.