I thought we would never get to our home. I don’t know if I would have tried to go back home even, but Ilsa said that is what we must do. We must first live through those first weeks when she is so sick with the other ladies and I take care of them all. I don’t know what happens to the others, but I know Ilsa finally gets rid of the fever and then she can eat the little bit of food they give me to cook. I have to go very slow, giving her little bits of soup.

Then she is also right—we must get away from the Russian soldiers. They save us but they would also take us and then maybe we will never find Carole. Ilsa is so weak but still she tells them we have to go home, to Germany, to see if anyone else survived from our family. Then Ilsa says to me, we try and find Carole and we apply to go to America.

She is right, people don’t stay in the same place all that time, especially in New York. It is eight years since Carole left and we have to find her. First we have to get back to our home in Germany, but what a mess we go through. We must get across the Polish Corridor and then still so far, with everything miserable and broken. People die on the platform just waiting for the train; the tracks are broken and torn up. How do we get anywhere? It wears me out when I think about how we did it, even though now I have a bed and we have food and little coal for heat. I used to think all these things are normal; now I don’t take them for granted. I know they are very important and I am lucky to have lived to have them again. Some are not so lucky.

What identifies a person with a country? Is it the culture, the language, the neighbors or the neighborhood? Fighting in the war for my country, as a young man, that made me realize that this country was very important. I could die for my country: so many young men did—even friends of mine. It was terrible war. We lived in trenches, cold, dreary, filthy, endless. Fortunately the war ended before I was sent to the Eastern Front—that would only have been worse still. But I really knew I was a German—people wanted to kill me for it. I saw the very best in my countrymen and the very worst.

You know, we are not even citizens anymore. It’s bad enough to have to carry papers with the Swastika all over them and to see all those arm bands everywhere. But I am not even considered German. Such an insult. It’s unimaginable.

Each missing member suffered immeasurably: torture; starvation; disease; violence; humiliation; hatred; and desperation. They died apart from community, family, eulogy and comfort, without grave, shiva, grief, or sympathy. Fifty-nine died; a tiny island in the horrific testament of six million. But possibly, a number to imagine, to care about, to save, celebrate and mourn. But if I took the time to know that loss, could I even go on?

The stories transcend time and technology. I listen to the wind for epics that blow across the plains. I touch the earth and feel the hoof beats of settlers. Fondling tea cups stained with gossip and advice I hear the laughter of women I know, yet I’ve never met. Their shuffles and accents squeeze from the porcelain cracks. The dust beneath my feet was stomped by Moses, Beethoven, and my grandfathers. It showers me with gifts. Ancient brothers sacrifice goats while sisters raised timbrels and danced in the desert.

My imagination dazzles as these bygone days lift my wings. I fill the song with my voice. My chest heats with wonder and the future shines.

But other times the tragedies of history weigh me down. There are promises duty binds upon me and gifts I can never repay. I feel wooden and unworthy. How can I make sense of those stories?

My trip to Poland started years before with a letter from Gertrud, in Germany. She visited the archive of the concentration camp Stutthof and saw the identity numbers my Grandmother and Aunt wore as prisoners there.

This information shocked me. Someone had a piece of my family that I didn’t have. I’d been working with my Grandmother’s notes of her experiences in Concentration camp. The Stutthof—where my Grandmother and Aunt spent the last half of the war, was a place of unspeakable cruelty. It was there that Rudolph Spanner perfected the art of rendering human fat—pure Jewish fat.

Did this letter mean I had to go to Poland to see the numbers and inhale that place? It almost seemed indecent that others would see them and I would stay away. I hadn’t known there was a place to go.

It was so hard to understand Selma and Eva’s stories, even hearing them from their own lips. Maybe I would get it if I stood under the timbers that held their dread.

My Mother’s voice rose so quickly in my head. Laura—the first daughter, was put on a boat and sent to the US in ’38—Laura—my Mother shouted: “No, it is wrong to spend a dime in such a place. You cannot support Poland. The Poles. You knew your Grandmother and Aunt. Their story is the overcoming, not the labeling or limiting.This sore on our lives must be closed and the grip released.”

True Selma and Eva led full lives after the three and a half years they spent in concentration camps, true. Their passion for life was not erased there; it was fulfilled here: they were the American dream. But their legacy is that of survivors of the Shoah—a teen-aged girl and a middle-aged woman. Two people who survived the worst by their wits, their strength, by sheer luck.

Do I go? Do I go? I asked myself over and over?

Finally, I did go. I traveled with my daughter thousands of miles to stand in the snow and cold where my Grandmother and her younger daughter, Eva, found one another in 1944 after 18 months of heartbreaking separation. They found one another at the Stutthof, in a hall amongst thousands of female prisoners penned by barbed wire into two groups, awaiting role call. Selma made her way the front of her group and anxiously asked the new prisoners if anyone knew of her daughter, Eva. Someone answered “yes” and the crowd pushed Eva up to the front of the group so she could see her mother.

“Momma, you must come over to this side. You are with too many old ladies.”

“But I am afraid. The guard walks up and down with his bayonet drawn.”

Finally they worked it out. Another woman spotted her daughter in the group with Eva. That daughter slipped beneath the barbed wire to join her mother, while Selma slipped beneath to join Eva and the younger women. One slipped to immediate death, the other to continued slavery, starvation, brutality, typhus, murderers, clubbers, vicious dogs and the possibility of survival. But most importantly, the roll-call came out even.

The Stutthof is a forgotten camp. It’s not mentioned in The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin. It’s not in most of the books and the movies about the Holocaust. Yet in the bad old days, it was the hub of a huge series of slave labor camps across the flat Baltic forest.

It began as a Prisoner of War camp for the short-lived Pomeranian resistance. Heinrich Himmler himself promoted it to concentration camp status. It became the first such camp outside of Germany. It was the last camp to be liberated, May 10, 1945.

Under a carpet of fresh January snow in a forgotten corner of Poland, it didn’t look like a scar. The soil was not even visible, let alone red with blood. It was hard to imagine the thousands of people brutalized and murdered there. Quiet and courtesy defeated the anger I wanted to feel.

“Would you like some tea?”

“Please. Thank you.”

I looked at the index cards I received, one for Selma, one for Eva. The prisoner number typed across the top of each according to the perverse brilliance that planned, executed and filed this horror so accurately.

There is no “getting” this story, this place, these places. I walked this sterile snow-covered camp converted to museum and archive and I realized it bore no relationship to the world Selma and Eva inhabited there.

They waited in those endless roll calls with no scheduled bus to Danzig, or Gdansk. as we say now, or to civilization. After they convinced their liberators they were Jews, after they beat the typhus, they still had to lie their way free of the Red Army of liberation and find their way home to the country that had stripped them of citizenship and condemned them, across a wrecked continent.

But I did get something. It was here they began to begin a new life. Listening to the Russian shells coming for them, terrifying them and giving them hope that hope flew from this place and they started to become another people altogether: Americans. Right here, just as if they swallowed huge long-acting tablets that worked on them through the long nights of fever, through the purgatory years as they waited to immigrate, during the anxious years of transition, and over and over again through the nightmares that followed them. This is where they turned their gaze to the fierce distant sun like strong yellow flowers. I could see that.

I made other pilgrimages to find shreds of my family tapestry, not all so grim as this. I glimpsed the worlds they saw and fitted themselves into—my Grandmother, my Mother, my Father–the young soldier who would save them by the Associative Property of war. I wonder how to incorporate the shards they left me, so I wrote, recited and looked in the mirror. The future shines, illumined by the past.

I try to keep my speed down to 80 as I blast across the miles of bare land. I spy, with my little eye: small scrubby growth; a few dried blossoms; a large road kill—is it a young deer or maybe a mangled javalina? Long passed, now. Occasional rocky outcroppings seem like something really special on the horizon.

I’m zooming across the American west with mind-games for the solo road-warrior. Whatever was it that drew people here, 250 miles East of El Paso and 100 miles west of Odessa? I wonder what this dry, open place looked like to my Grandmother’s eyes at fifty-seven.

This is where Selma came, arm-in-arm with a husband she barely knew, after middle years had been torn apart by anti-Semitism, three and a half years in concentration camps, return to war-torn Germany and salvation in Manhattan’s Washington Heights. Was she frightened? Excited? Hopeful? Disappointed? Relieved? Inspired?

Half an hour from the border at El Paso, the guard stops me to ask:
“Are you a citizen?”
“Yes.”
“Where are you going?”
“Fort Stockton.”
“Why—there isn’t anything there?”

In Stockton, Comanche springs raced from the ground. This precious water revived stagecoach passengers fearful of Comanche raids. It allowed Jefferson Davis to dream about fleets of camels patrolling the land. It filled the best watermelons and the old swimming pool.

Nathan Winkler founded a dry-goods store in Fort Stockton in 1912. He’d come to the US in 1900 from Austria-Hungary, not yet twenty. His half brother brought him to West Texas to learn the retail trade. There were handfuls of young Jewish merchants sprinkled across small western settlements.

In 1951, Nathan, a vigorous, prosperous widower with four grown children left Fort Stockton for a visit to Fort Worth. He was introduced to Selma, who had recently moved there with her two daughters, and he wooed her in one week.

Selma must have been so surprised, so grateful for a second chance at love and at life. This sun-scorched land must have looked strange and promising. People were slow, warm and friendly. How different it must have looked, those dusty blocks where cactus struggled to grow replacing Manhatten’s green parks. Here, the men were handsome and well-dressed in bolos, plaid shirts and enormous hats from Winkler’s.

Put aside your nightmares, Selma. Forget the rocks through your windows and the blood sprayed across the walls of the Riga Ghetto. Take comfort in the new and familiar: the rituals of married life; man and wfe working at the store; civic leaders. Money was available; it could be made and spent. There were new things to have—a home, a car, diamond jewelry, furs. People in Texas didn’t speak in terms of the four or five cows that brother Norbert would have brokered in Westphalia. Here, people had thousands of head of cattle. They took enormous risks and pulled oil right out of the ground. But the biggest difference was safety, security, warmth, acceptance—knowing that your hardest times were behind you and you’d made it through somehow.

Changes aren’t easy at 57: foods; names; weights, measures; language; the way it’s done. Selma wrestled with the English language, laced with Texas drawls and Spanish phrases, into an agreeable tongue that offered her the hearts of her neighbors and even the pages of Tolstoy.

Her new husband was a silent man, a skillful merchant, a far-sighted investor in companies and people. She relished the role of the merchant’s wife: a life she’d trained for forty-five years before. She dove into the dust of her back yard and pulled out apricot trees, watermelons, plums and even roses. She qvelled over her grandchildren. Finally she had a normal life, full of the nice things she had once owned and all the modern appliances the 1950′s had to offer.

Working at the store, she came to know everyone. She licked her wicked wounds and revealed her exotic and disturbing past on occasion at ladies luncheons and rotary breakfasts. Selma flowered in the relentless sun that would whip her sheets dry in a flash.

We would go to Stockton for Spring break, flying from Chicago, loaded with packages and reeking of garlic, anise, salt and Westphalian rye bread. We transferred in Dallas, hopped to Midland, drove for an hour through oil derricks and tumbleweed. As the trip grew hotter, we smelled more strongly of our Chicago deli imports. It became harder to carry the ill-wrapped goods with their string handles and awkward corners. They would bump and tip. Finally, we were at Grandma’s, spilling our goodies across her kitchen table and drawing her delighted exclamations.

“See, we even brought a little plant.”

A tiny start had grabbed my Mother’s attention on our way out the door and found a hand between us. In Fort Stockton, where even the cactus wanted care, that extra spot of green was precious; a little spot of life that Selma could offer a second chance.

My daughter reminded me that it would be worse if it had been green. It might look pretty, verdant, life-affirming: a green field dotted with crumbling brick chimneys from the ruined barracks; the cratered ovens memorializing a peculiar race of sub-human supermen who could decide to erase a people—and almost succeed.

Most tourists don’t come in January, for good reason. But there are clumps of people, young and old. They are quiet, helping one another, saying a prayer, earnestly clambering through the thick snow, careful not to slip on this unforgiving earth and the vast expanse—a stretch of snowy wilderness we would avoid in town. But who can complain in Birkenau? If my coat’s a bit thin, if a bit of moisture comes through the toe of my boot, if the wind stings my eyes, how can I complain about such minor matters in the shadow of the hole in the world.

I clutch a return ticket in my pocket. Gray cabdrivers await the 15 Zloty return fare and I press against the watch on my arm. Suddenly I know that we must make the 3:36 train back to Krakow. There’s little light left in this bleak Polish winter sky and we must be out of here before dark. I couldn’t stand to be here after dark.
So this is Birkenau.

My head didn’t form the reciprocal phrase at Auschwitz. We were fresher then—a few hours back when we were dropped at the museum door, warm, fearful. Now the chill of vast acres of Birkenau has numbed each fiber.

I’ve been reading Primo Levi’s Survival at Auschwitz. Last night I pressed the book mark into the beginning of his second winter. Now we stood in the cold and snow that he dreaded. My heart is full of Levi’s youth and his stories of theft, bravery, and adjustment to barbarism.

I’ve been bracing myself for this day. I summoned mental and physical strength. I set aside my warmest socks.

Walking alongside the brick buildings of Auschwitz, my daughter dared to mention that it almost looks nice: the richly colored brick in perfect rows; the wrought iron gate; the blanket of snow; the cold cleansing air. It could be a trip around an army barrack or an old company town. But inside each building there is an exhibit of some small glimpse at the horrors perfected here.

There is no understanding Auschwitz and Birkenau—that is the point of coming here. That is what drives us along the corridors so we can get out in time. That is what saves us, as we push inside the taxi. If you could contain Auschwitz, if you could grasp it, perhaps you would become a part of it. It is permissible, essential even, to leave portions unread, moments uncontemplated.

The archivists know this. They know that a glimpse into the storehouses of plunder and evil says more than numbers and maps and orders and carloads. Each Holocaust site has its pile of shoes, only here there are also cases of human hair, baby clothes, spectacles, shaving brushes and prosthetic limbs. How many of these arms and legs were gifts from the Kaiser to loyal soldiers just a couple of decades before they were stolen here at Auschwitz?

Of all the collections, it is the luggage that hits me the hardest. Leather bags with conscientious tags: Ernest Rosenthal, Levi Bloch, addresses in Hungary, Poland, and Yugoslavia. These bags were carefully packed for their last journey, filled with only the most important or useful things for resettlement. Resettlement would have been an awful enough fate. But the truth was too wicked for the owner to have contemplated.

So this is Poland, this is Europe, this was the Twentieth Century. I know “never forget.” I must learn “don’t always remember” so I can look at the future.

I had a letter from Gertrud. She visited the archive of the concentration camp Stutthof. She saw the identity numbers my Grandmother and Aunt wore as prisoners there.

This information shocked me. Someone had a piece of my family that I didn’t have. I’d been working with my Grandmother’s notes of her experiences in Concentration camp and I knew a tiny smattering of what went on in the Stutthof. It was a place of unspeakable cruelty—extreme, even in the context of the Shoah. This was where Rudolph Spanner perfected the art of rendering human fat—pure Jewish fat.

Did this letter mean I had to go to Poland to see the numbers and inhale the place? It almost seemed indecent that others would see them and I would stay away. I didn’t know there was a place to go.

I’m sure Eva and Selma gladly left the rags of their uniforms, useless and hated detritus. Now I learned the numbers were enshrined: testimony to screams, terror, hatred, life-times missed and brutality mastered. They bore witness, confirmed history, recorded the sweat and soil and took people to places we cannot imagine with our intellect. They made the suffering and stories nauseatingly real, like the smell of the shoes at the Holocaust Museum.

I knew Selma and Eva’s story. But it is so hard to believe, even having known them and heard the stories from their own lips. Would I really get it if I saw these marks? If I stood under the timbers that held their dread? Wrapped in the gray skies that clothed them? Amidst the brutalized population that let this horror occur, that smelled the bodies burn in its own backyard and did nothing—or worse, was grateful for the relief from its Jewish problem?

I saw these things in Dachau. I felt the soils of Europe turn to blood beneath my feet, while my own blood turned to steel wire.

My Mother’s voice rose so quickly in my head. Laura said “No: it is wrong to spend a dime in such a place; wrong to support any industry designed to exploit this horror, however modest, or dignified. To contribute to the economy of a people that allowed this to happen on their soil? To support Poland? the Poles? No.”

“You knew your Grandmother and Aunt. Their story is the overcoming, not the labeling or limiting. Their lives should not be summarized by this helping of hardship they endured. This sore on our lives must be closed and the grip released.”

Their lives were certainly more than the three and a half years they spent in NAZI concentration camps. Their passion for life was not erased there; it was fulfilled here: they are the American dream.

But their role in history is probably as survivors of the Shoah; a teen-aged girl and a middle-aged woman who survived somehow by their wits, their bodily strength, sheer luck and mental fortitude.

Do I go? Would I go in search of completion? Or to find yet a new cynicism in this horror? Must I witness the lives and tears and blood spilled in that soil? Does my Kaddish need to come directly from the scar? Or do I listen to the voice of survival, of self-protection, of escape.

I didn’t yet know.

THE STUTTHOF—An Answer:

Here I am. I had to come after asking over and over before different audiences. Do I go? The answer came back yes, enough of this wondering. So I traveled for thousands of miles to stand here in the snow and the cold where my Grandmother and her younger daughter, Eva, found one another in 1944, after eighteen months of heartbreaking separation, amongst thousands of women penned by barbed wire into two groups, awaiting role call.

“Momma, you must come over to this side. You are with too many old ladies.”

“But I am afraid. The guard walks up and down with his bayonet drawn.”

Finally they worked it out. Another woman spotted her daughter in the group with Eva. The daughter slipped beneath the wire to join her mother while Selma slipped beneath to join Eva in the younger group. One slipped unwittingly to immediate death, the other to continued slavery, starvation, brutality, typhus, murderers, clubbers, dogs, possible attack by German or Russian forces, and the possibility of survival. But most importantly, the roll-call came out even.

This is a forgotten camp. It’s not mentioned in The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, the books, the movies about the Holocaust. Yet in it’s wicked days and nights it was the hub of a huge series of camps across the Baltic forest. It was built as a place for Nazis to terrorize the Western Pomeranians and hold prisoners of war. Eventually it was honored by a visit from Himmler himself and it was promoted to concentration camp status.

The Jewish barracks were destroyed long ago—ostensibly to try and curb one of the many typhus outbreaks. Under a carpet of snow in a forgotten corner of Poland it doesn’t look like a scar. The soil is not even visible, let alone red with the blood that flowed here. It’s hard to imagine the thousands of people brutalized and murdered here. It’s hard to imagine the Red Army stumbling across a scene so despicable that the liberating army quickly hanged all the SS guards, male and female and photographed them spinning from their improvised gallows.

“Tea?”

“Please. Thank you.”

Quiet.

I walk this sterile snow-covered camp converted to museum and archive and I realize it bears no relationship to the camp or subcamp world Selma and Eva inhabited. No, not the world of the Haftlinge, the prisoners, hostages of a doomed war, insular and desperate. After two and a half years of hunger and suffering the new girl could still figure out the better side of the wire, the widow could still fear the end of a bayonet, and love and connection could carry them through.

I look at the index cards that were given me, one for Selma, one for Eva. The prisoner number is recorded and retrieved according to the perverse brilliance that planned, executed and filed this horror away dispassionately and correctly. There is no getting this story, this place, these places. Here, they waited in the endless roll calls, listening to Russian bombardment coming for them. From here there was no meticulous bus schedule to Gdansk, to civilization. After they beat the typhus they still had to lie their way free of the Russians and find their way home across a wrecked continent. But from here they began to begin a new life.

This place is hard to take in. The quiet courtesy defeats the anger that should be here. The snow is deceptively soft and clean. The bitter cold seems justified.

Today this place is about death, memorial, documentation. Selma and Eva defied that legacy and lived. I see now, that this place did not hold them, own them, or define them. They left this place behind.

My people—my two who survived this hell— left a Europe wracked and ruined with hatred. They left it so far behind that they became another people altogether: Americans. They swallowed a huge long-acting tablet that worked on them as they struggled to return to the country that condemned them, through the purgatory years before they could emigrate, during the anxious years of transition, and while fevers of illness and recovery awakened them. It charged through their limbs for forty and fifty years, turning their gaze to the fierce sun like strong yellow flowers. I did bear witness and I witnessed escape.

If you’re interested in more about this subject find a more journalistic account of my Winter 2009 trip.