Part I: Rumors and Omens
March 15, 1994. 6:00 AM.
Eight months ago at this time of day, I was having breakfast in a restaurant above the departure lounge of the Tegel International airport in the former West Berlin. Coins from four countries littered my Levi’s pockets. There were Marks, Guilders, Zlotys and a few U.S. coins. It was mostly Monopoly money to me – the real stuff was in a zippered and pinned inside pocket at the back of my cam-fish jacket.
Without my reading glasses, I couldn’t tell one coin from another, except for the pennies. And I was so ragged out and rundown I really didn’t care. But the men’s room attendant did care. She got a little upset when I plunked down money from the Netherlands instead of Germany for my toilet toll. She smiled and nodded agreeably when I let her take her pick from a handful of coins I held out to her.
All I cared about besides taking a leak was getting through a four and one-half hour wait for the flight back from Berlin through Amsterdam to DC. I was tired, wired, and in no mood for hanging out in an airport. On arriving, I had tried to change flights to get home faster, but I had non-refundable, non-transferable tickets for which I’d paid KLM bargain prices. Changing flights meant paying several hundred more dollars for a new, full fare ticket. Breakfast was step one of my impromptu plans to keep myself occupied until boarding time.
It was a good move. The atmosphere of the restaurant was not as frenzied as it was around the ticket counters and departure areas. There were hundreds of people downstairs. They were meeting flights, making flight arrangements, pouring into and out of departure and arrival areas, or just waiting for their flight to be called. The few plastic shell chairs on the concourse were uncomfortable, if you could get one. Ashtrays were scarce.
I found a haven on the top level where the airport conference rooms and restaurant were located. The men’s room was cleaner, more spacious, and free. The restaurant was nearly empty. Breakfast was all you could eat for about twelve bucks and the food was nicely laid out on cold trays and steam tables. Fresh fruits, melons, breads and pastries, meats, butter, jams and juices, and more were there for the taking. A waiter brought me some mineral water and a couple of cups of coffee. I took my time, enjoying both the quiet and the meal, looking out over the runways, smoking, and thinking about what I had just been through.
I couldn’t sit there forever, though. After an hour or so, I went back downstairs to the visitor information desk. I had thought of a couple of things I might do to kill some time. Perhaps I could manage a quick bus and subway ride to the berlin zoo or Spandau Prison. The Berlin Zoo wound up being my only choice since it was readily accessible by subway, and, according to the tourist information staff, Spandau had been torn down after the death of Rudolph Hess.
Unfortunately or fortunately, depending on how you look at it, I never reached the zoo. It wasn’t for lack of trying. I just couldn’t find it after leaving the metro. I got off at the right stop and even got further directions at a newsstand. But after going a couple of blocks and finding no sign of it, I turned backand took a look around the general area of the subway station. As fate would have it, I had arrived at the site of a German cathedral destroyed during the war and never rebuilt. A journey of many years came to a fitting end in the ruin.
It was a trip I guess I started when I was twelve or thirteen and was first exposed to the story of The Holocaust, mostly through pop-history paperbacks. Back then, I read everything I could get my hands on. Most of what I read was matter-of-fact and only slightly sensational, with a few graphic, black and whites for the middle pages. There had also been the obligatory details about medical experiments at Auschwitz on twins and on the infirm as well as about starving prisoners unknowingly eating flesh being boiled off human skeletons and the like. These weren’t scholarly works, you understand. But they were effective.
Place names like The Warsaw Ghetto, Dachau, Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen, Treblinka, Nuremberg, and words and phrases like sonderkommando, crematorium, Zyklon B, and “Arbeit Macht Frei”,and images of ovens, barbed wire, the living dead and piles of the truly dead were part of my life by age fifteen, although not of really part of my sensibility. I had read about them and knew what I had read, but did not know. Nevertheless, I was so stricken by what I read that, in response to one writer’s admonition that we never forget, I made a heartfelt promise that the horror would not be forgotten. I would remember.
Over the years, I added to what I knew in a totally disorganized way. I watched and read and listened. Television and mainstream historians and investigative journalists all played big roles in that protracted osmosis. I even met a Holocaust survivor or two after I moved up to D.C. As I grew, the history, the facts, and the media coverage grew.
More and more stuff was made public. Survivors and guards alike showed up in television interviews, in documentaries, and in public. Eichmann was captured and Mengele was disinterred, although I wouldn’t make book on the latter. I learned of SimonWiesenthal and of the OSI.
As a kid, I took part in debates with others my age about the issue of capturing and punishing old men for what were to us ancient crimes. As an adult, I even met one of our for-real Nazihunters, who assured me we could have had them, any of them, at any time after the war. The story grew and could not be denied, even by the machinations of revisionist (read Fascist) authors and associations.
As the story unfolded for me, I saw that we knew and had always known more about the Final Solution than was admitted. And that we could have taken out the camps at will but didn’t. And that we made room in our nation for virtually every Nazi we met who was willing to drop a dime on a Commie or a fellow traveler so as to endear themselves to Allen Dulles’ boys or to J. Edgar Hoover. I learned that we supported former Nazis in their rise to renewed power during the rebuilding of Germany and made them comfortable in the leadership of the U.N. and of the Space Race.
Thirty years ago, the party line was that we knew little until the camps were liberated. Fifteen years ago, I understood that there had been eyewitness reports to FDR but no salvation from the West. Today, it’s clear that the governments of the U.S. and its allies were as deliberate and as duplicitous and as guilty as any German, soldier or civilian.
Films like Shoah and programs like Kitty on PBS about survivors returning to the scenes of the crimes made me start thinking that I could go there. I had a promise to keep and I could go there. I picked up clues that would let me find Majdanek or Belzec or Mathausen or Sobibor, so that I could stand where the condemned had stood and see where they had died. I could say I had seen the evidence first-hand. Having stood there, I could hold out against revisionism with my own experience. I also saw that I had to do it soon.
Soon, because Dachau is now a verdant park which belies its purpose and demeans memory. Because Sobibor and Plaznow and Treblinka is gone and there were plans to put a hotel and visitor’s center in the administrative complex at Auschwitz. What little evidence remained was fading and could soon vanish. It could all be cleared for urban renewal or become part of a great, sanitized park system with self-guided tours going from marker to push-the-button marker on neat little trails that wind their way to the exit and onto the local McDonald’s.
I can tell you what made me realize that I could go. But, there’s no telling exactly why I felt so compelled to go. You know how it is. Children often make decisions which they forget but later live out. So, at the age of forty-eight, in the year of the fiftieth anniversary of the final transports of Jews from the Cracow ghetto, I kept my childhood promise by going to Poland to see what was left of Auschwitz and Birkenau, the twin sisters of no mercy. Having done so, I could not now forget what happened there or why or how if I wanted to.