The Book of Names

"There was no problem with the killing or the burning of the corpses,

the problem was with the things they brought."

We are in the fourth hour of our six hour study tour of Auschwitz-Birkenau. Our guide is speaking to us. She is quoting from the memoirs of an officer that worked at the camp. Our group is standing huddled around her, shivering in the cold wind, trying to hear. She is speaking softly. We are in the camp they call Auschwitz II - Birkenau, and for some reason, no one is using headsets here. Sometimes her voice trails off, as if it's hard for her to say the things that must be said. Or maybe she's just tired. We hear a train whistle in the distance. Big black crows fly overhead. There is mud on our shoes.

We are standing in the place where the people stepped out from the railroad cars and were told to go either left or right. Our guide is getting ready to show us where the buildings used to be that stored all the things the prisoners brought with them; things that would eventually be sorted and sent back to Germany. She is getting ready to show us where the killing and the burning took place. She keeps saying, the pregnant women were all immediately killed.

I am thinking of the piles we saw earlier in the day. Giant piles behind glass. Suitcases and combs and shaving brushes. Wooden legs and glasses and prayer shawls. I am thinking of the deep colorful pile of coffee pots and pans and bowls and cups. And of the shoes. The fancy shoes and the plain shoes. The sandals and the high heels. Green shoes black shoes red shoes. Men's shoes. Women's shoes. Children's shoes.

* * * * * * * * *

Our "educator" rounds us up at 9 am, makes sure we all have working headsets, and herds us out into the courtyard. We are in Auschwitz I - the original camp. As she begins to speak it begins to rain. No one seems to notice. We walk through a gate under metal words. Arbeit Macht Frei or Work Sets You Free. Everyone is hushed and obedient. We crunch down gravel roads between rows and rows of numbered brick barracks. Dark clumps of people are walking quietly around us with their own "educators."

We go in one building where we see a hallway covered with hundreds of photos of faces, all in identical frames. In the beginning, every prisoner was photographed. The date of their arrival was noted, and the date of their death. I look in the eyes of the people on the wall. I see fear and despair, terror and disbelief. I see questions. Defiance. Some of them have faint smiles. Some of them look as if they have hope. I wonder who all these human beings were before they were an exhibit in a hall. I see that most of the women were dead within a few weeks or at most months of their arrival. The men seemed to survive a little longer. After a while no one took pictures of the prisoners when they arrived, or marked down in a book the day they died.

We weave in and out of the old brick buildings. Up and down stairs. There are displays on the walls, and things to see in glass cases. There is too much information to read. We walk past rough wooden beds, and straw mattresses on the floor. We file in and out of rooms. Here are long troughs for washing. There is the execution wall. There is the prison where the first gassing experiments took place. Here are empty canisters of Zyclon-B.

We go upstairs to a dim room where there is a pile that is impossible to comprehend. It fills up all the space behind a wall of glass. It is a mountain made out of uncountable clumps of cut off human hair. There are pictures on the wall of enormous bags filled with it that were found at the end of the war. Bags that were ready to be shipped to Germany, where their contents would be made into cloth. There is a bolt of fabric on display of the final product. Our guide explains what we are seeing. Sometimes her words fall away at the end of her sentences. When she is finished speaking she gives us time to be alone.

The last thing we see are the showers and the ovens. The place they figured out how to do the exterminating before they moved the whole operation to the newer, bigger camp down the road. Everything is small. Bricks and metal and cement. It is hard to breathe.

And then the morning is finished.

People eat sandwiches.

And wait for the bus to Auschwitz II - Birkenau.

There are no sidewalks or gravel or cement around the buildings here. We are walking in mud filled with the footprints of all the other people that have come this way. The trees are winter trees. The cold rain comes and goes. There are chimneys poking up everywhere, showing where the wooden barracks used to be. The camp is a city. We cannot see the end of it. Stacks of red bricks disappear into the distance. Barbed wire fences close everything in.

We are brought to the children's barracks, where the Russian children with blonde hair and blue eyes were housed, waiting to be "Germanized." It's dark inside and hard to see. There are faded nursery rhyme pictures on the walls that were painted by adult prisoners. The wooden bunks are shorter than the adult ones we have seen. There are ladders to climb to the top. There is cold gray January light coming in the windows. The smell is old wood. Dried up roses are scattered here and there.

And here are the death barracks, where you were brought if you were ill, or injured, or unable to work. Where you were given no food or water and were left to die, and if you didn't die quickly enough you were gassed. And here is the building with the simple sign that reads: Inside this building Nazis killed mothers and their newborn babies with shots to the heart.

There are flags and wreaths and plaques and memorials.

The gas chambers and crematoriums are exploded piles of rubble.

And then the quiet telling is over for the day.

Everyone gets back on the bus. We go home to warm bright rooms. A good dinner. A soft bed.

Our guide's gentle voice whispers in my head.

The next day we feel compelled to return without a guide. We are the first ones through the gate. The camp is deserted. There is mist hanging in the air. A man on a ladder is changing lightbulbs. A woman comes out of a building with cleaning supplies. We retrace some of our steps of the day before. Our footsteps echo in the empty buildings.

Our final stop is Block 27. The Shoah display. We step inside. The haunting music with the Hebrew words echoes all around us. We find the walls with the penciled children's drawings, half erased. Their silenced voices are so deafening I run from the room. We find the Book of Names; a massive monolith that fills the world. We search out names of family and friends. When I unexpectedly find my husband's Chinese surname there I reach out and run my fingers across the page. The printing is slightly raised. I touch the names over and over. The oil from many hands has turned the edges of the book gray.

* * * * * * * * *

Our guide told us that sometimes in the summer she does 2 six hour study tours in one day. Which makes me wonder about this pretty woman with the soft voice who speaks English with a Polish accent. Makes me wonder why, and how, she does this difficult thing over and over and over. I think about darkness, and all the things that are not darkness. And then I think about my sister. The one who came to visit us last summer. The one who swam in the pool every day, when the sun was out. And I am remembering my sister, and how every time she got in that pool she would start rescuing all the little creatures that had fallen in the water. The bees and the butterflies. The creatures that were not water creatures. The ones that were drowning. About how she would cup them gently in her hands, take them out of the pool, and put them on the cement to dry. About how she would get out of the water herself, to sit in the sun, and would worry about all the tiny living things that were going to die because she wasn't there to save them. How she would sigh and say, it's such a big responsibility. And how later, when the sun had gone away, and we were sitting with our wine, she would talk about the crickets and the beetles and all the other insects she had rescued that day, and how sad she felt when she couldn't save a certain bumblebee. How she took it out of the water, and kept moving it away from the puddles, about how it lifted up its leg, and maybe fluttered its wing, but died anyway. And even though the bumblebee died, somehow I am sustained.