“Black Water”

Alex Stein

Art of Creative Unity Award 2022 | Second Prize

BLACK WATER

In the summer of 1990, less than a year after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Krakow, Poland seems stuck in time.  And that time is the 1890s.

My girlfriend and I exit the train from Berlin and walk through a Krakow station that’s clinging to the fading remnants of its former grandeur.  We step outside and find a flea market next to city hall, where vendors sell old and damaged goods.  I spot Nazi military medals alongside an exquisitely crafted Lange & Söhne timepiece with a faded black band that may once have been worn by a Jewish businessman on his way to the ovens.  The watch is ancient, but its second hand advances with loud, confident clicks.

We’ve armed ourselves with a Lonely Planet guidebook that said it’s tricky to travel to Poland from the West.  We needed a visa from an Eastern bloc country, so we trekked to Berlin, crossed the border, got visas at East Germany’s Polish Embassy, and celebrated by renting chisels from newly minted East German capitalists and chipping our own chunks off a still-standing section of Wall.  I didn’t realize it then, but our guidebook was already obsolete, what with German Reunification looming and the imminent implosion of the Soviet Union (which seems inevitable in hindsight, but at the time was visible on the horizon only by those who noticed the loosening Soviet stranglehold on Poland).

A Black Marketer approaches and whispers in English that he changes money.  The rate he quotes is much worse than what banks offer.  I wave him off, irritated at being a clear target.  My girlfriend finds an antique accordion and impulsively buys it for her brother, a musician who loves old instruments.  It costs the equivalent of two dollars, but is easily worth 200.

A cab driver in his 40s approaches with a smile.  “Taxi, Auschwitz?” he asks.  Apparently, everyone in Poland knows we’re tourists.  Determined not to be taken, I pull out my Lonely Planet and explain in detail the range of acceptable prices.  I quote a long passage from the guidebook, then look up expectantly.

“Taxi, Auschwitz?” the cab driver repeats, not understanding a word of what I said.  He writes a number on a small pad, then says “zloty.”  The zloty is Poland’s official currency and it recently collapsed.  I do the math and realize his price is under five dollars.  “Both ways,” he says.  When I hesitate, he adds “roundtrip” and smiles, pleased he remembered the English word.

We lug the accordion over to the taxi and the cabbie drives us into the middle of nowhere.

In the West, suburbs and rural areas are recognizable even when signs are in foreign languages.  Cities give way to suburbs and eventually countryside.  But we’re not in the West anymore.  In Poland, a country just starting to emerge from decades behind the Iron Curtain, every single thing we pass looks slightly off and a bit dodgy.  Multiple signposts line the sides of the road, but nearly every sign has been stolen.  The few people out on the street stare unblinkingly at us as we drive by.

I wonder if this guy’s going to take us to the woods and murder us.  Or maybe hold us for ransom.  That sounds a lot more lucrative than driving two hours roundtrip for five bucks.

I wonder where our driver’s family came from and what they thought of the constant stream of inbound trains and the smell of burning flesh.  They must have known, even if they didn’t allow themselves to acknowledge it.

Fifty minutes later, we pull into a car park.  “I wait,” the cabbie says.  He gestures at the accordion.  “You can stay this here.”

We leave the accordion behind and head into the camp, passing under the gate with “Arbeit Macht Frei” carved in iron.  “Work sets you free.”

***

I’m the son of a German gentile mother and a Jewish father descended from Russians, so my heritage is complicated.  I always considered Auschwitz to be Ground Zero for that complexity, a singularity that might somehow fuse different strands of my background and make me whole.  I had no idea how that might happen, but I felt certain it could only happen here.

Inside the camp, signs in multiple languages describe the exhibits.  Visitors are hushed, reverent.

Each building illustrates a different aspect of what happened.  One building contains hundreds of old suitcases confiscated from Jews who came here on railroad cars.  Another displays thousands of pairs of eyeglasses.  Another contains piles of human hair shaved from skulls of victims.  (The Nazis collected most of the hair and wove it into uniforms worn by German soldiers.)  We see crutches and wooden legs, shoes and thousands of shaving brushes.  The displays are glassed-in and climate-controlled to slow the aging of these artifacts.  I’d seen photos of all this before and the photos are powerful.  But it’s six million times more powerful to share the room with these objects, each connected to someone murdered here.

I do a double-take at one of the displays, spotting a once-gorgeous Lange & Söhne watch with a faded black band.  It looks exactly like the one in Krakow, only this one’s second hand will never move again.

***

I’ve always believed that memories linger and attach themselves to places.  And the memories here are thick and awful.

Still, for most of the time Auschwitz operated, this part of the complex functioned largely as a slave labor camp.  These buildings were barracks built to house Jews (as well as the Roma, homosexuals, and other officially designated “enemies of the Reich”) for as long as they could produce the munitions needed to power the Nazi war machine.

I see people quietly sobbing.  But as bad as this area is, I know the worst is still to come.

***

We leave the exhibit buildings and follow train tracks to Birkenau, three kilometers away.

The difference is obvious.  Buildings in Birkenau have been allowed to rot and fall.

But the layout of the camp is still clear.  Grass stops where buildings once stood, as if the very ground here was poisoned by history.

The emptiness scares me more than the museum displays.

The Nazis viewed Birkenau as a model of factory efficiency.  And the product of this factory was death.

***

We walk through waves of silence to the wreckage of the crematoria, which often burned 24 hours a day.

There are fewer visitors in this corner of the complex, where Nazi guards and the Sonderkommando (Jews who collaborated with their captors in hopes of staying alive a little longer) herded prisoners into “showers” to be poisoned with Zyklon B.

There is a pond nearby and we walk around it.  No one is in sight.  It’s just us and the ghosts.

I glance at the peaceful water.  45 years after the Red Army liberated the camp, the water is still black from ash dumped into the pond every day for almost three years.  I kneel by the edge of the pond and am about to dip my hand in when I get a sudden chill.  I remember that the ash came from burning millions of bodies.  This ash was once human beings who lived full lives before they were put on lists, forced into cattle cars, and brought here to be exterminated.  I yank my hand back, overwhelmed by ripples of what the Germans call Waldeinsamkeit.  This word has no direct English translation, but signifies the sudden awareness that you are completely alone in the woods.

I stand up and spot something ahead.  It seems unbelievable.  I want to get closer, but I’m frozen in place.  I take a photo to prove to myself later that I didn’t dream the whole thing.

There, just off the path, are bones.  They seem human.  A ribcage in the dirt.

I cannot explain this.  Even today, decades later, it seems impossible.

I stare at the bones, wondering if I’m going mad or being pulled into the past.  My German grandfather – a schoolteacher drafted into the army in his 40s, a man who believed Hitler was a clown, a reluctant soldier killed in battle ten days before the end of the war – appears before me and promises I’ll be okay.  But he blocks my way and won’t let me approach the bones.

The dead scream at me from everywhere.  Jews and Germans, innocent and guilty (and every shade in between), demanding revenge or forgiveness.  Or maybe just wanting to be heard.

I hear them.  I hear them all.

My dead grandfather hears them, too.  I watch the pain engulf him.  He looks at me and nods, sadly.  And then he’s gone.

***

I take a step forward, but my girlfriend grabs my hand and pulls me back.  She’s had enough.  We turn and walk along the railroad tracks back where we came from, hoping to leave death and ash and bone behind.

We stop at a small cafeteria with a tiny gift shop.  I drink strong Russian tea and buy a ceramic pin I’ve kept in my wallet ever since.

I glance at my weather-beaten Casio Forester watch (which no one will never mistake for an exquisitely crafted timepiece).  Somehow, we’ve been here for seven hours, lost inside a place where time cannot exist in any normal sense.

***

Outside, our cabbie waits in the car park, the accordion safe in his back seat.

He was smiling before, but now just nods.  “Back?” he asks.

“Back,” I answer.

As he drives, I get lost in thought.  I think a lot about those who see evil and choose to look away.  At some point, I realize that I no longer fear being murdered.

Back in Krakow, our cabbie blurts out something in Polish, then talks for several minutes, proclaiming things that are clearly important.  I listen intently.  Although I don’t speak a word of Polish, I know he’s explaining himself.  I don’t need to know any of the words to understand what he’s saying.  He tells me about his family and why it’s important for him to take people to Auschwitz and return them safely.  His heritage, like mine, is complicated.

When he stops talking, I say “Thank you.”  He stares at me, needing to make sure I understand.  I hold out a twenty-dollar bill.  It’s not nearly enough for all I experienced today, but it’s what I have.  The driver shakes his head.  He doesn’t want money.  But I see where he’s looking and realize he wants something he can’t yet find in Poland.  He points to my watch – my boxy, functional Casio Forester that’s built to last.

With no hesitation, I hand it over.  I know my time here is done.

Alex M. Stein is a Los Angeles-based screenwriter and documentary filmmaker. He is the author of the short-story collection TALES FROM THE TRAIL: SHORT FICTION ABOUT DOGS, MUSHING, AND SLED-DOG RACES and the essay collection NO, MR. BOND, I EXPECT YOUR DREAMS TO DIE. He performs original stories at live shows all over the L.A. area as well as many online shows. He was born in New York and has been to 47 of the 50 states.