from The Crime of a Soldier
- By Erri De Luca
Editor's note: Tuesday, January 27, 2015 marks seventy years since the liberation of Auschwitz. In a recent novel, the Italian writer Erri De Luca reflects on his visit to the camp during the '90s.
My Yiddish came from obstinacy. I first wanted to learn it after returning from the ceremonies marking the fiftieth anniversary of the Warsaw uprising: April 1943, April 1993. At age forty-three I took some vacation time from my job at a construction site and went to Warsaw.
Reading I’d done as a boy had left some sort of map imprinted under my skin. I knew the layout of the ghetto, where the Germans piled together more than four hundred thousand lives. Wohnung bezirk, or “housing district”—that’s what they called the stockyard for bodies awaiting the shredder. The dispatch of armored trains to extermination camps they called an Aussiedlung, a “transfer.” Passing off fake vocabulary for cover. It’s what the powerful do; the duty of writers is to return things to their proper names [. . . .]
When I first reached the age of independent awareness, I made Marek Edelman—a leader of the Warsaw uprising—my hero. Before I’d ever heard of Che Guevara, I knew about him. After the war, Edelman became a cardiologist: he wanted to save as many hearts as he possibly could. For me, he’s the perfect hero. Equally noble, Guevara took the opposite route—a doctor who fought as a revolutionary.
I didn’t make it from Warsaw to Treblinka, where the freight cars loaded in the ghetto’s collection area (the Umschlagplatz) ended up. Instead I went to Auschwitz (Oświęcim in Polish) and Birkenau/Brzezinka, the most extensive of the extermination camps. I entered through the large gate that opened up for the trains. I wandered through open barracks, still damp from earth and terror. I sat down on a wooden bunk that once hosted bodies undone by work and by hunger. I closed my eyes, and fell asleep for a moment, because I’m not able to pray [. . . .]
I don’t remember any other visitors. If they were there, I avoided them. The plains of Upper Silesia were motionless, the air disturbed only slightly, by some black butterflies. The land was deaf and dumb. I walked from the barbed-wire enclosure for gypsies to the area for women, gathering to mind each of the stories I’d read about this place that matched them perfectly.
“Give Mama the baby!” The phrase—cried out by a Hungarian Jew during the summer of 1944—saved her sister’s life. With her daughter in her arms, the sister had gotten off the armored convoy and was headed for the selection at the end of the station platform. The woman—who for months had been locked up in the women’s quarters watching the arrivals—knew that the elderly and infants were put in a line that led straight to the gas chambers. Through a silence broken only by orders and the barking of dogs, the woman’s voice reached her sister, who mechanically obeyed. She handed the baby over to their mother and, by doing so, made it through the selection, her alone. They both survived, she and her sister. I know of no cry more merciless, or more saintly.
I walked down the broad steps that once led to large rooms decorated with fake showers; like the crematoriums, the retreating Germans had demolished them. I was able to go back up!—the very thought made me dizzy. I had to sit down on a stair halfway back. Descendants who’d come to visit this place had left messages on iron rebar, sticking out from the broken blocks of cement. I stayed until closing time.
Before leaving I committed an act of theft and sacrilege. In the middle of the abandoned rails leading to the camp, I leaned down and picked up a bent, dented bolt from one of the railroad ties. Today it sits on my table, next to a window that looks out onto the shade cast by trees I’ve planted over the years. If you’re going to work as a writer, you should give the world back some of the wood used to print your books.
Translated by Jim Hicks
Erri De Luca is an Italian novelist, poet, essayist and translator, and his poem "Being Medit" appears in the current issue of MR. The excerpts above are taken from The Crime of a Soldier (Feltrinelli, 2013).
