To stand facing the Auschwitz death camp on a hazy December 1994 morning was as disorienting as waking up and finding myself atop Mount Everest. For Jews like me, Auschwitz stands in the mind as AUSCHWITZ, the most unimaginable place on earth. Its reputation tends towards the mythic, worse than Mordor, worse than Hell. Even those unfortunates who suffered there would write years afterwards that they had a difficult time believing such a place existed. And yet, here it was right before my eyes, Auschwitz One to be exact, the original camp. A former Austrian cavalry barracks, the site contained attractive brick buildings that resembled dignified Dutch barns. One could envision the blocks of them being converted into a pleasant assisted-living facility.

I had walked down the road from the German – Polish Reconciliation Center on the first morning of the Convocation at Auschwitz, a weeklong conference of two hundred Jews, Christians and Buddhists who gathered to commemorate the 50^th anniversary of the end of World War II and to bear witness for the victims of the Holocaust. Although it was a sunny morning, the air was thick with coal smoke billowing from the chimneys along the way. Chickens squawked about behind fenced-in front yards. The few concrete walls were plastered with posters advertising Lech beer or the upcoming soccer matches between Oswiecim and neighboring towns. “Auschwitz” is the Germanized name of Oswiecim (pronounced Oz-Vent-Shim), a major railroad center west of Krakow in Poland. This rail nexus brought Jews from all over Europe to the two killing centers located just outside the town center.

I took a deep breath and tried to take it all in. From the get-go, everything about Oswiecim was distressingly normal. I had taken the train here in a vain attempt to honor those who were shipped by boxcars under conditions too horrific to compare. As I approached the station, an irrational fear took hold that I would be greeted by columns of smoke on the horizon, the obscene signature of the four crematoria. Instead, I exited onto a scene no different than that of a commuter rail station in Westchester. Families and young lovers reunited with hugs and kisses. Teenagers, hooked up to their Walkmans, congregated around stalls selling Cokes and pastries. Cars and buses scurried about as taxicabs hailed weary travelers. The cabbie who drove me to my destination told me that there was only one Jew named Szymon Kluger currently living in Oswiecim. Before World War II, about 10,000 Jews lived in what was a once a thriving Judaic community which hosted over twenty synagogues.

This disconnect between the past and the present began weeks before I boarded the LOT airliner from Newark to Warsaw. My decision to attend the Convocation came about during a dinner with one of the facilitators. All she had to say was “We’re going to celebrate the last night of Chanukah under the main gate of Auschwitz, the one with the slogan, Arbeit Macht Frei (Work Makes You Free).” That was it. My side hobby was documenting social justice events that flew under the radar of the mainstream media. I had to pack my cameras and go.

A week after that dinner, I attended a Bar Mitzvah ceremony at my local synagogue in Greenfield, Massachusetts. As my partner, Sarah and I walked up to the entrance that early Saturday morning, we were assaulted by swastikas and “White Power” graffiti sprayed across the outside wall. Struck dumb, I entered the shul and, leaving Sarah without a word, descended into the lower level to find a private room. I closed the door and began to shake. The tremors lasted for several minutes as I struggled to breathe, my first ever panic attack as a Jew. Supposedly recovered, I rejoined Sarah just as the service began. The Bar Mitzvah boy stood at the podium and sang in his off-key pubescent voice but I paid no attention. My mind had fallen down a dark rabbit hole.

Any minute, they’re going to burst through the door and kill us. Any minute and we’ll be slaughtered like sheep. We have to flee, NOW!

It was all I could do not to drag Sarah out of her seat and run out the door. And who were the “They?” It didn’t matter. The Crusaders, Spanish Inquisitors, Nazis or Russian peasants inflamed by their priest for a pogrom. The identity was less important than the result. All of us lying in a bloody heap as the synagogue burnt to the ground around us.

Needless to say, the congregation emerged unscathed that day. I didn’t. To complete the perfect storm of Holocaust-related events, I was teaching fifth grade at nearby Bernardston Elementary School. My students were reading the kid-lit classic, “Number the Stars” by Lois Lowry which relates how the Danish people rescued their Jewish population from under the noses of their Nazi occupiers. During group readings, however, my students expressed that they had no idea why the Jews in Denmark were disappearing. Where did they go and why? There was not one Jewish kid in my class. It was clearly time to begin a Holocaust unit, something I had never taught before. In order to give my students ownership of the material, I asked them to write letters and poems to the children whose lives had been extinguished by the Nazis. There were 1,500,000 in all.

As my time for departure to Poland approached, my body broke out into unexplained aches and pains as if my subconscious was looking for a way to duck out. Gee, Dan, your headaches are worse. Guess you can’t go to Auschwitz, eh? Whenever I thought about my impending journey, my heart leapt into my mouth. My fifth-graders mirrored this subliminal terror with their own. One girl, Annie, a sensitive redhead who periodically wept during math quizzes, told her startled mother that “Mister Brown is being sent to Auschwitz!” For the first time in my life, I wrote out a will. When I packed my suitcase, I included several box drinks and little bags of snacks so I wouldn’t starve to death during my week there. I knew this was illogical – after all, the Holocaust had ended fifty years before. A deeper voice admonished me, You’re a Jew and you’re going to Auschwitz. I brought along the drinks and the snacks.

* * *

The Auschwitz State Museum lies just past the main entrance to Auschwitz One. The death camp contains two separate centers, about a mile apart. Auschwitz One, as noted, is the original cavalry barracks. The main killing area was Birkenau, constructed from scratch during the war. “Birkenau” means “Birch woods,” a suggestion of bucolic grace. The thin white trees standing against the deep blue sky would be the last thing you saw before descending into one of the four gas chamber/crematoria sites.

The museum contained exhibits of the artifacts stolen by the Nazis from their victims. The Holocaust, besides being a genocide, was also a major looting operation. Anything of value was taken and stored in a cluster of thirty warehouses, code-named “Canada” by the inmates who saw that country as a land of abundance. From there, they were shipped to Germany for use by its citizens. Jewelry and the gold pried from teeth were deposited in Swiss bank accounts.

My foray on that first day was cursory. I wandered through the halls and the souvenir shop but felt nothing. It was all too much to take in. Outside the Museum, there were two food trucks but I didn’t give them any notice. I headed back to the center and spent the day with the others constructing menorahs out of wooden tongue depressors and brass fittings for the Chanukah ceremony. After our first introductory meeting, all two hundred of us ate dinner together in the Center’s dining area. To my shock, I learned that the meals throughout the week would be vegetarian. Sure enough, a plate arrived in front of me with some form of vegetable and potato glop. I supplemented it with as much bread and butter that I could cram onto my plate. I muttered snide comments about Hitler being a vegetarian, but they were lost in the general hubbub of the cafeteria.

Unlike Hitler, I’m not a vegetarian. I’m especially not a vegetarian when stressed out and the stress of the Convocation only increased as the week progressed.

It began the next day as the entire assemblage returned to Block IV of the Museum. This block was the section that contained the artifacts of the slain. There was no program; we were advised by the facilitators of the event to just wander about and pay attention to our feelings and reactions. That was not difficult. Each of the exhibits hit you where you lived.

For the women in our group, the most frightful was a huge glassed-in display of women’s hair, four thousand pounds of it, all graying into eternity. The Nazis shorn the hair off their victims and sent it back to the Fatherland to stuff mattresses, make rope, socks and carpets as well as to provide insulation for boots and submarine periscopes. For the rabbis, it was the prayer shawls of their murdered co-religionists. The gay men and women in our group were faced with the pink triangles sewn onto the striped uniforms of the doomed.

I had brought the writings from my fifth-graders and intended to place them on a glass countertop containing baby shoes and sweaters within the children’s section of Block IV. I had viewed these the day before and an inner voice warned me that once I placed the letters, some awful internal combustion would occur.

All of us who congregated at the Museum that day learned that it is impossible to process Auschwitz with one’s intellect. Instead, we were forced to surrender to a form a madness that left our souls shattered. Afterwards, some of us came to believe that we were channeling the spirits of those who perished.

I picked a poem at random. It was written by Katie, aged ten, who lived alone with her mother. I mouthed the words as I read.

For All the Children who were Thrown Away

For all the children

who were thrown away,

who were never wanted.

For all the children

Who could never talk.

For all the children

who could never learn.

For all the children

who could not go to school

or who didn’t know what school was.

For all the children

who lie here at Auschwitz.

Until a few weeks before, Katie had never heard of the Holocaust. I wondered if she had channeled as well.

I placed the letters of my kids on the countertop, swooned and fell to the ground. There was no conscious choice. The emotions that forced a scream out of my lungs traveled beyond adjectives. It was as if my soul had left my body and been lifted by angels who had once been children. I lay on the floor of Block IV enveloped in the white light of sacred grief and wailed in anguish. The sensation was at once debilitating and intoxicating – and unstoppable, like a fractured floodgate.

There were about twelve people in the room including a documentary film crew. They no longer existed. I sensed more than saw a group of women who surrounded me and recited Kaddish, the Hebrew prayer for the dead. Later on, I would learn more about these women who blessed me.

I regained my footing, somehow managed to kiss each woman on the cheek and staggered out of the museum. The day was cloudy with a cold breeze. Drained and starved, I felt as though I had traveled back from another dimension. It was time for lunch and my group was already exiting the building and walking back in small clusters to the Center. There was no way I could suffer a slice of turnip pie or boiled kale in the state I was in. I needed meat!

I gazed across the parking lot and my eyes fastened on the food trucks. I could tell that one was for coffee and tea. The other, an olive-green painted panel truck with an open side had a menu bolted to the side of the vehicle with items written in Polish, English and German. I lurched over for a closer look.

The first item listed was a “Hotdoggy.”

What the hell is a “Hotdoggy?” I pictured a dachshund wrapped in a hoagy roll.

Knowing that my Polish was remedial; somehow I had managed to procure a train ticket in Krakow by way of a dictionary, pantomime and a sketchpad, I approached the truck and pointed to the menu.

“What’ll you have, mate?” Crocodile Dundee materialized inside the truck. He was a young lanky fellow with his blond hair in dreadlocks. Several rings decorated his left hand.

“You’re an Aussie?”

He gave me a toothy grin. “Right-ee-oh, Mister Yank, born and raised in Melbourne.”

I was about to ask how he got here but realized that I didn’t give a shit. I was exhausted and wanted my Hotdoggy, two in fact. I placed the order. He took two Doggys out of the steamer and placed them in thick brown buns. “Would you like the Special Sauce with that?” It was capitalized on the menu.

“What’s Special Sauce?”

“Don’t know,” he winked, “but it’s special.”

I restrained the urge to leap through the window and throttle him. I gritted my teeth and tried again. “What’s in it?”

“I have no idea, but seriously, mate, it’s good.” He handed me the Doggys on a paper plate.

A plastic table with three chairs was arranged near the truck. I dropped into a chair and took a huge bite. To my surprise, it was delicious. Especially the Special Sauce. It had a piquant flavor garnished with some unrecognizable but pleasant seasoning. I devoured both Doggys in about five minutes and washed them down with a Coke. To my surprise, I felt better, pretty damn good, in fact. The transfiguration that had occurred back in Block IV already seemed like a past life.

The next morning over breakfast (toast and eggs but no bacon), I sat next to Berta. She was my “Auschwitz Buddy.” We had all been assigned one. The organizers felt that it was necessary for everyone to have another individual to hang on to so we didn’t go crazy in isolation. Berta, whose father was a colonel in the Wehrmacht during the war while her uncle aided the resistance against Hitler, was a charter member of “One by One.” Many rumors but no hard facts about this group had been circulating among Convocation participants.

The facilitator interrupted the chatter to announce that we would soon assemble for the morning activity. A ceremony on the Selection Platform at Birkenau followed by a prayer service atop one of the four ruined crematoria. Jesus Christ…the hits just keep on coming.

“I guess I’ll see you later for lunch, hey?” said Berta.

I was about to answer in the affirmative when I heard a Hotdoggy calling me. Several, in fact.

“Sure thing,” I lied. For some reason, telling her that I preferred a hotdog in solitude instead of a group hug in a salad bowl seemed like sacrilege.

* * *

The Selection Platform is the most recognizable and dreaded landmark of Auschwitz. For two weeks, the monks and nuns of the Nipponzon Myohoji Buddhist order had been sitting in prayer on the Platform from dawn to dusk. This politically active order, who build Peace Pagodas around the world, co-sponsored the Convocation. Their temple and shrine were located near my home. They wore thick winter coats over their usual white and saffron robes and wool caps covered their bald heads. They projected an intent focus as they banged their flat circular drums and chanted “Nom Myoho Renge Kyo” – I devote myself to the Mystic Law of the Lotus Sutra.

Several vans brought us to Birkenau. The wintry air blended with the haze, thicker than in previous days. To others, we must have resembled phantoms emerging out of the mists to walk through the Gate of Death, as the entrance arch is called. The nuns and monks ended their chant, stood and joined us as we formed a circle on the Selection Platform. The 200 men and women holding hands included these Buddhist acolytes, Christian ministers, veterans of the Vietnam War, veterans of the Waffen SS, children of the Third Reich, children of Holocaust survivors and Hibakusha from Hiroshima. They had traveled from fifteen different countries on five separate continents. The ceremony featured Father Froelich, a German priest who held in front of his face a painting of a tortured Christ. It was the creation of two German soldiers who carried it across postwar Germany and Poland as an act of atonement. Froelich’s own father served in Hitler’s army. The energy around the circle was tense as unleashed emotions of anger and guilt swirled around us. Birkenau is the apex of the Holocaust, the nightmare made real.

As he spoke, the youthful cast of Terezin: Children of the Holocaust, a play we would see performed later at the Museum Theater, had arrived with their chaperons. While the adults stood apart from each other, the children huddled together in a private circle. Surrounded by the horror of Auschwitz, they chose to shut it out.

Others cannot. At our next station, atop the ruins of Crematoria #2, Methodist minister John Schuchardt threw away his prepared notes and sank to his knees. He was a big man with broad shoulders and curly white hair. Surrounded by sobs, hitched voices and the clicking of cameras, he thundered that no Christian could enter this space unless they did so in repentance. His voice crumpled into a heap of cries, so loud that they vibrated across the expanse of rubble. Standing beside him was Rabbi Sheila Weinberg from the Jewish Community of Amherst, Massachusetts, who placed Jewish Yahrzeit memorial candles along the entryway. She stood solitary and grim, her eyes like those of an Old Testament prophet sent by God to demand Justice. Upon her return to America, she would be ill for a week.

The service on the crematoria ended. Members of the Convocation hugged whoever was closest to them or knelt on the ruins to offer their own silent prayer. I continued to shoot frames but shed no tears. My catharsis in the Museum the day before had wiped them clean.

The march back to the Center was done in silence. We passed local women sweeping the Selection Platform with wicker brooms and a gaggle of Polish high school students. It’s customary for local schools to take field trips here for the edification of their charges. One of the boys walked along the length of the Platform twiddling a hand-held video game. Repressing the urge to swat him, I wanted my Hotdoggys more than ever.

* * *

At the food truck, the dread-headed Australian appeared behind the window. Today, instead of his previous snarky vibe, his eyes were soft with compassion.

“You look pretty messed up there, mate. We’ve all heard about what your group is doing. I’m impressed. I’ve been here a year and still can’t bear to go anywhere near Birkenau.”

“I get it. Being here…” I struggled for words, “is like stepping off the edge of the Earth. My name’s Dan by the way.” I extended my hand. He took it with a vigorous shake.

“Malcolm here. I gather you’re in dire need of a Hotdoggy.”

“That and about three beers.”

Malcolm laughed. “Can’t help you there. But you need to pace yourself, Dan, otherwise, you’ll go batty.”

“I think that ship has sailed.” I told him about the Museum visit yesterday.

Malcolm whistled and looked at the sky. I glanced over my shoulder and was surprised to find a squad of Polish teens behind me. I surveyed the kids. They looked bored and hungry.

“I hope you keep coming by,” said Malcolm as he dropped more Hotdoggys into the steamer. “Consider this neutral ground.”

“Like Sweden with Hotdoggys. Thanks Malcolm, I suppose I’ll see you again.” I ate my Doggys as I trudged back to the Center to be introduced to “One by One.”

* * *

“One by One” is a dialogue group composed of children of Holocaust survivors and children of the Third Reich. It was created by two Harvard psychologists who had treated individual members of each in therapy and noted striking similarities. The foremost was living with parents with deep and troubling secrets.

The original participants met together for what must have been one hair-raising weekend conference. Included was Otto, a German soldier who had been drafted into the SS at age sixteen. During the introductory conference, Otto’s hotel room bordered that of Anna Smulowitz, a playwright from Boston, whose parents survived Auschwitz and the “Paradise Ghetto” of Terezin. After the war, they were resettled in Kentucky where their neighbor was the Grand Dragon of the local Ku Klux Klan. Her parents had met at Auschwitz and survived but neither fully recovered. Anna’s father greeted each morning in the bathroom conversing with his first wife and child who perished in the gas chambers. Her mother suffered fits of violence. When Anna was first appraised as to Otto’s proximity to her, it was all she could do to not run shrieking out into the street.

But as they congregated and shared their stories, her view of him underwent a transformation. Otto related how Moses had come to him in a dream saying, “I’ll meet you halfway.” He spent the remainder of the weekend silent and morose.

“He just sat there,” Anna recalled. “On the last day, I hugged him. He cried. I cried. Others cried. This great weight fell from my heart forever.” Since that introductory session, the Jewish women have been especially protective of him and he has responded in kind. Journeying to the Convocation, he rented a bus so his Jewish comrades would be spared the distress of arriving at Oswiecim by train.

Anna and comrade Rosalie Gerut conducted the presentation and after introductions, invited another member of her group, Helga, to share her background. Helga was distraught even before she approached the stage, her face creased with tears. She told about her father who was a Gestapo chief responsible for the destruction of the Ghetto of Lida in former Byelorussia. Helga’s hands twitched through her short-cropped hair and she could barely finish her narrative. Listening in the audience was Jim Levinson, leader of a small, stateside Jewish congregation who had led us in song and prayer each morning. His ancestors were killed in Lida during the war. After the presentation, he and Helga withdrew together, I assumed to come to grips with their startling connection. The next day, they reappeared hand in hand to lead us in our daily prayer circle.

Dinner afterwards was a muted affair. Between the agonizing morning ceremony on the crematorium and the afternoon revelations of “One by One,” nobody had much energy to converse. We would soon see a play written by Anna Smulowitz about her mother’s childhood at the Terezin concentration camp. Upon arriving at the Auschwitz Museum Theater, I cast a wistful glance towards Malcolm’s truck but it was shut down for the night. A Hotdoggy would hit the spot right about now.

* * *

Terezin, or Theresienstadt as the Germans called it, was located north of Prague in former Czechoslovakia. It was a showcase ghetto created by the Nazis to counter the claims of mass murder occurring throughout their concentration camp empire. When officials from the International Committee of the Red Cross came to inspect on June 23, 1944, they found contented Jews sitting at cafes sipping “coffee,” playing soccer games and promenading through streets lined with freshly-painted houses adorned with flower boxes. A chorus of rosy-cheeked children and a symphony orchestra performed for the guests. Adolf Eichmann supervised the event. Anna’s mother served him lunch. The ruse was heightened by a planned documentary film entitled “The Führer Gives a City to the Jews.” In fact, those dying from disease and starvation were kept out of sight. Prior to the visit, 7,500 Jews were deported so the camp wouldn’t appear overcrowded. Terezin was the holding pen for Auschwitz. 15,000 Jewish children passed through there during the war. Less than a 150 survived. Anna’s mother was one of them.

Anna’s drama, Terezin: Children of the Holocaust is a fictional account of six Jewish children during that infamous Red Cross visit. Unbeknownst to them, in two days, they would be shipped to Auschwitz. The plot revolved around the kids trying to come to terms with their fatal situation. In one scene, four of them practiced the Hitler Salute in a vain attempt to win sympathy from their captors.

That night, it was performed twice, once by an American cast – the kids huddled together at the Platform – and by students of the Odenwald School in Germany, a progressive institution founded in 1910. After the presentations, both cast members fielded a Q and A where they expressed how much this production had changed their lives. As they spoke, they wept, as did many in attendance.

* * *

On the last day of the Convocation, a procession wove through the center of downtown Oswiecim after which a commemorative scroll was presented to the mayor, a white-haired gentleman who resembled everyone’s kindly grandpa. I wondered where he was fifty years before when he was a strapping twenty – something. Did he aid and abet the Nazis, or was he in the Resistance? If neither, did he pretend that nothing unusual was happening in his home town, despite the pervading stink of the corpses burnt in the crematoria and their ashes floating down the Sola River? According to survivors, the smoke issuing from the four cremation centers was hard not to see – or smell.

Before we headed into town, I ducked out for my last Hotdoggy excursion. I’d already given Berta a goodbye hug and thanked her for being my buddy. I also wanted to say farewell to Malcolm whom I’m sure I would never see again. While some of my peers had vowed to return to Auschwitz for annual or semi-annual pilgrimages, I entertained no such desire. Once was enough.

Malcolm treated me to my final Doggy with an extra slathering of the Special Sauce. I promised to send him photographs of him and his truck. I ate my treat standing in front of the window. The thick coal smoke clouded the horizon. Sniffing it reinforced my desire to get home.

Just as I was about to depart, an odd thought shot through my mind. It seemed important enough to share with Malcolm. “You want to hear something funny?”

“Always,” he answered. “Humor is in short supply around here.”

“Well…I don’t quite know how to express it. But I might be the only Jew in history who ever snuck into Auschwitz to get some good food.” My face twisted into a goofy grin.

Malcolm gawked at me. Then his face widened enough to split in half and he let out a belly laugh that echoed through the lot. Several somber visitors exiting the Museum swung their heads towards us with sharp looks of disapproval.

Malcolm sobered up and offered his hand out the window. “Safe travels and thanks again. You people did a good thing here. Auschwitz can never be too sanctified.”

I gripped his forearm and gave it a tight squeeze. “Thanks for the Hotdoggys. As strange as it sounds, they helped keep me sane. Take good care. I think I’ve paid my dues to the Holocaust.”

In fact, I was just beginning a journey into it that would consume my life for the following year and a half. I published newspaper and magazine articles about the Convocation, lectured on the Holocaust at venues throughout the Northeast and curated an exhibition including my Auschwitz photographs that drew five hundred people on opening night. That hegira ended with me lying flat on a therapist’s couch, screaming with clenched fists as if my psyche had been poisoned. The Hotdoggys were forgotten.

A month after the Convocation, however, I and several others gave a final presentation about the event to a packed crowd at the Unitarian-Universalist Church in Northampton, Massachusetts. As we related the grim details about Auschwitz and what had transpired, I noticed a small boy, about seven-years old in one of the front rows. His face was crestfallen and his trembling lips reminded me of how my father had once tried to enhance his little son’s Judaism with photographs of dead bodies at Buchenwald. No doubt, this boy’s Jewish parents had brought him along in order to further his own education.

Watching this little fellow, I thought of my fifth-graders writing their letters and poems that, to this day, break my heart. I remember the sacred grief that enveloped me after placing their writings on the glass case at the Auschwitz State Museum. More importantly, I remember the 1,500,000 Jewish boys and girls who fell victim to the Holocaust and am thankful that it didn’t include him.

 

Daniel A. Brown was born in New York City in 1950 and currently lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico with his wife, Lisa and dog, Cody. Although a professional Southwest landscape painter (www.intothewildblue.com), his writings have been published in a diverse number of national magazines including Yoga Journal, AOPA Pilot, True West and Communities. He considers his participation in the 1994 “Convocation at Auschwitz” to be one of the major turning points of his life.