Hypocrite in a Pouffy White Dress Read online

  An event was being planned, he explained, called March of the Living. Three thousand Jewish teenagers from around the world were going to converge in Poland for a week to learn about Jewish history and the Holocaust, followed by a week in Israel, where they would learn about the Jewish state. Since Lippy knew Hebrew, he was covering the Israeli leg of the trip. Since I knew nothing, Sheldon thought it might be a good idea for me to cover the Polish leg, where I could join a legion of three thousand other know-nothings and, in his words, “finally learn something.” I’d leave at the end of the month.

  “What do you say?” Sheldon asked. “You ready to become a foreign correspondent?”

  Never one to pass up a golden opportunity, I said, “Well, I don’t know. Can I do a stopover in Paris?”

  In preparation for such an overseas assignment, any smart, enterprising young reporter would undoubtedly get busy reading up on Polish and Jewish history. Telling myself I wanted to maintain the utmost objectivity, I instead did nothing but brag to my friends and plan the vacation that I had, in fact, wangled for myself in Paris beforehand. My best friend Michelle had introduced me to a guy with an apartment near Sacre Coeur. Didier wore leather pants and managed a French rock band, and when he offered to let me stay with him, neither of us had any illusions I’d be sleeping on his sofa. Since there weren’t a lot of female “new journalists” I could draw on as role models for my assignment overseas, I’d looked to the doctor of gonzo journalism himself for guidance about writing about the Holocaust. “How would Hunter S. Thompson prepare for visiting a bunch of concentration camps?” I wondered. Since transporting firearms, cocaine, and ether were out, getting laid in Paris seemed as good a preparation to me as any.

  In the end, this proved better planning than I could’ve imagined. Although the organizers of the March of the Living had managed to arrange for three thousand teenagers to tour Poland for a week, they’d somehow forgotten to pick me up at the airport. When I arrived at Warsaw’s international airport from Paris at nine o’clock at night with my press credentials and my word processor, neither the soldiers brandishing machine guns nor the Politburo agents at the tourist counter had any idea where I was supposed to go. Had I come straight from New York, I probably would’ve freaked. Instead, I was now flushed, bowlegged, and slightly drunk. “Well, okay. Whatever,” I shrugged to the tourist agent, pointing to phrases in my pocket English-Polish phrasebook, “Just stick me in a taxi and take me to your biggest hotel.”

  In 1990, Poland was still technically part of the Soviet Eastern Bloc. With only two accredited tourist hotels in Warsaw, I figured if I just showed up at one of them, I was bound to bump into someone. Bouncing through the streets of Warsaw in a jury-rigged taxi, I was amazed how gloomy the city was; the entire place seemed to have been lit by one 40-watt lightbulb. The boulevards were impassive blocks of concrete high-rises. None of the stores were open; the streets were eerily empty, sickly red and green traffic lights blinked into the darkness for no one. Only a few dim bands of neon occasionally illuminated the tops of buildings. It was like a city in the middle of an air raid, or after a neutron bomb; all the infrastructure remained, yet the people had vanished. I wouldn’t see another place so bleak until I went to Detroit three years later.

  Warsaw’s top tourist hotel had all the charm of a legion hall after an Elks dance. When I asked the receptionist whether my contacts had checked in yet, she smiled uncomprehendingly. “You wait for the lobby?” she said, then pointed toward the bar. “Maybe you like drink of the vodka.”

  In a stark, paneled room, local men, none of whom appeared to be under seventy, sat smoking and staring blearily at an old television set bolted to the wall. Their faces were like crumpled butcher paper, and their clothing looked salvaged, a mishmash of canvas coveralls, threadbare sweaters, and plaid polyester shirts. The only woman was the bartender, with sloppily bleached blond hair and a no-nonsense look that suggested she’d spent all day at target practice. When I walked in, nobody said anything or even acknowledged my presence. They were all transfixed by the television. Overhead, Madonna was onscreen, singing, “C’mon and Vogue” in a black velvet bustier. For the next two hours, I sat on a folding chair with the rest of the lumpen proletariat, shivering in the unheated bar and watching MTV. Wow, I thought delightedly, so this is what it’s like to be a foreign correspondent. If only my friends back home could see me now!

  Eventually, the March’s organizers showed up and checked me into the hotel. The next morning at breakfast, I ran into Shimon, a freelance photographer for The Jewish Week. A former tank commander in the Israeli army, Shimon had traded in the barrel of a gun for that of a Nikon. Sauntering around Warsaw in his flak jacket with camera bags slung across his chest like a bandolier, he was cocksure and charming, a sort of Jewish picture-snapping Rambo. I called him the “anti-Lippy,” which seemed to amuse him. He didn’t have Lippy’s sense of humor, though. Shimon was thirty-eight years old with a wife and two kids, and anytime I called him “Old Guy” he got really annoyed.

  “Hey, you made it,” he said. “I’ve been here two days already. Let me tell you. This whole country is a shithole. The hotel staff? Imbeciles. And the march we’re on? A zoo. The organizers have no idea what the fuck they’re doing. They’ve got three thousand Jewish teenagers running around the Polish hotels like maniacs. But what do I give a shit?” he said. “The Polish zlotys are trading at something like six thousand to the dollar. Last night, I had a steak dinner with wine for two-and-a-half bucks.”

  Shimon and I headed into the hotel parking lot, where a tour bus was waiting. “I’ve already staked out seats for us in the front,” he said. “There’s no place reserved for press. You didn’t happen to bring a flask, did you? With these little maniacs, we’re going to need it.”

  As we settled into our seats, Shimon gave me a copy of the week’s itinerary to review. It read like a vacation package designed by Joseph Goebbels. Monday: Majdanek concentration camp. Tuesday: Treblinka concentration camp. Wednesday: Warsaw ghetto. Thursday: travel to Krakow. Friday: Auschwitz and Birkenau concentration camps.

  “Are they kidding?” I said to Shimon. “I thought this was a Jewish heritage tour. All we’re seeing here are death camps and ruins.”

  “Yeah, well. Welcome to our heritage,” Shimon said, opening a canister of film with his teeth.

  Around us, scores of Jewish teenagers carried on like teenagers, flirting, pinching, giggling, playing grab-ass and keep-away with each other’s sweatshirts and baseball hats.

  “Roxanne,” a girl in a pink sweater and matching leg warmers shrieked from the back of the bus, “toss me the Pringles?” Behind us, two beefy boys crammed into their seats, then put on Walkmans and cranked up the volume until their headphones emanated dueling bass lines. “Yo, man, I want the window,” another boy laughed, playfully shoving his seatmate across the aisle.

  “Yo, get off me.”

  “No, you get off me.”

  “You gonna say uncle? Say uncle, man.”

  “I’m not saying uncle. You say uncle.”

  “You guys, cut it out,” a girl yelled. “You’re making me spill my nail polish.”

  “What the hell is this,” I said to Shimon. “‘Camp Concentration Camp’?”

  “Listen to you,” he laughed. “What were you expecting, a garden tour and the ballet?”

  I supposed that I was.

  The first stop on our whirlwind tour of Nazi atrocities was the Majdanek concentration camp, set on the outskirts of a bucolic Polish village. Indeed, some of the picturesque little houses seemed to have a fine view of the crematorium across the fields—or rather, they would have had a fine view, had the crematorium, like most everything else in the camp, not been torn down and cleaned up. A few neat barracks had been left standing, though, and inside were displays of canisters of Zyklon-B, the poison used in the gas chambers. There were also piles and piles of Nazi loot, old clothing and luggage taken from the victims, as well as the tattered and disinte
grating uniforms they’d been forced to wear. The barracks were dark and stinking of mildew and clay, yet outside, it was balmy; the sunlight was dusty with pollen. Fields around the camp glittered in the breeze. You could hear sparrows chirping and the steady hum of insects. It was surreal and disorienting.

  In another section of the camp stood a huge, stony memorial above what appeared to be an enormous mound of crushed seashells. These, we discovered, were actually human remains: bone bits and ashes left over from the crematoriums. This was pretty much a conversation stopper, and even the kids eating potato chips seemed to pause in mid-bite. Isaac, one of the boys I’d been interviewing along the way, kneeled down to get a better look.

  “They just don’t seem real,” he said softly.

  I’d read books by camp survivors Elie Wiesel and Primo Levi; I’d visited a Holocaust museum and seen movies like Sophie’s Choice. But now that I was actually at a concentration camp, it was, perversely, like seeing a celebrity in person—or, perhaps more aptly, Charles Manson. After viewing pictures and footage of them for years, it was hard to comprehend that they were actually standing in front of you.

  Around me, some of the teenagers started to weep or say fevered prayers in Hebrew, but I found myself feeling devoid of any emotion whatsoever except for a strange, free-floating anger directed not just at the Nazis and Poles, but at the March’s organizers and the entire world. Why was this the very first stop on a Jewish heritage tour, I wanted to know. Surely, there had to be more to our past than this. Do not tell me that this is everything.

  “So, what do you think?” Shimon said as the group solemnly proceeded out of the camp. “I’ll say one thing. There’s no better way to shut up three thousand teenagers.”

  “What do I think?” I said irritably. “I think I want to go for one of those two-dollar steak dinners and a bottle of wine, that’s what I think.”

  “It’s Tuesday, so it must be Treblinka,” I groaned as I climbed aboard the bus the next morning and eased myself carefully down into the seat next to Shimon.

  “Fucking hell. Are you as hungover as I am?” he asked, massaging his forehead.

  After we’d returned to Warsaw, Shimon and I had skipped the “debriefing” at the hotel and gone out to dinner instead. The restaurant overlooked one of the few ornate buildings in Warsaw, a monstrosity Stalin had commissioned that resembled a grotesque wedding cake crowned with a hypodermic needle. Shimon and I were two of only four customers in the restaurant. Heady with the power of our expense account, we ordered vodka cocktails, then half the menu and two bottles of wine. The bill came to a whopping $6.47, and Shimon and I drunkenly vied to pay it. When we left an additional six-dollar tip, the waiters fell all over each other thanking us. “God, He blesses you, Mr. and Mrs. America.” Their gratitude was heartbreaking. The whole nation seemed picked-over, a wasteland of concrete. Even the vowels had been looted from the language.

  “This world is one cruel, unfair, fucked-up motherfucker,” I told Shimon after dinner as I slid down onto the floor of the hotel elevator and leaned my head back against the simulated wood panels. I wasn’t quite sure how I made it from the elevator to my room, but I had a good idea that I’d crawled.

  Now, the tour bus sat idling in the parking lot. “Augh. Can we go already?” I said impatiently. “The exhaust fumes are making me nauseous.” The driver was standing by the side of the bus, languidly smoking a cigarette.

  “Boy, that’s a first,” Shimon smirked. “I guess now that we’re not going to be killed there, nobody can be bothered to drive us to a camp.”

  Treblinka was so pristine, it looked more like an art installation than a concentration camp. Indeed, the entire site had been demolished by the Nazis in the wake of advancing Allied troops, so the only structures now were memorials. Jagged rocks, each engraved with the name of a town whose population had been annihilated, were scattered around the woodsy site like a haphazard graveyard. Seeing it without knowing the historical context, you’d have absolutely no way of divining what had actually happened there. You might think it was another Stonehenge, a miniature Easter Island. A few kids seemed to be under just this impression: they sat down beside one of the memorials and began passing around chicken salad sandwiches.

  “Oh look,” I said sarcastically. “What a great place for a picnic. Or, better yet, a fashion shoot. Here,” I said, striking a pose beside a chunk of granite with the name “Bialystok” etched on it. Bialystok had been the town my grandmother had come from; all her relatives there had been killed.

  “Get one of me like this.” I tucked an arm seductively behind my head. “For Grandma.”

  Shimon looked at me incredulously. “You’re insane,” he said.

  “Why not?” I said bitterly. “Everyone else here seems determined to pretty things up.”

  Just then, Jonathan ran over to me. Jonathan was one of the kids I’d chosen to track throughout the March, recording their impressions and experiences. He was a sixteen-year-old punk rock aficionado and sci-fi enthusiast from San Francisco. Out of respect for the trip, he’d pinned a yarmulke to his dyed-blue-and-purple hair. “Hey, Susie,” he said breathlessly. “Are you ready for the height of sickness? Check out the souvenir shop.”

  Amazingly, while authorities hadn’t bothered to put up detailed plaques or exhibits explaining what had transpired at the camps, they had managed to build a souvenir kiosk. In case you’re ever in dire need of a concentration camp commemorative tschotchke, you’ll be relieved to know that, at least when I was there, Treblinka sells key rings, change purses, and souvenir bookmarks.

  “What, no snow globes?” I cracked.

  “Yeah. Why not?” Jonathan said with mock annoyance. “I mean, they could have little ovens inside, and fake ashes instead of snow.”

  “I see there are no Nazi lawn trolls, either,” I sniffed.

  “Hey,” Jonathan called over to the bored-looking woman behind the counter. “Do you have any bumper stickers that say ‘Honk If You Love the FÜhrer’?”

  “Communists.” I shook my head. “They know nothing about merchandising.”

  “Un-fucking-believable, isn’t it?” Jonathan handed me his camera. “You have to take a picture of me here. Otherwise, people back home will think I’m making this up.”

  “Ohmygod. Look at these,” I cried, motioning to a rack of postcards. The cards had attractive shots of Treblinka on a sunny day, some with a montage of close-ups and long views of all the memorials. “Okay,” I said. “Hands-down, this wins.”

  We each bought some, along with the airmail stamps thoughtfully provided at the cashier’s window.

  “Augh, this is so great,” Jonathan said, writing hurriedly. “I just hope people realize I’m being ironic. How’s this? ‘Dear Mom. Here I am at Treblinka. As you can see, it is very pretty. The people are friendly. I am having lots of fun. That’s all for now. Bye.’”

  “Oh, that’s brilliant,” I said, then handed him mine. Greetings from Sunny Treblinka! Having a Wonderful Time, I’d written. PS. Wish You Were Here.

  “Are you okay?” Shimon said when we climbed back on the bus.

  “Of course,” I snapped. Ever since Jonathan and I finished our postcards, we couldn’t stop making caustic remarks and laughing—if laughing is what you’d call the shrill, mirthless asthma that seemed to have overtaken us. My ribs ached and my breathing was irregular. “Why wouldn’t I be okay?” I said acidly. “I’m a professional journalist.”

  That night, Shimon and I drank two bottles of wine with dinner again. When the restaurant closed, we moved on to the dreary bar at the hotel and ordered shots of industrial-strength potato vodka washed down with the Polish version of champagne, which is every bit as bad an idea as it sounds. A group of sad Polish prostitutes lingered by the elevator banks in out-of-date dresses and stucco-like makeup; the same old men who’d been there the night of my arrival remained hunched over their drinks, staring at the cheap laminate tabletop. Being awake at 2:00 A. M. in Warsaw was depressin
g, but given the images that were swirling in my head, I figured it beat going to sleep.

  The next morning, the March of the Living toured the site of the Warsaw ghetto, now a concrete housing development that reminded me of any number of inner city projects back in the states: one ghetto echoing another. A memorial to the uprising had been constructed in a plaza nearby, an abstract sculpture of fists emerging through flames. Then, the group was taken to a dilapidated Jewish cemetery which had been mostly destroyed during the war.

  “What genius figured that a Jewish cemetery would be a nice break from the concentration camps?” I said to Shimon. “I mean, what are they trying to do here, depress every kid to death?”

  “No,” he sighed wearily. “Make sure they realize their responsibilities as Jews. You know, support Israel. Don’t marry a shiksah. Call your mother. That sort of thing.”

  The so-called highlight of the March took place on Friday. All the participants would go first to Auschwitz. From there, they’d march two kilometers to the neighboring Birkenau. This would be a replay, in reverse, of the “March of the Dead” that concentration camp prisoners often had to walk from the labor camp to their own extermination. Nobel laureate and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel was going to be leading the March personally.

  “Another day, another horror,” I moaned as I settled in beside Shimon for the ride to Auschwitz. Then I said, “Do you think, if we asked really, really nicely, they’d drive us to Dachau afterward? Because frankly, I just don’t think we’re getting to see enough concentration camps on this trip.”

  The fields around Auschwitz were flooded with hazy sunshine. Forsythia bloomed on the roadsides. “Ugh, my allergies,” wheezed a kid across the aisle. People handed around Kleenex and cans of 7-Up they’d bought at the hotel vending machines. I realized I loved and hated teenagers for exactly the same reason: only teenagers, en route to Auschwitz, would sing “We Will Rock You,” then pass around an economy-sized bag of Doritos.