After lunch we wrap up very warmly, and walk to the last village in Poland, Wołosate. Up to the top of the road and then heading leftwards near Andrej’s Bar, and making towards the ridge, an ice landscape, sub-zero. Only trees breaking the whiteness. The Carpathians above us curving between Poland and Ukraine. Hardly a sound in the forest but we can see bird tracks through the snow.
Near to Wołosate, we sit down in a snowy field and have what has to be the coldest picnic of our lives – eating herrings from a tin and then chocolate in minus ten, minus fifteen. On the way back down, dusk with us now and the temperature dropping quickly, I tell him about the Levi I’ve been rereading, and suggest starting with If This Is a Man and The Truce. J. seems receptive to this, even enthusiastic. His mood seems to have really lifted in the last day or so, and this in turn has given me renewed energy for the days ahead.
In the evening, back at the hotel, in a quiet corner of the bar, I read excerpts of Levi, and we talk about the life of the quiet chemist from Turin who had never planned to be a writer, but found writing an urgent necessity after the war, to try to make sense of what he had lived through.
4 January 2004, Ustrzyki GÓrne to Krakow
In the bus, coming down the valley, the windows encrusted in ice. The bus filling at every stop with surprising numbers of hikers. I’m fascinated by the young Poles who surround us, by their courtesy towards each other. Teenagers with none of the aggression that’s habitual in London. I’ve seen that kind of gentleness in young people only once before – in rural Ireland. Could it, in some way, be related to Catholicism, or is it more to do with living in the countryside? The trees and occasional farm buildings outside are now visible again as the ice melts on the windows.
Through Sanok again, on to Rzeszów, and then reaching Tarnów in the early evening. On the train to Krakow, we continue our talk about Levi, and read excerpts of Martin Gilbert which relate to some of the towns we’re passing on the train. After some hesitation, I decide to show J. the passage in Gilbert that has haunted me since I first read it five years ago – perhaps the single most disturbing piece of writing ever committed to paper by a direct witness of the Holocaust: Jan Karski’s description of what he experienced at the railway siding of Izbicafn2, a transit camp for the Belzec extermination camp, twenty kilometres north of Zamość in south-eastern Poland, only an hour north-east of where we are travelling this evening.
Karski was an important figure in the Polish underground, and had been asked by Jewish leaders to witness the extermination of the Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto and at Izbica, so that the Allies could learn the reality of the genocide that was taking place in Poland. So, in September 1942, risking his life, Karski travels with a member of the Jewish underground from Warsaw to a village near Izbica. And there he’s taken to a village shop, run by a member of the Polish resistance who’s helping the Jewish underground, where he changes into an Estonian militia uniform – Ukrainians were the principal nationality working alongside the SS at Izbica, Belzec and other extermination camps, but there were also small numbers of guards from the Baltic states. Shortly afterwards, an Estonian guard working at Izbica (but also co-operating with the Jewish undergound – for his own, very mixed, reasons) arrives to collect Karski and take him to the camp. Karski then describes, in extraordinary (at times almost hallucinatory) detail, what he witnesses on this early-autumn afternoon at Izbica.
I do not have religious belief any more, so it is strange to find myself reaching for the word ‘sacred’ to describe this writing of Karski’s. Yet this is the word I return to. It is because he is writing at, and then beyond, the limits of human understanding and endurance. It is not only that he risked his own life, repeatedly, in order to witness first-hand the extermination of the Jews in Poland, it is that he then attempted, with supreme effort, to communicate to the wider world what was happening. And in these actions, and the words that followed, quite beyond our conception of human limits, there is a quality that can only be called sacred. In the face of such terror, to still insist on the act of witness.
These things happened. This is what Karski comes back to, over and over again. Human beings did these things to other human beings. And they happened on this earth, not very far away from where I am writing these words. I also need to know what happened; perhaps it’s impossible to know why it happened, but I feel it’s my responsibility to know what was done, to know what human beings are capable of. If Primo Levi or Jan Karski have the courage to try to find words for what they experienced, I will find a way of listening to them. And while they were seeing these barbarities, many other human beings looked away. Many of us now would describe that looking away as having a criminal aspect, or, at the very least, an aspect of culpability. But what does looking away mean today? And what to do with knowledge of such things, should you choose to know?
On the almost empty train, I pass the book over to J. so he can read this passage:
The camp was about a mile and a half from the shop … It took about twenty minutes to get to the camp but we became aware of its presence in less than half that time. About a mile away … we began to hear shouts, shots and screams. The noise increased steadily as we approached.
‘What’s happening?’ I asked. ‘What’s the meaning of all that noise? What could it be?’
He shrugged. ‘They’re bringing in a “batch” today.’
I knew what he meant and did not enquire further. We walked on while the noise increased alarmingly. From time to time a series of long screams or a particularly inhuman groan would set the hair on my scalp bristling.
‘What are the chances of anyone escaping?’ I asked my companion, hoping to hear an optimistic answer.
‘None at all sir,’ he answered, dashing my hopes to the ground. ‘Once they get this far, their goose is cooked.’
… As we approached to within a few hundred yards of the camp, the shouts, cries, and shots cut off further conversation. I again noticed, or thought I noticed, an unpleasant stench that seemed to come from decomposing bodies mixed with horse manure. This may have been an illusion. The Estonian was, in any case, completely impervious to it. He even began to hum some sort of folk tune to himself. We passed through a small grove of decrepit-looking trees and emerged directly in front of the loud, sobbing, reeking camp of death.
It was on a large, flat plain and occupied about a square mile. It was surrounded on all sides by a formidable barbed-wire fence, nearly two yards in height and in good repair. Inside the fence, at intervals of about fifteen yards, guards were standing, holding rifles with fixed bayonets ready for use. Around the outside of the fence militiamen circulated on constant patrol. The camp itself contained a few small sheds or barracks. The rest of the area was completely covered by a dense, pulsating, throbbing, noisy human mass. Starved, stinking, gesticulating, insane human beings in constant, agitated motion. Through them, forcing paths if necessary with their rifle butts, walked the German police and the militiamen. They walked in silence, their faces bored and indifferent. They looked like shepherds bringing a flock to the market or pig-dealers among their pigs. They had the tired, vaguely disgusted appearance of men doing a routine, tedious job
…. To my left I noticed the rail tracks which passed about a hundred yards from the camp … On the track a dusty freight train waited, motionless. It had at least thirty carriages, all filthy. The Estonian followed my gaze …