16
The Patience of a Hand and a Pencil
Oświęcim–Lodz–Koło–Chelmno–Rzuchów
5 January 2004, Oświęcim to Lodz
Back at the station in Oświęcim, J. and I retrieve our packs from the left luggage and then are disturbed to find that our connecting train to Sosnowiec does not seem to be on the departures board. This is where we pick up our connection to Lodz, and the next two days we have an extremely tight schedule so we must reach Lodz tonight. We check with the woman behind the misted-up information window, but, in response to us pointing to our printout with the Sosnowiec train time shown, she simply shakes her head rather pityingly. The train does not exist, or at least it isn’t running this evening. We decide to get a taxi these thirty kilometres or so. Getting into the warmth of the car, exhaustion suddenly hits us. We’ve pushed ourselves to the limits today, we don’t even have the energy to talk. Just the comforting sound of the windscreen wipers against the snow, and beyond the glow of collieries and the heavy industry of Silesia.
Our driver has taken to his task of getting us to Sosnowiec on time with relish – overtaking everything in our path using a technique of flashing his headlights in warning as we go. With the freezing conditions this is almost certainly dangerous, but, in our deep tiredness, we’re in that zone beyond worry where fatalism takes over. We make our connection and sleep the couple of hours to Lodz. As we edge into the city at night I try to remember fragments from The Chronicle of the Lodz Ghetto that made such an impression on me as a student twenty years ago, but can only recall the image of the crazed, tyrannical figure of Chaim Rumkowski, the Nazi-appointed chairman of the ghetto’s Jewish Council, who commanded a 600-strong personal police force, demanded that stamps were created in his image and was insistent on being transported around his tiny, doomed kingdom in a carriage drawn by a skeletal horse.
There’s deeper snow here, further north. We edge along icy pavements from the station towards the main street and find a hotel, faded art deco touches, paint peeling. Our room is decorated in the kind of thick 1960s oranges and purples with swirling lampshades and wallpaper that has gone so far out of fashion that it once again has a kind of aesthetic appeal. A hot shower, then I’m keen to find a restaurant but J. says he’s ‘too tired to eat’. Not a combination of words I’ve ever heard from him before. He’s gone into a strange, withdrawn mood, where I cannot reach him, which troubles me. Maybe I’ve underestimated the effect of these days, not just the physical demands but the emotional impact too.
But, in the end, we do go out. The city of Lodz seems to centre on Ulica Piotrkowska, a single, extremely long and straight street – the longest in Europe, we learn later. Just round the corner we come across a series of large stars and names marked on the pavement outside a cinema. Lodz has always been the centre of the outstanding Polish film industry. There’s one for Wadja, and here’s one for Kieslowski. I kneel down and kiss the star to try and make J. laugh. This is supposed to be a lively, student city but it’s almost totally dead tonight, out of term-time, presumably. We ask about eating in the few bars that are still open but it’s 11 p.m. now and we just collect shakes of heads wherever we go. We end up in a subterranean Irish bar, adorned with photographs of visiting world leaders who have, rather improbably, made it here – Gerhard Schröder, Madeleine Albright and François Mitterrand. But there’s only J. and I tonight and we’re drinking extortionately expensive Guinness and trying to understand what we’ve experienced today. J.’s withdrawnness wears off as the Guinness begins to do its job.
Both of us are still amazed by the fact that the vast chemicals plant which IG Farben built in the war, at least a large section of it, is not only still there at Oświęcim, but is still operating. And we wonder at how such a reality seems to have gone unnoticed. IG Farben, at that time the second-largest transnational corporation in the world, and Auschwitz their greatest single investment of the 1940s. And the continuity of IG Farben – this is what has not been looked at in detail yet – the continuity of the capital and, in many cases, the personnel. Flowing out of that single corporation – BASF, Bayer, Agfa, Hoechst and Interhandel (later taken over by UBS as we’ve already seen). Hadn’t Rudy Kennedy dug up information in the late 1990s that BASF were still paying out pensions to employees who had worked at IG Farben in the war years? Some of whom had even worked at Buna, organising the slave labour, overseeing Rudy Kennedy, Freddie Knoller, Primo Levi and the other thousands of prisoners there.
*
6 January 2004 (Epiphany), Lodz to Koło
Wake with a hacking cough and a temperature, I don’t know how much sleep I got, but it seemed like a long, feverish night. The effects of the last days are really catching up now. Not good timing, but I will not let my physical state interfere with what needs to be done over the next day and a half.
J. is worried about whether we can reach Chelmno and still connect with our Berlin train tomorrow lunchtime, and is making sceptical comments about our plans. ‘But we have to do this,’ I say. ‘Whatever it takes.’ I don’t like his doubt, and my Taurean stubbornness takes over, drawing on extra reserves of adrenaline and sheer determination. But I am aware that this can-do spirit that I’m giving off this morning is at odds with my weakened physical state. And, perhaps unfairly, I’m frustrated with J. I feel I’m having to generate this energy for both of us, when, if I was at home I would have dosed myself with medicine by now and gone to bed for a couple of days. I’d appreciate some encouragement, some reassurance, but I don’t think it’s going to happen today. I feel I’ve probably overestimated his capacity to take in what we’ve seen, read and experienced over the last days.
A breakfast of powdered coffee and chicory and yellowing rolls. An elderly priest sits in a corner of the very brown, high-ceilinged room, lugubriously reading the paper. Piped piano music does not lighten the mood. Then out in search of information about Lodz and how we can get to Chelmno. The main street is much more impressive today, wider than it seemed last night and crowded, bustling. In one direction you can see it continue straight for a mile or more, the other way there’s a slight incline so it dips over the horizon. Very ornate wrought-iron shop frontages and art deco designs, expressions of the former wealth of the city, all based on its textiles industry. The ‘Manchester of Poland’ as it was once called, and as populous and productive as its English cousin at its peak in the 1930s. In 1939 Lodz had 750,000 inhabitants and the engine of this thriving city was a community of 200,000 Jews. Almost entirely eradicated. Of this original population (the second largest after Warsaw), Gilbert tells us that only a hundred Jews survive today.
We walk along these streets and try to imagine the emptiness here on the day after the ghetto was established – the first in Poland, created in February 1940. And then the even greater emptiness after the clearance of the ghetto in autumn 1944. The heart of the city simply gone. We do not really have the ability to understand such a thing. Or to imagine the twelve-year-old Simon Srebnik here surrounded by death: ‘All I’d seen was corpses … in the Lodz Ghetto I saw people take a step and fall dead. I thought that’s how things were, it was normal. I’d walk the streets of Lodz and in a hundred metres I’d see two hundred bodies.’