In a small bookshop just off the main street, we buy maps and books on the Lodz Ghetto (there’s nothing on Chelmno), and the proprietor draws a map of where to find the tourist office. There an extremely enthusiastic young couple try to help us. We explain the nature of our historical research. Not many travellers come to this city, certainly not in January, and fewer still visit Chelmno by public transport. Maps are examined, phone directories consulted. There isn’t anywhere to stay in Chelmno itself and there are no official hotels even in Koło, the nearest town, but after a while they manage to find a room above a restaurant there. And there’s a bus that leaves in an hour. We talk to this couple about their background, both are history graduates, and ask them how much Lodz commemorates its Jewish past. Only in the last few years has an effort really been made. There is a ghetto archive office and a small museum now that can be visited – if we were here for longer they could arrange for it to be opened for us. There will also be commemorations in summer 2005 for the sixtieth anniversary of the end of the war. On the way back to our hotel to pick up our bags we notice that in the pedestrianised section in the centre of the main street there are tens of thousands of small paving stones, all with names on them. Presumably commemorating the war dead, but it would be interesting to know how many of the stones record those 200,000 Jewish citizens of Lodz.
As we leave the city, the deranged figure of Rumkowski, ‘King Chaim’ as many Jews in the ghetto sarcastically referred to him, still echoes in our minds, together with the mocking ghost memory of hooves on the Lodz cobbles – Rumkowski in his rickety wooden carriage pulled by a skeletal horse, surrounded by his ‘police’. This image of his collusion with Nazism – simultaneously absurd and horrifying. Yet, once again, the urge to simply condemn seems shallow. We are still unable to fully understand the moral morass that the Nazi occupying powers dragged the Jewish authorities into – using a corrupted concept of ‘ghetto autonomy’ which began by stressing survival through employment and ended up with getting the Jewish authorities to organise the transports of their own people to the extermination camps. I remember how Primo Levi ends his reflection on ‘The Grey Zone’, with those haunting words about Rumkowski, warning us not to think we would behave so very differently:
We are all mirrored in Rumkowski, his ambiguity is ours, it is our second nature … as … described by Isabella in Measure for Measure, the Man who, ‘dressed in a little brief authority, most ignorant of what he’s most assured … plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven as make the angels weep.’ Like Rumkowski, we too are so dazzled by power and prestige as to forget our essential fragility: willingly or not we come to terms with power, forgetting that we are all in the ghetto, that the ghetto is walled in, that outside the ghetto reign the lords of death and that close by the train is waiting.
*
Soon we’re sitting at the back of a bus heading out of Lodz to the north-west, and reading Martin Gilbert again, our companion on this long journey. Flat lands fringed by lines of willows. Here and there a barn, a farm. All the towns and villages we pass through over the next hour were once primarily Jewish communities – Zgierz (5,000 Jews killed in the first months of the war), Orzoków (more than 2,500 Jews gassed at Chelmno), Łęczyca (all 1,700 Jews gassed at Chelmno in April 1942), Dąbie (all 975 Jews of this village were driven to Chelmno and gassed in the Saurer trucks on 14 December 1941, a week after the first killings there). Looking at the map, an image of a vast inverted funnel of killing comes into our minds – with Lodz at the widest point, to the south-east, and then all the intermediate towns and villages further north and west being channelled towards the narrow point of the settlement of Chelmno.
As the bus stops in the little square of Grabow I have a strange feeling that I’ve seen this place before. Later I remember that it was here that Lanzmann recorded his interview with an elderly Polish couple:
‘Barbara, tell this couple they live in a lovely house. Do they agree? Do they think it’s a lovely house?’
‘Yes.’
‘Tell me about the decoration of this house, the doors. What does it mean?’
‘People used to do carvings like that.’
‘Did they decorate it that way?’
‘No, it was the Jews again. The door’s a good century old.’
‘Did Jews own this house?’
‘Yes, all these houses.’
Dusk approaches and so too does the village of Chelmno, seventeen years after first seeing it in Shoah. On our left the bulbous spire of the church comes into view, a dip, and then, that must be the place, just there. The site of the old castle, where the people were put into the gaswagen. It’s gone in a couple of seconds as we drive by – it looks quite unremarkable, like a disused car park, with some gates and a prefab building at the front. There doesn’t appear to be any memorial at all here. We’ll return tomorrow. The bus drives on, through the forest of Rzuchów and finally we arrive in Koło. Some ten-storey blocks of flats on the edge of town, but the centre is older. And obviously completely off any tourist route. As we get out of the bus gaggles of teenagers giggle and point at the two backpackers, amazed that anyone would visit their parochial town.
We eventually find our restaurant, run by a neat, middle-aged woman, slightly nervous, and her teenage son, who shows us to a room on the floor above. It’s a semi-official place, there are several rooms up here, and a single shower at the end of the corridor. But the room’s more like somebody’s apartment than a hotel room; at one end there’s a long dining table, there are heavy glass cabinets on two sides and twin beds. The boy, who speaks more English, confirms that we can eat there later on and also books us a taxi for 6.45 tomorrow morning. We’ve realised the only way we can visit Chelmno properly, walk to the Rzuchów forest and still make it to Konin by midday to catch our Berlin train, is by using taxis.
Again a sense of running against the clock, making use of every hour we have left. I’m still feeling pretty lousy but the adrenaline is taking over now. Why don’t we try to walk to Powiercie this evening before supper? This was the original arrival point for Jews and Roma during the first phase of Chelmno’s existence as a centre of extermination from 1941 to 1942, before the railway link, which today no longer exists, was built from Koło to Chelmno village. It’s only about two kilometres out of town to the south-east.
*
Of all the sites of the Holocaust, Chelmno is the one that poses the greatest challenge to our understanding. The fact that the most detailed publication available on Chelmno, by Manfred Struck, is called Chelmno/Kulmhof: Ein vergessener Ort des Holocaust? (Chelmno: A Forgotten Site of the Holocaust?) is itself revealing. As is the fact that there is still no English translation of this work twenty years after its publication. So, over the next hours, J. and I try to piece together what we can about how this Vernichtungslager actually worked. The complex reality is that what is called ‘Chelmno extermination camp’ did not exist only at that geographical location, Chelmno village – but rather operated over three distinct sites, nine kilometres apart, as can be seen in the map opposite:
The complexity of operations at Chelmno has defeated many historians – perhaps because it’s only by coming to this place, by walking between the sites, that you can understand how all the aspects fit together. Our guide for so much of this trip has been somebody with an almost encyclopedic knowledge of the Holocaust – Professor Martin Gilbert, yet even he seems to stumble when he reaches Chelmno. He writes the following in Holocaust Journey, which J. and I are confused about: ‘Chelmno. This is the village from which the camp got its name, though the camp itself is just over six kilometers to the north-west. At a later point in the history of the camp, when it was re-opened for one month in 1944, the deportees were held here in Chelmno, in the local and somewhat dilapidated castle.’