She glances at the photo, and the pilot light of memory flickers in her eyes. ~ Frank Deford
My father is 14 or 15 in the photo, posing with the big band he helped organize in high school. He wears two-tone saddle shoes, neatly tied. They look new. The photo has been hanging on my family picture wall for 15 years waiting for me to really look at it. I finally did.
In any old picture, the first thing I notice is the shoes. They hint at normal life, intimate suggestions of routine and circumstance. As I study his picture, I imagine him tying them on that morning, and wonder what was going on in those minutes: was he bickering with his sisters; what breakfast smells wafted upstairs; what was on his mind?
His eager and confident face hitches my heart. He has no idea that he is almost halfway through his life already, or that he will find a great love and have a child. Or that he will die suddenly and not be able to finish what he started.
It was around 1930 then. The Depression was two years old. Across the world in Germany, where his family originally came from, Adolf Hitler was winding up ten years of speech-making, positioning himself to head the Nazi party. My father doesn’t know about that either, sitting there holding his saxophone.
*****
I climbed down off the bus into a busy parking lot lined with busses. Leaves crunched underfoot. It was a cloudy October day toward the end of our tour of Central and Eastern Europe. We waited behind a group of children chattering as they trailed their teachers though the gate. They quieted as they put on the hearing devices their docent handed out, and filed out the back door, leaving room for us. Auschwitz was a busy place.
Our docent was Magda, a compact blonde woman with a lined face and matter-of-fact manner. She must have been a child in the era she would tell us about, if she’d been born at all. She led us under a gate with a sign proclaiming, “Arbeit macht frei,” which translates “Work sets you free” or “Work brings freedom.” This cruel and ironic legend was used at the entrances of all the Nazi camps except one. It seemed to promise the Poles, Jews, gypsies, handicapped and others who the Nazis determined to eliminate that there would be a way out.
*****
The next picture on my wall shows some of my husband’s ancestors, captured in a formal family tableau, wife seated, husband beside her, adult children and their offspring lined up stiffly on either side.
The seated woman is Seraphina Studer Ruder, whom my daughter discovered when she did a family history project in middle school. Next to her is Fridolin, her husband. The names that bring smiles to our lips didn’t seem to cheer them up any. They both look pretty grim.
They’d left Germany in 1855, missing Hitler by 34 years, to settle in a German Catholic enclave in the middle of Illinois, and set themselves to farming. They posed for this picture about the time Hitler was denied entrance into art school in Vienna, for the third time. Had they stayed, would their children and grandchildren have been drawn into Hitler’s plans? If he’d been accepted into art school, would there have been any plans?
Hints about their lives jump at me. Their chairs rest on a rumpled shag rug. Her shoes, partly hidden by the nap, are petite and worn. His are dress shoes, well-used and scuffed. That morning for the picture, I imagine they put on the best they had, knowing they were laying down a record for those of us who would follow. It must have been a hard life with little leisure, in flat farmland that must have compared poorly to the hills and mountains of their youth.
*****
Magda led us to a long row of tidy red brick barracks, with a guard tower at the end of the road. Barbed wire ringed the area. She explained that the barracks had been built several years before the war for the Polish military, but turned out to be tailor-made for the Nazis’ purposes. Some buildings housed small numbers of SS troops, others crammed in hundreds of prisoners. We entered the first building, noting the terrazzo steps worn down in the middle by thousands of feet.
Large black and white photos hung on the walls, illustrating Magda’s talk. They captured the arrival of families, who stood together in ragged lines, children clinging to their parents’ knees. Their clothes are mussed, their shoes dusty, their faces grimy. None of them knows what is ahead, that soon they would be separated, men from women, children from mothers. Their faces are stunned and unknowing; exhausted people who couldn’t imagine the unimaginable.
We are told that the photos were taken in secret by two SS officers. Their motivation is unknown. I prefer to think that they were moved to preserve proof of what they couldn’t stop. Their action allows the 1.3 million people who visit each year to better take in what happened here. Without the photos, it would be impossible to believe.
We climbed the steps to the second floor of the barracks. Magda explained how prisoners were herded from here to the basement and told that finally they would have a shower. They were told to leave their suitcases and remove their glasses, clothing, and shoes to retrieve after they’d bathed.
Once the “shower room” door was locked, primitive gas canisters were dropped through chutes in the ceiling and minutes later, all were dead. Their bodies were transported to the end of the row of barracks to the new crematorium, by Jewish prisoners who were spared in order to carry out this duty. Back in the barracks, belongings were gathered up and stockpiled.
She led us to a series of large rooms. Lights were low. On each side was a huge glassed-in case, floor to ceiling. The first was filled with suitcases carefully labeled with name and address as if they would be needed again. Thousands of wire-rimmed glasses filled another.
Behind the glass in the next room sat an enormous pile of shoes, everyday necessities turned into horrific trophies. No one spoke in the room.
We came next to the children’s window that held toys and baby blankets, and a mountain of kids’ shoes, turned every which way as if scattered at the front door after school. To look at one pair was to imagine its owner, so we looked away. We filed by, eyes brimming.
The last pictures were of the liberation of Auschwitz in March 1945. Many Nazis had fled by then, marching hundreds of prisoners into the countryside. Soviet liberators ushered emaciated survivors in striped uniforms down the path we had just walked on. Some prisoners looked directly at the camera. Had they dared to expect this?
*****
On my wall, the post-war pictures begin. In a four-generation snapshot, my toddler husband sits on the lap of Fridolin and Seraphina’s son, his Buster Browns dangling. Parallel pictures from our two families stand side by side, showing two ex-soldiers, glad to be back to normal life, neither knowing what is to come.
My husbands’ parents laugh, barefoot at a well pump, holding him high. Sixty-some years later, they still laugh together. Mine lean into each other, dressed for a night on the town. My mom wears a sophisticated career girl ensemble and high heels, my dad a business suit, all shine and polish. I would be along in a year or two, and he would be gone a couple of years after that.
Whether caught up in waves of history, or in private tragedies, it is just as well that we can’t tell what is coming. But it is a gift when we have pictures to hold the moments still where we can visit them, for remembering or trying to understand.
CBH 11/11
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