An extract from Gabe, which has been coming along very well.

Sins

I’ve heard that it’s the same at every concentration camp: no birds fly over, there aren’t any insects and you can’t hear any traffic noise.  Dachau is the same as I remember it, cold and barren in every sense of the word.  The visitors tred softly.  Near the entrance is a bronze monument to the thousands that died here made of vaguely human shapes the same as those the prisoners were reduced to, taken down to the wicks.

“I can’t believe how quiet it is,” Tilley murmurs, taking my hand.  “Even the kids have shut up.”

We glance back to the bus alongside the cars parked a way away, the young teens hanging back to the bumper and watching the camp mutely.  They have clipboards under their arms and their coats flap in the wind.

I think everyone should see a concentration camp sometime in their life, but there’s got to be some sort of minimum age.  History books make the years and the figures dry and distant, so the kids aren’t prepared at all for when they get here and see the solid bricks and dirt paths of it.  The shower rooms.  The ovens.  This isn’t like any other school outing they’ll go on.  There’s nowhere for them to sit and eat their sandwiches, and they can’t smile in the photos with their friends.  It’s an oddness that most of the camp photos  taken by visitors are all without a subject, as if the image is just a record of the place and not an indication that they were actually there.

We walk, the ground crunching like rock salt and the loudest sound after our breathing and the wind pulling through gaps in the buildings.  Closer to the shower block we pause, standing still to take in the innocuous exterior.  I desperately want a cigarette but I don’t dare light one.  Just can’t smoke in the camp and I’d be at a loss for what to do with the dog end all day.

Tilley steps into my side, her coat rustling against mine.  “When were you last here?  This is the one you went to before, right?”

“Yeah, couple years after my folks died.  I came up after doing Munich.”

She nods.  “I remember you going to Munich.  Surprised you didn’t say anything about this.”

I shrug, twist my boot in the ground to raise a bow wave of tiny stones and dust that sits static about the sole when I stop.  “Not the sort of thing you just bring up and talk about over tea.  Besides, it wasn’t really relevant to what I was doing at the time.  Just a curious detour that ended up feeling more important than what I was writing at the time, which is why I don’t have a book on Neo Nazis out.”

“Can’t look at the Nazis without the holocaust,” she replies, reflecting my sentiments exactly.

A few seconds pass and when I speak again I walk us both forward, around the shower building to where we can see some of the countryside through the fence.  “It’s a weird thing though, when you talk about it with people now.  It’s like ‘no, we’ve talked about the holocaust.  We’ve done that.  What are your thoughts about the Middle East?’, but it’s not really like that.  That whole period has been studied and preached about so much that it’s become sacred in itself, and it’s like we’re not supposed to talk about it.  But we have to, because it’s about people.  It was a mixed pot of blacks, gays, the disabled and intellectuals that got trooped through here alongside the Jews, and it was people who carried it all out.  Everyone should see places like this so they can get a feel for what people can do, can really actually do, at their worst.  People will torture, maim and kill if you just give them an excuse.”

We stand for long minutes with nothing but the wind, me studying the buildings and Tilley studying the chest of her coat. 

She gets hold of my gaze.  “Gabe, I know that you research some pretty messed up stuff for a living.  Evil, terrible things sometimes, and I know it’s because it needs to be brought out into the public light.  But, don’t you ever feel that…  When you’re spending months getting the primary source material about whatever, do you ever start to see their point?  Start agreeing with it?”

I feel a pressure in my temples as I frown.  “You mean like brainwashing?”

Her orange hair flicks in tapers as she shakes her head, and I can almost hear the warning bleeps of her backtracking.  “No, I mean getting saturated by their way of thinking.”

“No.”  The answer seemed to come faster than she was expecting.  I step away a little and face her, needing her attention wholly because she needs to understand this.  If she can’t understand this, then she doesn’t understand me as well as I either of us had thought.  “With any research you do into so called ‘dark’ subject matter, you start finding symbols coming out: plugs at the end of steel wires that conduct the heat of the thing straight into you without getting bypassed by unbiased reasoning and cold logic.  With the holocaust it was this one photo.”

I can see it in my hands even though I haven’t looked at it in years, and I want Tilley to see it now with me as much as I don’t ever want her to.

“It’s this gaunt woman, easily getting onto eighty, with arms as wide as my wrists all the way up and she’s hunched and laboring, and behind her there’s this little girl.  Around seven or eight years old, filthy, and she’s wearing these huge workmen Wellington boots, and that photo just brings it all together for me.  How did we let the fuckers get away with this shit for so long?  We knew what Auschwitz was and where it was.  We could have flown over and bombed it, and harsh as it sounds, the people inside would have been worth it.”

I jab a hand out to the crumbling building, dimly aware to keep my voice down.

“The guy who blew up the shower blocks is one of my biggest fucking heroes.  To put it in short, Hitler was a cunt, the Nazis were cunts, and the notion of distilling the populous down to the strongest was a piss poor excuse.”

Tilley watches me and sucks her bottom lip.  Finally it comes out grey with the faint white lines of tooth imprints.  “Is that why you didn’t write the book in the end?  Because it all boiled down to, pretty much, those two sentences for you?”

Christ, I want that fag.  My hand feels coarse and frozen as I press the heel across my jaw.  I start us walking again, away from the showers and keeping to the perimeter fence.  “It was far too close to my folks going,” I reply eventually.  “When I looked at pictures of the bodies being piled high, I’d see them.  I’d see my dad’s boots in the piles of shoes.”

The ground crunches for eight more paces, then, “I’m sorry.”

I give her a sideway glance.  “Nothing to be sorry about.  Just, your parents dying is the big kicker.”  I snort and try not to grin.  “Hell, no bugger ever sat me down when I was a lad and told me that these people that I depended on and needed like we need our shadows to be here would just die on me one day, and no mention of the possibility of them both going at the same time.  They teach you bollocks about Oxbow lakes and erosion in school.  There should have been a class where you got told: ‘one day they’re going to die and leave you, and it’s a bitch but it’s not as bad as you think it’ll be, and life will go on.  Before you realise that, though, you’ll spend a long time wanting to die.’  No one warns anyone about that.”

Tilley nods, not looking at me.  “Up until a few years ago, I used to hope that I’d die before them.  Just dodge the whole ordeal.  It’s selfish, but, just felt easier.”

We stop again and I watch her, suddenly feeling that maybe I understand her a bit better than I thought.  Same goes for her, I think.

She squints and shoves her hands into her pockets.  “You wanna get out of here for a bit?  Take a few hours off and come back?”

“Yeah.  I’m getting hungry and I don’t reckon they’ll have built a café here just yet.”

A single raised brow, thoughtful.  “Or a gift shop.”

“What would they sell?”

“Honestly, I shudder to think.”

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 3rd, 2008 at 1:59 pm and is filed under Short Stories. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.