“It’s just really fucked up to think about being in that exact place, you know? With the same dirt and air and leaves and buildings and molecules and whatever. I’m just anticipating never wanting to wear these clothes again.” Jamie is wearing her forest green tracksuit today, and Jessica is wearing a powder blue one, and this, from the stricken looks on their faces, is not something that had occurred to either one of them. Shayna thinks about offering to take a thus soiled tracksuit off Jamie’s hands.
They go back to their rooms one last time, and Shayna grabs her backpack, holding out hope that her journal will prove a viable commodity once she’s there (though she can’t yet rightfully consider it “her” journal. It’s just “the” journal, “a” journal, someone’s journal, it doesn’t matter whose, and since it’s fucking blank couldn’t be distinguished anyhow), that today’s the day her very being cracks wide open and spills over for sorting through.
She swallows two of Jamie’s Zolofts with water from the tap on her way out, and instantly feels fortified and capable of dealing. The third, she figures, she’ll pop on the way back.
Outside, before they get on the bus, Jonah orders them to take off their standard-issue Living windbreakers.
The cold is different, somehow, from the cold at home. Colder. The wind whistles, the sky flat and endless. A few kids comply and stand shivering; most hesitate and look at their shoes.
“Do you want to feel what they felt?” Jonah barks, pacing. “Do you want to begin to understand what it was like to have to leave everything and everyone you love and be cold and alone and not say good-bye and never come back?”
“No thanks,” Heather whispers.
Sonja the survivor stands along the edge of the group, looking absent but resolved, her name tag still, rightfully, proclaiming her aliveness.
Then Darcey starts crying again, and Rabbi Amy goes over and hugs her and explains that it’s okay, that she doesn’t really have to take off her jacket, that it’s just an exercise, that we can empathize without necessarily going through the exact same things.
But Jonah stares them all down as if it’s a dare. After a few minutes they go ahead and board the bus.
As they drive, Shayna sees the wooden railroad tracks all overgrown with grass and weeds, racing alongside the bus. She reaches for the journal, some fragment germinating about these juxtaposed, parallel methods of transport, about the busload of windbreakered Living on their voluntary way alongside crumbled train tracks to the death camp, but she vetoes it as soon as that now-familiar hovering pen-shadow appears over the white page. They’re on their way to Auschwitz, idiot! Genocide, Holocaust, Hitler, Jewish History, Continuity. These are words that begin with capital letters, for fuck’s sake. The stakes grew ever higher, and the fact that the journal was still empty meant that the opener needed to be especially brilliant. Lowercase thoughts — train tracks! — would not do.
Max had written a poem on the way to Auschwitz. “So Many Lives,” it was called. “So very many lives were lost / of them all what is the cost?” it had begun. It was beautiful. He’d read it aloud to Shayna and their parents upon his return, and everyone thought that he should seriously publish it.
At the entrance is a sign in several languages. Before she locates the English, Shayna half expects to see a height minimum, like for a roller coaster. “The place you are about to enter,” it begins, “is a site of extreme terror.” Shayna finds it nuts that people might not know where they were. Like after being forewarned in this manner someone might go, “You know what? I’m not really up for extreme terror today. Why don’t we go check out some kiddie rides somewhere instead?” Zoe, Aaron, and Rose-Ling snap picures of this sign. Jessica and Ari ask Jamie to take one of them together. “Move over that way,” she tells them, shuffling her hand to the left. “Your head is blocking the words.”
They pass by the double rows of barbed wire and under Arbeit Macht Frei. She’s seen pictures of this gate; it’s famous. It reminds her of the new mall promenade in downtown Philadelphia, which also has pretty wrought-iron arches.
“Shopping makes you free,” her dad always says whenever they go there.
The parking lot is a mess of tour buses, and there is, indeed, a snack bar. The place is hopping. Vibrant, even. Shayna feels around for any feeling at all. It’s actually not unlike the time she made out with Michael Rand in the tenth grade. She’d been way behind all her friends in getting that far, and had spent the entire nine minutes of her interlude with Michael thinking, alternately, I can’t believe this is happening, and Oh my God I’m making out with Michael Rand, and This is actually happening right now, and Allie says it feels like Jell-O and it’s true! So when Allie had asked how it was, Shayna found that she had no fucking idea how it was, and could only answer that, well, it was .
Darcey is holding on to Rabbi Amy’s hand, hanging on by a thread. And sure enough, the minute they set foot into the first barracks/museum, she’s sobbing.
“Did she not see the sign?” Heather whispers.
In the barracks are photos and basic information about when, how many, who, and so forth. Stuff Shayna knows in her sleep.
Everyone is paired up instantly. Jessica is clutching Ari, Jamie is holding on to Robbie, and Rose-Ling has laid claim to Aaron Weiner, who Heather claims is totally loaded. Jonah, looking smug and magnanimous, has adopted Zoe, and leads her around by the shoulders, there there-ing now and again.
The next barracks talk about arrival and registration, about examinations, about turning right or turning left, about life in the camps. This is more stuff Shayna knows all about, could recite from memory, and mostly she’s distracted by what she’ll write in the journal. She tries to let something penetrate, but really all she feels is nervous about facing the journal later with nothing whatsoever to say.
There is a promising twist in her stomach when she gets to the photo of the Auschwitz Orchestra. It surprises her; it’s actually one she’s never seen before. The thought of endeavoring to make music here. It’s so sudden and — Yes! Woohoo! — intense that she almost reaches for Heather, but doesn’t, just in time. When the feeling passes she’s sort of glad not to have succumbed to the dominant impulse, the compulsory crying and hand-holding.
Upstairs is a room full of gray hair. This is what goes through Shayna’s head: a roomful of hair, a roomful of hair. She waits patiently for the image to sink in and for some profundity to follow it, but none does. Max had written about wanting to throw up in this room. Jamie buries her head in Robbie’s shoulder, Rose-Ling holds her hands over her face, and Jessica leans into Ari with all her weight. There are only the sounds of sniffling and sighing and breathing (which all Living must, after all), in-tandem footsteps. Sonja explains that all the hair is gray because it had been shaved after people were gassed, and the gas changed the color. Shayna catches sight of a long gray braid, winding its way through piles and piles of yet more hair. It is the second thing to catch her by surprise today. It’s like a punch in the gut, and she holds on to the wall, dizzy. This, though unpleasant, is also exhilarating, as it’s an actual, organic, vomitous experience, all her own. Never before has she heard or read accounts of a long gray braid, shaved off a dead girl’s head after she’d been gassed. What color had it been? Was it there for Shayna to see and for Shayna alone?
In another room are piles of prosthetics and crutches and things. It smells like burning plastic, just as Max had promised it would. The roomful of shoes also smells, though Shayna takes issue, now that she herself is here, with Max’s assessment of the smell as armpit. The smell is simply dank, fungal feet, any idiot could tell that much.