Niemen Vergessen...

Why is The White Hotel my favorite book? Because it seems to come close to allowing me to see the intensity of the Holocaust, seeing each individual as a whole world, as Nietzsche (ironically) said. This seems to be what the Austrian government has attempted with its “Letters to the Stars” project. 30,000 Austrian schoolchildren each chose one person who died in the Holocaust and wrote a letter to him or her after doing detailed research, and in many cases contact surviving family members. Each letter was tied to a while balloon and all the balloons were released at once. I am trying to put a link to the project down below but so far it doesn't work. Try it again in a couple of days if you are interested.

As I rode out to Mauthausen this morning, reading Tirzo de Molina’s play about Don Juan, dozing on and off, I tried to imagine being on a different sort of train from Vienna to Mauthausen, perhaps swelteringly hot, perhaps standing up, perhaps surrounded by loved ones, more likely alone. Over 200,000 went to Mauthausen this way. Is this kind of imagining fruitful? I don’t know. What other Holocausts are going on right now? Who is standing somewhere sweltering or shivering, watching someone they love die? I don’t know and I don’t have any answers. The entire trip was pretty surreal – blazing hot sun, light coming through the windows of the barracks, standing in the gas chamber, walking down the Stairway of Death, taking a ton of photos, meeting this guy called Jurgen who was from Linz and shared a taxi with me. I told him in my bad German that he should come over and travel around the US. He told me in his bad English that he had to improve his English first. The main word we used was “schlecht.”

Back on the train to Vienna, reading the Cambridge Opera Handbook, my feet up on the opposite seat in an air-conditioned compartment, watching the pretty countryside roll past, it’s almost impossible to believe in Mauthausen. I never understood that lack of belief before, and have often taken my faith in God for granted. Yet as I stood in a real gas chamber for the first time in my life I understood how my sister could be an atheist. Of course, I do continue to believe in a loving God and continue to attempt some kind of reconciliation of my belief with the ovens and places they did horrible experiments and the incredibly orderly way they ranked people. I suppose that’s also why I like The White Hotel, because it offers such a profound vision of some kind of justice at the end of everything – a justice I have to believe in or I would not have been able to stand there in the gas chamber.

In some ways the gift of Mauthausen to me today was the gift of that brief glimpse nihilism. It’s a hard vision to have but I intend to hold onto it if possible, never to forget. I came back and realized I hadn’t eaten anything all day and wanted to take about 80 showers. Jim called me to make sure I was okay and had me come up and sit on the roof and watch the full moon over Vienna, and he told me that he and Alan ordered different entrees at dinner tonight (I was laughing at them because they always order the same thing), and I laughed some more, and came down and watched ITALY win the World Cup in a penalty shootout.

I took a photo of the light coming into the barracks, and you might be able to see the chimney from the crematorium through the window. It’s kind of a companion photo to my artsy Venice picture with the light coming through from the Grand Canal. Is that pretentious or what? The landscape and the light were amazingly beautiful there.

Just look at that sky.