In Paradise: A Novel Read Online Free
Author: Peter Matthiessen
glimpsed from a poet’s oblique angle, some fleeting
apprehension
which might clarify, for example, the enigma of Borowski’s abrupt suicide at age twenty-eight, at the pinnacle of his celebrity and just three days after the birth of his first child to his longtime lover.
O N THIS FIRST MORNING a film documentary made by the liberating armies will be followed by a guided tour of this base camp, Auschwitz I; in the afternoon and for the next five days, all day in every weather, the retreatants will trek the long mile across the fields to the extermination camp KL Vernichtungslager Auschwitz II to offer prayer at its gas chambers and crematoria and all-day silent meditation on the long railway ramp known as “the selection platform.”
Although Professor Olin is not registered as a participant, he is experienced in meditation practice, and Ben Lama invites him to join the retreat schedule, coming and going as he pleases. This morning, he forgoes the screening on a strong instinct to confront the death camp all alone on this first day, undistracted by the dismay of others.
L EAVING A USCHWITZ I , he crosses the main railroad tracks, following directions to the outlying farmland community known as Brzezinka, “The Birches”—in German, Birkenau. Years before, Olin’s father had described to him this countryside he knew well as a boy and later as a young cavalry lieutenant, the army stables and broad pastures, the farms, orchards, and shaded lanes of its quaint hamlets. Not until 1940, as reported by Borowski, were those communities razed to create a buffer zone around the camp, with the inhabitants presumably resettled in the confiscated houses of the Jews.
Beyond the tracks, he follows an ice-puddled dirt road through the fields, along a ditch line of hard-cropped winter trees. In the distance, delicate as netting, high fences drift forth through a brownish fog. Soon the hazy outline of the main sentry tower thrusts up from a red wall of end-to-end brick buildings, slapped up in haste in 1942, Borowski wrote, by Russian prisoners from the eastern front before they perished of starvation. Below the tower, like the mouth of an ogre’s cave, an arched railway tunnel bores through the prison walls into the impoundment.
Uneasy, he enters by a broken gate and ventures through. Where the tunnel opens out into the camp, the railway splits into three tracks served by parallel ramps that separate two vast barbed-wired enclosures. Where these platforms draw to a point and end, pale ruins like immense mushrooms lie half-hidden in thin woods.
On the north side, in its own fenced compound possibly a mile across, stand the foundations of what is left of the small city of old stables used as barracks for male prisoners, long ramshackle sheds with black earth floors and missing slats and myriad chinks open to the weather. All but the sheds nearest the entrance had been burned down at war’s end by the Red Army, leaving a wasteland of charred chimneys like black stumps in the wake of forest fire.
Vast emptiness, terminal silence, under a gray overcast withholding snow. “Bearing witness”? Dear God. In the echo of such desolation, what more witness could be needed?
Vernichtungslager.
Extermination camp.
The name signified all by itself a mythic barbarism and depravity.
Could there be seasons in this place or is it always winter? He could be breathing the air of the Dark Ages.
Reading Borowski was Olin’s first exposure to the swarming scenes of terror on this platform, the howls of lost children running everywhere and nowhere “like wild dogs,” the young mother so frantic to be spared that she forsakes the little boy calling
Mama!
Mama!
who runs behind her (“Oh no, sir! He’s not mine!”), casting away the last of her humanity for a few more hours of excruciating life. Who could hear the despair of that child, the cries of all those children being stripped of their brief moment on this earth, without suffering this
apprehension
which might clarify, for example, the enigma of Borowski’s abrupt suicide at age twenty-eight, at the pinnacle of his celebrity and just three days after the birth of his first child to his longtime lover.
O N THIS FIRST MORNING a film documentary made by the liberating armies will be followed by a guided tour of this base camp, Auschwitz I; in the afternoon and for the next five days, all day in every weather, the retreatants will trek the long mile across the fields to the extermination camp KL Vernichtungslager Auschwitz II to offer prayer at its gas chambers and crematoria and all-day silent meditation on the long railway ramp known as “the selection platform.”
Although Professor Olin is not registered as a participant, he is experienced in meditation practice, and Ben Lama invites him to join the retreat schedule, coming and going as he pleases. This morning, he forgoes the screening on a strong instinct to confront the death camp all alone on this first day, undistracted by the dismay of others.
L EAVING A USCHWITZ I , he crosses the main railroad tracks, following directions to the outlying farmland community known as Brzezinka, “The Birches”—in German, Birkenau. Years before, Olin’s father had described to him this countryside he knew well as a boy and later as a young cavalry lieutenant, the army stables and broad pastures, the farms, orchards, and shaded lanes of its quaint hamlets. Not until 1940, as reported by Borowski, were those communities razed to create a buffer zone around the camp, with the inhabitants presumably resettled in the confiscated houses of the Jews.
Beyond the tracks, he follows an ice-puddled dirt road through the fields, along a ditch line of hard-cropped winter trees. In the distance, delicate as netting, high fences drift forth through a brownish fog. Soon the hazy outline of the main sentry tower thrusts up from a red wall of end-to-end brick buildings, slapped up in haste in 1942, Borowski wrote, by Russian prisoners from the eastern front before they perished of starvation. Below the tower, like the mouth of an ogre’s cave, an arched railway tunnel bores through the prison walls into the impoundment.
Uneasy, he enters by a broken gate and ventures through. Where the tunnel opens out into the camp, the railway splits into three tracks served by parallel ramps that separate two vast barbed-wired enclosures. Where these platforms draw to a point and end, pale ruins like immense mushrooms lie half-hidden in thin woods.
On the north side, in its own fenced compound possibly a mile across, stand the foundations of what is left of the small city of old stables used as barracks for male prisoners, long ramshackle sheds with black earth floors and missing slats and myriad chinks open to the weather. All but the sheds nearest the entrance had been burned down at war’s end by the Red Army, leaving a wasteland of charred chimneys like black stumps in the wake of forest fire.
Vast emptiness, terminal silence, under a gray overcast withholding snow. “Bearing witness”? Dear God. In the echo of such desolation, what more witness could be needed?
Vernichtungslager.
Extermination camp.
The name signified all by itself a mythic barbarism and depravity.
Could there be seasons in this place or is it always winter? He could be breathing the air of the Dark Ages.
Reading Borowski was Olin’s first exposure to the swarming scenes of terror on this platform, the howls of lost children running everywhere and nowhere “like wild dogs,” the young mother so frantic to be spared that she forsakes the little boy calling
Mama!
Mama!
who runs behind her (“Oh no, sir! He’s not mine!”), casting away the last of her humanity for a few more hours of excruciating life. Who could hear the despair of that child, the cries of all those children being stripped of their brief moment on this earth, without suffering this
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