In Paradise: A Novel Read Online Free PDF

ears of mostly Jewish listeners.
    The agonized sound of the ram’s horn blown before and after Kaddish is man’s last cry of protest against his fate, a glum American rabbi called James Glock instructs them. Of all sounds, the shofar is the loneliest, says Rabbi Glock. It is the voice of the living calling out prayer across the void to the nameless, numberless dead who do not answer. In Olin’s mind, it awakens a memory of a huge pumpkin collapsing in upon itself in an October field in the New England dusk, a sight that had struck him in boyhood as the loneliest thing he’d ever seen.
    Above the Wall, thin black branches of the naked birches flail the gray overcast like exposed nerves. “You too?” a young Frenchman whispers, noticing Olin’s fixed expression. “This accursed air? We breathe in,
n’est-ce pas
? But nothing is coming out.” Olin nods politely. He has no comfort to offer.

    A USCHWITZ I , with its upstairs museum, is all most visitors, descending for a quick half day from their round-trip charter bus from Cracow, might feel inclined to see; he imagines them reeling back aboard, undone by so much evidence of huge cold crimes. But Ben Lama’s would-be witness bearers are no tourists, and neither are they Holocaust voyeurs come to indulge a morbid curiosity; most seem to be here on painful missions incompletely understood, by themselves perhaps least of all. By the look of them, some must have sacrificed savings and vacations to travel here from other countries. Many had relatives among the victims, Ben Lama says; others are stricken descendants of the “perpetrators.” One shocked woman has collapsed and must be helped back to her room, but she soon sends word that she intends to see this through: she will not retreat to Cracow and fly home.
    “That’s the choice,” Ben Lama comments publicly at the noon meal. “We pass through quickly, sickened and depressed, or we stay for days and sit with it in meditation; we immerse ourselves and are transformed—” Here he stops short, grinning sheepishly as the wave of his own rhetoric overtakes him. “Anyway,” he smiles, “that’s our game plan for the next few days.”
    Olin trusts this man’s wry tone and absence of pretension. Respecting the good intentions of the others, he resolves to suppress a wince at sentimental rubbish about “closure” and “healing” and “confronting the Nazi within,” or when this gathering is referred to as a “spiritual retreat”: what “spiritual” business can these people have here? What transcendence do they aspire to, hope to attain? (And come to that, how “spiritual” had many of the victims been before their martyrdom? Surely a few in every transport had been cruel greedy bastards, never much missed at home.)
    As for “bearing witness,” the term strikes his ear as anachronistic and over-earnest. Excepting the few elderly survivors among them, what meaningful witness can any of them bear so many years after the fact? Witness to
what
, exactly? The emptiness? That silence? What can they hope to offer besides prayer in belated atonement for the guilt of absence, of having failed to share in unimaginable sufferings? Or hope to experience in this dead place beyond unearned gratification of shallow spiritual ambition? Their mission here, however well-intended, is little more than a wave of parting to a ghostly horror already withdrawing into myth.
    Not that he questions their sincerity. But who among them, Clements Olin included, has truly understood the conclusion of Borowski, Primo Levi, and others: that no one in the death camps, not even the victims, was wholly innocent of what was perpetrated here or wholly different from the perpetrators? Hadn’t all participants been compromised if only as members of a species capable of such cruelty? Perhaps only the occupants of those small shoes had died unstained.
    So even if these companions witness truly, what could “truly” mean? Spreading word of