the fires within : At a Nazi Concentration Camp, a Writer Confronts His Own Darkness-and Finds the Tools to Transform the Forces That Can Destroy a Community, or Numb the Human Heart

Ladybug, ladybug, Fly away home, Your house is on fire, Your children will burn. *

When I was a child, I sang this version of the nursery rhyme. It always frightened me to think of the last two lines. I used to imagine the terror in the poor ladybug’s heart. I used to picture her fleeing through the air, more lightning bug or firefly than ladybug, to save her children from the deadly flames. Any parent would certainly do the same. Anyone , for that matter, would do whatever was needed to put out the fire. Wouldn’t they?

But what about fires of a more subtle nature? Not less deadly, you understand, but more invisible at first, because they are more everyday and familiar. What about the low-level fires that burn constantly and quietly in the human heart, creating a continuity of background tension in our community, the ones that only flare up when personal and social conditions intensify the fuel load and people begin to burn from the inside out until we have the kind of flash-point fires we have witnessed in the hills and streets of our community? What about the fires that help kindle these explosions? Will we do what must be done to understand them and put them out? Or will we continue to turn from them, denying that they exist, or what is more common, justify them, giving all sorts of reasons why they are good fires, deserved fires, righteous fires, moral fires, our fires?

Of course, I am talking symbolically about the fires of suspicion, fear, hatred, misunderstanding and the belief that people we perceive as not like ourselves are somehow essentially other and therefore worthy of being seen in the distorted and distorting lightof these embers that threaten to consume us. Which is exactly what will happen if we do not look deeply at ourselves and transform these hot spots from the blindness of their heat to the potential of their light very soon. For we are a city on fire--a city where armed response proliferates in the neighborhoods of rich and poor alike, where the persistent contrast of privilege and neglect has created enough friction to whip the flames of hopelessness, frustration and rage into the twisted cycle of action and revenge.

It is not easy to talk this way. It is not pleasant to imagine we live in a city composed of volatile human embers that burn away largely unnoticed in the deep unconscious of our personal and collective mind. And it is especially uncomfortable to admit that we are part of that burning. It is threatening to our sense of who we believe ourselves to be. We are, in the main, good people after all. But when we dare to embrace the reality that we, in our most intimate feelings and thoughts, often burn in exactly this way, we have already done something constructive to help abate the potential rage of these fires. Our awareness is, then, a kind of controlled burn that transforms the raw energy of misunderstood and unexamined emotions into the energy for constructive action and hope.

And it only takes repositioning the finger that we so readily point at others and shifting our attention and awareness to ourselves for this transformation to begin. When we make this small but potent effort with the courage to know what we human beings are personally capable of in both creative and destructive ways, we take the first action needed to set these fires to rest. Or better yet, harness the fuel load they depend upon for their lives and put it to use for the benefit of others and ourselves. For when we look with care at our own unexplored, fear-driven suspicions and hatreds and how we project these onto the blank, faceless screens we have made of people we perceive as other , we unleash this potential and create the ability to be free of our own blindness. And the most beneficial way to approach this is with an attitude of inquiry and nonaggression toward ourselves--for we are not seeking to blame but to build a foundation of understanding and change.

I KNOW WE ARE CAPABLE OF DOING THIS BECAUSE OF WHAT HAPPENED to me as I stood in the remains of the concentration camp called Mauthausen in upper Austria. In 1990, I had been traveling through Europe on a writing grant and suddenly became possessed with the idea that I had to go where I most did not want to go and see what I most feared and had avoided thus far in my journey. (The process of looking deeply at oneself is often exactly like this.) I would go to the site of a Nazi concentration camp and witness one of the places where humans have enacted some of their worst crimes against other humans. Notice, even now as I write this, how I say humans and their. Even now, knowing what I know, I want to be safe. I want those who conceive and commit such atrocities as were enacted within the walls of the Nazi camps to be someone clearly and essentially other than myself. This need, which holds hope in its fist, dies hard.

At the time, I didn’t really have a clear understanding of the suddenness of my decision to go, but I do know this: Often the complexly generous depths of our psyche create the conditions in which we will ask exactly the right question of ourselves so that we may listen to the answer and grow. And then, perhaps it was also something stubborn, unheroic and ironic in me remembering that not so long ago many people in Europe didn’t get to decide whether or not to go to a concentration camp. Maybe that’s why I had to go now.

I knew the name, Mauthausen, and my hands trembled as I opened the map to the index to find out how to get there, because I couldn’t believe I was actually going to see the word: Mauthausen. Mauthausen, Dachau, Auschwitz, Birkenau, Bergen-Belsen. I don’t even know how I came to know these names so well, but I’ve known them since I was a child and could repeat them like a rosary. I looked down through the M’s until there it was, and I was stunned to see it listed like any other city or town. But this was all wrong. It should have an asterisk beside it. It should be underlined, or marked in bold letters, or capitals, or it should take up a whole page by itself. Because that’s how large the word was in my mind. But it just said, Mauthausen, Page 178, E-5. The route led across Germany into Austria, near the town of Linz. If I hurried, I could be there in five hours. I noted the irony of a Jew speeding to get to a concentration camp before it closes and headed for the autobahn in the Volvo I borrowed from a friend whose family fled the Nazi hunt.

But, the drive didn’t prove to be that easy. For one thing, I found myself scanning the radio dial, looking for something familiar, but all I heard were programs in German. It didn’t surprise me that this was so; after all, I was in Germany. But perhaps the knowledge that I was going to visit a concentration camp did kick into gear a certain fear and unconscious predisposition within me--fed by a lifetime of personal and societal images and messages created by media, attitudes picked up from adults in my postwar childhood, the manner in which I was taught to think about the German people in my early education, etc.--to dislike the sound of the language. Yes, the sound of German itself triggers a preconditioned flood of distaste for its tone, its nuance. (A German friend in Berlin, born in the 1950s, once told me tearfully that when she traveled abroad, all she had to do was begin to speak, and the cold shroud of ostracism and dislike would begin in the strangers around her.) Here I am, a poet, finding the language of Goethe, Rilke, Kafka nothing more than a series of arrogant barks and derisive-sounding insinuations.

Again, I didin’t understand the content of the sentences I heard, but the lid on the box of some deep-seated conditioning of suspicion and fear had been lifted, and I fell almost into a trance as I noticed that even the laughter of the broadcasters seemed to threaten me in some way I couldn’t quite grasp. Magically, I found a show playing Gershwin and Cole Porter tunes, and with a certain relief I began to sing along until it struck me that since these composers were a Jew and a homosexual, there was even a bitter irony to be found right here.

As I drove at an enormous speed across the German countryside, I noticed two other things that were very disturbing. The first is that there were no bilboards advertising the camp. I know that a concentration camp isn’t a tourist attraction, it isn’t Disneyland or Knott’s Berry Farm, and I could have hardly expected to see a sign saying MAUTHAUSEN--SITE OF NAZI ATROCITIES--300 KILOMETERS AHEAD, but the fact that it wasn’t emphasized on the map, and now this lack of signs, made me wonder if there wasn’t an unconscious or subtle conspiracy to hide it. And then there’s this: As I drove hour after hour past the thousands and thousands of trees that line the spotless roads of Germany and continued on across the border into Austria, passing the checkpoint with a slight but noticeable flutter of the heart, I found myself descending into a clouded pattern of thinking that these are German, and then Austrian, trees. I am someone who spends a great deal of time enjoying the beauty and sanctity of trees wherever I travel, but here I found them curiously ominous as I realized that during the war I wouldn’t have been able to hide safely behind one of them.

When I arrived at the outskirts of the town of Mauthausen, I saw a towering smokestack in the distance, and I thought, “There’s the place. It’s the crematorium.” I felt grim but strangely relieved that it had been left so exposed and that I wouldn’t have to ask directions to the camp. So I drove through the town directly to the smokestack, which lies just alongside a railroad track--images of cattle cars of human beings raced through my mind when I saw the tracks--and discovered it wasn’t the concentration camp after all, but an abandoned mill. I couldn’t believe my eyes and was disappointed in some crazy way, because it didn’t match my imagination of what the place was going to be.

So then I had to figure out where it was, or how to find it, and I drove around and around the town, making a point to look again at the smokestack and the railroad tracks, until I had to confront the next horror, which was: Just how do you ask someone, “Excuse me, where’s the concentration camp?” And whom do you ask? For example, should I ask the old people I saw on the streets? And would they be the same people who had been there during the war? How would I feel then, talking to them? Because, to my surprise, I felt this combination of shame and embarrassment that I wanted to see the concentration camp and, at the same time, a deep conviction that I must see the camp, that we should all see it so that we can work to build a world that excludes the kind of ignorance and hatred and fear and brutality that led to the construction of the camps in the first place.

And so I drove around until I got the courage to ask just anyone. But it was like a first date, where you drive up and then you leave, and you drive up and then you leave again because you’re just so nervous about the final confrontation. Finally, I pulled over to the side of a road, went into a store and, since I had no German, which made me pre-verbal and vulnerable, like a very young child, but at the same time animal-like and alert, so that my eyes and ears became more keen to nuance, I practiced what I was going to say. I had been told that the symbol for concentration camp was KZ.

Inside the store I saw a man of about 35, a woman and two children. The woman was combing the long brown hair of one of the girls and the other girl was staring at me as I came toward them and said, in my minuscule German, “ Bitte. Wo ist der KZ ?” I could hardly get the words out of my mouth. But this young man said, in English and out loud, “You want ze Conzentration Camp?” and I hated him, because he could say it and I couldn’t. And the fact that he could say it made him seem callous in my eyes, because how can you even say it? How can you say concentration camp ? There shouldn’t even be such words.

When I arrived at the camp, I stopped to pick up a brochure at the gate and began to walk around. This is the camp, I told myself. I’m walking on the ground where more than 200,000 people were incarcerated by the brutality of human ignorance, many of them dying as they were forced to hammer out the rocks from the rock quarry, carry them up the 186 steps--called the Death Steps because thousands of prisoners were shot here--and build the walls of the camp around themselves. I walked across the roll-call ground where prisoners were gathered and public executions were carried out and went over to the walls to touch the stones, almost as if I was trying to feel the human heat of the prisoners, their bodies, still coming through, to help the reality of the camp become substantial in my mind. Though that was not long in coming.

As I stood on the cliff overlooking the rock quarry itself, the cliff nicknamed Parachutists Cliff by the SS guards because it was from these heights that prisoners were frequently thrown over the steep face of the quarry walls, I heard a man’s voice shouting “ Komm! Komm! Schnell! Schnell! “ A moment of sheer instinctive terror passed through me as I looked up to see a man running toward me. And behind him was an 8- or 9-year-old boy. They were dressed in identical uniforms for jogging and were heading for the treacherous task of running down the notorious 186 steps. The father was urging the son on. His voice sounded suspiciously cold and militaristic to my ears. “Do they know where they are?” I thought. “Do they know where they are jogging? How can they not know where they are ?” I twisted inside myself with anger and hurt.

I walked back to the main area, taking it all in, and as I made my way through the different barracks, the guard’s quarters, the execution corner, the gas chamber that had been disguised as a shower room, the crematorium, something started to happen to me. I began to change. I started talking to myself and tried to walk up the sides of the walls, kicking them with the pain I felt as I heard my own voice in narration. “Yes, this is where they slept two and three to a bed, hundreds to a room. This is where they were hung by rings and beaten with chains during interrogation.” And then I’d kick the walls.

I discovered in the literature available at the gate that there was one particular barracks where the Jews were sent. Most of the barracks were torn down after the Americans liberated the camp in May of 1945, but the layout I saw was just as it had been, and the rectangular cement foundations were still there. It was with a very grim and almost trance-like clarity that I thought, “I’m going to take my place. I’m going to go where I had to go. I’m going to stand where I had to stand. I’m going to sit where I had to sit and lie down where I had to lie down. I’m going to join my people in a way that I’ve never joined my people before.”

I walked very slowly what felt like back to my barracks, even though I knew I was going there for the first time. I climbed onto the rectangle of the foundation and began to walk within its confines and look around. I knew that no matter how deeply I tried to imagine the life I might have had there as a prisoner, I couldn’t, and I felt grateful for that. Just behind the barracks for Jewish prisoners stood one of the guard towers, with its gun mounts still intact, and there was a barbed-wire fence that had carried high voltage connected to the stone wall of the tower. I imagined I could see threads of cloth or human skin still attached to the twisted knots of wire in the fence.

Behind the fence there were some trees. Actually, Mauthausen had been built on a beautiful site. It was one of the first things I noticed as I climbed up onto the foundation--that you could wake up on a spring morning there and look into the distance and see the gorgeous rolling hills. I was there in May and the grass had begun to grow after a long winter and the hills rolled away into the distance with cultivated dark, rich soil. There was a perfect blue sky overhead. On the other side of the fence a local farmer was planting seeds. It was a beautiful day in Mauthausen. I even said that out loud to myself, “It’s a beautiful day in the concentration camp.”

But when I heard a bird singing from a tree in a nearby field, I was filled with this odd feeling, this new certainty, which horrified me even as the words formed in my mind, that nothing should be alive. Not a tree. Not one blade of grass. Not one of the little, yellow star-shaped weeds or flowers that grew out of the cracks of the foundation and all around in the soil where the barracks had been. Especially not these, since they seemed to mock the yellow stars the Jews had to wear for identification. My head began to spin with this, and I felt as if the whole world had been turned upside down, and now I was staring into a galaxy of yellow star-shaped weeds, which mocked and reminded me that in the very soil of this overturned universe was my own blood.

Ordinarily, I would rejoice at this sign that life conquers death by continuing on. Nature’s cycle of life, death and rebirth has always held for me a certain almost sacred, elegant beauty. But not today. Today I understood, as I never had before, that for a period the Nazis had instituted their own distorted version of nature, weeding out what they considered the “undesirable elements,” and in so doing, for a time stopped time as we understand it. That for many peoples, the Nazis had virtually accomplished a permanent erasure, or as we now call it, “cleansing” from their soil. I crouched down and stared at the ground.

Sometimes we are lucky. Sometimes the pain inside us is so severe that we hardly recognize ourselves, the answer I spoke of, seeking to be discovered, forcing the question into our minds: Is it me? Is it me with such thoughts, such feelings so deeply rooted inside? And this question is what wakes us up. For in that moment, just as I reached out a hand I hardly recognized as my own, so cold was it with pain and anger, to touch the little yellow tuft of one of those stars, I saw that the reach of the Nazis’ ignorance had extended across all the years, across all the miles, to me. Amazing.

In the concentration camp called Mauthausen, 45 years after its liberation, another casualty to the brutality of human blindness almost occurred. How else could I have actually believed, even for a moment, that nature’s renewal was an insult to life? And didn’t all the fear and suspicion I had experienced on my journey to Mauthausen, bred by years of conditioning, years of internalizing the intellectual, emotional, historical, moral food of my culture, keep alive the kind of poisoned, unaware heart that would have led, not that long ago, to my own destruction? Or, at the very least, to my silently participating in the destruction of someone very much like me? Wasn’t I, in fact, just like the boy being urged on by his father toward the treachery of the 186 steps?

As if, in my own life, I needed urging. Didn’t I, at the age of 6, have my head smacked against the wall of my building by a German neighbor as he drunkenly seethed into my face, “They should have killed every one of you Jews!” Didn’t I attempt to flee countless times from the gang of boys chasing me through the Bronx streets shouting, “Christ killer! Jew bastard!” as they surrounded me and spit into my face, held me down and punched the living daylights out of me?

It’s not like the violence of bigotry was just something I had seen in movies or heard about at school. Didn’t my personal experiences, my humiliation, my blood, and the blood of my people, earn me the right to hate? How easy it would have been--how perfectly natural in that moment--for me to justify every thought and feeling I had experienced on my journey that day. But if I had, that justification would be like the crack of a rifle shot. The head falling, my own.

SO I MADE A VOW--THAT I would take on the responsibility, in my own life, to start time. Certainly we must grieve for the victims and do all we can to resist the tyranny of hatred and ignorance. I’m not for a moment proposing that actions based on such ignorance should be condoned. To understand is not to justify or excuse. But we must look deeply within ourselves for the causes of such ignorance and its extension into action or we run the risk of losing ourselves in the process of opposition and becoming the very enemy we oppose.

It’s just too easy to justify our own hatred, fear and prejudice toward an entire people, to identify them as other in our minds. And, with the rapidity and repetition of images offered by the media, it is difficult to resist generalizing the actions of a few members of a group into a more globalized expectation and version of that group as a whole. (I wonder how many people in our city thought or heard totally unfounded rumors from others, as I did, that it must have been a gang initiation that started the recent fires in the Santa Monica Mountains? How many of us felt that the death and destruction there was of no real consequence because it was happening in someone else’s neighborhood? How many felt that way about the eruption more than a year ago in the neighborhood called South-Central? How many of us felt, in both cases, it was to be expected, or even deserved? Because the people there are other. Not our group, not our kind, not our tribe, not ourselves.)

The diversity and multi-ethnicity of Los Angeles give it the potential to lead our nation as a city of the future. But the word diversity does not apply only to the city in which we make our lives. Within each one of us there is a diversity of voices, a multiplicity of hopes, needs, fears, strengths common to all people. The internal voices we ultimately listen to are the ones that grow strongest within us, the ones we nurture most. If we nurture our awareness with the radical acknowledgment that as human beings we are capable of blindness and the subtle and overt actions that flow from such blindness, in that moment we break the lock our own ignorance holds upon us and create real hope for change.

But if we continue to believe it is always someone else’s anger, someone else’s fear, someone else wreaking havoc in the streets of our city, and in so doing push the root of so many problems away and disconnect it from ourselves, believing there is an absolute discontinuity between how we live our lives and how they live theirs, how will we be able to get our hands on it? How will we study this rooted unawareness up close so we may come to understand it well enough to make the necessary transformation? Far from wanting it out of our hands, we must place it squarely there so we can cease to inflame our own wrongheadedness and build a future, a diamond from coal, a lotus growing out of the mud.