Dancing Around Auschwitz

Thursday, August 08, 2024

It was Sunday, the last day of the Jubilee Polish dance tour. We were to perform in Oswiecim. The town used to go under a different name, Auschwitz. 

We tried to arrange a tour of the Auschwitz concentration camp before we left the US. Our guide in Bielsko-Biala responded to our email a few days later—no tour group slots were available for the one day that we were free to go. But we could go individually and tour the camp on our own. When we arrived, I arranged for a group to go on Monday, ordered taxis through the hotel, and asked about best times to arrive to avoid waiting hours for an entry slot, hoping to avoid the tour buses bringing their typical late morning-early afternoon flood of tourists. The hotel response shattered our hopes. No longer could you just go to Auschwitz and enter when the crowds were light. Advance tickets were required to enter and the only tickets available that week were at 2 pm on Wednesday, a performance day for us.

I’ve been through this before. It is always possible to find a way to enter a popular tourist spot. Tour groups buy 30 advance tickets but only have 20 on the bus that day. Buy, beg, or barter for those unused tickets. One friend, unable to get tickets to see the Sistine Chapel in Florence, paid for a tour at the last minute and was able to see God and Adam touch. But there was something wrong here. This was Auschwitz, not a beautiful church, archaeological site, or theme park. Standing by the entrance begging for a ticket just to be able to see the horrors preserved behind the barbed wired felt wrong. Very wrong.

Auschwitz was sold out on Monday. A concentration camp. Sold out. What a concept. Hopefully, that would do the world some good. We didn’t go.

How important was it to go anyway? In my suburban Jewish 1950s childhood, I had learned about Auschwitz alongside the rudiments of Hebrew and Jewish ritual in Sunday school. We were introduced to elders of the synagogue with numbers still tattooed on their arms. The figure of 6 million Jewish dead has been ingrained in our minds just before the phrase “Never again!”

How much did I need to see Arbeit Macht Frei spanning the gate? What would I learn in viewing the ovens or barracks that a childhood fed the tales of gas-filled showers, piles of shoes filling a warehouse, or humans used as experimental rats hadn’t already taught? Better those tourist slots go to Holocaust deniers or those for whom the word Auschwitz connoted some cool death ritual that they just had to check off on their summer Polish tour.

A week later it was our time to perform at Oswiecim, our last show of the tour. It is a lovely town with the usual stolid downtown, chain stores, Soviet-era apartment blocks painted brilliant yellow and green, murals of doves on the walls. You can buy gas at Circle K for 6.49 zloty a litre. Our performance was part of festival week with bouncers for kids, sausage grilling on barbeques outside the cultural center, and a nice outdoor stage and stands. Two churches with suffering Jesus statues stood across the street.

Knowing the disappointment of not being able to visit, Kasia our guide asked Piotr the bus driver to detour past the camp on our way to the downtown cultural center. There it was, a thick, high wall of concrete topped by layers of barbed wire. Drab lines of red brick buildings lay behind. A single group of a dozen tourists spanned between one building and the next, heads down. The next block had the parking lot, filled with rows of white buses and randomly parked groups of cars. There seemed to be room to visit Auschwitz that day.

Have any free time after your tour of Auschwitz? The next corner featured a bright orange sign advertising Zatorland, a nearby theme park highlighting fierce dinosaur statues. Fun for the whole family.  A concentration camp as a tourist destination among many other similar destinations. What a concept.

As I dropped off the steep steps of the bus behind the outdoor stage, I stared at several of the local middle-aged men and women guiding us to our dressing room. Did their grandfathers serve as camp guards, drivers, cooks, mechanics? Did their grandmothers bake bread to sell to the SS commandants tired of army food after a hard day of killing Jews? How much did their parents know and what did they tell them about “what happened during the war?”

Then the performance took over. We go on stage in 30 minutes.

Pull on that shirt, now slightly gamey after 10 days of performances, over my tee. Make sure the buttons are all done. Suspenders can’t be twisted. The necktie could use an ironing but it’s the last show, it will have to do. Get Dee to tie it for me, a far better job than I can do. A quick look backstage to see where the entrances and exits are. I’m dancing the waltz tonight instead of Lonnie. Find the other 7 dancers and make sure they know to look for me and not him in the choreography. Second costumes and tap shoes are moved to the small tent backstage for our costume change.

The skies open and heavy rain erupts. The crowd empties out, leaving the Polish group dancing before us to face rows of empty benches before their covered stage. The rain ends and the crowd filters back for our set, but the front third of the stage is covered with water. The local crew sweeps it clear. It would still be damp—likely slippery-- as we danced. The constructed stage looked the same as the one in Wisla a couple of days earlier, which had been treacherously slippery to perform on. Some dancers add duct tape to the bottoms of their shows for grip, others dipped their shoes in a pool of sticky Pepsi, a bottle of which we found backstage, for the same purpose. Performer tricks.

Finally, it’s time. A lengthy introduction in Polish. Then Joe and the band strike up the best-known American song ever and we parade onstage.

O Susanna,

don’t you cry for me,

I come from Alabama

with a banjo on my knee.

In a normal performance, the rest of the world would shut itself out. Remember to keep the lines in Virginia Reel straight. Move the Hambone to the very front of the stage. Look for Lucia when Kentucky Running Set starts. Don’t forget the bow at the beginning of Lover’s Waltz. Exit stage right after Teacup Square where Nancy has left her shoes for changing into the next number. Maintain your smile and point it toward the audience whenever you could.

But, crowding into this checklist of performance thoughts came unwelcome ones: who are the people out there? Were their parents those who directed my relatives to the gas chambers,  brought here in cattle cars from Dveen, where my family lived for generations? Would I even be here if my grandfather hadn’t fled the equally antisemitic Russians three decades before the Nazi debacle? Would his last vision have been that Arbeit Macht Frei sign?

What are the ethics of spending an evening entertaining these people? What about those Jewish musicians forced to entertain German officers and their wives over a heavily laden dinner table on a cold December evening then return to their unheated barracks unfed? Can I forget them as I offer my broadest smile to the crowd?

Yet why the blanket condemnation? How many of these families arrived after the war when the Germans living in Oswiecim were exiled by the Soviets? Whose grandmother slipped extra food to a prisoner when no one was watching? Were any the descendants of Jews who were adopted by brave, humane Catholic families to avoid their being sent to the camps?

Maybe this was the ultimate revenge? I am here. A Jew. In Auschwitz. Receiving enthusiastic applause from the grandchildren of camp guards. As a people, we survived the Nazis best efforts to murder us all. My family thrived enough allow me to fly to Poland and dance for the descendants of those who helped run concentration camps.

Those various thought lines battled each other for the duration of the show.  It wasn’t my best performance. It would have been wrong if it were.

Dinner after the show temporarily washed away the conflict, filled with wine, good food, and the satisfaction of knowing it was the last show of a tour.

As we filtered back to the bus, the local Oswiecim group was still on stage. They had a large group of young boys performing with them, all in puffy white shirts with red ties, wide brim hats, and angelic dimples. I asked to take a photo of one and his pals all crowded into the photo. Shining faces, excited to perform, aching to go onstage, they flashed V signs to the graying photographer photographing them.

These were the grandchildren of Auschwitz. What is their responsibility for their ancestors actions, good or bad? What will they do if the situation arises again when they’ve grown?  What would I have done if I had been a Catholic shopkeeper in Oswiecim in 1942?

We piled on the bus for the long trip back to the hotel. Tired, but elated at the end of the tour, Michael and Sue launched us into a series of songs from The Sound of Music, written by Rogers and Hammerstein, both Jewish, to pass the time.  On this day on which I have never felt more Jewish, it seemed the perfect ending.  

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