The Kramah! The Kramah!

"What is the etiquette for fending off death camp celebrity selfie requests—when, just to spice things up, you’re not the celebrity?" An excerpt of Jerry Stahl's latest memoir, "Nein, Nein, Nein."

A sign at Auschwitz/Birkenau.

SO I’M SHAMBLING OUT OF A CREMATORIUM during a tour of Auschwitz when suddenly these young Asian women in matching Bowie tees come running toward me squealing, “The Kramah! The Kramah!” I can’t place the accent, but after a second I realize they’re saying “Kramer,” and they think I’m the actor Michael Richards from Seinfeld. My first thought is, No one should squeal in a concentration camp. My second: How creepy is it that I look like Michael Richards?

Of course, I feel like an egregious shitbag thinking any of this. Here. But that’s the point. I have just stumbled from one of the stained, airless chambers in which, seventy years ago, a million men, women, and children spent their last twenty minutes naked, foaming from the mouth in screaming agony, as prussic acid scalded their lungs until they asphyxiated. The corpses, I’ve learned, formed a pyramid. Victims struggled for the last inch of air beneath the ceiling. Parents tried to lift their children as high as they could. The top layer was always babies.

Before the Kramer thing, waiting in line for death camp tickets, the back of my neck got sunburned. The sun was blazing and the line snaked from the death camp entrance all the way through an adjoining plaza and out to the far corner of the parking lot. But who brings sunblock to Warsaw? In September?

When I catch myself whining about being burned at Auschwitz, I want to rip my brain out, soak it in lye, and roll it in broken glass. After the gas chamber, this feels like the right response to just being part of the human race.

What is the etiquette for fending off death camp celebrity selfie requests—when, just to spice things up, you’re not the celebrity?

I let the young women take a few selfies with me just to get rid of them. They want me to smile. And I glance nervously at the rest of my tour group, hoping none of them are witnessing this mortifying episode. Needless to say, it won’t be the last, as we roll along through the Reichland, from camp to camp, sampling a polka party, an “authentic bratwurst dinner,” and other festivities I’ll be describing in the pages to come. Or trying to. Trying, because in a rare fit of domestic responsibility, I hired a cleaning person—actually, a neighbor’s grandmother—to come in and tackle the nest of squalor my house morphed into after I got back and unpacked.

The thing is, no matter what I’m writing, I always start with a stack of spanking new overpriced Moleskine notebooks. And end with a pile of scribbled-on napkins, hotel stationery, ripped-out magazine pages, ad circulars, felt-tip-on-toilet-paper, or soggy coasters . . . whatever smudged, garbage-adjacent material makes it most difficult to decipher later. Picture a rottweiler-sized mound of notes, cluttering every available surface of my already book- and paper-cluttered house. A rottweiler that went missing days after my return. For the simple reason that— you’re way ahead of me—said sweet, grandmotherly cleaning person thought it was trash and threw it out.

Happily, addicts—whether current or former—are great with catastrophe. So I could handle the whole suddenly solitary, formerly-noisy-now-dead-quiet house; the whole third-marriage-bites-the-dust thing. I missed my four-year-old daughter to the point of pillow-chewing. But I’m a pro, I don’t register emotions, I just stuff them and drive into utility poles. But losing notes . . . Jesus!

After clawing my way through three garbage cans, a clogged gutter, and the fecal-caked rim of a hillside septic tank, I sat down, bit the bullet, and tried to write down every detail I could. “Every act of memory,” to mangle a line from the late, great Oliver Sacks, “is to some degree an act of imagination.” Or, to paraphrase Picasso, “Art is the lie that reveals the truth.” Either way . . . you get the idea.

Now where were we? Right! I landed in Warsaw, dumped my bags, and, per instructions, glided into the lobby of the swanky Warsaw Hilton at six sharp to meet my fellow travelers.

I will admit that I judged everyone immediately upon stepping out of the chrome-shiny elevator. The four hearty, open-faced gentlemen lurking by the front desk are surely 4-H Club alumni, I think to myself. Solid Midwesterners who, if they have not recently milked cows, look like they’d know how.

As I step over to join the 4-H crew, two Amazonian young Polish ladies strut through the lobby, legs up to their cheekbones in see-through fuck-me heels and silver micro-skirts, escorted by a no-neck bodyguard type in wraparound shades. The women seem to have shimmied out of an old Robert Palmer video, so slinky I imagine them living on ground-up disco balls and cocaine. The muscle keeps one hand slipped inside the lapel of his jacket, either holding a gun or scratching a mole. I see the look his full-lipped companions shoot our way and die a little. I can hear their thoughts. Och, spójrz na amerykańskich rolników! Oh, look at the American farmers!

That night, we venture out to have dinner in some kind of kielbasa grotto. It looks like a tarted-up potato cellar, with pictures of various Polish meats lining the walls. The lighting is early bathysphere. During the meal my fellow riders and I are instructed to go around the table and say a bit about ourselves.

To one side of me sit two retired school teachers from Omaha, best friends Pam and Trudy. “Our husbands don’t like to travel,” Trudy tells me. “Thank God,” Pam mutters out of the side of her mouth, a manner of speaking so film noir I find it instantly endearing. She’s got a Lucille Ball permanent wave, permanently pursed lips, and, magnified behind unironic butterfly glasses, a no-nonsense glare I can only imagine scared generations of Omaha teens into shutting the fuck up in homeroom. Her friend Trudy’s glasses hang on a rhinestone chain resting on the perpetually buttoned top button of one of those long cardigans my mother, in far-off 1960s Pittsburgh, used to call her “duster.” Both opt for the same shade of blue rinse as Mrs. Slocombe in the old Brit sitcom Are You Being Served?, the very tint Wendy O. Williams rocked in her foot-high mohawked Plasmatics days. Right away, I liked these two, even as I felt that I’d better mind my Ps and Qs around them.

Beside the Omaha ladies is a sixty-ish bullet-headed “precision bulldozer operator” and ex–rugby player from Sydney, Dozer Bob, whose reason for the Eastern Europe tour is straightforward. “Just wanted to travel, didn’t I?”

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Later, after six vodkas (him, not me), Bulldozer Bob corners me to confide the sad climax to his very sad marriage—and the real motive for his trip. “My wife. She never wanted us to have company, did she? She never wanted to see anybody. I don’t think we had company more than once. So I was alone, forever-like, and I thought it was supposed to be that way. Until last year, I came home from a job out of town and she was gone. The note she left? It said, ‘I want to be around people.’ Can you believe it?”

Oh man! It’s such a brutal story, all I can do is sympathize, and steer him in a different conversational direction. I mean, I’ve just met the guy. Bob lights up when asked to describe the razor-thin, right-next-to-the-cliff intricacies of his dozer work. His specialty is dangerous mountaintop construction projects. “One wrong move and it’s over the side, isn’t it? You’re talking 100,000 pounds of Caterpillar D9—with a ripper attachment—right up your arse.”

As a fellow mobile-coach insomniac, Bob and I bonded. I don’t know if you’ve had the experience of meeting someone who, for whatever reason, seems to have been saving up their most personal issues, their deepest and darkest, just for you. But I was happy to listen. Perhaps because I was an outsider, the designated weirdo, he felt he could tell me anything. (Is it in The Decameron, where Boccaccio says, “You can always trust a leper”?)

Facing me, on the other side of the table, is a lovely, well-coiffed, expensively tailored Japanese lady, Mariko, who informs us she works at a law office. But not just any law firm. She works in the office of the Third Circuit Court of Appeals. The federal bench. She sees the twitch grip my face when she says this but, understandably, misinterprets it as some kind of—what?—fanboy reaction to the judiciary? As in, “Oh wow, the Third Circuit. That’s Delaware, Pennsylvania, the Virgin Islands, and New Jersey!”

In fact, I’ve got a whole other reason for freaking. My father—what are the odds?—served on the Third Circuit. Briefly. From the time he was sworn in on October 10, 1968, until February 21, 1970, the day he stopped serving. Anywhere. Because he went into our garage (as mentioned) and left the motor running. I mean, it was such a shock—not him killing himself (I’m over that), I mean her working there, in the Third Circuit. It was such a surprise that I went into blurt mode. Saying something, more or less, like, “Hey, that’s crazy, my father was a judge on that circuit.”

“What was his name?”
“David Stahl.”
Which elicited an even more unexpected reaction:

“You must be mistaken.”

Mariko, clearly, did not want people taking Circuit credit when Circuit credit was not due.

“I don’t,” she continues tartly, “remember him. And I remember the names of all the judges. Their pictures are on the walls.”

Here, two thoughts grip me at the same time. One, they took the old man’s picture off the wall. Well that’s weird and embarrassing. And two, of course I now had to explain that, well, actually, he did serve, but, you know, she might not remember his name because he didn’t, like, serve very long . . .

“In fact”—here I catch myself counting on my fingers—“about fifteen months altogether, from late ’68 to early ’70, before he, you know . . .”

My voice trails off, leaving Mariko hanging expectantly, skeptically on my next words. Before he what? I could hear her thinking. Got an operation to become a woman and moved to Malaysia? Fell down an elevator shaft? Slipped on a creamsicle in front of a streetcar and expired in three evenly divided pieces? The moment stretched. And—has this ever happened to you?—I found myself wanting to say nothing, possibly never open my mouth again, and at the same time blurting, but quietly, “Well uh, actually, he kind of killed himself.”

Which I instantly regret. Because really, what better info to share with someone you’ve never met before in your life, but you’re going to be spending fourteen days with, than announcing a parent’s suicide? When you were sixteen. Quel icebreaker!

The whole exchange was relatively low decibel (for once) so no one else heard, and Mariko’s partner, a tall, steely-eyed athletic fellow in a windbreaker, maybe fifty, could go on and introduce himself as if nothing had even happened.

Steely Eyes announces that his name is Don, and he’s a vacationing state policeman. But I already knew that.

Well, my sphincter knew it. I feel the clench before the message makes it to my brain.

It may have been a quarter century since I last had occasion to lower myself in the back of a law enforcement vehicle. But I might as well be smuggling grenades-and- crack in my pants for the guilt and cop-sweat suddenly oozing out of my pores. An ooze—and I have no proof for this—I am sure Don the Statie can sense despite the strong kielbasa waft flooding the premises. Bad enough I’d announced myself as Gerald Von Suicide, now I was squirming like a perp in a lineup.

Tad and Madge are the next couple over. T and M sport what I’d call the never-too-old-to-have-fun-at-Disney-World look. Tad: red shorts, old tennies, bald with a mullet spilling out of a backward Astros cap. Madge favors matching red shorts and a Don’t Mess with Texas T-shirt. Tad refers to himself as a jokester. “Why Nazis?” he asks, turning to Madge to answer his own question. “I guess it’s their old world charm? Kidding!”

Tad has Madge in stitches, and he cracks up my new friends the Omaha teachers too. Despite Trudy’s, to me, forbidding visage, she turns out to be a total sweetheart, with the kind of laugh that makes her cover her mouth, as if surprised whenever she hears herself.

Lest I forget, that first night in the sausage grotto, my bona fides as nutritional nut-job were premiered for all my new friends. I’ve been a veggie for decades—function of all those “you’ll be dead in a year” speeches by straight-shooting liver specialists. I may have geezed Mexican tar smuggled north in the anal cavities of enterprising drug mules, but God forbid I’d gnaw a nonorganic celery stick. And I was too superstitious to change diets. Long after I’d kicked dope and cured hep C, I still stayed away from meat. But what was in front of me here was not just meat, it was kielbasa. Growing up in far-off Pittsburgh, kielbasa was everywhere. To me, it always tasted like somebody’s grandmother. But now, in this dim, low-ceilinged cave, I gulped back bile as a stone-faced waiter delivered varieties I’d never heard of. Arrayed before us, in no particular order, were: Kielbasa Krakówska—hot-smoked with pepper and garlic. Kielbasa wiejska—a U-shaped tube of pork and veal. Kielbasa weselna: wedding sausage. (Insert joke here.) And Kielbasa Biala, a white bulbous sausage, like something you’d find on a coroner’s table after a fatal, Bobbitt-inspired sex crime. The full-on Castrato Platter!

Jerry Stahl

Fighting off images of George Bush Senior gone green and vomiting in an envoy’s lap on a state visit to Japan (anybody else remember?), I was eager to not call attention to myself. So I slurped up my żurek (sour rye soup) and made busy work of pushing sauerkraut and bigos, Poland’s national bean dish, around on my plate—each of which, by the way, was emblazoned with Poland’s national bird, a white-tailed eagle against a shield of red, and seemed to weigh a ton. The plates were so heavy I had to resist the urge to simply pick one up and knock myself out with it. Instead, by way of nutritional subterfuge, I found if I could cover the national bird’s beak and eyeballs with chunks of national meat, I could perform something that looked like eating, until the waiter came by to clear everything away.

If I was going to make it through the meal—let alone Poland—I knew I had to man up. I nibbled cabbage, fighting the rising panic at what I’ve signed on for; when I raised my eyes, I saw our tour guide, Suzannah, directly across the table from me. She’s been working her way from diner to diner.

“All right there?”

“Aces,” I say, hearing the word and wondering where the hell it came from.

“Aces, is it?”

Suzannah’s got that certain timbre of British accent that makes you question your own intelligence. She stares for a second, and I can all but see the thought balloon over her head: Are you going to be a problem?

Tall, silver-haired, wire-thin, with no-nonsense black spectacles, Suzannah owns the sort of Helen Mirren at fifty-ish features that seem to modulate between fierce and pleasant. Fiercely pleasant being perhaps the perfect combo for a professional tour guide: the rolling embodiment of Carry On. The job itself, it becomes clear as we merrily roll along, exists as a blend of shepherd and tummler.

“Did you know,” Suzannah asks, aiming an amused smile my way, “the word kielbasa is actually derived from the Hebrew, kol basar, meaning ‘all kinds of meat’?”

“I did not,” I say, though my first thought, of course, is why is she telling me about Hebrew stuff? Did “Honk If You Love Semites” appear on my forehead when I hit Polish soil?

Once Hebeanoia rears its ugly head, there’s no putting it back in the phylactery.

“I don’t know much,” I stammer, “about kielbasa history.”

“And you’re a vegetarian? For moral reasons?”

Not for the last time, I can’t tell if our guide is needling me or making an effort to help me “feel a part of.”

“Nothing moral about it,” I say, wishing I hadn’t. “I mean, I don’t eat meat. But I’d shoot a cow just to watch it die. I just don’t like the taste of hormones.”

“Interesting.” Now I’m getting the raised eyebrow. “Hormones?”

Way to blather! Nothing says “Aren’t you glad to have me on this trip?” like launching into cow shooting. Seeing the expressions on my fellow diners’ faces—am I imagin- ing the hush that’s come over the table?—I hear myself announce, “Hitler was a vegetarian!” And go on to describe how the führer loved his kale, pasta, and apples, and had quite the sweet tooth. “He was so terrified of being poisoned he kept a dozen adolescent girls on staff as food tasters. And flatulent? Forget about it. They called him ‘der stinkbomb.’ In German, I mean.”

Hitler’s flatulence! Adolescent girls! Talk about a great first impression. What’s the Polish word for “cringe?”

Intros complete, Suzannah encourages us to go around the room and say, in a sentence or two, why we’ve elected to come along on the tour. I count sixteen of us. Almost everyone responds with some version of “I love the Jewish people” or “I’ve always been fascinated by Jews!” or “I’ve seen so much about the Jews on the History Channel.” And, of course, the perennial “I watched Schindler’s List.”

I’d say it’s a good bet a lot of these fine folks probably haven’t ever met an actual spawn of Moses. (Here I am!) And the way they say “the Jews,” to me, recalls the distinctly Trumpian flavor of “the Blacks.” (Remember “Look at my African American over here?”) But who cares? Reflexive contempt melts away at such relentless niceness. Who the fuck am I?

By the time it’s my turn, I feel like a snitch. All these normal, decent-seeming souls getting their kielbasa on in preparation for a nice, old-fashioned mass-murder tour. And me, a cynical shmohawk on board to ride along and try to capture the whole exotic spectacle. After I explain that I’m here on assignment, for a magazine, a dapper Chicago septuagenarian named Sylvan—“but call me Shlomo!”—slides his chair over and tells me he always planned to write after he retired too. Look at us! Just a couple of scribble-happy retirees!

Within minutes of meeting, Shlomo, a round-faced, beaming, fireplug of a guy, regales me with his adventures as a six-year-old in a Polish DP (displaced persons) camp before coming to America, in steerage. “I didn’t get a piece of meat for three years! One time I found a salami wrapper and it was like a holiday!”

The DP centers, my new dinner pal tells me, were beyond dismal. “I was,” he tosses out casually, “a brand new orphan.” Before that can sink in he barrels on: “For a while, at a camp called Babenhausen, me and the other little kids slept in what used to be stalls for Third Reich horses. We’d try and smoke the hay. The worst part was, we weren’t just smelling horseshit, we were smelling Nazi horseshit.

“Another camp I got sent to was a got-damn concentration camp till a month before I got there.” (Shlomo never says god-damn, he says got-damn. Sometimes you meet people you could listen to all day.)

I thought I knew my Holocaust, but already Shlo’s telling me things I didn’t know. Like how he and other “war orphans” had to live alongside real Jew haters.

“These were the schmucks who beat Jews in the street under Hitler. Supposedly they were de-Nazified, but come on! What else were they going to tell the Americans—I still keep Hitler’s picture under my pillow? They hated us!” It’s the last part—the still hating—that gets to me. His laugh is weirdly high-pitched, and contagious, but it doesn’t sound happy about any of this. “Think about it, Jer.” (Shlo’s the one Globoid who doesn’t call me Gerald.) “One day I’m running from these bastards, the next I have to shit beside them. And the food? The shit was probably tastier. Do you know what gruel is? We would have killed for gruel. Some people did. But let me tell you something, boychick, what made it okay was knowing those Nazi sons of bitches had to eat the same drek we did.”

Despite the mega-grim memories, Shlomo grins big. “Oh boy,” he says, taking a pause to polish off a pierogi, “we’re going to be friends!” I’ve known him two minutes, and I love the guy.

Suzannah, I see, is conferring with Tad and Madge, our fellow travelers from Odessa. (The one in West Texas, not the Ukraine.) Their lowered voices, I’m convinced, are discussing my ridiculous veggie declaration. You want to find out how paranoid, narcissistic, and dickish you really are? Find a tour bus and hop on board. This was of course pre-corona, so the primary concerns were not viral but (in my case) psycho-emotional. One way or another, visiting the sites where your ancestors, your people, were slaughtered, can stir the pot.

An hour later, my pork sausage congealing on the plate, my new pal slides his seat closer. We’ve been sharing confidences. When Shlo tells me about his wife’s colon situation—“Thank God we didn’t have to get her a bag!”—I tell him about my grandpa Moishe, who got a colostomy back in the fifties, when things were really primitive. “They put this bandage on his stomach. When he had to go, he’d step into another room, peel the bandage off, pull out what looked like a little pink dog penis, and drop a deuce in a saucepan my grandmother carried around in her purse.”

Silence. Was I talking loud?

Christ! I’ve been hanging out with sick-fuck professional ironists so long I’ve forgotten how to talk to non-nihilists. Shlo lets it go with a shrug. “I hope you had a good dishwasher!” And within moments we’re back on track.

I must, for reasons of future bus-ride congeniality, learn some kind of verbal restraint. Not for the first time, as the trip kicks in, I make a note to myself: Don’t be an asshole.

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Excerpted from Nein, Nein, Nein!: One Man's Tale of Depression, Psychic Torment, and a Bus Tour of the Holocaust by Jerry Stahl, no out in paperback from Akashic Books. © Jerry Stahl.