Notes in the Margin (Part IV)

Kulka

Nothing like reading a Holocaust memoir at the Jiffy Lube. Distant relatives gassed so I could be here waiting on another uniformed man with a checklist. Soon, he will tell me, with a half smile, all the things I need aside from an oil change. An oil change is $37.50 (more if you use the fancy synthetic oil), but everything else is going to run the bill to—oh, my neglected Outback. There’s a TV hanging, by chains, from a corner of the ceiling. A real estate show’s on. A couple is touring a beach house in San Diego. They discuss square footage with the host. In my book, a professor tours the remains of Birkenau, a sub-camp, part of the Auschwitz complex. It is his first time back since he was an eleven-year-old prisoner. A historian, the professor had not intended for the visit to become personal. This is a memoir of reluctance. The title is a mouthful: Landscapes of the Metropolis of Death: Reflections on Memory and Imagination. But it’s accurate and landscape looms as prominently in the book as death. The professor, Otto Dov Kulka, didn’t actually write it. He spoke it into a tape recorder over the course of many years.

It is mid-October in West Lebanon, New Hampshire. We call it West Leb. Cold, the kind of cold you aren’t yet ready for, and the rain falls in solid sheets of gray. The couple is testing out the hot tub. They appear to have brought bathing suits. The other patrons and I sit and watch the TV, our mouths agape, awaiting our verdicts. A kind of comfort in this collective paralysis. All waiting rooms are the same. The Jiffy Lube, the hospital. A permanence about them. My cohorts look like the type of people who probably take better care of their cars than I do. Their news will be more welcome than mine. But I pledge here, to myself, that I will not be duped, as I was last time, into having the spark plugs replaced. Same goes for the air filter. This time I will hold fast. The couple and the host are standing in the driveway now. The husband says that the three-car garage will give them a lot of flexibility. He loves toys. Sometimes he wishes he didn’t live in SoCal, so he could buy a snow blower. I read. In the fall of 1944, the front was closing in on Auschwitz. Those prisoners who had not yet been annihilated were either killed or, if deemed healthy enough, sent to work in Germany. A few remained, alive though unable to work. Among these was an eleven-year-old named Otto. He says...