I WENT BACK there not long ago. It was winter, a clear, cold day. Beyond Schirmeck the woods were snowy, the trees powdered white and the ground white too. The grounds of the concentration camp, an elongated area on a sloping terrace of mountain with a broad view of the Vosges, lay white in the bright sunshine. The gray-blue painted wood of the two- and three-story watchtowers and the one-story barracks made a pleasant contrast with the snow. True, there was the entryway festooned with barbed wire and the sign CONCENTRATION CAMP STRUTHOF-NATZWEILER and the double barbed-wire fence that surrounded the camp. But the ground between the remaining barracks, where more barracks had once stood side by side, no longer showed any trace of the camp under its glittering cover of snow. It could have been a sledding slope for children, spending their winter vacation in the cheerful barracks with the homely many-paned windows, and about to be called indoors for cake and hot chocolate.
The camp was closed. I tramped around it in the snow, getting my feet wet. I could easily see the whole grounds, and remembered how on my first visit I had gone down the steps that led between the foundations of the former barracks. I also remembered the ovens of the crematorium that were on display in another barracks, and that another barracks had contained cells. I remembered my vain attempts, back then, to imagine in concrete detail a camp filled with prisoners and guards and suffering. I really tried; I looked at a barracks, closed my eyes, and imagined row upon row of barracks. I measured a barracks, calculated its occupants from the informational booklet, and imagined how crowded it had been. I found out that the steps between the barracks had also been used for roll call, and as I looked from the bottom of the camp up towards the top, I filled them with rows of backs. But it was all in vain, and I had a feeling of the most dreadful, shameful failure.
On the way back, further down the hill, I found a small house opposite a restaurant that had a sign on it indicating that it had been a gas chamber. It was painted white, had doors and windows framed in sandstone, and could have been a barn or a shed or servants’ living quarters. This building, too, was closed and I didn’t remember if I had gone inside it on my first visit. I didn’t get out of the car. I sat for a while with the motor running, and looked. Then I drove on.
At first I was embarrassed to meander home through the Alsatian villages looking for a restaurant where I could have lunch. But my awkwardness was not the result of real feeling, but of thinking about the way one is supposed to feel after visiting a concentration camp. I noticed this myself, shrugged, and found a restaurant called Au Petit Gar?on in a village on a slope of the Vosges. My table looked out over the plain. Hanna had called me kid.
The previous time I had walked around the concentration camp grounds until they closed. Then I had sat down under the memorial that stood above the camp, and looked down over the grounds. I felt a great emptiness inside, as if I had been searching for some glimpse, not outside but within myself, and had discovered that there was nothing to be found.
Then it got dark. I had to wait an hour until the driver of a small open truck let me climb up and sit on the truck bed and took me to the next village, and I gave up the idea of hitchhiking back that same day. I found a cheap room in a guest house in the village and had a thin steak with french fries and peas in the dining room.
Four men were loudly playing cards at the next table. The door opened and a little old man came in without greeting anyone. He wore short pants and had a wooden leg. He ordered a beer at the bar. He sat facing away from the neighboring table, so that all they saw was his back and the back of his overly enlarged, bald skull. The card players laid down their cards, reached into the ashtrays, picked up the butts, took aim, and hit him. The man at the bar flapped his hands behind his head as if swatting away flies. The innkeeper set his beer in front of him. No one said a word.
I couldn’t stand it. I jumped up and went over to the next table. “Stop it!” I was shaking with outrage. At that moment, the man half hobbled, half hopped over and began fumbling with his leg; suddenly he was holding the wooden leg in both hands. He brought it crashing down onto the table so that the glasses and ashtrays danced, and fell into an empty chair, laughing a squeaky, toothless laugh as the others laughed in a beery rumble along with him. “Stop it!” they laughed, pointing at me. “Stop it
During the night the wind howled around the house. I was not cold, and the noise of the wind and the creaking of the tree in front of the house and the occasional banging of a shutter were not enough to have kept me awake. But I became more and more inwardly restless, until my whole body began to shiver. I felt afraid, not in anticipation that something bad was going to happen, but in a physical way. I lay there, listening to the wind, feeling relieved every time it weakened and died down, but dreading its renewed assaults and not knowing how I would get out of bed next day, hitchhike back, continue my studies, and one day have a career and a wife and children.
I wanted simultaneously to understand Hanna’s crime and to condemn it. But it was too terrible for that. When I tried to understand it, I had the feeling I was failing to condemn it as it must be condemned. When I condemned it as it must be condemned, there was no room for understanding. But even as I wanted to understand Hanna, failing to understand her meant betraying her all over again. I could not resolve this. I wanted to pose myself both tasks—understanding and condemnation. But it was impossible to do both.
The next day was another beautiful summer day. Hitchhiking was easy, and I got back in a few hours. I walked through the city as though I had been away for a long time; the streets and buildings and people looked strange to me. But that didn’t mean the other world of the concentration camps felt any closer. My impressions of Struthof joined my few already existing images of Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen, and froze along with them.