Please Keep Your Hands and Feet Inside the Camp at All Times

This is part one of a six-part series. Read the other installments here.

So I'm shambling out of a crematorium during a tour of Auschwitz when suddenly these teen girls 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 Michael Richards. My first thought is, No one should squeal in a concentration camp. My second: How creepy is it that I look like Michael Richards?

I feel like an egregious asshole even thinking about it. Here. I have just stumbled from one of the stained, airless chambers in which, 70 years ago, a million men, women, and children spent their last 20 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.

Jesus! Before the Kramer thing, waiting in line for death camp tickets, the back of my neck got sunburned. (Who brings sunblock to Warsaw?) When I catch myself whining about being burned, at Auschwitz, I want to take 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.

I let the girls take a few selfies with me just to get rid of them. I glance nervously at the rest of my tour group, hoping none of them are witnessing this mortifying episode.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. The tour, I should probably explain, is the reason I'm here. The one I've signed onto is WORLD WAR TWO SITES OF EASTERN EUROPE. Fourteen bus-riding days and nights, in Poland and Germany. Highlights (if that's the word) include three camps: Auschwitz, Buchenwald, and Dachau, along with a polka party, authentic bratwurst dinner, and other festivities. And I'll be sharing all of it with 19 regular folks I've never even met.

Normally I would never participate in this kind of thing. It's my idea of hell. But these aren't normal times. With a deluge of Trump-inspired alt-right-fueled Jew hate and racial animus spewing from social media like shit from a clogged toilet, I felt I was becoming numb to the horrible realities creeping across our country (and this was before the election). I wanted to give a shock to my system, to visit a place where something truly horrible had occurred on an unimaginable scale. And just to make things more uncomfortable, I decided to do it with a tour group.

Truth be told, it's not the camps that scare me. It's the bus. I don't like being in close quarters with other people (or other people generally), and since kicking heroin (long story) I get car sick. Nevertheless, I fly to Warsaw, dump my bags in the hotel and, per instructions, glide into the lobby of the swanky Warsaw Hilton at six sharp to meet my fellow Holocausters. I'm not trying to look good here, so I'll just tell you that I judge everyone immediately upon stepping out of the elevator. The four hearty, open-faced gentlemen standing 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. Glancing to the other end of the room I spot a group of elderly women sitting in chaise loungers who are surely terrible mothers. As I step sheepishly over to join the 4-H crew, a pair of six-foot Polish ladies strut through the lobby, legs up to their cheekbones in see-through fuck-me heels and micro skirts, escorted by a no-neck bodyguard from central casting. I see the look they shoot our way and die a little. Oh, look at the American farmers!

That night, we venture out to have dinner in some kind of kielbasa grotto. After the meal we go around and say a bit about ourselves and why we wanted to come on this tour. At the table are retired school teachers from Omaha, a backhoe operator from Perth, a 60-ish former New Jersey state policeman and his wife, who manages a law office. Shockingly—to me, at least—a good majority reply with some version of "I love the Jewish people," or "I've always been fascinated by the Jews!" If I had to guess, I'd say a lot of them probably haven't ever met an actual Jew (here I am!). And the way they say "the Jews" brings to mind a Trumpian echo of his professed love of "the blacks." But who cares? Everyone is just so earnest. Reflexive contempt melts away at such relentless niceness.

Truth be told by the time it's my turn I feel like a snitch. All of these normal, mild-mannered people getting ready for a nice, old-fashioned Holocaust tour and me, a cynical asshole here to write about the whole spectacle and hopefully capture the ridiculousness of it all. But after I explain that I'm here on assignment, a dapper Chicago septuagenarian named Shlomo tells me he always planned to write after he retired, too. Look at us! Just a couple of retirees!

Shlomo goes on to describe his adventures as a six-year-old, in the 30s, placed in a Polish DP (displaced persons) camp before traveling in steerage to the States. An hour later, my pork sausage congealing on the plate, my new pal slides his seat closer. He tells me about his wife's colon situation—"Thank God we didn't have to get her a bag"—and I tell him about my grandpa Max, who got a colostomy back in the 60s. "They put this bandage on his stomach. When he had to go he'd step into another room, take the bandage off and pull out what looked like a little pink dog penis and drop a deuce in a saucepan my grandmother carried around in her purse."

Shlomo's face goes sour and I can tell he's a bit shocked at my level of detail—I've been hanging out with sick fuck artist types for so long I've forgotten how to talk to normal people—but he lets it go and within minutes we're back on track. I must, for reasons of bus-ride congeniality, learn some kind of verbal restraint. Note to self: Don't be an asshole.

Illustration by Koren Shadmi