In Paradise: A Novel by Peter Matthiessen Page B

that mortality was widely seen in Germany as more than sufficient compensation for the Third Reich’s share of the estimated fourteen million Europeans, most of them Jews, who had been murdered by Germany and Russia. “Can you believe this?” he asks bitterly. “They were actually sorry for themselves.”

    E AGER TO DECLARE their nation’s shame before others can imply it, the Germans have been far more forthcoming than the Poles, including the group of Warsaw intelligentsia who have adopted Clements Olin.
    At the edge of this group, never quite included, is Stefan, the man Olin has observed trying to speak with Sister Catherine; a former monk, Stefan had trained in the same seminary as Priest Mikal. Stefan’s priory is in the region of the notorious Treblinka death camp north of Warsaw, by repute even more terrible than Birkenau; nobody, he says, ever escaped Treblinka and survived. He claims this with an air of perverse pride as if vaunting his district soccer team. He also seems proud of his excommunication from the Church for submitting a reform petition to the new Polish pope without seeking approval from the bishop, knowing that any such attempt to circumvent the hierarchy would be useless. In a symbolic but futile gesture, he says, he finally knelt before the altar and stripped off his rope belt and brown cassock.
    The Polish group has also adopted Eva’s friend, the artist Malan, a self-taught painter who survived four years in this camp, then returned from Warsaw in old age to create a huge fresco on the cellar walls of a closed chapel within distant sight of the high tower at Birkenau. Malan has invited Olin to come inspect his work-in-progress, which Eva calls extraordinary, and Olin has promised he will visit there in the next days.
    The first Pole to go forward is his friend Rebecca, who clomps onto the stage and promptly offends some in her audience with her reminder that Auschwitz had dealt mostly with the Jews of western Europe, and that by the time the death factory at Birkenau became operational in the winter of 1942, a far more extensive genocide had already decimated the so-called
Ostjude
of eastern Poland, the Baltics, Byelorussia, and Ukraine. Before the war, Becca’s home city of Warsaw had the largest Jewish community on earth, she says, but few of its Jews wound up in Auschwitz: more than a million, transported eastward, died in smaller, more primitive “facilities” such as Treblinka.
    “Correct,” quavers a long-bearded old man who as a boy had witnessed from hiding the bloody murder of his family in Ukraine’s Babi Yar ravine. Most of those Jews in the East were never arrested or imprisoned, he says, simply rounded up with the aid of local Slavs and confined in open pens without shelter, food, or water until they died; others were asphyxiated by exhaust fumes piped into the backs of idling vans and trucks. But most were marched into the forests, where the SS made do with bullets in the back of the head as they knelt in prayer at the edge of enormous pits dug by themselves. That so few survivor accounts emerged from the ruins of eastern Europe was partly because so few literate victims survived to testify, and also because the new satellite states stifled all reports of Russian participation in atrocities. In the histories, the wretched millions killed from Warsaw eastward became little more than a chapter note in the great modern tragedy of the Jewish people.

    O NSTAGE, B ECCA is lamenting an irrepressible young cousin whose father had constructed a secret hiding place in his Warsaw house. As the Gestapo broke their door down with violent shouts and banging, the terrified little girl wailed in the dark and could not be hushed. Rather than suffocate his favorite child, she said, the father led his family out of hiding, pleading for mercy. All would die at Auschwitz but that little girl crouched unnoticed in the hiding place, an irony that the child herself, as the agent of her