9/20/02

Lublin / Warsaw / Krakow

Woke up to a simple spread of Polish bread, butter, cheese and tomatoes nicely prepared by Slawek's mom. Slawek had an appointment at 10am but walked over to Majdanek with me for a short tour. It's amazing how close to the city it is. We took a shortcut from the back like a five-minute walk from his apartment. I'm still a little confused why there are no holes in the ceiling at the 3 back chambers at Majdanek, or why only one has a back and front door, and Slawek didn't have the answer, but it was nicer to go there with sunshine.

We were able to get into the exhibit barracks which I couldn't get into before because I was there so late. Tons of information and documentation and some evil looking whips and truncheons on display, including one with some barbed wire tied into the end. There was a really neat little section of artwork made in the camp including this little 'movie' which was little cartoon panels to tell the story of a girl in the camp. It was mostly rolled up and about the size of a roll of toilet paper. They also had some little kid toys and a small bunch of hair on display. There were a lot more people here this day, school groups or something. It was all so much nicer with the sun out. Had some time to really check out the crematorium too. There were all sorts of tourists and a few Germans showed up. Damn, Germans need some fucking sunshine in their lives! How often do you see a German comedy?

I picked up a small book and a video and wish I picked up the big book but didn't want to carry so much (damn!) and caught a cab straight to the train station. Sadly I had left my slownik (dictionary) at the hotel and didn't give myself enough time to pick it up. Oh well.

Trained back the 2.5 hours to Warsaw and Jacek picked me up and we raced home to change and get clothes and meet Krzys back at the station to catch the train to Krakow and its 3-hour ride. Boy I love European trains. They're like the trains in the James Bond movies where you have these little compartments with six seats. And the food is so much better. They have real plates of real food instead of microwave pizza and Doritos.

We arrived about 8:00pm and cabbed to the Hotel Kazimierz in the old Jewish section of Krakow. I called the Pendereckis from our hotel room. Pani Penderecka (women's names end with an 'a' while their husband's end with an 'i') incredibly answered the phone and she was so gorgeously nice. Unfortunately Krzysztof was on tour until the 14th and she was leaving for New York on Sunday. She offered to rearrange her Saturday schedule but we were already planning on going to Oswiecim all day long. She is SO nice!!! I said, Next time, she said great.We then walked down the street, passing a Jewish restaurant that looked fun and the Jarden bookstore where I had ordered books from before. When we came to the rynek (market square) I was floored by the gorgeous kosciol (church), an extremely beautiful spired thin tall church that looks like Sleeping Beauty's castle from Disneyland only much cooler and older and less fake-looking.

The rynek here is just amazing. Really really incredible. I could sit here for hours. I wanted to go eat at this restaurant that kings used to eat at but Krzys and Jacek were having intense problems with eating at a tourist restaurant. For me the price was like normal New York diner prices, but for them, it was some kind of internally painful thing to allow me to take them there. So we went to this other place that was really nice and I had some kind of Polish steak with stuff on it and some more great Polish beer. Just beautiful to eat in the outside of this gorgeous square. Music playing, people out, really great. Krakow is a lot different than Warsaw. More people speak English and people are generally more cosmopolitan and look less poor. The popular Warsaw haircut is to have your hair really short to the scalp but uneven, like someone with rusty scissors chopped it off. I actually saw a non-white person in Krakow! An Asian! Boy did he look out of place!

One of the nicest things about visiting Poland and Paris was the lack of pierced and tattooed people. I mean, if you're reading this you're probably my friend already and you know I dig you and stuff, but everyone in America is tattooed or pierced. It really was just refreshing to not see it around so much.

We walked back to the hotel, took turns showering and readied ourselves for the next morning's trip to Oswiecim, home of Auschwitz and Birkenau.

Gary Sherman's long-"lost" classic "Deathline" played yesterday during the Walter Reade fest. It's great to see the turnout for these films. Gary had brought his own print so this was the first time for almost everyone to see his version of the film. For years all we've had is the truncated American version titled "Raw Meat" so this was quite a treat! Guillermo del Toro, director of Cronos, Mimic, Blade II, Devil's Backbone and the upcoming Hellboy, is a huge fan of the film and he introduced the movie and had a Q & A session with Gary beforehand.

It's so crazy to hear how much hell basically everyone has to go through to get any creative thing done. Gary has created three classics, Deathline, Dead & Buried, and the incredible Vice Squad, but hell has greeted him during his productions in too many ways. He also directed Poltergeist III and his hell on that pic was that Heather O'Rourke died during production and they were unable to finish the film to his original story. Deathline was mangled by the American distributor and Dead & Buried changed hands three times during production! I personally love Dead & Buried and Gary said the movie is about 80% of what he wanted it to be, which I guess is pretty good in Hollywood.

After the screening Mark Walkow, Maitland McDonough, Tony Timpone hung out for a bit while Scooter McCrae, Matt Kiernan, Mike Gingold, Lanny and I chatted and then our group of five went on to Ollie's for horrible service though tasty chow. We met up with Gary, Guillermo and Larry Cohen at Josefina's and Gary and Guillermo joined us for drinks at the Ian Schrager hotel on 58th. The flames were out for some reason but the green-lit escalators were there so we had our fun in the Library bar, taking a few minutes to get a seat.

It was kinda wild hanging out with these guys and hearing their horror stories about getting films made. Filmmakers really do want to make movies. They don't want to give you crap. But sadly the people with the pocketbooks aren't usually filmmakers and have their own bizarre ideas of what is 'scary.' Gary's working on a miniseries for Sci-Fi Channel right now, a huge 7-hour monster which is titled something close to 'The Eight Dimension' and Guillermo's prepping for Hellboy. Guillermo is such an amazing total film fan. God these guys are great!

Movies can rock! Filmmakers are cool. Guillermo says that New Line and Revolution are great studios, and Gary is loving the response he's getting from Sci-Fi Channel on his script, so things are looking good for these guys.

I can't believe I was sitting next to the guy who directed 'Vice Squad' for a few hours! I LOVE that movie! What he did with Wings Hauser is near genius, if not genius itself. Definitely a high point in his career.

9/19/02 - Part 2

Belzec

On the way from Sobibor to Belzec, we stop at a roadside pub for refreshments. God I love Poland! We each got huge portions of good real food for like $3-4 each. And of coures more beer. I rarely drink in the States. Just last night (Oct. 16) I had one glass of wine and had a headache and was tired. But in Europe… maybe it's just different alcohol, or maybe it's the climate, but alcohol tastes great, doesn't fuck me up, and just seems to work.

I've been psyched about visiting Belzec (pronounced Behw-zhets; the l has a line through it and the z has a dot over it and the c is a 'ts' sound in Polish) for awhile. When I first started reading about the camps it most spiked my interest as it's the most forgotten of the four solely-extermination centers. I had read of one visit by a rabbi who said he saw pieces of bones lying around. Then I read a few more and all reported the same findings. That you could just drag a rake over the topsoil and uncover historical records of the Nazi's crimes in this area. I had also read a bit about Christian Wirth (pronounced Veert) who ran this camp, and others in the Aktion Reinhard program. He had a really bad reputation, even among other top SS-Men. Franz Suchomel spoke of Wirth with distate in 'Shoah.'

Wirth's first venture was the Chelmno camp near Lodz, Poland. (Boy do I wish I could type out how Lodz really looks. It's actually pronounced between 'woodge' and 'wooch.') This camp operated in two segments and used 3 mobile gas vans for the killing. The operations began the same day that Japan bombed Pearl Harbor, December 7, 1941 (although some sources say the official operations opening date was December 8). Nowhere else in print or on the web is any significance attributed to the Japanese attack and the first mass gassings. So far it appears I'm the only one drawing any connection here. Maybe there is none. Just interesting is all.

Chelmno's operations began before the Wannsee Conference (which occurred January 20, 1942) where the Final Solution to the Jewish Problem was delivered to the heads of the Nazi machine. After orchestrating Chelmno, Wirth moved on to Belzec near the Ukraine border and set up the first camp with gas chambers, and becoming the first commandant of Belzec.

Belzec was just total hell. The deportees would arrive at the Belzec station where the cars would be broken into groups of 20, and then shunted into the camp via a rail spur. The doors would open and the Ukrainians would scream at the Jews to get out of the cars. The dead were pulled out by the Sonderkommando, worker Jews.

What a lot of people don't realize is that these trains were moving very slowly. The trains would sometimes take days to arrive at a death camp. First the Jews were forced into ghettos, deprived of outside food or supplies, and were already weakened. When the 'promise' of work and food was offered by the Germans, it was normal for the Jews to accept this belief. Word of 'death camps' came very late. And it was hard for anyone to actually believe that the Germans would be exterminating people en masse.

Let me ask you: If I told you that at 69th and Broadway there is a factory and people are going in and not coming out, would you believe me? Even today, after the Germans, after September 11th, it's just such a bizarre concept to take in.

As the trains were very full with so many people, packed 100 or more to a car, they moved slower than usual. This also assisted in killing the 'cargo' off as they had no food or water on the journey, nor a toilet. They were crammed into smelly dirty cars. Sometimes the Nazis would place quicklime in the cars and just let the cars sit, hoping the Jews would die in the cars alone, without the need for gas chambers.

After departing the cars the Jews were lined up, told they would have a shower, and were sent to an undressing area, the women to a haircutting area, and were told to head into the Hackenholt Foundation for disinfection. Lorenz Hackenholt was in charge of the gas chambers. The Germans loved their irony during this period. The gas chambers also had a large Jewish star above the entrance to further deceive their victims.

Well, by the time we got to Belzec this day, there was just plain nothing left at all. This was the first camp dismantled, and there were little traces of its existence even in 1943. The Poles, under Communist rule, erected a simple monument that said nothing of the Jews, just 'Hitler's Victims.' I had seen pictures of this camp. A gate with the dates of its operation, the monument, some large gray slabs covering mass grave sites, and some urns on the edge of the original camp. All gone and hurled at the bottom edge of the camp in one big crumbled mountain of concrete. We saw a sign saying that the Polish government and the United States Holocaust Museum were putting in a new memorial.

Slawek was surprised. He didn't know this had happened. Only this week (Oct. 13-20) did I learn on the internet that the whole place was gone over in May to prepare for the new monument. We walk up to where the old monument was, and there's still some foundation there. People had left candles and flowers there. Slawek had a new map of the camp prepared by British historian Mike Tregenza showing the locations of the mass graves, of which they have now found 33. Basically the whole area of land is one mass grave. Belzec was just so far away from everything, and the first gas chamber death camp, that apparently Wirth and his men felt they didn't need to go too far in covering up their traces. Basically every bit of ground under our feet contained the remains of over 600,000 Jewish, and 1,500 Poles who had assisted Jews. Incredible.

We walked up to where the old slabs were and where the urns were, and threw the woods. All the trees had been planted by Jewish hands upon orders from the Nazis, to cover the traces. The woods are fairly sparse. We retraced the path of the original train spur that came into the camp, then walked over to where some of the excavations had occurred, unearthing the foundations of the original SS barracks and a garage. The original SS living quarters is across the way, now occupied by a family, but we didn't meet them. This white house can be seen in this photo of the SS-Men of Belzec standing at attention in full uniform and smiling at the camera. Further away from the camp, down the train line, is a large empty brick building that the SS used to store all the belongings of the Jews, taken from them as they disembarked the train. Here they would be sorted by other work Jews and sent back to Germany.

I remember reading about the hair removal and how the hair would be sewn into cloth and sock and used as insulation on submarines and as stuffing for pillows. I thought it strange that a government that declared the Jews to be so inhuman would bother to recycle their hair to put in their pillows to dream on at night, but they did. The German government was so full of lies. Theivery appears to have been as strong an influence as hatred. Ripping out the gold teeth and melting them down into ingots, attempts to create fertilizer, and even fuel from the corpses, show that the Jews were mined for everything they had. The apartments they departed were robbed, their belongs sorted through immediately, and their clothing gone through for hidden valuables. The Jews were told to bring only their most important possession which helped the Nazis to recover them, as the jewels and money and gold would be on them when they arrived.

We wandered over to the new Belzec station. I was somewhat surprised to see that a brand-new building was here, instead of the dilapidated one I had seen briefly in Shoah, and for that matter all over Poland. The stops on my train adventures to pick up other passengers disclosed 'stations' there were merely rotting wooded shacks, or just concrete covers. Belzec is right on the edge of the Poland-Ukraine border now, as Poland's borders were shifted West after the war. I don't know enough about the area to understand why they would replace this station in particular when so many are in ruins. Maybe this information will come out one day.

So we left Belzec and made our way back to Lublin. As it was my curiousity had disenabled me from catching the last train to Warsaw, so I spent the night at Slawek's and his mother's flat, flipping through the hundreds of books Slawek's father had collected on the destructions of the Jews, and through a small notebook of his father's, with details I had not read in any of the 30 or so books I had managed to read before my trip. Slawek pulled the couch out into a bed, I stayed up as long as I could ingesting new information, and slept.