Landscapes of the Metropolis of Death: Reflections on Memory and Imagination - Tapa dura

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Otto Dov Kulka is Rosenbloom Professor Emeritus of Jewish History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

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From Chapter Three: The Final Liquidation of the ‘Family Camp’

A completely different type of encounter with the Auschwitz form of death lay in a kind of development, if one can put it like that, an involuntary upgrading of the games of daring, the games of touching the electrified barbed- wire fence. This was in October 1944 . By then I was already in the men’s camp together with my father, working as an apprentice to a group of blacksmiths, of whom my father was one. Every day after work I would pass a small metal container of soup to my uncle through the barbed wire. The uncle, my mother’s brother, had arrived from Theresienstadt and was in an adjacent camp. That particular day, around dusk, was the same. But on that day a revolt broke out among the Sonderkommando inmates in one of the crematoria, an event which became fateful for me as well. The inmates rebelled, set fire to the crematorium, and tried to escape. The procedure in such cases was to electrify the fence. Of course, I did not learn about all this until afterwards.

As I did every day, I passed the container with the soup through the fence, and at one point I touched the barbed wire. I felt shocks run through every part of my body and I was stuck to the fence. I was immobilized but felt as though I had risen into the air and was floating a few centimeters above the ground. At that moment I understood well what had happened: I was caught on the electrified fence.

At that moment it was also clear to me that I was dead, because it was known that anyone caught on the wire died instantly. But I see, even as I float, even as I experience a choking feeling, as I look at the world around me – I see that nothing has changed. Blue skies hide between the clouds, there are people opposite me – opposite me, wearing a faded green coat and holding a large wooden pole, a Soviet prisoner of war was standing and staring. The only thought that kept pounding in my head the whole time was: I am dead, and the world as I see it has not changed! Is this what the world looks like after death?

Here was the boundless curiosity a human being possesses from the moment he first becomes aware of his mortality; curiosity that transcends death: ‘What is it like to be dead? Is this what it is like to be dead? After all, one sees the world as it is and the world is open before me. I am floating, yes, but nothing has changed.’ This riddle, which had vexed me since the age of five or six, without any connection to death or to the Metropolis of Death or to the crematoria, was suddenly solved. Death is not death – the world has not changed; I see the world and I take in the world. That was the experience that overwhelmed me during all those long minutes and seconds, until someone standing there grabbed the wooden pole – or maybe it was a shovel – from the Soviet prisoner of war and poked me in the chest with it a few times. I slid to the ground.

What happened afterwards – that is a different story. The burns on my hands turned into pus- filled sores and I had to hide to avoid being selected for the group of those unfit for work . . .