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The Man by the Door
Howard Kaplan
 RYBACK: Unearths Martin's Secret |
(April 10, 2000)What to do with a survivor- guide at Dachau, who, despite his claims, may never have been interned there?
For the last five years Martin Zaidenstadt, deep in his 80s, has kept a daily vigil outside Dachau�s crematorium door. There he recounts, in any of a number of languages, what he witnessed at the camp, to a large number of the one million people who peer annually into Dachau�s ovens. Then Zaidenstadt thrusts his card at the transfixed tourists and mentions how expensive it is to print them. Almost all respond from their wallets.
Zaidenstadt is particularly passionate about the horrors of Dachau�s gas chamber, though Timothy Ryback has established quite convincingly that the gas chambers there were never used, maybe because the gas vents were so close to the SS barracks and maybe because the crematorium found full occupancy without them.
So does it matter that holes puncture Zaidenstadt�s story, that he might never have seen Dachau before the 1990s -- as he stands, a tired, bent Jew in front of the ovens, bearing living testament to those who certainly died there? Martin is married to a German woman in the town of Dachau, has breathed life into three postwar children who have never ventured into the camp, and knelt for decades in the Catholic church near his home -- until reborn with his vigil.
Ryback, a prominent Salzburg-based journalist, has conducted an extensive hunt into Zaidenstadt�s past, in search of a truth that seems increasingly irrelevant as the quest intensifies. Barbara Dystel, the Dachau memorial site�s highly competent director, sees Martin as a sweet, gentle man. The groundskeeper, who has an office in a back room of the crematorium, allows Martin to rest on his sofa. As Dachau�s inmates were not tattooed, Dystel believes Martin might have been interned there, registered under a different name. At the same time, she expresses little concern that Martin may have fabricated his own story and could be considered someone exploiting the fate of the victims to solicit money for himself. Though she cannot find Martin�s name in the registry compiled from the Nazi registration cards after the war, she persuasively tells the author: She is content knowing Martin for what he is, the survivor outside the gas chamber door.
Woven between the pursuit of the past -- the author rifles through community Yizkor (memorial) books, and ventures into Jedwabne, Martin�s birthplace in Poland -- Ryback intersperses vignettes of Dachau�s contemporary citizens. The most interesting morsel reveals that many expectant mothers rush off to Munich to deliver their babies, ensuring the birth certificates will not be stained by the name "Dachau."
In brief chapters we meet the likes of Dr. Hans Joachim Sewering, now a respiratory specialist and apparently a participant in a wartime program called T-4, in which doctors killed certain deficient patients in order to "cleanse the Fatherland."
Gertrud Schmidt-Podolsky, a political firebrand, publicly champions the rights of Dachauers to live "normally despite their town�s grim legacy." And there is Otto Fuchs, the painter, who tells the author: "If you look at the curves of the female form, you will see the Dachau landscape, the same contours, the same simple lines of the horizon, a gentle series of curved lines in dialog with one another." Fuchs�s comments reminded me of an admonition from Somerset Maugham, the prolific British author, who in one of his autobiographies suggested that aspiring writers reject sentences that sound spectacular but mean nothing. Fundamentally the townspeople portraits are distracting and reveal little that is unexpected.
TIMOTHY W. RYBACK HAS WRIT- ten extensively on European politics and culture for a variety of publications. He originally visited Dachau in the early 1990s to pen a New Yorker piece on the town and its denizens, and later found himself drawn inexplicably back to the scenic town beside the death camp. The story, one has the feeling, would have worked better as another magazine article; there�s not enough here to carry a book, even a slim one of 196 pages.
When Ryback is at the heart of his material, one on one with Martin, the passages are riveting and written with a novelist�s eye and elegance. For example, from an early description of Zaidenstadt: "Martin will pass indolently from one memory to the next, his eyes fixed on the distant shores of his youth, until he is overtaken by a squall of rage. His eyes fill with fear or anger. He fulminates and rages, and after a few moments this passes, and he again is set adrift onto other memories."
Near the book�s close, Ryback unearths Martin�s secret -- what happened to the Jedwabne Jews and among them Martin�s first wife and 4-year old daughter. But every survivor bears such a story; its revelation is anticlimactic and the author�s focus on it unworthy. Though Martin�s degree of assimilation is unusual, many survivors who chose not to speak about their experience, late in their lives and suddenly faced with their mortality, move to bear witness. What matters is that Martin has ultimately found his way back to Judaism at the doors of the crematorium.
Still, a difficult question arises from Martin�s fabrications. Many would argue that they are both an affront to the truth and an aid to Holocaust deniers. But is exaggerating the horror really an affront to the truth? I�m not persuaded. An aid to Holocaust deniers? They fabricate at will, and I believe that Martin�s bending of the truth gives little ammunition to them, especially when compared with the number of people he influences.
Howard Kaplan is a novelist living in Los Angeles.
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