Researches into the Holocaust through a Polish museum shows something very strange. A familiar name, with familiar notives… Can those nightmares from the past come forward to trouble the present?
I flew into Warsaw’s Chopin Airport, but a Ukrainian named Jan Holodryga met me there. The museum told me to expect him. He insisted on carrying my old olive Navy seabag that I always used instead of a suitcase. It was pretty heavy—I’d forgotten the old rule about how when planning for a trip, you should pack everything you think you’ll need, then remove half—but Jan, despite his graying hair and beard, hefted it with little difficulty out to the plain orange sedan.
His voice heavily accented, he kept up a running monologue the whole time he was leading me out of the airport, weaving through the crowd with my seabag on his shoulder: “Nothing can prepare you for it. Science men came and studied all the grounds, found nothing. Still bodies arrive—”
“You’re really serious, then?” I finally managed to get in while he wrestled my seabag into the car’s back seat. Like everyone I had heard the stories, but this was a man who actually worked at the station. “No exaggerating?”
At that he fell silent. He straightened up, chewing on his lower lip for a few moments while cars hissed by and a horn blew somewhere.
“Were I in your place,” he said, “I would not believe it. Many do not, of course. But, Mr. Landry?” He met my eyes and I noticed the gray of his own, “Seventeen months I have been there, and I witnessed for myself eleven arrivals. The last was three weeks ago.”
We climbed in, shut the door, and he started the engine with a roar so loud I jumped in my seat. “Sorry,” he said. “Needs a muffler, sounds like a tank. Every street I drive down, people notice and look.” He was pulling out into traffic, watching the street. “But the arrivals, they are the greatest mystery, hey?…no one yet has been able to solve it. Perhaps you could?” he said with a you know I’m joking, right? kind of smile.
“Well…the condition they arrive in…”
“Yes. Some say this, others that…the trouble is, no proof, we cannot know who is right. Treblinka is nearby, so some say it is prisoners from there. But those had numbers on them, yes?”
“Actually, no, that was Auschwitz. And the ones just off the train and selected for extermination, they weren’t numbered at all.”
“Ah.” He nodded. “If only that were…” he scowled, as if thinking hard for the right word. “Conclusive. People first thought it was the Black Plague, now returned. Then they saw the dead were appearing in the field, out of nowhere. They built the whole research station around it. Some think it’s…” he screwed up his face again—”serial killers, from a different place. Found a way to send the evidence far away.”
Yes, I had heard that. Others asserted the field was a dumping ground for alien kidnap victims, once the aliens were finished with them. Still others thought some prestigious university was conducting secret quantum experiments with luckless volunteer students.
I still wasn’t convinced it was happening at all. Not that I thought Jan would flat-out lie to me, but this was something beyond far-fetched. It simply could not be.
“So,” he asked, “you are here to write a story for your museum?” The engine rumbled as we cruised out into the country.
“Yes.” That was part of my mission. The other part, I kept to myself.
###
“So, what’s your job there?” I asked. It was late afternoon and the sun was descending ahead of us.
“I am the cook. And what you call…’gofer?’“ He ran down his story: an orphan, he had wandered into Poland and found work at a restaurant. That led to service with a government official which, after a few years, led to his assignment at the site known as the Blednica Research Station. “And I understand, you have a—what is it—photographic memory?”
“Yes.” I left it at that.
He, however, would not. “So you are like Mozart, hey?”
“Well, once I’ve heard a song, I can ‘listen’ to it in my memory. Only one instrument at a time, though.”
“Oh.” He nodded again. “In school you must have gotten, say, high grades in everything.”
“No, no.” That was a common misconception among those who knew me. “The ‘photographs’ are so fragmented and cluttered that it takes a lot of energy just to visualize one of them.” I did not add the part about the happy times with Dad I remembered too well, and always would, for life.
Ninety minutes and a sunset later, Jan swung right onto a dirt road, trees flying by in the outer fringes of the headlights, until a steel gate like Fort Knox confronted us.
We waited, the car engine idling with its deafening noise. A guard came out and spent the next five minutes checking Jan’s pass along with my passport, drivers license and other documents, bantering with Jan in Polish like an old school chum. He must have joked about something because at one point they erupted into laughter. I wondered how often anyone ever laughed on the other side of that gate.
The guard stepped back, waved us through. The gate opened and Jan eased the rattling sedan onward.
I watched for the field I had heard so much about. It was the first thing I saw, an open expanse a little smaller than a soccer field, flooded with klieg lights like a stadium for a night ballgame. Really like any other field, at least any that had been good and trampled, a thousand footprints left in mud now hardened, and grass showing in patches. Soldiers, civilians milled around it, nobody actually on it.
I had seen no pictures of this. No one had, for the place allowed no photography. I’d had to surrender my iPhone to the gate guard who assured me, through translator Jan, that I would get it back when it was time to return to Washington, DC with my story all written.
Jan stood beside me. “You are now seeing what very few—”
He didn’t finish. Voices rose up around the area, murmuring, shouting in Polish. Someone pointed. I squinted in that direction, tensed. Something had appeared in the field that I knew for a fact had not been there a moment ago.
Jan’s hand floated toward me, likely to take my arm and lead me away somewhere. Too late—my journalist instincts kicked in, and I was off like a shot.
I did not run far, however. Even expecting the sight did not help. More lights clapped on, blinding white, when it was already bright as day. That didn’t help, either. I staggered, hand to my mouth and stomach lurching.
A body had appeared all right. But not only one. Two, three—I stopped counting at five, and there were still more than that.
Twenty feet away under the glaring lights were men and women reduced to cadavers, shorn of hair and lacking a single thread of clothing. They lay in a tangle, stiff, teeth bared, some showing bones and ribs under the skin.
Soldiers approached. Their training had prepared them for this, but to me it was a blow to the face. I stared, a deer in the headlights, stomach kicking until I had to double over and vomit. At least I managed to turn around first—I could not subject those victims to one more indignity.
This was what General Eisenhower made a special trip to see, in order to relate firsthand what had gone on behind the Nazis’ closed iron doors. Other generals went with him, including tough-as-nails Patton who (if it was any consolation to me) also threw up, so I’d read. Pictures don’t prepare you for the reality, in person, up close.
For one thing, I smelled them, too. Rancid, rotten, with a whiff of diesel fumes. Covering my mouth, I could think nothing but that this whole business had been a terrible idea and I was insane to come.
I worked for the museum. I had seen countless black and white photographs of Poles and other Europeans. After a year or two, whenever seeing films of liberated camps with the stiff bodies stacked like cordwood, I found I recognized some of them, though they had been reduced to hairless skeletons. Some were easier to identify than others.
It happened often enough for the museum director to contact the Polish government. He offered me a twofold assignment: write an article about the phenomenon, and if given the opportunity, try to identify any victims who arrived during my time there. They proposed this to the Poles and they agreed, keeping it a secret. It was a long shot, but if I could place one victim, or better two, then maybe…
Another cry went up, voices going Woahh all over again.
An arm had moved. It belonged to a woman sprawled on her side across another victim. A distinct twitch, rigor mortis, I thought. But her mouth followed suit, forcing itself open enough to emit a gurgle. Her closed eyelids lifted to reveal two white slits. And then—as if to dispel any remaining doubt—she let out a loud gasp, eyes springing wide, back arching.
The sound shook me out of my paralysis. Before I knew what I was doing I bolted toward her, thinking of CPR, because one of my modest accomplishments so far in my twenty-five years was learning first aid at the YMCA.
Save her.
I never got the chance, of course. A soldier caught my arm, helmet strapped on under his chin, shouting Polish in my ear.
An ambulance rolled up and first responders jumped out, two men and two women in red and black uniforms with RATOWNIK MEDYCZNY blocked out on the backs. Two of them placed the woman on a stretcher, clamped an oxygen mask over her face and loaded her in. They were not going far; the government kept an infirmary on site for times like these, although so far, no one had ever arrived still living.
The others separated the victims and checked for breathing, feeling necks for pulses. It was clear, though, that the rest were long gone. If nothing else, they were all well into adulthood—no children, thank God.
I watched the woman through the ambulance’s open rear doors. If my own guess was true, then she had been through a lot even before the attempted gassing: the long train journey packed into a boxcar, the shouts of the guards, the stripping and shearing and finally the monoxide assault on her lungs that she somehow survived.
She lifted an arm. She pointed. Her mouth opened and closed. She coughed, and her whole body lurched.
Was she trying to say something? What I liked to think of as my journalist instinct—the same impulse that brought me out to this spot to begin with—kicked in again. I started toward her.
The soldier caught my arm again, shaking his head. “Nie.”
Oh, damn it to hell! I shook him off and ran to the ambulance.
The woman, breathing through her mask, saw me coming and held my gaze. Her eyes were green and bright, even fierce, though her arms and legs were too thin and she might have been held captive for some time— if she really came from the camp. I reached out, hesitantly, and touched her hand. It was dry, the grip weak, but it was a living hand and that meant a lot.
The soldier appeared beside me, glowering. I raised a finger—Just a minute!
She moved only her mouth and her right hand. The rest of her remained as still as the other men and women who had accompanied her here. Her hand wavered, the finger pointing. She pulled in a breath. “Ee-fon…” She drew in another. “Mar-zenk.”
I looked to where she indicated. Jan stood some twenty meters away, talking with a soldier about something.
I turned back to her. “I don’t know what you mean”—forgetting she probably didn’t know English. An eidetic memory doesn’t stop you from forgetting little things like this.
Her arm held steady. “Mar-zenko.” So, one of those men resembled someone she had known?
Jan and the soldier finished talking. Jan stepped away, a few steps to the left, to confer now with a fiftyish man in a gray suit. The survivor’s finger followed him. When he stopped, it remained on him.
Her eyes gleamed up at me.
The soldier grabbed my arm and hustled me across the compound as the first responders saw to their patient. Jan saw me and scrambled up, chattering at the soldier in Polish. The man released his steel grip and the two exchanged a few words. I rubbed my arm and watched the survivor across the field. After a minute, Jan rejoined me.
“The director says you have seen enough for one night—hey? I will take you to your hotel, you can get checked in.”
We returned to the sedan. He fired it up and it made its loud tank-roar. I winced—this was not a place for loud noises, not right now.
I was thinking new thoughts, and did not like them. I would not see him in a suspicious way now. My mind was already busy spinning perfectly rational explanations: the poor woman had clearly been through an ordeal of some kind, maybe a gassing, and her mind could not have been working right.
“So, Mr. Landry?” Jan asked. “What you do think?”
I paused. “That woman…she didn’t seem scared.”
“No coward.”
Ouch. I cringed, and Jan saw it and cut himself off. Too late; he had set off the memory, flooding my mind sharp cutting images.
Jan noticed. “What is it?”
“My Dad passed away.” My voice was hoarse.
“I am sorry.”
“Two years ago, from lung cancer.” The words were spilling out and I knew I would not be able to stop them. This had happened once before when someone innocently said that C-word. “My older brother, he insisted on staying every night at the hospital with Dad. I stayed with Dad in the daytime. One night Mom and I finally got the call, come quickly, it won’t be much longer. She woke me up and told me, but I…” I swallowed. “I didn’t go.”
Jan kept his eyes on the road.
“I couldn’t…bear the thought. Seeing him die in front of me, the raw grief. It was too much. It was too damned much, and I stayed in bed, and I made her drive there alone.”
“I am sorry for that, too.”
That was all he said, and I appreciated it. I knew, however, that I would cringe to remember this moment from now on. And I myself might live a very long time. I’d never smoked and would probably outlive Dad.
I was thinking And some have accused me of being too quiet when Jan asked, “So, what did the woman say?”
Silence. “Nothing. Nothing I understood at least.”
I turned toward him. He was eyeing me. He went on eyeing me for several seconds as we waited for a red light, then went back to watching the street.
“Very well.”
###
Blednica was a remote village with not much in the way of hotels. Jan drove past it a little ways to the town of Ostrow Mazowiecka, where the museum had booked me into a small inn’s third-floor garret.
Going in, closing the door behind me and setting down the seabag Jan had insisted on carrying up the stairs, I fell on the bed and watched the sloping ceiling as the past hour replayed in my head.
Now that it had been proven in my face that the laws of reality were not so ironclad as I’d always believed, I could not dismiss what I was thinking. Instead of trying to sleep (good luck with that anyway) I got up, fished my laptop from my seabag, realized I had forgotten to get the place’s Wi-Fi password, searched all over for it before finding it printed on a card displayed on the desk in plain view, connected, sat on my bed with my laptop balanced on my crossed legs.
I had read as much as anyone, seen as many films as anyone about that era—the war, the Holocaust, the July 20 attempt to overthrow Hitler by assassination. Many names and players had crossed my sight. The woman’s name-drop of earlier connected me instantly with a book called The Treblinka Garrison. Page 122 mentioned a guard named Ivan Marczenko. The prisoners called him Ivan the Terrible.
Treblinka did not use Zyklon B; their gas chambers were fed by two tank engines. Ivan operated them. Known for his “extreme cruelty,” he would cut off the ears of workers who were then forced to continue their work even as they bled. Shortly after that, he would shoot them. He also tortured victims with pipes, swords and whips before the gas chambers finally finished them off.
In 1986 a retired Cleveland auto worker named John Demjanjuk was accused of being Ivan, but in the end his case was dropped for lack of evidence. He was a war criminal, but not that war criminal.
By the time I ran Marczenko’s name through Google, I had regained my bearings somewhat. Maybe all bets were off, but surely…
After two hours of searching, I knew the following. He was seen last in the Trieste region of northern Italy near the end of the war. A single picture, really a thumbnail, showed a man wearing a dark shirt and hat, who could have been any flunky working for the Nazis.
I flopped down on my back, seeing but not really noticing the ceiling. Consider: the Germans unlocked jet propulsion. They built ballistic missiles that shot up into space and back down to strike London at speeds faster than sound. And they almost figured out the bomb—almost.
So could they really have figured out time travel? At least enough to send victims into the future, maybe toward the end of the war when they were desperate to hide the evidence?
The evidence—my gut clenched. I was supposed to try and identify those, wasn’t I? Oh, God help me…
After what I had seen, anything was possible.
###
Jan picked me up the next morning. Maybe he noticed how I was studying him out the corner of my eye, maybe he didn’t. (He looks nothing like the guy in the picture, I kept telling myself.)
“Where is the survivor now?” I asked without knowing why, since the infirmary was the only place she could possibly be. I wasn’t completely awake yet.
“Are you certain she told you nothing, Mr. Landry?”
Now I was awake. His eyes, did they turn to ice for just that moment? His jaw clench? “No, no, I told you, I don’t speak her language.”
He shrugged. “I did not mean to press. I am only curious.”
We drove the rest of the way in silence. A heavy silence, at least to me. When I got out of the car, I felt his eyes on my back as I headed for the administrative building.
###
The director was a prim man with silver hair who looked ready for a corporate meeting; gray suit, black tie. I ran down every detail from my memory, and hastened to add my doubts—the survivor had been put through a nightmare, she was in a chemical haze, etc.
It was a relief when he did not dismiss me on the spot as crazy. (Considering where we were, maybe I shouldn’t have worried.) “At this time, she is being fed intravenously,” he said in better English than my own. “The doctor tells me it will be some time before we start her on food—”
Inwardly I jolted. Holy hell, Jan was the cook, wasn’t he? I hadn’t even thought of that.
“We will make a search of his quarters,” the director said, hands folded on his desk. Then, seeing the look on my face: “No, no, it is only a routine matter! Do not trouble yourself. He is in the kitchen at this time, he will not even know—it’s not like we’re going to throw his things everywhere,” he chuckled. “I’m sure it will come to nothing.”
All the same, I slunk out of his office feeling that old familiar burn of shame, biting my lip, wishing I’d kept my big mouth shut.
Thirty minutes later I was out on the field, listening to a lady chemist with red hair run down the tests they conducted on the soil. Routine tests each Wednesday, special tests after an arrival: chalk lines like police lines marked around the bodies, and after those were taken away, soil samples placed into half-pint cartons and brought inside and assigned laboratory numbers. She was explaining something called the Mehlich Buffer Preparation and elements like phosphorus, calcium, magnesium, zinc and so on—looking for any abnormal levels, or anything new—when I happened to look up and spot Jan across the compound.
He was heading in the direction of the infirmary, for some reason carrying a gray briefcase. I stiffened. I stared as he strode in a straight line, on a mission, reaching the infirmary, going in, closing the door.
The chemist talked on, but I didn’t really hear her. I had been squatting, but I rose to my feet. There were people in there, right?—Doctors, nurses?
I interrupted the chemist. “Hold on a sec.”
My legs propelled me forward. I would have a look—that was all. Someone had to be in there with him, and if he’d gotten wise and was sore at me then so what, I had to put this to rest.
Reaching the infirmary, I took hold of the doorknob, turned it, entered. “Hey! Jan?”
I stopped.
The room had four beds, three of them unoccupied. The victim lay sound asleep in one, chest rising and falling, wearing a blue hospital gown, an I.V. taped to her arm. It was all just like a hospital room, with one exception.
The end table beside the bed had been moved down to beside her hand. A lamp lay on its side on the floor. The briefcase lay open on the end table, its contents showing: A block like dirty white cheese, with a metal appendage sticking out one end—
My insides turned to ice. An image shot to mind, the date July 20, 1944, the place Hitler’s Wolfsschanze. This was a hunk of plastic explosive with a Switch no. 10 pencil detonator, like the one used by Stauffenberg and company. Not a pencil’s size, though, not a mere five inches: this one was twelve inches at least, the explosive itself packed into two-thirds of the briefcase.
Holy. hell.
But that was not the worst part. He had handcuffed the survivor’s wrist to one of the detonator’s inspection holes.
“Mr. Landry?”
I jerked my head up. He stood in an open doorway opposite me, looking absolutely no different except his face mirrored what had to be my own shocked look. “It is armed. Get away!”
With the detonator protruding from the plastic, the device resembled an explosive version of Thor’s hammer. The handle’s end had already been crimped flat; Jan was telling the truth, it was armed. That triggered the unwelcome visualization of readings past: The now-crushed glass ampoule inside that contained the green copper chloride, the liquid now released to erode a wire little by little until it snapped and set the thing off. And judging by all that plastic, I was guessing it might wreck this whole building.
But how would he escape? I thought of something. “You’re traveling out of here…time travel, right? Further up ahead?”
“GO!” he shouted an instant before slamming the door. And that would be the last I ever saw of him.
A hopeful thought—hey! The safety strip! Maybe he forgot to remove it—but, no, there it was on the floor. And not only that, a black strip, meaning a ten minute delay. At least half of that had to be gone now.
My mind echoed Jan’s shout, Get out, GET OUT!
I did not go. The helpless woman on the bed, already the victim of a gassing—I could not leave her. I already knew what it was to live gnawed by guilt because I had forsaken a dying person. It was not going to happen again. The threat of everything ending here and now it did not matter, somehow. If this was to be her fate, then at least someone stayed with her through it.
Nothing to lose, then. Stooping down, feeling as in a dream, I reached for the detonator. Easy, easy! Don’t hurry.
My fingers closed around it. Nothing happened.
Now I braced my left hand against the plastic. It yielded under the light press of my palm, did not blow us sky-high. Malleable, right? Mold it into any shape you need, that’s the idea. Maybe this wouldn’t be so hard…working the handle, the crimped end reminding me every moment this device was live, sweat trickling down my brow, stinging my eyes. I gritted my teeth. There, it’s giving, little by little. Work it a little more, a little more showed, a shadow of the clay sticking to it, the line showed how far it had been stuck in and I had made some progress. Careful, careful, my heart hammered, it’s gonna go off, GO OFF—
I yanked the detonator free so hard, my heart stopped. I was certain this was it. But my action only pulled the survivor’s hand away from her side and I felt its weight, the chain taut. I realized only now she had slept through it all. Even Jan’s shout hadn’t wakened her.
A mechanism inside the detonator snapped like a mousetrap. I dropped it and yelled as if stung. It fell, dragging her hand off the bed, one metal end thumping the floor.
Stooping down, keeping clear of that still dangerous-looking hunk of cheese in the open briefcase, I examined the detonator. The inspection holes confirmed it; the wire had snapped, the percussion cap had sparked.
A chill came over me. One second longer…
But wait. Only now did I notice, really notice where Jan had jammed the cuff into one of the inspection holes and out through another. My eyes opened wide, and I placed a hand over my mouth.
The door opened. I looked over my shoulder. The director stood there with two soldiers. He was third person in the last ten minutes to gape in shock, first myself, then Jan, now him. “What in God’s name…”
I let out a yell and then a roar of laughter, sobbing, tears spilling over and trickling down my cheeks, crying, laughing all at once. Jan, you dope! And I was a dope too for missing it, but didn’t care.
“What is it?” the director shouted. The survivor was finally stirring awake, blinking her eyes.
“The handcuff.” I flapped a finger at the mechanism. “He threaded it through these holes, right? That was the only way he could bind her to it. Except it blocked the striker inside—the spring-loaded striker,” I gasped for breath, “that hits the percussion cap and causes the explosion. The cuff metal was blocking it.” I sniffed, wiped my face on my sleeve. “He sabotaged his own bomb. It was never going to work!”
The craziest day of my life.
The soldiers tried the other door, found it locked, broke it open. It was the bathroom, I saw. There was no other door out of it, only a high window that was open, but too small for Jan. One curious detail: a faint, but distinct brown ring showed on the linoleum floor, about a meter across, where something had charred it.
###
Soldiers removed the July 20 device. One of the kitchen staff confessed to seeing the military enter Jan’s quarters and innocently tipping him off. The gate guards confirmed Jan had not tried to leave. The search turned up a hidden cache of cyanide ampules, the same kind favored by Himmler and Eva Braun and so many others at war’s end.
The director unfortunately had to resign when the government wanted to know, how did an explosive device get into the station undetected? We have as many theories about that as about Jan himself. Maybe he sneaked it in piece by piece, components stuck down his sock or what have you. Every theory has its problems.
About that, now. Jan had arrived all of seven years ahead of the first casualties. Enough time to get into government service, to earn trust, and when the station was established, get assigned there. He knew about it way in advance. This is what we are dealing with.
The same international science teams that had studied and sampled and analyzed the field to within an inch of its life, now did the same for the infirmary. They also questioned me to within an inch of my mercifully-preserved life. Meanwhile, another group of bodies, six of them, arrived in the field. I recognized none of them, but at least we had something even better now: an eyewitness.
Yes, she came from Treblinka, she said. Better yet, she had been transferred from Auschwitz, and had a number tattooed on her forearm to confirm her story. That, at least, is no longer a mystery.
Perhaps because of this, a new mystery had to take its place. I will now leave you with it.
I had to stay overnight at the station because it was locked down, no one allowed in or out. The next day a soldier drove me to my inn, where I found a neatly-folded piece of paper at the front desk with my name handwritten on it.
“Who brought this?” I asked. The clerk’s description matched Jan.
The government has it now, of course. Written in English, it reads in its entirety:
Mr. Landry,
I am sorry to have given you a fright. I do not know what came over me, except the woman in the infirmary looked like a woman who abused me as a boy in a foster home, and it took me by surprise. I collect war items, including a bomb like the one used on Hitler. I got an uncontrollable urge to blow her up with it. By the time my sanity returned, I could not undo what I had done and so had to go away. They will not find me, but I wish you well.
Kind regards,
Jan
Here’s what I believe he really meant. He was sent here by his Nazi bosses, because they knew their victims would turn up and get attention. The Nazis tried to conceal their crimes toward the end, as we now know, and as long as their victims arrived dead, no one could tell any tales; no one could prove anything.
But if any showed up alive…
That would explain the poison ampules. Apparently the bomb was his rear guard if ever found out, keeping everyone away while he made whatever preparations he’d had to make with whatever he used. It could also take him different places, apparently, as well as times.
So is he somewhere in the future now? Possibly. I doubt he would have wanted to return to 1945, whether or not he could. The Nazis didn’t spectacularly win the war, so we know their time travel ability was limited. Maybe you can only travel forward in any case, and not back.
Also: Why only send their victims ahead, along with an ordinary guard, and not themselves? War criminals, high officials—even the leader himself, along with scientists, a thousand men and an action plan?
Here’s the scary part.
Who says they didn’t?
END
