Landscapes of the Metropolis of Death: Reflections on Memory and Imagination by Otto Dov Kulka

Author:Otto Dov Kulka [Dov Kulka, Otto]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Published: 2013-04-07T16:00:00+00:00

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The immutable law of the Great Death, the immutable law which recurs in that dream in infinite permutations, which in one place I called ‘the eternal death of the child’, that terrible immutability did not cease even here, in the attempt to save her. Her last moments, her last hallucinations, as described by that friend of hers, were devoted to me: worry and nightmares in which she saw me hiding in a secret place which my father and I had prepared for the time when the Czech camp, the family camp, would be liquidated, in the event that we would not leave it; that is, I would not be able to leave, I would not be included in the group of youths chosen for a further extension of life. Even though my mother knew I had got out, because when we last met I was already in a different part of the camp, the picture that stayed with her in those last nightmarish hours was of how I remained in that hiding place in the desolate camp; a hiding place which was in a kind of loft of the huge water tank in the inmates’ large washing barracks, the barracks with the wonderful acoustics in which we sang – two hundred metres from the selections platform, about three hundred metres from the crematoria – where we sang then in the children’s choir, conducted by the choirmaster, the ‘Ode to Joy’: ‘Joy! Bright spark of divinity! . . . Fire-inspired, we tread thy sanctuary.’ Here the circle was closed, after I heard the conclusion of this tragedy, foreordained as it was, here, in Jerusalem of 1961.

At the Estuary of the Great River of Time on the Shores of the Baltic Sea

I have related this story ahead of another end-story, in which an additional circle was closed: the story of the journey which my father and I took when we went to Danzig and to Stutthof. We went to look for the grave, to look for the satellite city of the Metropolis of Death – and we reached it. The gate, unlike the one in Birkenau, was well kept, and the buildings which greeted the visitors were as well guarded as they were preserved, with museum rooms and research rooms for the staff of the place, which had in the meantime become a memorial site. A memorial site mainly for the camp of the prisoners of the Polish national resistance movement against the Nazis. The avenue leading into the camp and its continuation inside recalled the well-kept camps, like Dachau in Germany, with floor plans, maps and statistical data, followed by a few rooms containing appurtenances of torture and devices for executions. But the camp itself, Stutthof itself, was a kind of field, a seemingly almost endless space, desolate yet somehow cultivated, the grass cut, a sort of lawn stretching – not endlessly, but to the edge of a large, black forest, beyond which was, we were told, the sea.

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