To Pay Our Respects
As we stand at the gates of the Mauthausen concentration camp, more than at any other time previously, I feel acutely aware of the family into which I have married. Daniele and I deluded ourselves that our separate family histories, their drastically different ways of interacting, much less of communicating, wouldn’t affect us. His family: Italian, rigid; my family: North American, loose. My parents—both born before World War II; his parents—both born after World War II. My parents vividly remember the photographs of Shoah victims in Life magazine, skeletal humans barely still alive. Daniele’s Italian grandfather lived those pictures yet, perhaps because he never spoke of them, the impact of World War II on Daniele’s parents feels distinctly less palpable than on my parents. Although Daniele’s parents lived on the continent where the Holocaust occurred, his parents don’t speak of it, not the way my parents spoke of it when my two older brothers and I were being raised on Bainbridge Island, near Seattle. Although Daniele’s parents lived in the same house as a father who survived a death camp, it feels as if they didn’t experience World War II in the way my parents experienced it. During World War II, Grandma served as a public health physician in Vancouver and Grandpa served as a thoracic surgeon in France. Then Grandpa disappeared, and Grandma was not told where he was for years; Grandpa’s mental health issues were so severe, he could no longer serve as a combat physician and was hospitalized for the rest of his military service. When, as a little kid, my husband sat on the back of his grandfather’s bicycle, his nonno was carrying within him the living memory of burning human flesh. The ashes had fallen on him. At Mauthausen Concentration Camp, Italian prisoners of war, including Daniele’s grandfather, were part of the Nazi’s forced slave labour system.
“Do you want to start at the Visitor’s Center?” I’m holding our dachshund Tootsie in my arms. On our way to the annual dachshund parade in Kraków, a road trip that is my birthday present, we stopped to honour Daniele’s nonno. History is no longer of the past, but very much of our shared present. We are standing on it, in it.
Daniele is shaking. “I can’t. I can’t go in there. I can’t ask.”
I hand him Tootsie, pressing her tubular form across Daniele’s chest. She licks his face. I look across at an unassuming valley at the suburban houses with their yellow facades. “May I go to the Visitor’s Center and ask for you, on behalf of your family?” Daniele strokes Tootsie’s long back. She looks at the high red brick walls before us. “What will you ask?”
“Where your grandfather might have slept. Where he might have worked. Where they suggest we pay our respects. Since it is all so overwhelming, they can probably give us an idea of where to start.”
“Yes, yes. Please.”
In her memoir Still Alive: A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered, Ruth Kluger writes that concentration camps made into museums can never convey the grime and odour and dearth of humanity inside those death camps; I keep this upmost in my mind as I walk across the gravel parking lot. I had heard Kluger speak during my graduate work at the University of Notre Dame. One elderly gentleman had asked her why the Jewish people standing on the train platforms didn’t revolt—there were more of you than there were of them, he said.
Another elderly gentleman had asked her if she found God in the camps, if that is how she survived—to which she answered, and I paraphrase, There was no God in the camps. Survival was absurd. There was nothing special about me at all that meant I survived. I survived. You didn’t. It was absurd. I found the questions and comments offensive, and I told her as much in the next day’s session. She said to me sternly, with an unwavering stare, “Why shouldn’t people ask difficult questions? Why not? We need difficult questions.”
During WW2, Daniele’s grandfathers, who were serving in different units of the Italian army, were both taken as prisoners of war by the Germans. Daniele’s paternal grandfather was imprisoned on the outskirts of Berlin and issued a day pass, which meant he could—and did— travel by train into and out of Berlin. My husband says his father’s father talked constantly about his time in Berlin as if it had been a great adventure. He talked so much that people seemed to have stopped listening, including his grandson. My husband remembers his mom’s intense irritation, which perhaps made it hard to retain his grandfather’s stories. He regrets not listening better, but regret doesn’t help find what is lost. His mom complained bitterly about her father-in-law’s enthusiasm; after all, her own father had suffered so horrifically that he refused to discuss his time at Mauthausen, even with, especially with his daughter. Daniele’s maternal grandfather cast himself not as a hero, nor as a returning soldier, but simply as a common man: he lived. The war had been hard. Mauthausen was unspeakable.
The docent in the Visitor’s Centre pointed on the map to the location of the Italian memorial centre. “You might want to start here. The barracks where your husband’s grandfather would have been held are here.” I grabbed the counter. I felt overcome by the utter decency of her behaviour. I found her decency shocking.
The docent was kind, professional, compassionate, and helpful, which felt extraordinary in this horrifying place. She gave me a business card with the name and address of a person whom I could contact to learn about my husband’s grandfather’s imprisonment at Mauthausen. The docent answered all my questions. When we phoned my mother-in-law later in the day to tell her, she sounded furious.
Early in our Marriage, a Drive with my Italian In-Laws
“Did your father speak of the concentration camp?” I ask my mother-in-law. I think of myself as so generous, sharing my North American-bred curiosity as if it were a treasured knick-knack.
Grazia turns to the backseat of the car to look at me. “And what would he have said?” She practically spits out the words; the force sends spittle flying from her mouth. Daniele’s father Brunello is driving us up into the Tuscan hills west of Lucca. Daniele’s mom wants to see the sunset over the sea.
I press on. I still haven’t learned what is not mine to know. Have I no respect? This was her father, taken prisoner of war by the Germans. Unlike my parents, who were born before World War II, Daniele’s parents were born after the war. The distinction remains important; we speak of it often, considering it part of the generational spillover affecting our interactions as a married couple. Ours is a union made across nine time zones, two languages, cultures, and continents. We love that we call home a country neither one of us can claim as our own, Switzerland.
“How did he make it home?” I ask. “Train? Did he walk?”
“What does it matter?” Grazia shakes her head and shrugs her shoulders as if shaking off the clammy weight of history itself. “He came home.” Her voice is shaking with anger. Is it anger? Insistence? She turns back to face the road ahead.
The conversation drops like a rock down an empty well. Like so many others, my question smashes into smithereens. What had once been known is now no longer known. Daniele’s father drives, fast, as ever. So many switchbacks. Life goes one way, then it goes another.
I hold the car door handle tightly, trying to stay away from the clasp that might accidentally open and fling me out into an olive orchard. There are waves of netting underneath the olive trees, like fishing nets drying out of the water, but these have been strung to catch falling olives.
Some of my North American friends who have visited Rome, Florence, and Venice tell me their impression is that Italians are quintessential lovers of life, but I’m not sold on this phrase. My experience as a frequent car passenger in Italy suggests otherwise. Many Italians drive the way they talk, not listening, brushing up against sentences the way their Fiats and Alfa Romeos almost brush up against bumpers before swooshing into left lanes to pass. Yes, North Americans say Italians love life, but surely it is not because of the way they drive. If they love life, why are they in such a hurry to drive fast and die? But I rarely see car accidents, though our mechanic tells us we are unique in not needing to replace our brakes very often.
My husband’s house of origin is full of ghosts kept alive by the grudges of the living. I want to feel a reverence for the past, a reverence for my husband’s family, living and dead, for generations of Italians gathered at the hardwood dining table, with a hardwood bench that wrecks my lower back, but instead I feel only the heaviness of pasta.
Penne with sun-dried tomatoes, linguine with Italian parsley, and farfalle with prosciutto. Tordelli in brodo. Every primo, pasta. Every room, a ghost. Although Grazia scrubs the house clean daily, behind every door live memories that I am expected to know without ever having been told. I am expected to carry the weight of the dead. I have married in.
I bump into the edges of tables, beds, and hall corners. The stairs are made of local Carrara marble; I stub my big right toe on the second step, which is much higher than the first step. Daniele has been navigating the steps since childhood; he doesn’t trip. After every visit, when we return home to Switzerland, I discover bruises on my thighs, shins, and forearms.
On our drive, Brunello takes yet another sharp corner rather hard, with only one hand on the wheel. He asks, “Cosa ha detto?” What did she say?
Daniele translates: Renée vuole sapere del tempo passato dal papà della mamma nel campo di concentramento.
Brunello says, “L’odore. L’odore.” The car is quiet, like a chapel. The churn of wheels against asphalt is our organ music.
Daniele’s grandfather had talked to his son-in-law Brunello about the concentration camp—once. Ash in the air. The smell of burning human flesh. The odor. “L’odore.” When we reach our destination, I briefly walk away to steady myself. Or is it to steel myself? I’m not sure.
Someone in the town is boiling rabbit. When I was a kid, raised on a mini back-to-land Seventies farm on the West Coast of the United States, we raised rabbits and ate them. I know the smell of cooking rabbit. When we first went out to eat with Daniele’s parents in Tuscany, I was so excited to find rabbit on the menu; it tasted like a comfort food I’d already left behind. I had the sense, even in those early years with Daniele, that I would be leaving many loves behind, that my life was changing. I even left behind my huge hound dog Truffle with my mom and dad.
I grasp onto any familiar tastes, even rabbit meat, which I no longer want to eat. The sun is low over the Mediterranean, turning the sea from dark blue to slate grey. Oddly, the benches face away from the sea, back toward the hill, as if the spectacular vista were so common to the people who live here, they didn’t have to look at it.
Daniele motions me back to the Renault. His body is alive: his arms take flight back and forth to catch my attention, his fingers wiggle, his head bobbles right and left like a doll on a dashboard. He adds a made-up Italian jig with his feet, and this means: “Ti voglio tanto bene.”
Daniele’s dad says we must leave, right away; he doesn’t want to drive back down in darkness. There could be wild boar, there might be a stray cat, anything could happen. Nevertheless, I know my questions have unsettled Grazia. Daniele’s mom is the one who must leave, right away. Less than five minutes after we arrived, we leave.
In the backseat of the car, I whisper to my husband, like a forbidden lover stealing a kiss. “I really wanted to stay for the sunset.”
“We have to go. We’ve been here for a full minute,” Daniele says.
“We arrive, to leave.”
Daniele asks, “But did you see the changing colour of the sea? Did you see the islands of Capraia and Gorgona? Dante wanted to move them to block the river Arno, so that everyone in Pisa would drown.”
“Cosa dici, Daniele?” yells Grazia without turning around. What did you just say? “Muovasi la Capraia e la Gorgona.’”
“E faccian siepe ad Arno in su la foce, sì ch’elli annieghi in te ogni persona.” Brunello continues.
I add, unnecessarily, “Dante.” Father and son are quoting Dante. I guessed, but it was a good one.
“Brava.” Brunello turns the wheel hard into another corner, and the car dips back down the hill, down toward the sea.
All Daniele’s grandparents died before my time. His mother’s mother died three months before Daniele and I met. Perhaps they might have told me the stories I long to know. There would have been cultures to learn, traditions to share, histories to honour. There would also have been language difficulties. Issues of translation. Barriers to cross. But I was close with all my grandparents, so I thought perhaps Daniele’s grandparents might have liked me, too. My mother’s sisters, and my aunts, treated me with suspicion when I was an adult—my mother and I both always had too many questions for their emotional comfort zones, don’t speak of reality!— but my grandparents had always answered all my questions, giving me a foundational footing that my questions were valid and that I was a decent human, even if my grandparents were both imperfect in the ways all humans are imperfect.
In Mauthausen, a Photograph
Before I enter the “Room of Names,” I pass by museum cases that display mementos and photographs contributed by surviving family members of Mauthausen’s murdered. A small porcelain-framed photograph of a lanky young man and his white fluffy poodle mesmerizes me. They sit on top of a mountain with snow-capped mountains in the distance behind them; the mountains look uncannily familiar. I lean in to read: Lake Como. They sit in Italy, across the Swiss-Italian border, less than an hour from where we live. I know the climb, the place. I’ve hiked there.
Not for the first time this morning, I bend my knees and then bend my body all the way down over my knees to breathe. This time, the pain is not imaginary; I gasp. Tootsie and Daniele and I have hiked this same area of Lake Como. I know neither the man nor his dog, but I know the place. The view. Cumulative loss builds in my body; whereas the man and his poodle climbed up, I spiral down.
I imagine the man and his poodle started their hike at the shores of Lake Como itself, in Bellagio. They stopped for a morning cappuccino, a normal thing to do, and stood at the bar. Perhaps the bartender’s name was Francesco, and he said, “Buongiorno.” He didn’t ask what the young man wanted, because he always drank the same thing. The poodle sat at his feet, on top of his right foot. The poodle always did this; the young man found it comforting, familiar, welcome. The young man’s friend joined him and showed him his new camera; he wanted to take photos of their climb. A cousin or sister or aunt was supposed to join them this morning, too, but for some unaccountable reason she stayed home. For the rest of her life, she would think of this day, this missed hike, the glorious sun, the wind, and weep.
But she had made panini with Prosciutto di Parma. She made a special trip into the city earlier in the week to buy delicious prosciutto for their planned hike. The war was coming; they knew he would leave to fight at the front. Soon.
As he hiked up the mountain, he felt the round sandwiches in his pockets. She had wrapped them with a clean kitchen cloth, including a few end slices of prosciutto for the dog. The young man didn’t carry water. He’d find a running spring halfway up and drink from it. It was early enough in spring that the water would still be running.
The 23rd Annual Kraków Dachshund Parade
We are finally in Kraków, exhausted from the emotion of this road trip and paying our respects to Daniele’s nonno.
Daniele and I settle on a bench under poplar trees with a view of the Barbican gates where the parade is to start. Tootsie paws Daniele’s legs, and he lifts her to his lap. I reach over to smooth out the lace at the end of her red-harness dress. It matches my red skirt, and although mine has no frilly lace, both have black dachshunds leaping and running all across the red background. Ten months ago, I started selecting outfits for the parade. Dachshund Delights made Tootsie’s Hug-a-Dog harness, or doggy dress, and Go Follow Rabbits made my human skirt to match. Daniele’s bright yellow hiking shirt doesn’t match our outfits, but he is very much involved. We arrived early because he was so worried we would miss the start.
Across from us, a king and his jester are sitting on a park bench. The smooth miniature dachshund jester and his human king are wearing matching green capes and cardboard crowns painted gold. The dachshund jester wears a gold lamé bodysuit; his human, gold lamé tights. The jester wears a green and yellow clown collar made of felt; the king, an enormous plastic green and yellow ring. The king also carries a tall staff with his kingdom’s flag at the top. After ten years living in Switzerland, all it took finally to find my peeps was a two-day drive to Krakow.
Our dachshunds start barking at each other, so I pick up Tootsie from Daniele’s lap and take her over to say “hi.” The king speaks no English and we speak no Polish, but our dachshunds keep yipping until the jester’s homemade cardboard crown falls off one tan ear.
It’s already hot and muggy, so we start back to our bench in the shade of the poplar tree, though as we leave Tootsie slams on her paw brakes and turns back to lick her new jester friend on his dewlaps.
An elderly gentleman wearing a dapper suit and tie walks by with a standard wire-haired dachshund; they seem to be on a standard Sunday walk, though the gentleman tips his hat first at the king and then at us. The wirehaired waddles as if he owns the day. He doesn’t need a parade.
Daniele’s grandfather survived the extraordinary, but he wasn’t blessed. He just lived. In her memoir about surviving Auschwitz, Ruth Kluger writes: “For the main characteristic of sentimentality is deception, including self-deception, the inclination to see something other than what’s in front of you.”
After Mauthausen, Daniele’s nonno made his way home, and lived: married, had children, and rode his grandson Daniele to school.
That little boy with a flop of blonde hair grew up and found me nine time zones away when we both attended at graduate school in Indiana, and later I followed him to Switzerland, and then we married in a courthouse near my parents’ forestland home in northern Idaho. Our marriage certificate was a bargain: twenty-eight bucks, though the forms and permits to enter Switzerland surpassed that cost by hundreds. Our extraordinary, very lucky, ordinary life made possible by one man’s survival. But I veer to sentimentality.
As we joined all the dachshunds at the Barbican Gate, Daniele kept holding out his arms in front of me, trying to protect Tootsie from getting squished. We were all a moving mashup of dachshund lovers.
“Just be calm, Sweetheart.”
“But the dachshunds! The tubes! Someone is going to step on a paw. Or the whole dog, for god’s sakes.”
“Everyone knows there are dogs underfoot,” and just as I tried to reassure him, a dachshund started yipping and crying while a person in a Jolly Green Giant outfit bent over to pick up his wagging green bean.
A woman next to me tugged on my skirt and started speaking in rapid Polish. She switched to gestures, using her hand to fan my skirt and Tootsie’s dress. She made the sign for okay, patted my arm again, and patted her heart.
Tootsie tucked her snout into the corner of my elbow, so all you could see was the red harness dress with black dachshunds leaping around on it and lace trim on the edges. Her long ears drooped over my arm with her tail over my other arm, and her eyes were hidden. She moaned, deeply. It wasn’t often that I felt I had taken Tootsie somewhere she didn’t want to go—she always wanted to be with me because her separation anxiety was so extreme that I even took her to do my weekly grocery shopping. She loved riding around in the grocery cart.
The night before Tootsie had seemed unfazed by the crowds of English tourists during our walk through the old town to the Wawel Castle. Tootsie stayed unruffled when a guide approached to sell us day tickets to Auschwitz. “No, I do not need to do that,” I said sharply to the young man. He called after me, not unkindly, “It’s history, Ma’am. Not a tourist site. History! Don’t you care about history?” In a role reversal, Daniele stayed behind and chatted with the young man, but I walked away and didn’t stop until I reached the path leading up to the Wawel Royal Castle.
Yet if I had realized Tootsie would be so shy, slamming on her brakes each time the Krakow crowd roared with laughter at the little tubes’ outfits—the miniature Elvis with blue jeans and leather jacket was my favourite—we wouldn’t have gone on the road trip at all.
Here, at the parade, she was clearly making do. So was Daniele. They are both introverts, better suited to mountain treks than city parties.
For me though, the dachshund parade was a relief, a respite from fear, and though the canine march was overwhelming for our Tootsie, watching her waddle along Krakow’s historic cobblestone streets helped me re-enter the present day. Once we started, we completed the whole parade, as those who take part in parades usually do, the whole waddling wiggling wagging lot of us. We finished by the Cathedral and watched various interloper dogs and dachshunds taking part in obedience demonstrations on the stage. Daniele found us a fridge magnet to memorialize my birthday, though he had to gesture at me and Tootsie standing in the shade of the St. Mary’s Basilica before the sponsoring radio station would sell him one. You had to attend with a dachshund to buy a magnet; they wouldn’t sell just anyone a magnet.
Tootsie started at the front of the parade, alongside that smooth-tan jester and the waddling Elvis, but they left us far behind; every other dachshund and human passed us. We finished last, very last, trailing along through the lingering crowd, savouring the steps we had made and the view of the Cathedral’s clock tower overhead. As if on cue, Tootsie looked up at me; she tilted her head this way and that way, seeking comfort from us, as only a dachshund knows how to do.
