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Isaac Goodfriend, the ebullient cantor of an Atlanta synagogue and singer of the National Anthem at Carter's Inauguration, also returned without bitterness. Hidden by Polish farmers, Goodfriend came back 35 years later to the house of his saviors with presents and memories. The family reciprocated—with a lunch of Polish ham.
Said Goodfriend: "They never did know what kosher meant. But they defined decency."
There were no echoes of decency at the next stop, a short bus ride from Warsaw. In 1943 the outside of Treblinka was designed like a Hollywood set to assuage the arriving victims and make them easier to manage. Bewildered Jews, released from cattle cars, saw a mock railroad station, complete with buffet and flower beds. Hours later the passengers were forced to strip and take "showers." They were crammed into gas chambers so tightly that babies were often thrust in over the heads of adults. The doors were then closed and the gas jets turned on. There were few survivors of Treblinka. In shame the Germans later tore down the camp's structures, and now all that stands on the bare acreage is a kind of modern Stonehenge.
So many people were murdered there that the vast parade of rocks bear the names of cities rather than individuals. Around the stones are stands of tall trees whose leaves moan endlessly in the wind.
A more silent and harrowing arena awaited the group in Auschwitz, not far from the city of Cracow. Here, in 1944, the killing machines operated with irrational efficiency. Even when the Germans needed rolling stock to bring their own wounded soldiers back from the front, the railroad cars of Auschwitz kept on rolling.
Hannah Rosensaft, a plump, cheerful passenger through the early journey, held back tears for as long as she could.
But the survivor of Auschwitz could find no consolation. Behind great glass containers the story of the prisoners was presented in mute detail: a room of human hair, to be used by the Reich for textiles; a room of confiscated Jewish prayer shawls. Commission members could see the gas chambers near by, but what no one could see, except the survivors in their minds' eyes, was the process of selection that led to death. A former prisoner testified in an Auschwitz guidebook: "During the selection of children, the SS men had placed a rod at the height of 1.20 meters. Children who had passed under the rod would be gassed. Small children, knowing what was awaiting them, tried hard to push out their necks when passing under the rod, in the hope of escaping gassing."
One of those children, Elie Wiesel, led the commission on to Birkenau, the neighboring camp, where crematories once burned night and day. Linking arms with four other survivors, Wiesel marched over the tracks that had brought him here a world ago and laid a wreath on a monument to the fallen. "Do not let your eyes deceive you," he said quietly.