Gary Shteyngart - The Russian Debutante's Handbook

“Vladimir’s tired,” Morgan said. She understood something was wrong, but wasn’t sure if Auschwitz alone was responsible. “You’ve been tired all day, haven’t you, Vladimir?”

“Yes, thank you,” Vladimir said, and almost bowed in gratitude for her intervention. The last thing he wanted to do was to speak to them. He wanted to be alone. He smiled and raised his finger as if to demonstrate initiative, then took the lead in descending the stairs and emerging into the forest of chimneys and surviving barracks.

Cohen and Morgan walked beside the railroad tracks, Cohen stopping every few meters to take a damning photograph. They ducked into the barracks periodically to see the blighted conditions of the camp inmates which, of course, left much to the imagination without the human element. They were on their way to the pit of human ashes lying at the end of the tracks. Vladimir walked alone, staying midway between the main lookout tower and the forest. This was where the ramp was supposed to be located, the ramp where arrivals were separated for death, either instantly by Zyklon B or protractedly by hard labor.

It was hard to recreate this part of the process, since only a narrow patch of dust ran off from the tracks to indicate that something had once been here. Across the tracks a sole structure stood—a rickety, wooden lookout post on a set of stilts, which reminded Vladimir of the house of Baba Yaga , the witch of Russian fairy tales. Her house was supposed to be built on chicken legs that would take the Baba to wherever she felt havoc needed to be wreaked. The house could also act on its own accord, galloping through the village, trampling honest Christian folk at will.

Vladimir’s grandmother had fulfilled the duty of Russian grandmothers and told him Baba Yaga tales as an inducement for eating his farmer cheese, buckwheat kasha, and the other insipid delicacies of their country’s diet. But as these tales were frightening indeed, Grandma tempered the carnage with helpful disclaimers, such as “I hope you know that none of our relatives was ever killed by Baba Yaga!” Whether Grandma consciously understood the deeper significance of this disclaimer, Vladimir would never know. But it was true that practically his entire family escaped Hitler’s advance into the Soviet Union. It was actually Grandma herself who was responsible for saving the Girshkins from Hitler, although homegrown Stalin proved beyond her capabilities.

Originally, the Girshkins were situated near the Ukrainian town of Kamenets-Podolsk, a town whose Jews were all but wiped out in the early phases of Operation Barbarossa. The Girshkins, even then, were prosperous. They owned not one hotel but three, all catering to stagecoach travelers and thereby constituting perhaps one of the first known examples of the motel chain. Well, certainly in the Ukraine.

A practical clan, the Girshkins kept well abreast of the times. When the outcome of the Bolshevik Revolution seemed a certainty, the family pooled all their gold, threw it into a wheelbarrow (which, to hear Grandma tell it, was practically full), then emptied the wheelbarrow into the local stream and resolutely trampled back home to eat up the last of their sturgeon and caviar. Having thus eluded any aspersions of being bourgeoisie, the Girshkins put their best proletarian foot forward, and this particular limb—like the lamb shank at Passover representing the strength of the Lord’s forearm—was embodied by Grandma.

Grandma joined the Red Pioneers, then the Komsomol Youth League, and finally the Party itself. There were pictures of her playing each of these venues with her eyes ablaze and mouth crinkled painfully into a smile, looking like a heroin addict granted her fix. Looking, in other words, like the paragon of Soviet agit-prop, especially with her pendulous peasant bosom and the broadest shoulders in her province, said shoulders kept aloft by a posture that, all by itself, had won her a prize in high school. And so, with these attributes in tow, Grandma left for Leningrad. She managed to get herself admitted to the infamous Institute of Pedagogy, where the most stalwart comrades were instructed in the science of indoctrinating the first generation of revolutionary toddlers.

After graduating the institute with top honors, Vladimir’s grandmother became a resounding success at an orphanage for emotionally disturbed children. While the frilly Petersburg women shunned the traditional disciplinary aspects of child-rearing, Grandma singlehandedly beat the crap out of hundreds of wayward young boys and girls, who in a matter of days were on their knees, singing “Lenin Lives on Forever.” This when they weren’t repolishing the balustrades, waxing the floors, or combing the neighborhood sidewalks for scrap metal, which Grandma convinced them would somehow be recycled into a tank they could all take for rides about town. Within a year, this no-nonsense approach, fresh from the cane-wielding, belt-swinging provinces, had yielded such spectacular results that nearly all the children were deemed no longer emotionally disturbed. Indeed, many of them achieved prominence in all walks of Soviet life, the majority with the military and security organs.

After her tenure at the orphanage, Grandma was given a cheap plastic medal and an entire grammar school to lord over. But the most enduring aspect of her success was her ability to get the Girshkins out of bleak, industrializing Kamenets-Podolsk and into a spacious clapboard house on the outskirts of Leningrad. This first move spared the family a confrontation with the SS and their cheerful Ukrainian cohorts, while Grandma’s second move, evacuation of the family before Leningrad fell under siege, saved the Girshkins from starvation and the shells of the Wehrmacht. How Grandma managed to pull the right strings and get all thirty Girshkins on the train to the Urals, where a partly-Jewish cousin, thrice removed, peacefully herded sheep in the shadows of an ore-smelting plant, was anyone’s guess. The old woman guarded the truth like an NKVD file, but it was no mystery, really. Anyone who could reform an entire orphanage, or, more significantly, push Vladimir’s dreamy and forgetful father through ten years of Soviet medical school (granted, it usually took five), could easily secure passage across the choked rail arteries of wartime Russia.

AND THAT, THOUGHTVladimir, was the woman who had kept his family out of Stadtkamp Auschwitz II–Birkenau. If he possessed even the trace of doubt of an agnostic, now would be the time to mumble what he remembered of the Mourner’s Kaddish. But with Hebrew school resolving the last enigmas of the empty heavens above, Vladimir could only smile and remember the feisty Grandma he once knew as a child.

He looked down the tracks where Cohen was on his knees taking a picture of a passing cloud, an unremarkable cirrus shaped as if it were sketched expressly for a meteorology textbook, its immortality assured only through the wild Polish luck of having passed the former concentration camp on the day of Cohen’s visit. By this time the tour group had reached the tracks and started toward them at a leisurely pace—perhaps the pond of human ashes had had a debilitating effect and the worldly tour group was beating it back to the barracks.

Perhaps he was being judgmental.

Oh, it was high time to get out of here! Every thought inappropriate, every gesture a heresy. Enough! Look how his grandmother had escaped the gas and the bombs, investing body and soul in the Soviet system that ultimately took as many lives as the Teutonic evil streaming through the borders in columns of panzer and precision-strafing from above. Her lesson to Vladimir was as clear as it should have been for his fellow Jews interned in the pond of ashes down the track: Get out while you can and by any means necessary. Run, before the goyim get you, and get you they will, no matter how many laps you cover with Kostya and how much they claim to love you while the absinthe flows.