MATTHEW WELLS

THE AUSCHWITZ CIRCUS

 *
"The Auschwitz Circus," in addition to being the inspiration for Kent Bash's
excellent cover and the catalyst for this issue, is also Matthew Wells' first
short fiction sale. The story began life as a one-act play, and was performed as
part of an evening of ten-minute one-acts by various writers at A Theatre
Company in New York City.

 *
Matthew has made his living for the last twenty years acting and writing plays.
His produced plays are too numerous to mention, but they include God's Country,
which was performed Off-Off Broadway in 1990, The Goose Girl, done in Los
Angeles at the Theatre of N. O. T.E, and Wildest Dreams, produced by Lightning
Strikes at the Madison Avenue Theatre in New York.

It is 1938. In a little church cemetery in Leonding, Adolf Hitler,one year away
from invading Poland, is standing over the grave of his mother and father. He is
thinking of his mother's death, only a few days before Christmas in 1907. He has
spent Christmas alone ever since. He is already planning to change the
celebration of Christmas to a celebration of mother- hood, to change even the
name of the holiday from Weihenacht to Mutternacht, from Holy Night to Mother
Night. He barely notices the young woman in slacks who is also standing by a
grave in the cemetery, but as she tums and looks at him, he does notice the look
of joy and triumph in her face, just before she shoots him three times in the
head.

"She's obsessed with him," says Nora's husband Louis.

"Hitler," says Phyllis. She looks at her brother and laughs nervously, which is
the only way that she knows how to laugh.

Louis nods. "There's this place. This museum in the Village. The PMS?"

Phyllis screws up her face. "That's the one, what, full of exhibits that never
happened, right? -- the old Kennedy Museum?"

Louis nods again. "Ever been there?"

Another nervous laugh. "I already go to a place dedicated to things that never
happened; it's called the inside of my head. And you know me --why go anywhere
else when I can get it at home for free."

"Well, Nora goes to the PMS."

"Nora has no imagination."

"She goes there all the time."

"How often is all the time?"

"Two, three times a week. Right after work. Sometimes on the weekends. On the
second floor, it's called the Alternate Reality floor, they have these, I don't
know, they're like game rooms. She goes to this one room. The Hitler Room.
Because in the Hitler Room, you get to kill Hitler. Before he becomes Hitler.
You get to change the course of history."

November 9th, 1923, and Adolf Hitler is driving like a madman in a red Fiat to
the Lake Staffel country home of his friend Ernst Hanfstaengl. There is a
throbbing in his left shoulder, which has been dislocated and fractured by the
weight of the man who fell on it not an hour ago, the man he linked arms with
just before the police opened fire on them all in front of the Odeonsplatz in
Munich. For the next two days he will hide in the Hanfstaengl attic under a
couple of blankets and threaten to commit suicide, until finally he tums himself
in to the Bavarian police on the 11th of November. He will be sentenced to five
years in prison; he will serve less than nine months.

Hitler glances nervously in his rear view mirror. He half expects to see the
motor cars of the police screaming into view behind him as he drives south. What
he sees instead is the eyes of the young woman who has been hiding in the back
seat, the young woman who is even now swooping forward and looping a length of
piano wire around his neck and saying over and over again in English: "Die, you
son of a bitch, die."

"And does she?" asks Phyllis.

"Does she what?"

"Change the course of history?

Louis looks at the ceiling. "I don't know. I don't think so."

"Why not?"

"Because she keeps going back."

It is 1907. Hitler has just been rejected by the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna.
The two required drawings that accompany his portfolio, one on the expulsion of
Adam and Eve from Paradise and one on any incident connected with the legend of
Noah's Ark, have been rejected because they have, in the words of one examiner,
"too few heads." Nora pictures the future dictator of Germany fuming wandering
the streets of Vienna, imagining pyramids of heads, mountains of heads, oceans
of heads, all of them Jewish. Instead, she finds him talking with a Mend in an
outdoor cafe, complaining about the professors at the Art Academy, expressing
worry about his mother, who is sick in Linz.

Nora walks up to the table. "Excuse me," she says in flawless German, "but are
you Adolf Hitler?"

The serious young man stares up at her. "Ja . . ."

"I have something for you," she says, and reaches into her purse. Before his
friend can stop her, she buries a knife into Hitler's belly and begins to carve.

"She keeps going back," says Louis. "And I don't know why."

Phyllis looks at her brother like he's missing the obvious. "Maybe she likes
it," she says, because she knows through experience that the only reason why
people do anything more than once is because they like it. Even the things they
say they hate-- if they do it more than once, then deep down, they really like
it. "I mean," says Phyllis, "given the chance, wouldn't you do what she's doing?
I mean I would. I certainly would."

"But it doesn't change anything" says Louis. "How could she think it would
change anything?"

Phyllis knows from the way her brother has asked the question that he isn't
looking for an answer, he's just trying to understand his wife; but she tries to
give him an answer anyway. She thinks for a moment about killing Adolf Hitler
before he comes to power in Germany; thinks about how she would do it. A gun? A
knife? Explosives? And she realizes that she doesn't know the first thing about
where to find Hitler before, say, 1939; or what he looks like. So how does Nora
know that?

"Maybe it doesn't change just anything" Phyllis says slowly. "Maybe it just
changes Nora." And that, she realizes, that, she can understand.

"Oh it's changed her, all right," says Louis.

"He thinks I'm crazy," says Nora.

Im shaking my head. "He's your husband; it comes with the territory." Nora
shrugs. "Well, maybe not actually crazy. I mean the weird thing is that he
doesn't argue with the principle behind what I'm doing. He just doesn't think
it's right for me. Sort of like saying, I don't have anything against smoking --
just as long as you don't do it."

"So he's contradicting himself."

"Oh yeah. It's typical."

"Maybe if you showed him what the Hitler Room was like?"

"I've tried. I mean he's only ever been in the Museum once. And he got himself
thrown out."

"Thrown out? Why?"

"Well, we were in one of the Kennedy exhibits, the Grassy Knoll? -where you get
to be a part of everything, and take pictures?"

"You actually got tickets to that?" It's the single most popular room in the
PMS. The only things close to it are the Jack the Ripper and the Little Big
Horn.

"I bought the tickets a year in advance. For his birthday. I mean he's a Kennedy
nut, he's into all the theories, and I figured, well this is great -- he gets to
be there, he gets to see it for himself -- he'll love it. Well, let me tell you
. . ."

"What happened?"

"The minute he saw the motorcade, the minute it rounded the comer in front of
the Book Depository, he was running out into the street yelling stop, stop,
there's a guy with a gun, there's a guy with a rifle. And the motorcade
screeches to a halt, and Louis is pointing all over the place, and the next
thing you know there's Secret Service everywhere, and they've got two gunmen in
the book depository, one guy behind us on the grassy knoll, and one guy under a
manhole cover in the middle of the street. I mean he ruined it. He mined it for
everybody."

Nora sighs. "He said later, how can you go and just watch? And I said, that's
the point. Watching is the point. And he says, oh yeah? Do you just go back and
watch Hitler? Which is apples and oranges, and I tell him this, and he's shaking
his head saying no, no, no, no, the point is, if you can go back, you don't just
watch. You do something."

I know what he means. I've killed Hitler. I've been a member of the PMS since
the Seventies, when the Hitler Room was my home away from home. I've killed
Hitler hundreds of times. And it was never enough. Because it's not about the
one who gave the orders, and it's not about the ones who pulled the trigger, and
it's not even about the people who died. It's about the people who lived. And
did nothing. Like the people in Krakow who watched the Germans take my
grandmother away. Who just sat there, and did nothing, like it was some kind of
performanee; like they were only the audience. It wasn't just the Germans who
killed her-- it was the people who did nothing. And I never realized that, until
I went looking for my grandmother. And found the Auschwitz Circus.

Nora asks: "How old was she?"

"Thirty," I say.

"My grandparents were in their forties."

There is a moment when we just sit there on the museum bench, the granddaughters
of women who died when they were younger than we are now.

I try to picture the scene. A black-and-white street in Krakow. A building.
Soldiers at the door.

"What are you doing?"

"Victoria Berkovits?"

"What do you want?"

Maybe they tell her she is to be relocated. Maybe they tell her to pack. Or
maybe it's, "We just have a few questions to ask you, Fraulein." Questions about
your father the Rabbi. Questions about your sister, your daughter. "Just a
formality, Fraulein."

They drag her into the street. I try to picture the crowd. Black-and-white
people. Silent. Staring. Saying to themselves: "That's Victoria. That's my
friend Victoria. I know her. And she knows me." And they rum away. Knowing what
is happening to her, and convincing themselves that, whatever is happening to
her (and they have no idea what it is), it is only what she deserves.

And what is my grandmother thinking about? Every time I picture it, I get a
different answer. Sometimes, she is thinking of her daughter. My mother. Who is
with her sister. My aunt. On her way to America. Sometimes she is thinking of my
grandfather, two years dead as she is dragged down the steps of her home in
front of her neighbors. And sometimes she is thinking about her neighbors. Her
friends. All of them peering at her behind closed windows, behind raised blinds.
Peering and doing nothing. Saying nothing. As she is forced into the back of a
truck. Does she go quietly? Does she yell and scream? Does she say what I would
have said?

Nora says: "Treblinka."

I say: "Auschwitz."

The way we say it is like two strangers shaking hands.

Christmas Eve, 1918. The War To End All Wars has ended, and Adolf Hitler lies
half blind and seething in a military hospital in Pasewalk outside Berlin. He is
raging against the November criminals, the November traitors who have betrayed
the Motherland. He can see their faces even without the use of his eyes. They
are all Jewish. They are all laughing at him, laughing at his rotten teeth and
his Iron Cross. And he knows that the reason they are laughing at him is because
they are afraid of him, and with good reason -because when he regains his sight,
he will dedicate himself to ridding the world of every last one of them, a deed
the rest of the world will surely allow him to perform, because it is their
secret desire, the one they are not strong enough or honest enough to express in
tull view of the world, as he is. Yes, he thinks, the Jews, he thinks, and he
begins to mutter to himself the words of a speech that he could give, a speech
that will rouse all of Germany to his side, from the lowliest peasant to the
smiling nurse by his bedside who is even now leaning down over him with a pillow
in her hands, a pillow that slowly smothers him, a pillow as soft and white as
the snow on the cemetery where his mother is buried.

"Will you stop?" says Louis.

"Stop what?"

Louis gestures. "This," he says.

Nora starts to say, "This what?" but the look on Louis' face stops her. She
sighs. Pick your fights, she says to herself. You've finally convinced him to
come with you to the Museum, so that has to be the absolute last thing you start
fighting about. At least today.

They are in the PMS Cafe, in the Garden Room. The PMS Cafe has been a Village
fixture since it opened its doors in 1967 and instantly became one of the
flagship cabarets in the rise of Off-Broadway theater, producing a number of
lost and unwritten plays like Sheridan's Gallantry, Shakespeare's Love's
Labour's Won, and Marlowe's The Maid's Holiday, the posters for which are
hanging behind Louis and Nora's table.

Louis gestures again. "Why are you doing this?"

"Because it's the only thing I can do."

"Nora, it doesn't change anything."

"Of course it does. It changes everything."

"Will it bring anybody back to life?"

"Everybody. Every time I do it."

Louis snorts. But he pays the check, and lets Nora lead him into the Museum.

The PMS is not an easy place to find. It's on the corner of West Tenth and West
Fourth, which in any other city but New York would be impossible.

Under its original name of the Camelot Hotel, the museum was founded in 1964 and
privately funded by anonymous donations from the Kennedy family, who wanted it
to be a living shrine to lost innocence, unrealized potential, and the bright
future that was forever lost in Dallas in 1963. As a result, nobody ever called
it the Camelot Hotel; everybody referred to it as the Kennedy Museum, or the
Kennedy Place, the name by which it is still known among the older denizens of
the Village.

By the end of the Sixties, the ivy-covered walls of the museum contained the
most comprehensive collection in the world of exhibits, photographs, and records
of things that never did happen, never could happen, and never would happen, for
good or ill. For instance -- as you enter, on your left, opposite the doorway to
The PMS Cafe, you will see the very popular Point Of No Return Exhibit. Here
you'll find President Bill Clinton actually saying, "No; sorry," to a half-naked
woman. Here also is Nixon burning the Watergate tapes on the White House lawn;
George Armstrong Custer yelling: "Run away, run away;" and, of course, John F.
Kennedy saying: "Fuck it, I'm sleeping in today."

In 1984, as part of its 20th Anniversary celebration, the museum went through
extensive remodeling and officially changed its name to The Post Modem Salon and
began marketing itself under the motto: "Three floors. No reality." (Actually it
has four floors-- three floors and a mezzanine-- but the mezzanine is impossible
to find.)

And as part of the remodeling, the entire second floor was redesigned to become
the heart, of the new museum. Alternate Reality.

"And here we are on the Second Floor," says the guide. He points to his right.
"Over the doorway, at the head of the stairs? -- that's a picture of John
Lennon's fiftieth birthday party." As usual, this announcement gets a couple of
low moans. "Third guy on the left, that's Jimi Hendrix."

More moans. Louis shakes his head. Nora holds his arm.

"There are," says the guide, "over fifty rooms on the second floor. Each
dedicated to a different theme. For instance, over here is the Off-White House.
This is where you'll find President George Armstrong Custer; President Aaron
Burrs President Michael Dukakis. And my personal favorite, President George S.
Patton."

Louis is standing under a dark television set. "What's this?" he asks.

"Ah," says the guide. "That's the Malcolm X American Express commercial." He
switches on the television with a remote control clicker. The screen comes to
life, showing Malcolm X, in a dark suit, with a graying beard, sitting alone in
a plush banquette.

"Do you know me?" he asks. "Back in the Sixties, I called the Kennedy
assassination just another case of chickens coming home to roost. But these
days, when I eat my chicken at Lutece, I use the American Express card. Because
when I pick up a check, I do it by any means necessary."

A deep announcer's voice: "Cardmember since 1968."

The television clicks off.

"And this," says the guide, "is the very popular Hitler Room."

It is December, 1907. There is snow on the ground. Hitler's mother is being
buried in a small cemetery in Leonding. Nora points out the future leader of
Germany, and hides behind Louis as she takes a gun out from under her sweater.

Louis looks around, worried. "Nora. There are people watching."

"So what? They won't do anything; they're Germans." She hands Louis the gun.
"Here. Go ahead. You do it."

"What?"

"Go ahead -- kill him."

Louis looks around nervously. The priest is saying something in German. Everyone
is standing with their heads down. Nora is whispering egging him on. He shushes
her. People start staring at them. Especially Hitler, anger in his eyes.

The anger makes it easier. Louis looks into Hitler's eyes and sees a black
chimney of smoke boiling up into a gray sky and without thinking he shoots
Hitler twice in the chest, then twice in the stomach, then he walks over to the
writhing body and puts the fifth bullet between Hitler's eyes.

As Nora predicts, the people around them just watch.

"Jesus," says Louis. He wipes the sweat from his eyes; he feels like he has just
spent an hour in a steam room. "Jesus," he says, "what a rush," he says.

"You want a rush," says Nora, "you should try killing him at the Nuremberg
Rally."

Louis looks at her like a little boy who has just been handed a new toy. "Can
I?"

Nora smiles.

Over the next few weeks, Louis does nothing but kill Hitler.

"It's not enough," he says.

He branches out. He kills everyone in the German High Command. He kills their
parents, their lovers, their children, their wives.

"It's still not enough."

He shoots the generals. He murders the soldiers. He hangs the lager Kommandants.
Hoss. Kramer: Baer. Goth. Weiss. Ziereis. Stangl. He butchers the executives at
I.G. Farben who set up their own work camp as part of Auschwitz. Durrfeld.
Tesch. Ter Meet. Schmitz. Eisfeld.

And it still isn't enough.

"Why isn't it enough?" says Nora.

"Because it's not just them," says Louis. "It's everybody. Everybody who stood
around and did nothing."

A smile grows on Nora's face. "You really believe that?"

"Yes. I do."

Nora's smile gets bigger. It is the smile of a little girl who knows a secret,
and knows its power. "Then I have something you have to see," she says. "Then I
have something to show you."

In the back of the Second Floor, last room on the right, is the Auschwitz
Circus.

The first thing you see is a set of pictures. Pictures taken by Roman Vishniacin
the Forties. Pictures of old people. Pictures of crowded ghettoes.

And what happens in these pictures, what happens in the room, is that people are
taken out of their homes in broad daylight, in front of their neighbors, in
front of their friends. Taken out of their homes, past the faces of people who
see and do nothing, and piled into hot, sweaty, overcrowded boxcars with no food
and no water. From homes all over Europe, these people are sent hundreds of
miles away to a distant railroad station, in conditions of unspeakable
degradation.

And when they arrive at this railroad station, which gets between ten and
fifteen train loads a day, they are unloaded and pushed into line and driven
past a chamber orchestra playing Rossini overtures, they're pushed and shoved by
guards with dogs and guns down the Himmelstrasse, a long dark tunnel with barbed
wire on the walls and ceiling, they're yelled at and barked at and kicked all
the way into a huge big top, where the guards throw off their coats and become
clowns, the children are given candy, the old men are given food; and the
Auschwitz Circus does three shows a day.

And all the people lucky enough to get in, they have a number stamped on their
left arm, so they can leave and come back for free whenever they want -- days
later, weeks later, years later.

The door is never closed, The gates are always open. The show never ends.

The Auschwitz Circus.

Louis watches the soldiers as they clear the streets of people. "You mean there
are no concentration camps?"

In the background, the soldiers herd them away.

"No." Nora smiles. "No, there are. Thousands of them. All across the continent."

Herd them all away, the silent racists, the willfully blind.

"But in the world of the Auschwitz Circus, all the death camps have been built
for the people who do nothing."

The ones who heard and didn't care. The ones who knew and let it happen. The
ones who saw and smiled inside.

"They're the ones who go to the gas chamber. The ones who look the other way,
and do nothing."

In the background, the soldiers lead them all to darkness. The guilty of Europe.
The guilty of England. The guilty of America.

And Nora and Louis smile, and look, and do nothing.

* * *

When I think of Louis, I think of what he said to his wife in the Dallas Room.
He said to her, "How can you go and just watch? The point is, if you can go
back, you don't just watch. You do something."

I think of Louis a lot. And I think of what he's doing now. I never met Louis.
But I've seen him. I see him all the time. He's the one on the Second Floor with
the camera in his hand, the one taking pictures of the soldiers of the Auschwitz
Circus as they march the accomplices of abomination to a fate that no one
deserves, not even the guilty.

Nora? I still see Nora, now and then. We say hello but we do not talk, not the
way we used to, the way we used to before. She hasn't changed; she's still as
angry as the day I met her, still hates as passionately, with a pure white
flame. I wonder how she does it. The fire of anger is a righteous fire, but you
can't just light it and expect it to live forever. Time, like a steady rain,
drizzles it to death, washes it away until nothing is left but the cold comfort
of forgiveness. It's a fire, after all. You have to feed it to keep it burning.
And sometimes I think Nora is keeping hers alive by feeding it the one thing she
can't afford to lose. Her life.

I don't have time for that anymore. When I go to the PMS, I always go to the
Second Floor, but it's where I go to think. It's where I go to reflect. And it's
where I go to see my grandmother.

"Victoria?"

She comes out of the dark, she comes out of the black-and white past, the woman
I am named after.

She sits next to me. Hugging me. Smelling of flowers.

"And who is this?" she says to the little boy beside me.

"This is Zachary," I say. "Zachary," I say, "this is your great-grandmother."

"Hello, Zachary," she says, and gives him a little kiss on the forehead. "This
is for you," she says, and hands him a big red balloon. She looks up at me.
"He's beautiful," she whispers.

"Balloon," says Zachary.

There are tears in my eyes. When I wipe them away, my grandmother has Zachary
cradled in her arms. "If you like balloons," she says to Zachary, "you're going
to love the clowns."

And she reaches out to take my hand as we head down the hall to the Auschwitz
Circus.