Excerpt from The Plateau by Maggie Paxson, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

 

One day, I decided to hitch a ride with friends to Washington, D.C., to visit the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, which promised to take me down into the depths of the story that was drawing me forward.

The museum's interior is a marvel of evocation: You enter into the rust-gray walls of an elevator. As the doors open, the story begins, as it will end, in darkness. Right away, there are images of skeletal human beings looking straight into the camera-one man, bald and in rags, holding a metal bowl-and corpses on train tracks, in Buchenwald and Dachau. Then you walk, in the dark, toward the story of the rise of Nazism. Photographs of men with swastika armbands; of muzzled dogs, eye-high and ready for attack. Songs that, even if you don't know German, sound like the melody of a nation careening toward its moral end. Down the hall, you see posters from the 1930s that explain the Nuremberg Laws, using little stick silhouettes in white (for Aryan), black (for Jew), and gray (for somewhere in between). And then, artifacts of that era's hair samples, and eye-color testers, and metal instruments invented to assess the size of a forehead, a nose, or a skull-all to determine the hidden presence of a Jew. Here, up close, is the science of race in all its Weimar glory-early anthropology's poisoned fruit.

I wound my own way through the exhibit, feeling my hand brush up against the railing from time to time in the dark. The war years passed like the ticking of a great, unstoppable clock. Tick. 1938: Kristallnacht. Jews race over borders, smuggle themselves onto ships, fleeing as they can. Tick. 1939: The German army-eager to increase the Lebensraum for the Aryans of the Third Reich-gobbles portions of the Czech lands and Poland, and Jews are sent to ghettos. Tick. Spring of 1940: France falls. Tick. 1941: Germany advances its armies eastward toward Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, followed quickly by elite mobile killing units called Einsatzgruppen. Village by village, SS soldiers aim guns at locals together with the question, "Where are your Jews?" and the goal: to gather, shoot, and kill them all. Tick. Tick. Babi Yar.

Excerpted from The Plateau by Maggie Paxson. Copyright © 2019 by Maggie Paxson. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.