Lost in translation on the train to Auschwitz

Displaced in Mullingar: Mention of the Nazi death camp fails to register in conversation with a stranger from another land, writes Michael Harding.

On the train to Auschwitz I spoke to a young girl from Japan. She came into the carriage and offered sweets to me and the old man who sat in the corner. Simple beige cotton clothes covered her skeletal frame. She had a pale boyish face, with straight black hair.

"I am from Tokyo," she said, cheerfully.

I said I was Irish.

"Oh," she said, "James Joyce." She was eager to talk. To practise her English. But it was early in the morning and I didn't share her enthusiasm.

"Wimbledon," she said.

"Wimbledon is where they play tennis, "I replied.

"No. Wimbledon fruit," she said. "Strawberry. Cream." It was like a quiz; trying to decipher what her words meant.

"Perhaps you had strawberry and cream at Wimbledon" I guessed.

"No," she said, "Wimbledon. No Play. No game. I see rain." The carriages thumped along the tracks.

"I go to Prague," she said. "This train." I said I was going to Auschwitz. The word confused her.

Silence descended.

"Haruki Rakami," she said. "Very good Japanese writer." "And Mishima," I added. She nodded.

For a long time we stared out the window at the passing landscape. The ghostly birch trees and the grey sky and the black soot that clung to the ground and hung in the air.

As far as I could make out, she was a nurse. She had been visiting a Pharmacy Museum in Krakow.

Each time language failed us, we laughed. More sweets were offered.

"No thanks." The train was slowing.

"This is my stop," I said. "This is Auschwitz." "Auschwitz?" she repeated; her face a question mark.

"Wimbledon," I said, to cheer her up. She laughed.

"Strawberries and cream!" she added.

She laughed heartily. She was still laughing as I walked along the platform of Auschwitz station, and she waved out the window at me.

The floor of the station cafe smelled as if it had recently been cleaned with a smelly mop. I skipped breakfast and walked three kilometres on an empty stomach to the camps, passing the shells of derelict factories.

In the Auschwitz Museum, I saw the grainy black and white photographs taken on a snowy day in 1945, when all the striped and dazed congregation of that hell entered the history of cinematography.

As I walked around the old huts surrounded by barbed wire and watch towers, there was neither wind, nor snow. Only a grey roof of cloud, and a stillness without birdsong. Eventually I came to where the rail tracks end, beside the rubble of a crematorium, and there I remembered a poem by Emily Dickinson.

"A great Hope fell/ You heard no noise/ The Ruin was within/ Oh cunning wreck that told no tale/ And let no Witness in/ A not admitting of the wound/ Until it grew so wide/ That all my Life had entered it/And there were troughs beside".

At lunchtime, I went to an Italian restaurant resplendent with art deco trimmings, opposite the car park of the Auschwitz Museum. I had spaghetti and mushroom sauce; the sauce was a thick glue which I guessed had begun life as a tin of condensed soup.

I washed it down with a glass of still water, and got the next train back to Krakow.

That night the sound of the trains on the railway tracks outside my hotel woke me. I was sweaty and felt ashamed that an old man, who had shared the carriage with me and the girl from Japan, had been forced to endure our chatter, and listen to us laughing and sucking sweets.

I felt ashamed that I had been scratching around like a tourist on the surface of that great wound in the earth called Auschwitz.

I felt ashamed I had been peeping at the gaping hole where human beings fell together into a single black holocaust. All those chicks in one fell swoop.

And for some reason I remembered the first kiss I ever received as a young boy. Received from another young boy, just as innocent as me. I never saw him again though I grieved a little when I heard of his death in a road accident 30 years later.

I remember him because he was lovely and I loved him. And the thin girl from Tokyo was androgynous enough to remind me of his generous kiss.

Maybe I should have asked her did she have a boyfriend. Boyfriends translate well into foreign languages. Or maybe I should have ignored her and pretended to sleep.