A Real Pain (and a real life Holocaust tour story)

Content warning: just in case you couldn’t tell from the subject line, this post is somewhat off-key for a newsletter labelled “a light-hearted ephemera but, well, I do that occasionally. Life is always a medley. If you are not in the mood, no worries—the next email, coming up on the weekend, is pretty silly. Feel free to hold out for that.

I found the film A Real Pain to be a beautiful funny haunting empathetic movie for everyone, or anyone who cared to watch it. I don’t keep a film diary so I can’t say for sure what my film of the year is, but I think this might be it (I do keep a book diary; books of the year post coming up).

A Real Pain is about two cousins who mourn the death of their grandmother by going to Poland on a Holocaust tour to see her tiny hometown in Poland and also where she was held in a concentration camp during WWII. The cousins—a successful young digital marketer played by Jesse Eisenberg, who also wrote it; and a struggling young man with mental health concerns played Keiran Culkin—also talk about their own relationship, explore Poland at night, and think about the meaning of pain. What it means to remember it, to engage it, to ignore it, to numb it and to number. Culkin’s character is also at times a huge pain—noisy, selfish, nosy, rude—but fantastically engaged with life and at other times deeply kind. He captivates the other members of the tour group and infuriates his cousin, who also loves him deeply. The other members of the tour group are having their own interesting experiences—one a refugee from another genocide who later converted to Judaism, which gives the film a whole other layer. One is played by Jennifer Grey. You don’t learn a tonne about any of these people but you see their faces trying to encounter the worst thing they have ever known, so you feel entwined with them, or at least, I did.

It’s a beautiful movie about trying see something terrible in a way that doesn’t engulf you, but puts it in the context of history in a way that allows us to go on and do better. So here is something that I’ve wanted to describe for a while:

When Mark and I went to Poland in 2018, it was because my novel had been translated into Polish and it paid enough money for a vacation there. The publishers hadn’t asked me to come and were frankly surprised when I offered to visit, but were gracious enough about it. I really wanted to go because my grandfather is from there. He left during the first world war, and I had always wanted to retrace his steps (it is one of the great joys of my life that I did this, but that’s a different post). When Mark said he thought we ought to visit a concentration camp during the trip, I’m sorry to say I balked initially. I read a lot of about the Holocaust when I was younger, and got to the point with the nightmares where I couldn’t sleep at all. After that, I tended to avoid the topic; I haven’t even seen Life Is Beautiful. But Mark told me it was our moral duty to see one if we could and, of course, he was right.

If you are in Krakow, it is very easy to go to Auschwitz Birkenau—there’s a variety of tours, more involved/expensive and less so, and even a public transit option that I considered but ultimately discarded fearing that if we messed it up we’d be in the middle of nowhere unable to speak the language and possibly upset about the day’s events. The concentration camp tours take about 2/3 of the day, and to fill out the day are often bundled with a salt mine nearby that is apparently very interesting. For the same reason I didn’t want to struggle with public transit, I didn’t want to be underground in a claustrophobic mine looking at salt, and we opted for the horror show only.

The day was overwhelming and terrible, even though it was just a tour and I think very standard; it’s hard to remember everything that happened now. We had to get up very early and the hotel had a nice breakfast buffet so we ate that and either took some things from there to make sandwiches for lunch or actually paid the hotel to make us lunches; either way, we brought food to the concentration camp tour. When we got in the van, they immediately and unexpectedly gave us breakfast boxes, and when we said we already eaten left them in our laps.

There’s a big parking lot at Auschwitz and it takes a while to get processed in, and to feel like you’re not just at any big tourist attraction. And then you see the famous gate and it is really happening. In the film A Real Pain, the tour guide was English, and there was debate among the characters about not engaging with real Poles. Our tour guide was a Pole but not a Jew; he had chosen to devote his life to this work and after doing the tour once I understand that impulse. It was so hard to understand it from just seeing it once—I couldn’t, really. A few things pressed through and made a deep impression and the rest I just couldn’t process. I think, if I’m honest, the best thing would be to go back again and again and absorb a little bit more every time. But it isn’t likely I’m going to be able to do that.

I thought I understood from books but it was very different to be there. There are the famous bins of shoes and rows of suitcases where you see what was taken from people when they were murdered but that did not hit me as hard as the dormitories—at Auschwitz you can go see the bunks and picture yourself lying in the beds and that seemed very real to me. There were also different areas where people just slept on the floor, wherever they could find a spot—I can’t remember who got bunks and who didn’t or why—but I stood in that room and could picture just lying down there with all my fellow tourists and trying to sleep for the night. I think it must be different for everyone what feels real and visceral and personal. You can go in the “shower” room where people were gassed to death. You can stand in the middle of the room and picture not knowing, and then knowing, and that seemed, a little bit, real to me. You can go in the oven, where the bodies were cremated, where there is nothing to picture. That’s what I can remember; there was much more to the tour. Mark remembers different things so sometimes we compare notes. To absorb it all, I don’t know how long it would take; I don’t know how many times I would have to go.

On the way back to town, the van operators gave us boxed lunches to go with our uneaten boxed breakfasts—I felt like I had been eating all day. There’s a couple scenes in A Real Pain about touring in opulence being contrary to the point of investigating the Holocaust. The countryside is also very beautiful, both in the film and when we were there, and it’s nice to sit and watch it go by. Poland looks a bit like Canada, at least the rural parts. Not the cities. (Mark read this post over for me and disagreed with this bit; he felt Warsaw, reconstructed post WWII, looks a lot like Winnipeg.) How can anything be nice when evil continues, to this day and beyond, there are still terrible things happening. Learning about it is some small way we might make ourselves more ready to combat it. Or is that just a hopeful delusion?

We went back to the room, which was in a nicer hotel than we usually stay in and we had been very pleased with it. I remember sitting in the midafternoon light at the little table there and chewing on the soft, dairy-filled sandwiches and wondering what could possibly come next on such a day. And then I think we went for a walk or something.

Anyway, it was a really good film and going to Poland definitely changed my life.

<3

RR