Nein, Nein, Nein! One Man’s Tale of Depression, Psychic Torment, and a Bus Tour of the Holocaust, by Jerry Stahl

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Nein, Nein, Nein! by Jerry Stahl

“Why stay in this country, listening to mere Proud Boy-esque neo-Nazis?” asks Jerry Stahl, “when you could go to the source, to Poland and Germany, and experience the birthplace of actual Nazi-Nazis?” he explains. Nein, Nein, Nein! is the novelist-screenwriter-memoirist’s travelog of his bus trip across those two countries with stops at Auschwitz, Buchenwald and Dachau. And by the way, having been badly bullied on a school bus as a child, he hates busses.

Stahl is an over-sharer, part of that breed of writers who use the trauma and mistakes of their lives as raw, unfiltered, undisguised material. His thoughts about his own crash-and-burn marriage and drug addiction rattle like loose oil drums chained to the bumper of the bus as he shuttles between sites of horror-cum-tourist destinations. He’s traveling with retired blue-haired schoolteachers from Omaha, an Aussie “precision bulldozer operator,” a federal court clerk, a state trooper, the married “never-too-old-to-have-fun-at-Disney-World” couple—and one fellow Jew, a child of postwar DP camps before coming to the U.S By any measure, Stahl is the odd man out.

Many of his mordant observations could apply to any cruise or tour group whose participants are forced to be sociable, to “share” something of themselves with strangers. However, the particularities of this tour dominate his account. Picture Stahl’s sullen dismay when he finds, in a Warsaw gift shop, carved wooden souvenirs the size of salt shakers—“Little Jews” with hand-painted beards, moneybags and actual coins clutched in their tiny fists. Lek, the friendly shopkeeper, explained, “In Poland, we have a saying, ‘A Jew in the hallway, a coin in the pocket.’” Stahl bought six.

Running through Stahl’s travelog is the queasy idea of Holocaust tourism, where atrocity and banality converge with barely a nod of recognition from the participants. “I hope you are all in comfortable shoes for Auschwitz,” says the cheery tour guide. “We’ve got a lot of walking. And we’re behind schedule.”