In War Times (26 page)

The summerhouse, pleasantly proportioned and open on two sides to what promised to be a lush, mature garden in another month, tugged at Sam’s thoughts as he imagined happier seasons spent beneath its wide eaves. Its intact red tile roof was a moving filigree of tiny shadows as the overhanging, just-budding linden tree moved in the morning breeze. Red and yellow tulips blazed against the brick wall. A wide, dark-framed mirror hung on one of the walls. In the foreground was a statue of a figure carrying a basket overhead.

Sam had traded three packs of cigarettes for a Leica camera and film. He was now the company photographer, documenting the town, its people, and his buddies.

He opened the window. Grease, his roommate, said something rude about the influx of cold air and rolled over. Sam leaned out and took several pictures of the courtyard. The statue was in the foreground, and Sam hoped that he’d properly exposed the picture to get the effect he wanted: sunlight streaming down; a palpable sense of spring.

A girl and a boy edged around one corner of the summerhouse and looked both ways. As he watched, they ran up the walk to the back porch. Their footsteps on the stairs were quiet; carefully placed. Sam heard the door open and close, and they scurried down the walk, the boy holding a small bundle. Just as they went around the corner, the girl stopped, evidently feeling Sam’s gaze. She turned and looked up at him. At that instant he snapped her picture. She melted away through the bushes.

He went downstairs. Leonid was in the kitchen, as usual, cracking some hard-won real eggs into a bowl for their breakfast. He was less cadaverous now, and had learned some English. His hair was a gray haze of fuzz on his formerly bald pate. There were always good smells here. This morning, it was bread baking in the oven.

“Who is the girl?” asked Sam.

“Lise. Karl. Ah…same grandfather?”

“Cousins.”

Leonid nodded. “Cousins. Her mother…raped?”

“Raped.”

“Yes, raped by Russians. They say. Then shot. Horse, eaten. Father, dead Luftwaffe pilot.”

Sam was startled by the depth of sadness in his eyes.

“This was their house. Egg for them. Slice of bread.”

“Good,” said Sam. “We have plenty.”

“Yes. Plenty. Much?”

“Plenty is the same as much, yes. But maybe even more than much. More than enough.”

“I hope that someone takes care of my family this way.” But he looked doubtful.

That afternoon, a group of GI’s drove up in two six-by-six trucks. Sam was smoking a cigarette on the front stoop. A sergeant yelled from the window, “Want some booze? Rhine wine and cognac.”

“How much?”

“Three hundred bucks, including the trucks.”

“We’ve got plenty of trucks. One-fifty for the booze.”

“Ah, hell. Two hundred for everything.”

“Hold on.”

In fifteen minutes he’d canvassed all the unwary GI’s in the building, and came out with two-hundred dollars in cash.

They began to set up a
biergarten
in their backyard, using the two sides of the summer-house. The other two sides consisted of a fine bar, with brass railing, from the
volkspark
.

Sam envisioned an oasis in the middle of chaos.

And from that springboard, he and Wink prepared to begin their serious, real work.

O
N A RAINY DAY
in mid-April, Sunny’s efficient clerk sought them out, carrying a paper. “This is kind of strange—I mean, the provenance—but we checked it all out and the orders are good.”

Wink wiped his hands on a rag. “What are you talking about?”

“You and Dance are to take two bulldozers to a place called Bergen-Belsen.” Sam studied the orders.

They were written in a hand he recognized, from notes on her paper: Hadntz’s. And it was stamped and signed by General Simpson.

They were to drive a hundred miles through enemy territory.

“I asked some questions while you were getting the ’dozers,” said Wink, as they got ready to load them on the truck. “The German commander of Bergen-Belsen signed it over to the Brits to get rid of it. It’s a hellhole. I don’t know what they want with us. Except that they have a desperate need for earthmovers.”

“Hadntz wants us there. She meant for us to see that she was somehow involved with those orders. We know that she’s been working closely with the British.”

“Fat lot of good our ‘security clearance’ has been to us,” Wink complained as he checked the chains holding the ’dozers on the long truck bed. “I swear not to reveal the top-secret American method of peeling potatoes on pain of death.”

They stopped in bombed-out Kaarst. Sam rolled down his window and handed the orders to the Brits. The chilly air was laced with cigarette smoke from nearby soldiers.

“I’m beginning to think that Hadntz’s herd-animal ideas aren’t far off the mark. Without Hitler in evidence, everything is falling apart,” said Wink.

“Do you think the U.S. would be any different?”

“I think that our country has a pretty good framework for maintaining stability in the event of a president’s death. My question is—if humans are changed, somehow, how will that affect the whole lot of us? How might it affect this situation?”

“If the brain is just a series of electrochemical events, and if DNA controls those events, maybe if they unfolded in a slightly different way, people would be…changed.”

“Life could be just one big party.”

“Well, at least we might be able to get on with things. It’s going to take a lot of energy just to get this place back to where it was a few weeks ago.”

“I keep thinking about Perler. Do you think he and his crowd have anything to do with things falling apart?”

A Tommie came up to Sam’s window. “Two blocks west, then north.”

“Thanks.” Sam put the truck in first gear and it growled into motion.

On the outskirts of town, Wink said, “Look. Over there.”

Next to the road, the muddy, trampled field was empty, but a few hundred yards away a wave of people trudged toward them, and they stretched to the horizon.

Their truck was slowly enveloped by the refugees. The mob split in half and trudged past the truck, a river of women and children, but some older men as well, many wearing bold-striped prison uniforms. Everyone, including the children, carried parcels. Some were just boxes tied with twine; others had suitcases. All of them moved slowly, their eyes dull, putting one foot in front of the other, simply heading east, away from a much greater threat than the Allies—the Russians, their mortal, ancestral enemy.

After they had passed, Sam saw that the field behind them was scattered with bodies—not of soldiers, but of civilians, dying as they walked.

“God,” said Wink. “What can we do?”

They smelled the stink of the camp miles before they saw it, driving through a pine forest alongside a rapidly flowing river. Bodies became more numerous, at first randomly scattered and then stacked in piles. It was obvious that many of them had been shot. Smoke rose and flattened beneath a cloudy sky.

“They’re burning the bodies,” said Wink.

They stopped on what seemed the threshold of hell to wait for permission to enter.

On the other side of the gate, a range of humanity filled the trampled grounds. Some were moving; many were not. Starved men, women, and a surprising number of children slumped against any available prop. There was no way to tell if they were dead or alive, save that the open eyes of some observed incuriously. Many were naked. Some had been executed and left to lie where they fell. All were so emaciated that their joints protruded like knobs. Those involved in the liberation of the camp—soldiers, medical personnel—wore masks and cloths tied over their mouths, and moved purposefully through the living and the dead.

The Brit at the gate took one look at their ’dozers and waved them into the massive compound, bounded by barbed wire.

“We’re here,” said Wink. “Now what?”

“Let’s try and find out who’s in charge.” Sam pulled off the main drag and parked off to one side, next to a sagging wooden barracks. They jumped down from the truck.

No one paid them any attention. Two British soldiers with guns accompanied an SS officer in leg irons, who observed all the activity with an ironic gaze as they moved him along.

A dozen hefty blond women, wearing uniforms—skirt and jacket, with tall leather boots—were marched past them under guard. One of them looked defiantly forward, chin high. The rest of them walked with slumped shoulders and bowed heads, looking at the ground. Weirdly, an orchestra played somewhere, its clear sweet strains infusing the scene with an incongruous harmony.

“SS women?” asked Wink.

“Guess so.”

They made their way through a constant stream of guarded SS men dragging bodies toward a huge pit. Turning off to one side, they followed the stream of movement to the place where the bodies came from.

They stood before a mountain of naked, tangled bodies, their skin yellow, pale green, and black with bruises, stretched tight on a framework of bones. Crisscrossed with lines of darkened blood, their faces were hideously drawn and no longer seemed even human.

Wink said, “I’m going back to the truck.”

“I understand,” Sam said, but his voice sounded distant to him. He was hearing violin music in an isolated forest cottage, where the power of life rose up and triumphed over such scenes.

Hadntz hadn’t been able to do much of anything.

“Move aside,” said a Brit. “What are you Americans doing here anyway?”

“We brought those ’dozers over there.”

“Behind the crematorium?”

“The what?” asked Wink.

“Where they burned the bodies. But that was too slow. They couldn’t burn them fast enough. Only so many thousands a day.” His words were clipped, unstoppable.

“So they dug some jolly big trenches next to one another and let the rendered fat seep out to help the burning. You’re standing in front of a gas chamber. They were brought in trains and sorted as to whether or not they looked useful. All their clothing removed, the suitcases they’d packed put aside. Told they were to have a nice shower. Packed in tight with beatings. I mean as tightly as they possibly could be and the door barred. Gas took care of them in a minute or so, but they fought like hell, inside.”

Sam realized that here the dead far outnumbered the living. The weight of their lost lives was palpable, unbearably heavy with hopes, dreams, yearning, fear, and love. Each remarkably complex person had been an entire universe. There was no way to encompass such loss, to understand it. One could not help trying, though, and that was what brought Sam to a complete halt at the edge of a dark abyss, beyond which meaning did not exist.

For the next hour, they wandered the camp, as aimless as the released prisoners. Sam passed out all of his remaining cigarettes, which were gratefully accepted. One soldier looked alarmed, and came over to talk to them.

“Don’t give them any food. They just die, see? I gave one a biscuit and he took one bite and swallowed it and dropped dead. They can’t eat anymore. Stomachs can’t take it. Stay away from the barracks. They’re full of shit. I mean it. Those people couldn’t even move any more. There’s been no water for a week. They just shat where they were. Everyone sleeping with dead bodies around them. Lice. Terrible…just terrible.” He looked Sam square in the eyes and said, “I’m Jewish. Paul Franklin. From Lancashire. Now I know what I’ve been fighting for. This is hideous fucking evil and there is nothing else to be said about it.”

He recruited them to help repair the water system, and found someone for them to turn the ’dozers over to, with some perfunctory paperwork.

“They had no water?” Wink asked Franklin, as they headed toward the waterworks past endless rows of low, flat barracks overflowing with the dead.

“And no food, either, for the past week. They’re blaming that on Allied bombings, but the SS had plenty of food in that warehouse. They’ve mostly run off, disguising themselves. Innocent old farmers trying to get home to their families.”

“There’s a river right there,” said Sam. It glinted on the other side of the barbed wire.

Paul made a sound as if he were being strangled, which ended up as a sort of laugh. Then he rubbed his face. “Sorry. They claimed the river was contaminated. They didn’t want to make anyone sick.”

Sam was grateful to be given the simple, straightforward job of soldering pipes. At least he didn’t have to dig holes with the ’dozers they’d brought, nor push piles of bodies into the holes. There seemed to be a lot of dead children among the adults. His entire being ached, as if he were being squeezed inside a rubber strait-jacket. He sweated the pipe with the torch, hoped the joint was sound, and moved on to the next joint.

After three days of doing what they could, which included helping rig a system to pump water from the river, they prepared to leave. The ’dozers would stay behind. They allowed as many released prisoners as they could to crowd onto their truck. Sam gunned the engine and put the truck in gear.

Just then, a British soldier came round from behind the truck, waving some papers. “You’re to take this,” he said.