“Sir, I found something at the other end of the car. There wasn’t just livestock in here. There’s human feces stacked in the corner. It’s frozen. That’s why there wasn’t any stink,” he said. “You think there were POWs in this car?”
“GIs or Brits would have marked up the walls,” I said.
“You’re saying maybe this train carries Jews, sir?”
“Who else would it be?”
“I’m not sure, Lieutenant. I don’t know if I believe those stories.”
“You saw the SS at work.”
“That doesn’t make the stories true.”
“Maybe not.” The train was going faster and faster, the boxcar shaking, the lines of chaff on the floor eddying back and forth like seawater sliding across sand.
“I’ve never been this hungry. I’d eat the splinters out of the wall. You reckon we’re going to get out of this, sir?”
“If not, it won’t be for lack of trying.”
“Can I ask what you did in civilian life, Lieutenant? The reason I ask is you were having a dream. You said something about Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow, the outlaws. Dreaming about those two has got to be a new one.”
“I knew them. Friends of my grandfather killed them. My grandfather was a Texas Ranger who put John Wesley Hardin in jail. I went to school in Texas and Louisiana and have a degree in history from Texas A&M and plan to go to graduate school and become an anthropologist. Does that help you out?”
“Jesus Christ, sir.”
“What is it now?” I said, my attempt at affability starting to slip.
“Look yonder,” he replied. He pointed through the crack in the door.
Two fighters made a wide turn in the sky and came in low, right down on the deck, directly out of the sun, the muzzles of their fifty-caliber machine guns winking. A white star inside a blue red-rimmed disk was painted on their wings. I saw dirt spout in a straight line across a cultivated field just before I heard the rounds smack like a bucket of marbles into the sides of the boxcars. It was thrilling to see my countrymen appear almost miraculously in the sky, their wings emblazoned with an insignia we associated with the light of civilization. Unfortunately, our countrymen were shooting at us as well as at the enemy.
The planes roared overhead and made another turn and came in for a second pass, this time with rockets mounted under their wings. The rockets caught the locomotive dead-on, blowing the cab and the boiler apart, the coal car jackknifing and taking half a dozen boxcars down the embankment with it.
Our boxcar rolled to a slow halt and was stock-still on the tracks. The sergeant and I pushed open the sliding door and began running down a ditch that led to a canal overgrown on both banks with scrub brush and gnarled trees, so grotesque in their disfiguration that I wondered if they had been sprayed with herbicide. The current in the canal was brown and sluggish, more like sewage than creek water, the air as thick and gray as the inside of a damp cotton glove. Above the canal was a narrow, rutted road, bone-white in color, a viscous green rivulet running down its center. I thought I heard a sound like a metal sign clanging in the wind. I climbed up the embankment to see farther down the road, with no success. The wind changed direction, and the sergeant cupped his hand over his nose and mouth, trying not to gag. “God, what’s that smell?” he said.
It wasn’t a smell; it was an acrid stench, one whose density made the eyes water. Automatically, I tried to associate it with images out of my past: smoke from a chimney behind a rendering plant on a wintry day; the liquescence of unburied offal; cattle dead of anthrax sliding off the beds of dump trucks into a chemical soup. I thought of rats trapped in compacted garbage that had been sprinkled with kerosene and set aflame. The stench was all of these things but worse. In my mind’s eye, I saw thick curds of yellow and gray smoke rising from human hair and skin stretched on bone. I saw fingernails curl and snap, and the eyes of the dead pop open in the heat. I saw lesions and blisters spread across the faces of children and mothers and fathers and grandparents, as though their expressions were being reconfigured long after they were dead.
I realized the sergeant and I had stepped through a door in the dimension and were about to enter a place that had no equivalent except perhaps in photos from the devil’s scrapbook.
Chapter
4
TEN MINUTES LATER, we climbed up an eroded embankment on the creek and rested on our stomachs among the trees, staring out at an iron arch and a set of gates that formed the entrance to a fenced camp where there were at least four barracks-like tarpaper buildings and a gingerbread house.
Spirals of rusted barbed wire were strung along the top of the fence; poplars had been planted along it. The rusted arch and its stanchions were scrolled with English ivy that had turned to black string and bits of red leaves. The only sounds I could hear were a tin door banging incessantly on a tarpaper building, and the muttering of birds and a combative fluttering of wings.
Evidently, the camp had not included a crematorium when it was built, and the SS had made do with the materials they had on hand. Segments of train rails had been laid across bricks stacked four feet high, then piled with felled trees. Buckets of pitch that had been used for an accelerant lay empty on the ground. From the amount of ash under the rails, I estimated the fires had been burning for at least a day. Some of the bodies had been reduced to bones and leathery scraps hanging from the rails; others were smoldering, only partially consumed by the flames. Not far away, on a railroad spur, was a giant pit where other bodies had been thrown naked, one on top of another, and doused with lime.
Directly behind the improvised crematorium was a gallows, a single noose made of steel cable hanging from the crosspiece.
“What is this place, Lieutenant?” the sergeant said.
“Probably a supply depot for forced labor,” I said.
“Where are the guards?”
“The guys who work in these places don’t do well against armed troops. They probably got rid of their uniforms and hauled freight.”