This Light Between Us: A Novel of World War II

“Hello,” he says to the people at the fence. They stare back mournfully. “American. I am American.” He jabs a finger at his chest over and over.

They don’t answer, these skeletons, these misplaced scarecrows. Gaunt eyes, sallow cheeks, heads shaven, barely able to hold themselves up. Many wearing striped pajamas.

What Charlie was wearing in his visions.

Footsteps next to him. “My God,” Clay whispers. He doesn’t speak another word, can’t. This man who never stops talking, speechless.

The people behind the fence stare back. Some shuffle away. They all have a patch on their striped outfits. Triangular in shape, on their chests, with different colors: yellow, brown, red.

Alex walks over to the gate. Tries to open it but it’s padlocked shut.

From the jeep, Stanley shouts, “HQ’s telling us to leave.”

Clay: “What?”

“They said we’re not to engage the camp residents. We’re not to enter the premises. We’re to leave immediately.”

Clay shakes his head. “Why the hell should we leave?”

Stanley stands up in the jeep. “Guys. We should leave. Headquarters will send med teams.”

Alex shakes his head. “We can’t just leave them.” He pulls the strapped carbine from around his back. “Stand aside.”

“Maki!” Stanley says. “We have our orders. They don’t want us opening these gates.”

“Of course they don’t,” Clay says. “Jap boys liberating a camp? Doesn’t play well in the newspapers.”

“Screw HQ,” Alex says, already aiming his carbine at the lock. He shoots it off, the gunshot echoing across the camp. At once, every head inside turns toward the gate.

Alex kicks it open. Steps inside the camp. And it’s as if he’s crossed some invisible barrier. A nauseating stench of death, ripe and raw, fills his nostrils. Even the temperature seems to drop a few degrees.

Alex and Clay, with Chuck right behind, walk deeper into camp. Past people lying on the ground. Not all of them are dead. Not yet. Some breathe even as they lay there, their chests rising slowly, shallow, their lips puckering like beached fish slowly dying.

“God,” Clay whispers. “Oh, God.”

More inmates stumble out of barracks, triangular structures that resemble thatched roofs. The inmates, barefoot and hardly clothed, blink at the overcast skies, barely able to stay upright. The smallest breeze will topple the rickety structure of their bare bones.

“Germans!” Clay shouts, as they walk past the triangular-shaped barracks. “Wo sind die Nazis?” No one answers. Clay switches over to his broken French. “Où sont les Nazis?” He turns to a tall thin man with a red triangular patch on his breast who might once have been regal and proud, not this broken twig. “Wo sind die Nazis? Où sont les Nazis?”

“Speak English?” the man croaks, a speck of saliva dotting the corner of his chapped lips.

Clay nods, taps his chest repeatedly. “American. We are American.”

The man walks up, gestures to his mouth. “Food? Yes? You food?”

Chuck, his face pale as the gray snow lying around, reaches into his pocket, takes out a chocolate bar. Hands it to the man.

Who stares dumbly at it, eyes blinking in amazement, like he’s just been offered the greatest miracle on Earth. Others see this, and they come toward the three American soldiers. Swarming them. Extended arms, grasping hands, eyes wide with hunger and yearning. Making the same gesture, hand to mouth, hand to mouth.

Alex opens his mess kit, starts breaking up the K rations into smaller pieces, distributing them as he walks. As do Clay and Chuck. In seconds, all the food is gone, and Alex tosses the empty mess kit. A stick-thin man picks it up, licks it clean. Someone tugs at Alex’s water bottle. Alex undoes the strap, hands the bottle over. But the man—or is it a woman?—doesn’t have the strength to twist the cap open. He does it for her. Her lips wobbling, her mouth pathetic, water falling everywhere but in. He helps her. More people surround them.

“No more, sorry, we have nothing else for you,” Chuck says. The three push past the crowd. They walk to the other side of camp, past rows of barracks. Past three smoking heaps of barracks recently burned down. The foul stink of ash and charred flesh rising from them.

They come to an open space. They stop. Before them, a huge pile of naked bodies, a tangled web of what must be a hundred bodies. Heaped on top of each other.

Charlie, Alex thinks. Charlie …

Alex reaches for his helmet, takes it off. Chuck, too. They cannot process this obscenity.

They walk back to the jeep. The crowd still milling about, gawking at them. Alex takes off his gloves, gives them away to a man. The gloves dangle off the man’s arms like kitchen mitts on a stick. An almost-naked woman, shaking with cold, approaches. Alex starts unbuttoning his jacket. “If you want to help them over the long haul,” Clay says, “you’ll need to stay warm, Alex.”

At the opened gates, a pastel-pale man speaks in a thick French accent. “France? Where?”

“What?”

“To France. Where?”

Stanley points westward. “That way. But France is very, very far away.”

The man pulls up his collars and starts hobbling down the road in his striped pajamas and ratty shoes.

Outside the camp, he limps past a small group of people who’ve just walked out. They’ve set upon the dead horse by the roadside. Cut it wide open using sharp rocks, right at the soft belly, and their hands are digging into its flesh. Eating it raw, its blood smearing onto their hands, their faces, down the front of their clothes.

Alex stumbles over to the jeep. With a trembling hand, he picks up the transmitter and speaks into it, his voice shaking. “Send help. Send lots of food. Send lots of clothes. Send med teams. Good God. Send everything.”

66

APRIL 29, 1945, LATE AFTERNOON

BAVARIA, GERMANY

Army trucks arrive six hours later. Loaded with bottles of water, blankets, American Red Cross food packages: raisins, liver pâté, corned beef, biscuits. Alex, Clay, and a dozen other soldiers distribute the food. More inmates limp out of the barracks, in even worse shape than the others, and stream toward the trucks. They swarm the soldiers handing out the food but are so slight and frail, the soldiers easily move them back and restore order. Then, as quickly as the food arrived, a call comes in.

“Take the food away?” Alex says. “Why?”

The sergeant touches his moustache. “We’re getting reports from other camps. If we feed them too much, they’ll die.”

“Other camps?”

The sergeant shrugs.

“They got to eat, Sarge. If they don’t, they’ll die for sure.”

“Look at them, Maki. They’re skeletons. We overload their systems too quickly, they’ll die.”

“Sarge—”

“Look, you think I like this? But I’ve got my orders. As do you now. Stop distributing the food.” He reads the concern on Alex’s face. “You want to help them, Maki? Go distribute some blankets. Not to the people outside. They’re the healthier ones. But go into the barracks, to those too sick to even stand. Take Clay with you.”

* * *

Charlie Lévy. She is all he can think about. Every time he goes into another barrack, her name is on the tip of his tongue, her face looms large in his mind. His greatest hope but also his greatest fear is that he will find her in one of these barracks.

But inside every one, it is the same. The same foul, diseased stench wafting out, the long rows of shelves, three high, packed with prisoners lying down. Their eyes, blinking against the light streaming in through the doorway, rolling in sunken sockets, their wispy necks barely able to lift up their skulls off the wood platforms.

Clay stays at the entrance, his shirt held over his nose. Alex walks down the aisle between the rows of prisoners. His knuckles sometimes graze their shaven heads; their skulls feel as light as papier-mâché.

In every barrack as he distributes th

e blankets, he whispers, Connaissez-vous Mademoiselle Charlie Lévy? Connaissez-vous Mademoiselle Charlie Lévy?

No one ever answers.

* * *

Nighttime. Light snow falls from the black sky, an endless winter. Alex climbs into the back of the truck, collapses with fatigue. He leans back against the tarp, closes his eyes. Around him, the other GIs are asleep, or softly talking. Outside the truck he can hear prisoners rummaging through the trash pit, going through the soldiers’ dinner mess kits.

“More blankets will arrive tomorrow morning,” a soldier says. The tip of his cigarette glows as he takes a long pull. They’ve all been smoking like chimneys in an effort to cover the stench. “Heard they’re bringing a medic team, too.”

“It’s too late,” the other murmurs. “Hate to say that, but it is. These prisoners still here—they’re the sick ones, the dying ones left behind. The healthier ones, they were forced out on a death march. Two days ago, I heard.” The cigarette tips glows. “Thousands of them walking on these frozen roads to God knows where. We should focus on saving them.”

A long silence. The tip of the cigarette glows. The other soldier speaks.

“They’re probably dead, too.”

* * *

Exhausted as he is, he can’t sleep. Images keep dripping into his mind, everything he has seen through the day. He pulls himself into a sitting position. A few other soldiers are up, a motorcyclist runner, two others he can’t remember even seeing before. They’re hunched over a candle, snapping cards.