Matthew worked on the translation of the surrender documents, feeling strangely distant from it all as he watched the largest ever surrender of soldiers, artillery, and equipment completed in the formal drawing room of the palace.
Afterwards, he walked outside into the bright spring sunlight and tried to summon some emotion—satisfaction, if not joy, or at least relief. He felt nothing. He didn’t know when he’d stopped feeling, when that part of him that wept and laughed, wondered and hoped, had become so deadened he could not remember when it—or he—had been alive. He prayed there was still a flicker left, buried deep, waiting to be breathed back to life.
A jeep pulled up in front of the palace, kicking up clouds of dust. Matthew watched silently as an intelligence officer he knew by name—Jamison—jumped out, his expression tense.
“We’ve had reports of a camp about three miles away,” he stated starkly. “Wobbelin. We might need you for your German. Depending…” He stopped, but Matthew could fill it in himself. Depending on what they found.
Matthew dropped the cigarette he’d barely smoked and ground it under his heel. “I’ll come.”
As he climbed into the jeep next to another officer, he realized he had no idea what to expect. They’d all heard, vaguely, about the camps that had been discovered as the Allies pushed east. Other units had liberated a few, but details hadn’t been forthcoming. In any case, he’d known about such camps before the war, political prisons like Dachau. Someone in Fraustadt, a suspected Communist, had been taken there. He’d emerged four months later quiet and haggard, and no one had asked him any questions.
Matthew was prepared for the conditions to be brutal, food and water and decent clothing all sparing, but something in Jamison’s face made him wonder if it might be worse. Yet how much worse could it be, than beating and starvation and unjust imprisonment? What else could they possibly find?
As they took the narrow road out of Ludwigslust towards Wobbelin, the smell accosted them first. It rolled over them on a warm spring breeze, and it was like nothing Matthew had ever breathed in before. It smelled of something dreadfully dead, and yet also horribly alive. It held the sickly-sweetish tinge of decay, along with the terrible odor of sweat and feces, and another, charred smell he couldn’t and didn’t want to identify. It stung his nostrils and coated the back of his throat, and as they continued down the track, he fought the urge to gag, his stomach roiling.
At one point, Jamison cut the engine, squinting through the trees as he covered his mouth and nose with his handkerchief. “My God,” he said, his voice muffled. “What the hell is causing that stench?”
They found out just a few minutes later, when the zigzag of the high razor-topped fences surrounding the camp came into view above the trees, sunlight glinting off wire.
The gates were already opened, and another army jeep was parked in front. The smell was so thick, Matthew fought the urge to be sick; it felt like a miasma, palpable, visible, blanketing them with its utter awfulness.
He blinked in the bright spring sunlight as he gazed at the entrance of the camp, trying to take in what he was seeing and yet unable to. It was as if his brain had ceased to
function, the images in front of him impossible to translate into fact or reason.
“My God,” Jamison said again, softly. All three of them stared in mute, shocked horror at the devastation that lay before them. They had no other words.
The camp was made of a dozen or so long, low buildings, little more than cattle sheds, and stacked outside of them were bodies. At first, Matthew could not believe they were real, actual human beings stacked like lumber, arms and legs poking out like matchsticks. Some already snapped off and littered the ground like broken twigs.
He’d seen dead bodies before, of course, many times. After Ardennes, he’d crept from corpse to corpse, searching for any information hidden in dead soldiers’ pockets. He’d thought he was used to the look of a dead man—the glassy-eyed stare, the slack limbs, the bluish tinge, the inevitable stiffening. Even the unavoidable gore—gaping wounds, body parts blown off, heads no longer whole. He thought he’d seen it all.
Yet he’d never seen this.
Slowly, dazed as if in a horrible dream, he climbed out of the jeep. Jamison and the other officer followed, each one walking slowly, mouths agape, arms futilely covering their faces to ward off the terrible smell.
As they approached the gates of the camp, a few wraithlike figures stumbled towards them, arms outstretched, skin stretched so tightly over their bones they looked like living skeletons, like something out of a horror film with Boris Karloff, the kind you’d laugh at for being so ridiculous, and yet Matthew had never, ever been as far from laughing as he was now.
He was filled with a mute, overwhelming horror, a terrible incredulity that kept his mind frozen in place, his body too as the figures stumbled towards him. They wore striped uniforms, ragged and dirty; on each was a Star of David. As he stared at them, he realized they were speaking, their voices so hoarse he was barely able to hear them.
“Essen… essen… hast du etwas zu essen?”
Food. They were asking for food.
Matthew fumbled through his pockets, desperate to give them something, but he didn’t have so much as a stick of gum. Then one of the poor wretches saw his pack of cigarettes and motioned to it with a clawlike hand. Matthew thrust the pack at the man, heedless, only to watch in shock as he unrolled the paper and began stuffing the tobacco straight into his mouth.
“What…” The word exhaled from Jamison as he shook his head slowly. He’d found a dry piece of ration biscuit in his pocket and he handed it to one of the prisoners, who began to gulp it so fast he choked. All three of them watched, horrified, as the man began clutching his throat before falling to the ground, twitching and moaning. “I only gave him a biscuit,” Jamison cried, falling to his knees in front of the man. “Please…”
“Don’t give them food.” A hassled-looking medic came running towards them, snatching the half of a Hershey bar the other officer had been about to offer. “It will kill them. Their bodies won’t be able to take anything solid.”
“My God.” Jamison covered his mouth with one hand. “I’m so sorry.”
“You weren’t to know. How could you know?”
For a second they were all silent as they contemplated the depth of the horror around them, and the evil that had caused it.
Matthew looked around at the starved beings who were utterly desperate for food they were unable to eat, one further injustice that had been wreaked upon them. They were human beings, people who had once loved and laughed and lived, and yet they seemed like ghosts now, barely alive, their humanity stolen from them. He could not take it in.
“What…” He cleared his throat, the words rasping it raw. “What happened here?”