“They’ve been liquidating the camps,” the medic said. “Sending them all here, to get rid of the evidence. Trying to kill them all, by the looks of it.”
“Camps?” Matthew stared at him in blank shock. Somehow he had made himself assume this was an anomaly, the only one, a horror only they had stumbled upon. Surely it had to be, and yet of course it wasn’t. “You mean… there are more like this?”
The medic nodded somberly. “Dozens, at least, some much bigger than this one. Much worse.”
“Worse…” How could anything be worse than this? “They were for political prisoners,” he whispered to himself, as if even now he could convince himself of a truth. “Before the war. The camps… they weren’t like this.” He thought of what he’d been imagining—beatings, hunger, yes, yes, of course, but this was something else entirely. Something he could not conceive of, even as he looked at it, as he made himself take it all in.
He half-walked, half-stumbled away from the others, needing to see it all for himself, although already everything was emblazoned on his brain. He would never forget. He would never be able to.
He walked slowly through the camp, staring in mute, dazed incredulity at the bodies lying discarded in piles; he realized some of those stacked so carelessly were actually alive, yet too weak to move. Hoarsely, he called for a medic to help, and together they gently moved a man from a pile of corpses to a ragged blanket on the ground. His body felt like a bundle of brittle twigs, and his eyes were glassy and unseeing even as his chest rose and fell in barely visible breaths.
Near another building, Matthew saw a pool of quicklime that he didn’t want to think about; he turned his head away from several inmates who crouched around a dead horse, eating its raw innards in frenzied desperation.
How could this be? How could anyone have allowed this, caused it—exulted in it? The questions raced through Matthew’s mind with no answers, and despite all he saw, he still found he could feel no emotion. It was all too big to contemplate, too horrific to possibly comprehend. The flicker of humanity he’d been holding onto, for Lily’s sake, blew out. There was nothing left. He felt as if he were suspended in space, as if he no longer walked the earth like a normal man, and never would again.
A man came stumbling towards him, his face covered in sores, his stubbled head crawling with lice. He could have been twenty or eighty; it was impossible to tell. He held his arms out towards Matthew, his liberator, as he wept.
“Danke,” he said as he fell into his arms. Matthew embraced him, heedless of his filth and stench. “Danke,” the man said as he rested his head on Matthew’s shoulder. “Danke, danke.”
Matthew patted his back gently, uselessly. He had no words, no thoughts, nothing. “I am a Jew,” he heard himself saying, the words coming as if from outside himself, a fact he had to reveal and claim, now more than ever. “Ich bin ein Jude.” He could have been here. He could be this man he held in his arms, and, far more frighteningly, his brothers could. His mother. Gertie…
The man looked up at him; he had no teeth, and his breath was foul, everything about him unbearably repulsive and pitiable. Once he might have been a man of standing—an accountant like Matthew’s father, a lawyer, a doctor, a violinist. Once he might have lived in Warsaw, or Berlin, or Vienna, or Fraustadt, in an apartment with velvet curtains and hardwood floors, Mozart on the gramophone. Now he was little more than a wraith, a skeleton, barely alive. How could this be?
“Danke, Jude,” the man said as he wept on Matthew’s shoulder, two men joined in this moment, this tragedy. “Danke, Jude.”
Chapter Twenty-Five
ABBY
Abby looked down at Simon’s fingers laced with hers. Where to begin? How to start? Simon squeezed her fingers, an encouragement as well as a comfort, and she took a steadying breath.
“This feels a bit melodramatic,” she said, “considering we’ve just heard the most harrowing story about war, and concentration camps, and all the rest.” She trailed off, shaking her head. Her own small, sad story felt so pathetic in comparison, unworthy of such an emotional confession. Compared to Matthew Weiss, she had nothing to complain about.
“You’re hardly being melodramatic,” Simon told her gently. “Just honest, I think?” His hand remained warm wrapped around hers. “Are you going to tell me about your mother and brother’s accident?”
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Her lips trembled as she forced them upwards. “How did you know?”
He offered her a sad smile. “What else could it be?”
“It’s that obvious, huh?” She meant to sound joking, but already she felt near tears, every emotion skating so precariously close to the surface. She didn’t want to cry. Not yet, before she’d even said anything. Maybe not ever.
“I wouldn’t say it’s obvious. But I think—I hope—I’ve come to know you, and this is the big thing in your life you don’t like to talk about.”
She sighed, a raggedy sound. “Yes. Does everyone have a big thing, do you think?”
“Maybe not as big, but then it’s not a competition, is it? There are no medals for who’s experienced the worst tragedy, none that anyone would want. And this… this is your story, Abby. If you want to tell it to me.”
“The thing is,” Abby said slowly, staring down at their joined hands, “I already know what you’re going to say. You’re going to tell me it wasn’t my fault, that I need to forgive myself, that I need to let the past go and move on. And I know all that.” She looked up, managing a watery smile. “I had therapy, you know. Not a lot, but some. I’ve tried to work through my feelings of guilt Sort of, anyway.”
“I believe you.”
“Do you?” Abby withdrew her hand from Simon’s and wrapped her arms around her tucked-up knees, holding herself together. “Because I’m not sure I believe myself.”
He remained silent, sympathetic, waiting.
“Okay,” Abby said after a few moments. “This is how it happened. My brother had a piano lesson on Saturday mornings. It was a ten-minute drive away. Luke loved piano… he played all the time. Anyway…” She blew out a breath as the image of Luke sitting at the old piano, shaggy head bent towards the keys as he let his fingers ripple over them, filling the house with music, flitted through her mind. “That morning—it was April of my senior year—my mom wasn’t feeling well. She had some kind of flu, headache, stuffy nose, maybe a fever. She usually drove him, but I was seventeen, I had my license. Sometimes I did it, if I was needed.” She stopped then, and Simon nodded, encouraging.