Purple Hearts (Front Lines 3)

Rainy, her voice unreal, like it’s someone else using her mouth, says, “Chester, go back to company. We need food and medics. Go.” Chester does not argue or delay. He drives off in a cloud of dust.

“We will bring doctors and food,” Rainy says, raising her voice, and speaking Yiddish. Not all the men speak Yiddish, not all are Jews. Some are Poles, Russians, Hungarians, Belgians, French . . . The Jews translate for some of the others.

“Germans?” Rainy asks.

One of the men, marginally less starved than some, says in accented English, “All gone. They are run away. Will you look?”

“Look?”

He raises a hand and points. The mere effort of raising his hand seems to exhaust him. But he wobbles on, leading them as more walking skeletons come wandering to join them.

The camp is wooden huts in a row. Rainy now walks in front with their guide as Rio and Jenou refuse to look at each other and find their trigger fingers tightening.

They are shown the first hut. The reek inside is overpowering. Men lie naked or nearly naked on crude wooden shelves. Some are dead. Some are alive. Some who are alive will soon be dead.

Rainy speaks to them. We are Americans. We will not let the Nazis come back. We will feed you. We will care for you.

We are Americans.

We will not hurt you.

We are Americans.

“And I am a Jew,” Rainy says.

They reach out for her, bony fingers at the end of fleshless arms, they reach out to touch her, needing to believe that she is real.

Their fingers are parchment. Their touch infinitely gentle.

The dead are everywhere. Stacks of dead bodies by the side of the path, lines of dead laid out, all emaciated, all in the final stages of starvation and disease. All with bullet holes in the backs of their heads, or in their chests, or in their faces. Some have not been shot but bludgeoned, beaten to death with sticks or rifle butts until jaws crumpled and skulls collapsed like dropped eggs.

“Come and see,” their guide whispers, and they follow him, with dread poisoning their muscles, dragging at them, warning them no, no, no more.

Don’t look.

Don’t see.

They come to a shed not much bigger than the outbuilding behind Rio’s barn back in Gedwell Falls. The door is open.

No, don’t look, a voice in Rio’s mind begs.

Don’t look!

Don’t see!

But one by one, Rainy first, then Rio, then Jenou, they look inside. The dead are crammed in, stacks of them, tumbled piles of men with sunken eyes. All are naked and have had lime scattered over them. For the smell. It does not work. The smell is indescribable, and each of the women knows that this smell will never leave them. A million showers will not rid them of this smell.

Their guide leads on, shuffling on bare feet, and they follow, a new smell coming to them now, the smell of cooked meat.

The guide stops and inclines his head slightly. He does not need to point. They cannot help but see.

A wide trench has been scraped from the soil. Segments of steel train tracks have been laid out in a crude grid over charred wood. A barbecue pit.

Bodies, half-burned, lie stacked atop the grill. Heat still comes from it. Accusing faces stare up at them.

“What is this place?” Jenou asks, her voice strained, stretched to breaking. Her eyes swim with tears, and only upon seeing her friend does Rio realize that tears are falling freely down her own cheeks as well.

“One of the outer camps of a larger camp complex, called Buchenwald,” Rainy says. “It’s a slave labor camp where Jews are worked and tortured and starved to death. There are more. Many more, all across Germany and we think in Nazi-occupied Poland as well.”