Purple Hearts (Front Lines 3)
“You’re coming with me,” Rainy says. “Grab your gear. Sergeant Green? Would you pass word to Sergeant Marr’s CO that I am authorized to take whatever resources I need on direct orders from General Patton, and I am taking Marr.”
Rainy’s eyes are inhuman, cold, and her voice is impersonal. She strikes Frangie as a person straining to control herself.
“What’s going on? Where are we going, Captain Schulterman?”
“I don’t know yet. We’re on our way to a camp. We found one a couple weeks ago, and Generals Patton and Bradley and Ike himself toured it. Now I’ve been assigned full-time to the job of locating them.”
All of it said as if Rainy is an automaton. She seems to be vibrating with repressed energy. Her face is carefully blank, but when Frangie looks down she sees that Rainy’s right hand is clenched in a fist.
She says good-bye to Walter with a handshake that goes on longer than such things usually do and climbs into Rainy’s jeep, sitting behind her.
They drive off.
After less than a mile they come to a train.
The train is stopped on the tracks. It is a long line of run-down railroad cars, some enclosed, some with only sides and no roof.
They are not the first Americans on the scene. GIs, some white, some colored, stand staring, or walk away with ashen faces. Frangie sees more than one GI crying.
A terrible smell is carried on the breeze.
The jeep stops, and Rainy and Frangie climb out. They walk toward the train, toward the smell, past GIs with faces twisted into masks of grief and horror.
And rage.
Some of the doors have been opened and inside the cars Frangie sees what at first she takes for dead livestock. But no, there are rags.
And that is a human foot sticking out.
And a hand.
A shaved head.
A leg so starved that she can name each of the bones visible through papery skin.
“Those are people,” Frangie says. “Oh my God, Rainy, those are people!”
Frangie breaks into a run, toward the nearest car. Its door is wide open. The dead are stacked inside. Stacked so that some fell out when the door opened. Starved, sick, tortured bodies, and . . .
Oh, Jesus, some are alive!
She sees feeble movement here and there, a pitiful few still living, men and women buried beneath the dead, human beings trying to crawl like worms out of a pile of corpses.
Frangie stares in horror and sees a skull open its eyes. She goes to her, holds out a trembling hand, not knowing what to . . . there’s nothing in her training to explain what she should do when she finds a teenage girl buried beneath a pile of dead.
The living skull tries to speak but cannot, so she simply looks with imploring eyes at Frangie. Frangie takes out her canteen and trickles water into the girl’s mouth. Another medic, a white man, appears beside her. She sees the caduceus on his uniform, a doctor.
“Just a little,” he says. “Too much and it kills them.”
His words are cool and calm and dispassionate. His face is not. Tears run down his cheeks.
He helps Frangie to move the bodies, the pathetically light bodies, the beaten, starved, and finally shot bodies. They lift the girl down with infinite care and lay her on Frangie’s jacket on the ground.
“What is . . . why are they . . . ?”
Rainy, standing over them, says, “It’s happening all over Germany and Poland. The SS know we’re coming. They try to hide it. They move the people out of the camps and send them to camps farther from the line. Covering up. Hiding their handiwork.”
There is an eerie singsong in Rainy’s voice, an unworldly sound.