Trusting Calvin by Sharon Peters

and muscle pain.
    Zalmen was among the first felled. Fever flamed through him. Moshe and his friends forced water down his throat, wrapped cool rags around his head, and when he became delirious, they held him down so the fits of flailing didn’t fling him from his bunk. They had no medicine for any illness, and a few had already died of this terrifying sickness.
    When the fever finally broke and it appeared that Zalmen might live, the inmate in charge, who had watched the ministrations from a distance, approached. “Tomorrow you do not go to work. You stay here to clean the barracks.”
    Unsteady, barely able to speak, Zalmen hauled himself off the bunk the next morning when the others left and began scrubbing floors, his head muzzy, his body only vaguely responsive to what he was demanding of it. Feix appeared as part of his daily routine of inspecting every building to demonstrate that he knew all, that secrets could never take root under his command. He saw Zalmen moving slowly and, enraged at this insolence, drew back his whip again and again.
    When the prisoners returned from the plant that evening, Zelman was still working, his shirt and his back shredded, his trousers splattered with dried blood. Again his friends turned to the only form of treatment available, cold compresses.
    The next morning, Zalmen joined everyone else on the march to work. Prisoners who didn’t recover quickly, being of no value, were shot.
    Typhus lingered over the barracks for weeks like a malevolent mist. Moshe fell ill with a case less severe than Zalmen’s, though bad enough to leave him partially deaf in one ear.
    In two months, hundreds of men had died, their bodies hauled off to the ditch. This unanticipated burst of additional deaths did not create a manpower issue, however. Feix merely had to send word that he needed a hundred more Jews, and a hundred more Jews would arrive in short order. Still, having sick men around was an annoyance. The commandant grew weary of men dropping dead on the job, tired of the stench of dying.
    One morning he ordered the barracks where the sick were recovering emptied. Dozens hobbled, as ordered, to the edge of the ditch, and were shot, one by one. This was much more efficient than having to haul corpses across the yard when men died in their beds, and Feix seemed pleased with his solution.
    The determined typhus rampage finally slowed.
    One early evening as he made his way across the yard toward the barracks, Moshe was deep in thought. Somehow, against all odds, he and his brothers had survived a winter in Budzyn. He and Zalmen had marched through blinding blizzards driven by winds so harsh that ice had formed on their faces, through snow so deep that their feet and legs felt numb all day. Now spring was teasing the camp with the promise, if nothing else, of an easier march to work once the ankle-deep mud from the almost-daily rains, straight, heavy, and sullen, had dried. They were still alive, and he wouldn’t have predicted that when winter had begun.
    Suddenly a guard pointed his whip at Moshe and motioned for him to approach.
    â€œAnd you, too,” the guard shouted to another man, “and you, you, and you.” When he had collected five, he ordered them into formation and marched them out the gate toward the commandant’s house. The sentries at the gate smirked and hooted as they passed.
    Darkness hadn’t fallen yet, though the sun was dropping low in the sky, soft against their backs as they walked toward something they knew would be awful. Feix had been entertaining special guests, they knew, in the same way—through the rumor network—that they knew about much of what transpired in the primly landscaped world the commandant inhabited, far from the stench of latrines and sickness and desperation.
    When he entertained, the commandant took pride in providing unusual diversions. That would be the function they would serve, the men knew. There had been