War and Remembrance by Herman Wouk Page B

snow. Is the draft going to the Katowice coal mines? Not a bad fate! Mines are warmer in winter than the open air. Miners have to be well-fed to produce.
    For all the suffering on this march, Berel is grateful to God that he is in the labor column and out of the Stalag. Nothing in his experience of the last war, nothing in the Warsaw ghetto, equals what he has seen at Lamsdorf. The Stalag is not really a prison camp, for there are no barracks, no buildings, no roll calls, no administration; no means of order, except fear of the manned machine guns on the watchtowers, and of the blazing searchlights at night. The installation is just a barbed-wire enclosure open to the sky, stretching farther than the eye can see, penning in two hundred thousand starving men. On the eastern front the Geneva Convention does not exist. The Soviet Union never signed it.
    The Germans are not prepared, anyway, to support such a vast bag of captives. The supply of food and water is scanty. The rule of life at Lamsdorf is self-preservation, in filth, stench, snarling dogfights over edible scraps, and untended sickness. Dead bodies lie about in the muck and the snow. Daily the dead are cremated in heaps, fueled by wood and waste oil, outside the barbed wire. The pyres flame far into the night. The camp stinks as though a huge meat-packing plant were nearby, where animals are rendered and the hair or bristles scorched off their hides.
    Prisoners captured in the Germans’ November drive on Moscow make up this labor draft. Those who are dying in Lamsdorf were caught in the summer campaign. Reduced by now to walking skeletons, they collapse randomly, all over the place, day and night. Of the varied Lamsdorf horrors, one still scars Jastrow’s soul. He himself has glimpsed, in the night gloom beyond the searchlights, the small packs of prisoners, insane with hunger, who rove the frozen wastes of the camp, eating the soft inner parts of new-fallen corpses. He has seen the mutilated corpses by day. The watchtower guards shoot the cannibals, when they spot them. Prisoners who catch them kick or beat them to death. But the instinct to live outlasts human nature in these creatures, and cancels fear. The cannibals are crazy somnambulists, idiot mouths seeking to be filled, with enough cunning left in their blasted brains to feed at night, skulking in shadow like coyotes. Whatever lies ahead in Katowice, Berel Jastrow knows that nothing can be worse than Lamsdorf.
    Yet it seems the column is not going to Katowice. The ranks ahead are making a left turn. That will take the draft south to Oswiecim, Berel knows; but what is there for such a large labor force to do in Oswiecim? The place of his boyhood yeshiva is a town of small manufactures, isolated in the marshy land where the Sola meets the Vistula. Mainly, it is a railroad junction. No heavy labor there. At the turn in the road, he sees a new Gothic-lettered arrow, nailed above the faded Oswiecim signpost. The Germans are using the old name, which Berel remembers from his youth when Oswiecim was Austrian. Not only is it harsher, as German names tend to be; AUSCHWITZ hardly even sounds like Oswiecim.

4

    R ABINOVITZ returned in a rusty van loaded with supplies, followed by two tank trucks carrying fresh water and diesel fuel. This touched off a frenzy of work through the twilight and into the night. Shouting, laughing, singing Jews passed the stores hand to hand up the gangway, across the deck, and down the hatches: sacks of flour and potatoes, net bags of wormy cabbages and other stunted, gnarled vegetables, bundles of dried fish, and boxes of tinned food. The ragged Turkish crewmen brought aboard the fuel and water hoses to throb and thump and groan; they fastened down hatches, tinkered at the anchor windlass, coiled ropes, blasphemed, hammered, and bustled about. The old vessel itself, as though infected with the excitement of imminent departure, creaked, rolled, and strained at its mooring lines. Frigid