smell?” he said.
It wasn’t a smell; it was an acrid stench, one whose density made the eyes water. Automatically, I tried to associate it with images out of my past: smoke from a chimney behind a rendering plant on a wintry day; the liquescence of unburied offal; cattle dead of anthrax sliding off the beds of dump trucks into a chemical soup. I thought of rats trapped in compacted garbage that had been sprinkled with kerosene and set aflame. The stench was all of these things but worse. In my mind’s eye, I saw thick curds of yellow and gray smoke rising from human hair and skin stretched on bone. I saw fingernails curl and snap, and the eyes of the dead pop open in the heat. I saw lesions and blisters spread across the faces of children and mothers and fathers and grandparents, as though their expressions were being reconfigured long after they were dead.
I realized the sergeant and I had stepped through a door in the dimension and were about to enter a place that had no equivalent except perhaps in photos from the devil’s scrapbook.
Chapter
4
T EN MINUTES LATER, we climbed up an eroded embankment on the creek and rested on our stomachs among the trees, staring out at an iron arch and a set of gates that formed the entrance to a fenced camp where there were at least four barracks-like tarpaper buildings and a gingerbread house.
Spirals of rusted barbed wire were strung along the top of the fence; poplars had been planted along it. The rusted arch and its stanchions were scrolled with English ivy that had turned to black string and bits of red leaves. The only sounds I could hear were a tin door banging incessantly on a tarpaper building, and the muttering of birds and a combative fluttering of wings.
Evidently, the camp had not included a crematorium when it was built, and the SS had made do with the materials they had on hand. Segments of train rails had been laid across bricks stacked four feet high, then piled with felled trees. Buckets of pitch that had been used for an accelerant lay empty on the ground. From the amount of ash under the rails, I estimated the fires had been burning for at least a day. Some of the bodies had been reduced to bones and leathery scraps hanging from the rails; others were smoldering, only partially consumed by the flames. Not far away, on a railroad spur, was a giant pit where other bodies had been thrown naked, one on top of another, and doused with lime.
Directly behind the improvised crematorium was a gallows, a single noose made of steel cable hanging from the crosspiece.
“What is this place, Lieutenant?” the sergeant said.
“Probably a supply depot for forced labor,” I said.
“Where are the guards?”
“The guys who work in these places don’t do well against armed troops. They probably got rid of their uniforms and hauled freight.”
The sergeant wiped his nose on his sleeve. “Maybe there’s grub in that gingerbread house,” he said.
We had one weapon between us, my 1911-model army .45 automatic. I got to my feet and pulled it from the holster. It felt cold and heavy in my hand. “Let’s take a walk,” I said.
The gates were unlocked, the smoke flattening in the wind, the smell of charred flesh unbearable. I cleared my mouth and spat, then pulled my sweater over my nose. The sergeant kept looking sideways at the crematorium, his eyelids stitched to his brows, his cheeks sunken. “Lieutenant, there’s a little-bitty child in that pit,” he said. “Right yonder. Oh, man.”
“We’ll talk about it later, Sergeant. Concentrate on what’s in front of us.”
“Yes, sir. If this is a camp for slave labor, why is a child here?”
“Don’t try to make sense out of a place like this,” I said. “There are more of us than there are of them. That’s what we have to keep remembering.”
“Sir, maybe we should forget the house. I think there’s poultry in that tarpaper building. Maybe turkeys. Maybe we should wring the necks of a couple
It wasn’t a smell; it was an acrid stench, one whose density made the eyes water. Automatically, I tried to associate it with images out of my past: smoke from a chimney behind a rendering plant on a wintry day; the liquescence of unburied offal; cattle dead of anthrax sliding off the beds of dump trucks into a chemical soup. I thought of rats trapped in compacted garbage that had been sprinkled with kerosene and set aflame. The stench was all of these things but worse. In my mind’s eye, I saw thick curds of yellow and gray smoke rising from human hair and skin stretched on bone. I saw fingernails curl and snap, and the eyes of the dead pop open in the heat. I saw lesions and blisters spread across the faces of children and mothers and fathers and grandparents, as though their expressions were being reconfigured long after they were dead.
I realized the sergeant and I had stepped through a door in the dimension and were about to enter a place that had no equivalent except perhaps in photos from the devil’s scrapbook.
Chapter
4
T EN MINUTES LATER, we climbed up an eroded embankment on the creek and rested on our stomachs among the trees, staring out at an iron arch and a set of gates that formed the entrance to a fenced camp where there were at least four barracks-like tarpaper buildings and a gingerbread house.
Spirals of rusted barbed wire were strung along the top of the fence; poplars had been planted along it. The rusted arch and its stanchions were scrolled with English ivy that had turned to black string and bits of red leaves. The only sounds I could hear were a tin door banging incessantly on a tarpaper building, and the muttering of birds and a combative fluttering of wings.
Evidently, the camp had not included a crematorium when it was built, and the SS had made do with the materials they had on hand. Segments of train rails had been laid across bricks stacked four feet high, then piled with felled trees. Buckets of pitch that had been used for an accelerant lay empty on the ground. From the amount of ash under the rails, I estimated the fires had been burning for at least a day. Some of the bodies had been reduced to bones and leathery scraps hanging from the rails; others were smoldering, only partially consumed by the flames. Not far away, on a railroad spur, was a giant pit where other bodies had been thrown naked, one on top of another, and doused with lime.
Directly behind the improvised crematorium was a gallows, a single noose made of steel cable hanging from the crosspiece.
“What is this place, Lieutenant?” the sergeant said.
“Probably a supply depot for forced labor,” I said.
“Where are the guards?”
“The guys who work in these places don’t do well against armed troops. They probably got rid of their uniforms and hauled freight.”
The sergeant wiped his nose on his sleeve. “Maybe there’s grub in that gingerbread house,” he said.
We had one weapon between us, my 1911-model army .45 automatic. I got to my feet and pulled it from the holster. It felt cold and heavy in my hand. “Let’s take a walk,” I said.
The gates were unlocked, the smoke flattening in the wind, the smell of charred flesh unbearable. I cleared my mouth and spat, then pulled my sweater over my nose. The sergeant kept looking sideways at the crematorium, his eyelids stitched to his brows, his cheeks sunken. “Lieutenant, there’s a little-bitty child in that pit,” he said. “Right yonder. Oh, man.”
“We’ll talk about it later, Sergeant. Concentrate on what’s in front of us.”
“Yes, sir. If this is a camp for slave labor, why is a child here?”
“Don’t try to make sense out of a place like this,” I said. “There are more of us than there are of them. That’s what we have to keep remembering.”
“Sir, maybe we should forget the house. I think there’s poultry in that tarpaper building. Maybe turkeys. Maybe we should wring the necks of a couple
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