Beyond the Shadow of Night(67)

Some of his fellow workers—slaves, to be correct—turned and retched. Others looked away for a few seconds, composing themselves, then started work.

The room was a sea of dead, naked bodies—so many they were spilling out of the doorway. Some of the corpses had their hands over their mouths; others were frozen as they might have been when they had gasped their final, deadly breaths. Some had even tried to climb above the others to reach fresher air. All had faces stricken with pain and desperation.

And Asher recognized the oily, sooty smell that hung around the room. He knew it well from his days working with tractors back in Ukraine.

He knew what had killed these people: the exhaust fumes from an engine.

A guard stood next to him, rifle in hand. The guard said something and pointed into the room of corpses. Asher nodded to him and held a hand up; he couldn’t speak. The guard must have sensed Asher’s shock. After all, it couldn’t have been uncommon. He turned away and told someone else what to do.

Slowly, and grimacing with disgust, Asher joined in with the rest. They were each given a leather strap and shown how to attach the belt around the ankles of a body and drag it out of the building.

At one point, Asher turned to walk away, unable to even look at what he was doing.

A guard forced him back. “Do it,” he said, quietly but firmly. “You’ll get used to the sight, I guarantee it.”

Asher didn’t want to get used to it, but his mind was too much of a cauldron of disgust and fear to do anything but obey. He gulped, and slowly reached down for the legs of one woman, her eyes still open.

“Stop a moment,” a man said. He bent down to the woman’s head. A pair of pliers hung on a hook from his little finger, and he used both hands to open the woman’s mouth and peer inside. “You can take this one,” he said. “No gold here.”

Asher tried to compose himself. But it was useless. Had his mama and papa had their mouths searched in this same fashion earlier? His sisters too? Had their lifeless, naked forms been dragged along, bound by leather straps, like carcasses in an abattoir? The woman at Asher’s feet was someone’s wife, someone’s mama.

He tried to dismiss the thought, but it wouldn’t let go of his mind. And he couldn’t carry on.

A few words from a guard made no difference.

The barrel of a rifle brought him to his senses.

Yes, it was likely that this woman had once been proud of her looks, been keen to bring her children up well, and had worked hard to keep her house clean.

Those times had passed. He told himself over and over again that this was now merely a corpse. The woman was gone.

He tied one end of the leather strap around the body’s ankles and tugged, leaning back. After dragging it a couple of yards he stopped, leaned down to shut its eyes, and then continued dragging it backward, digging his heels into the earth. The corpse had very little weight to it, but Asher had very little strength.

He dragged the body around the side of the building, just following the rest of them. And there were many, because there were other doors to the same building, each with their own set of Totenjuden, each with their own sets of families and forgotten lives.

All that consideration of lives snuffed out was dismissed in an instant when Asher rounded the corner, because what he saw there made him fall to his knees.

There were two structures of some sort, one to his left and one to his right. They were long runs of metal bars, like wide railroad tracks, except there were about a dozen bars rather than two, a hundred or so feet long and held up off the earth by metal supports. Each set of bars had burning wood underneath and a mass of bodies on top.

Yes. Bodies. Human cadavers being roasted like cheap meat.

The smell—the same smell the men had experienced before but magnified a hundredfold—made a few of them collapse and retch. But at that moment, disgust and shame were vying for Asher’s feelings.

Bodies. Thousands upon thousands of them.

For a second, Asher’s thoughts were disturbed by cracking sounds. The sound of bones cooking or merely chunks of wood splitting in the heat? Did it matter?

He’d been so foolish, denying his instincts, relying on convenient excuses. Of course he’d heard no gunshots; perhaps the Nazi authorities considered that a waste of bullets.

The bodies must have been stacked five or ten deep on the pyres to his right; it was hard to tell among the tangled knots of limbs and torsos, all in various stages of incineration.

And how long had this been going on? Perhaps hundreds of thousands of them had been through this “process.”

The other pyre, to his left, wasn’t stacked so high, and held a mixture of assorted limbs, carbonized flesh, and ash.

One of the guards beckoned the Totenjuden toward the emptier pyre. But they didn’t move. One of them let go of his belt and started running—running and screaming at the top of his voice. Two guards chased. Two shots rang out.

The orders to approach the pyre were repeated.

The men looked at each other, then to the ground.

What else could Asher do?

The men dragged their corpses toward the pyre, Asher included.

After a few paces the guard then told them to halt, to stay exactly where they were. And the rumble of an engine gave precious relief, drowning out the noise of the cracking bones and bursting skin.

A huge vehicle appeared beyond the pyres. It was something Asher had never seen before: an earth-moving device like a tractor but much bigger. And it wasn’t moving earth; its cargo was bodies—more bodies, which it proceeded to drop onto the pyre in front of them.