Beyond the Shadow of Night(68)

“Okay,” the guard said once the earth-mover had left. “Onto here with the rest.”

The men didn’t move. The guard looked at them, then back at the pyre. Then he sat down and held his belly. He turned and beckoned over two more guards who were stationed by the security fence. As they approached, he vomited on the ground between his boots. Words were exchanged, and he walked off uneasily.

“What did they say?” one of the Totenjuden asked.

“He’s had enough,” another said. “Even some of the guards can’t take it.”

They carried on, all playing their parts, collecting more bodies and dragging them to the pyres, or collecting the odd body—or body part—that had fallen off it.

Asher now knew why they’d been chopping such large quantities of wood.

After all the dead bodies had been slung onto the burning racks, they were ordered back to the cabin. There were few words, none of them from Asher’s lips; his head was spinning with images of hell on earth, and his fellow workers were clearly feeling the same. They were offered potato soup with raw rice, but few had the inclination to eat.

Asher curled up on his bunk and closed his eyes, but struggled to sleep, his mind a mess of images of limbs and lifeless faces—hundreds of bodies disposed of like offal.

Now he knew what had happened to Rina, and probably the rest of his family too. Yes, he had begun to accept the unacceptable.

His mind turned to the good old days of his papa strolling around the farm back in Dyovsta, joking about the tractor—saying how it was such a new-fangled thing and would never replace horses. He thought of his papa in Warsaw, weary from loading bricks, his face noticeably aged from the never-ending physical work.

That was when Asher sat up in the bunk, startled.

“Bricks,” he whispered. He wiped the cold sweat of fear from his face and repeated the word.

Now he knew why the buildings in this wretched place looked familiar. It wasn’t so much the buildings, more the bricks they were constructed from. Asher’s own hands had held these bricks, fresh from the kiln, still warm. Still warm, like the bodies he’d just dragged to their unholy cremation. Yes. The bricks had been made in Warsaw and loaded onto the trucks by him and his papa.

Was there no cruelty too far?

This place—this place that God had clearly turned a blind eye to—was the “important construction project to the east” that had urgently needed all those bricks.

Asher tried to sleep, part of him hoping never to wake up.



But Asher did wake up, disturbed by a persistent creaking noise, and in the half-light he saw something moving back and forth in time with the sound. No, it was swinging left and right. It was swinging on the end of a leather belt hung from a high wooden beam. Clearly it wasn’t only German soldiers who’d had enough.

The body went on the pyre with the rest.

On that second day, Asher was still shocked at what he was doing—shocked, ashamed, guilty, his mind twitching with self-loathing.

By the third day his mind was numb; it was starting to be just a job.

On the fourth day there was a change. His team of Totenjuden cut hair and removed clothing just as they had on previous days, but as they were carrying clothing back to the warehouse they heard shots. They all stopped for a second, but then continued as if they’d heard nothing.

After the clothes had been taken to the warehouse, they started on the bodies again, dragging them out of the gassing building and throwing them onto the pyres. Today, some fluid was splashed over the bodies, and they caught fire more quickly and burned more aggressively. But after the last few bodies were flung on, the guard told the Totenjuden to follow him.

They went through another barbed-wire corridor and behind some hedging, where they found some bodies lying on the earth.

Yet more dead bodies. As if Asher hadn’t seen enough. But these were different: they were fully clothed and had bullet holes in their skulls.

That would explain the shots Asher had heard earlier.

After the guard spoke, the twenty Totenjuden started taking one corpse each. Asher was one of the first, and duly manhandled his allotted corpse toward the smoldering pyre.

“Who are they?” he asked one of his fellow Totenjuden.

The man let out a lazy laugh. “Haven’t you heard? They’re us.”

Asher frowned. “I don’t understand.”

“These men are us in three or four weeks’ time.”

It took a moment for Asher to get the message. Then he shook his head slowly. “Dear God, no,” he said.

“How long do you think we’ll last, being worked like dogs? These are the Totenjuden from three or four weeks ago. Time will move on. In a few weeks we will be the corpses with bullet holes in our heads, and another, fresher set of robots will be here, burying us. A month after that, they will be dead too.”

And as much as Asher wanted to argue—to say that what he was hearing couldn’t be true—he then saw something that silenced him.

At first he wasn’t sure. But he scanned the scene of blood, flesh, and soil before him once more. Yes, there was something there. The man’s corpse was tall and stick thin. It had a red birthmark covering one cheek and the side of its neck.

Its name used to be Oskar. Oskar the pacifist, the protective husband and father-to-be, the man who had been so grateful to the Kogans.