Tatiana and Alexander: A Novel(95)

"Yes, and we're about to spill some of that blood, Lieutenant. Stop talking about my balls. Order your men to the firing line."

Alexander went forward with 200 men, and by the time they reached Majdanek, at the end of July 1944, they had eighty.

They trod into Majdanek, which had been liberated by the Soviets barely three days earlier. The Nazi Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html

camp lay on a plate-flat field of brown-green grass and its squat, long green barracks looked almost like camouflage. Alexander smelled the acrid-sweet smell of burning flesh in the air, but said nothing, though by the gradual quieting down in his tank and around his formations, he could tell his men smelled it, too.

"Why did they want us to come here?" asked Telikov, coming up to Alexander and staring with him at the city of Lublin through the barbed wire fence. Lublin was just over the field and down a slope.

"The high command wants us to see what we're dealing with as we force our way into Germany," said Alexander. "So we don't feel pity for the Germans."

Ouspensky asked if the residents of Lublin could smell what he smelled, and Alexander replied that they had probably been smelling it every day for months.

The camp was small and seemed almost serene--as if the humanity had left it, leaving behind only ghosts--

And ash--

And bones--

And blue remnants of Zyclon B gas on the concrete walls.

Femur bones, and clavicles...

And spy holes in steel doors.

A "bathhouse" on one side of the small camp.

And ovens with one long tall chimney stack on the other.

A road that connected them.

Barracks that divided them.

A commandant's house.

SS barracks.

And nothing else.

The men walked through slowly and silently, and then bent their heads, and finally, standing at the back of the camp, they took off their caps.

"Can't pretend this was a forced labor camp, can you?" Ouspensky said to Alexander.

"No, can't."

But something else, too--past the ovens with white ash and white pieces of human skeletons, there were mounds of white ashes. Not ant mounds but sand dunes, pyramids, two stories high of white ash, and on even ground nearby the white ash was spread out, and on it grew enormous cabbages. Alexander, and his lieutenant and his sergeants and his corporals and his privates, stared at the ash and the cabbages the Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html

size of mutant pumpkins, and then someone said that he had never seen cabbages so big before, and if they took one, they would have dinner for eighty men tonight. Alexander didn't let them touch it. In the long wooden warehouse full of shoes and boots and sandals, shoes of all sizes, boots lined and leather, he did let them take a pair of boots each, mindful of how hard it was to get requisitioned footwear in the Red Army, particularly in the penal battalions. The shoes were piled from floor to ceiling, jammed three meters high behind a wire netting.

"How many shoes you think there are here?" asked Ouspensky.

"What am I, a mathematician?" snapped Alexander. "Hundreds of thousands, I would guess."

They left the camp silently and didn't stop at the barbed wire fence to glance at the steeple churches of Catholic Lublin just a couple of kilometers away.

"Who do you think they did that to, Captain? Poles?"

"Hmm. Poles, yes. Mainly Jewish Poles, I think," Alexander replied. "The command won't say, though. They don't want the Soviet army to be less outraged."

"How long do you think it took them?" asked Ouspensky.

"Majdanek became operational eight months ago. Two hundred and forty days. Slightly less time than it takes one woman to make one life, they managed to snuff out a million and a half lives."

No one spoke until they were a kilometer away.

Afterward, Ouspensky said, "A place like that just shows me the communists are right. There is no God."

"That didn't look like God's work to me, Ouspensky," said Alexander.

"How could God allow that?" Ouspensky exclaimed.

"The same way he allows volcano eruptions and gang rape. Violence is a terrible thing."

"There is no God," Ouspensky repeated stubbornly. "Majdanek, the communists, and science have shown us there is no God."

"I cannot speak for the communists. Majdanek showed us only man's inhumanity to man--this is what man sometimes does with the free will God gave him. If God made all men good, it wouldn't be called free will, would it? And finally it's not science's place to show us if there is a God behind the universe."

"It absolutely is. What else is science for?"

"Experiments."

"Yes?"

"Experiment with this--on such and such a day I slept so many hours and felt this way afterward. I ate x Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html

amount of food and was able to work for this long. In my forties my face began to line--science has told us this is the beginning of old age. How can the science that measures and combines and mixes and observes tell us what is behind the sleep?" Alexander laughed. "Ouspensky, science can measure how long we sleep, but can it tell us what we dreamed about? It will observe our reactions, it can tell if we twitched or laughed, or cried, but can it tell us what was inside our own head?"