Pursuit (11 page)

“
Heraus kommen! Heratts kommen! Langsam!
Slowly! Get down! Fall in line!”

They climbed down stiffly, those who were still alive, and lined up in ragged formation alongside the track, looking down the line and seeing other men climb down from similar cars. The last ones to reach the door of their particular car were ordered to go back and drag the dead bodies to the opening, where other prisoners were assigned to handle them. The bodies were directed to be taken across several tracks and piled up beside a fence that separated the freight yard from the town of Celle. From Grossman's car eighteen bodies were taken in addition to the old man; the boy, he saw, was among them. In the night someone had pushed the youngster to the rear to try for air at the small crack. Through the mesh of the fence several women and children stared at them expressionlessly; they might have been watching the unloading of a cattle car, or a circus.

The guards were walking up and down the line, their machine pistols at the ready, herding the men into files of two. Grossman was pushed up against Brodsky; he looked at him, seeing the man for the first time in proper light. Brodsky was tall, several inches taller than he was, and unlike most of the other prisoners he stood erect and did not stoop. His battered face was thinner than it had first appeared, and although Grossman guessed that the man was no more than thirty years old, the stubble of his beard was streaked with gray. His clothes hung on his shoulders as from a coat hanger, and the huge fists, when seen relaxed and hanging at his side, were large in size but that was all; they looked like bags of bones dangling from his wrists. But it was the eyes, now staring at the boy's body being added to the pile by the fence, that were most impressive. They were gray, set deep in the sunken squarish skull, seldom blinking, steady on whatever they were studying. At the moment they were filled with sadness.

A young lieutenant appeared at the door of the guard's van at the end of the train. He leaned over a short railing, raising a bullhorn to his mouth. His voice cracked as he began to speak, but firmed as he went along.

“You will be marched to the camp! Any outbreak will be instantly punished! You will march four abreast! Stragglers will be shot! Is it understood!” He made it a statement, not a question. “You will be marched to the camp! Any outbreak will be instantly punished! You will march four—”

His voice was suddenly drowned out in the deep baying of an air-raid siren, repeated over and over again in almost hysterical shrieks, as if the person operating it knew the warning was late and was trying to make up for its tardiness in volume. The prisoners stared at each other in alarm, and then cringed as the first bombs were dropped a mile or so away. The trackage there lifted itself in the air as if in slow motion, hesitated a moment, and then crumpled to earth, torn and twisted. The planes were approaching rapidly, low-flying fighters rigged with a few sticks of bombs each, coming in under the radar screen, taking the town by surprise. Their wings waggled as they dove, releasing the bombs. The guards swung their machine guns up and around, firing as rapidly as they could, and then ran for cover as the planes passed over with a deafening roar. The men in line wavered and then broke in panic, scattering, seeking the protection of the boxcars, some rolling frantically under them, others trying to scramble back inside. The guards in equal panic raked the running men with machine-gun fire, and then dove for protection themselves, clutching their guns to their chests, flinching at each explosion as the planes banked to return for a second strike. The air was filled with the
cruummmpppp! cruummmpppp! cruummmppp!
of the explosions. Boxcars lurched and then disintegrated, boards flying through the air, steel tortured, ripped; trucks were twisted from the tracks, upended, wheels spinning. A car with fuel went up with a loud
whooosh
, searing the men under it to coals. Bodies were tossed through the air. They looked like dolls thrown about by a spiteful child.

At the first explosion Grossman felt himself being propelled, half-pushed, half-dragged toward the far fence and the pile of corpses there. Brodsky was bent over, urging him on; a closer explosion half-threw the two men onto the pile. They rolled over the dead, wedging themselves between the bodies and the fence, half-stunned, looking at the continuing scene of destruction in horrored disbelief. Grossman found himself swept with fury, screaming curses. Didn't the airmen see the striped pajama uniforms? Didn't they know who they were bombing? Or didn't they care? Schlossberg was right; the Allies would bomb even their own if there were a few Germans there!

As suddenly as it had started the bombing ended and the planes were merely small specks in the afternoon sky. Behind them they left the twisted rails, the tortured earth, the burning cars, and the endless dead in every posture of ultimate surrender. The young officer appeared from beneath the guard's van, which miraculously had not been hit. He brushed off his knees and raised his bullhorn. Those guards not killed also appeared, their machine guns once more at the ready, their fingers trembling on the triggers. Despite the officer's attempted look of control, his voice was tinged with hysteria, amplified by the bullhorn.

“In line! In line! The first one who attempts to take advantage will be shot! Instantly! In line! In line!
Schnell! Schnell! Schnell! Schnell!
”

The survivors slowly brought themselves together, climbing over the shattered corpses, avoiding in dazed fashion the burning planks of the boxcars scattered about the yard, coming to stand dully beside the ripped track. Grossman looked about, shuddering. There were only about a hundred left of what had seemed to be almost a thousand when they had climbed down from the cars only moments before; the rest were lying where they had fallen, in every imaginable grotesque violation of bodily dignity. The officer walked nervously down the ragged line of men and then walked back to the head of the line. The guards stood well back, their guns trained on the line.

The bullhorn came up.

“March!”

It was evening and a pale listless moon was visible in the darkening sky when they arrived, trembling with fatigue. Camp One of the Bergen-Belsen complex looked like most of the other camps: wired-off compounds, each with its large compliment of wooden shacks scattered between pine trees, the ground flat and muddy, the watchtowers shoddy but well armed, the latrines represented by the open ditches back from the wire in each area. The marching men came into the compound under the plain sign “Bergen Lager” and came to a halt, catching their breath. Fourteen men had died on the march either from exhaustion or from being shot when pleading for a moment's rest.

Across the road from where the men stood, behind a separate wired-in area, a naked woman came from her shack, squatted obscenely over a ditch, relieved herself, wiped herself with her fingers, and then wiped her fingers in the mud, and walked back inside, making no attempt to cover herself. Grossman shuddered. He had never thought the day would come when he would have absolutely no sexual feeling at sight of a naked woman; but then, he told himself, these aren't women. These are animals and so they behave like animals.

The officer who had accompanied them from Celle, the young lieutenant, came from the command barrack with an SS major. The two stood talking, the major looking irritated by their discussion.

“We have no papers on them,” the lieutenant said apologetically. “Everything was lost in the bombing.”

The major shrugged, trying to sound philosophic about it.

“We'll sort them out in the morning,” he said, although he felt more prisoners were an imposition on him. “In the meantime we'll put a few in each of the first thirty barracks in Area Three in Camp One. Those are the barracks with the highest mortality; there's plenty of room.”

He called over an adjutant, spoke to him authoritatively for a few moments, and then disappeared into the command barrack, where he had been interrupted in the midst of an important card game. The adjutant barked orders; guards led the file of prisoners away, stopping at each barracks to shove three or four men inside.

In the gloom of the windowless room, Grossman could make out the curious eyes of the inmates lying on their tiered bunks, staring at the newcomers. Like cats in the dark, he thought, or rats—and suddenly received a vicious jab in the ribs. He turned in anger to face a Kapo, a prisoner who kept other prisoners in line and earned special privileges for doing so. A whip was curled threateningly in the Kapo's hand, the butt held ready for another jab. The Kapo was smiling coldly, his small eyes alive with delight that this prisoner apparently was one who could be provoked into asking for the business end of the lash, or even to being sent out to be shot.

“Climb, you Jew bastard! Up, you Jew turd! What do you want? An elevator to your suite? Top tier, Jew pig! Up! Up!”

Another vicious jab with the whip butt and Grossman felt a blinding fury sweep him. This was too much! To be pushed and insulted by another prisoner, a brute from some eastern country, a Russian, or a Pole, or a Lithuanian, to touch him like this?
Him
? There was a sudden painful grip of Brodsky's fingers biting through the thin uniform sleeve on one side. On the other, little Wolf was hissing at him through clenched teeth.

“Climb, dummy! Is this your first camp?”

Brodsky's grip tightened, almost paralyzing him with agony, bringing him back to his senses. He climbed, and Wolf and Brodsky followed. Below they left a disappointed Kapo.

At one time there had been straw mats on the hard planks; now there were only a few wisps of moldy straw, covered with a fine film of delousing powder. The previous inmate had vomited in his place and had not bothered, or had been too weak, to clean it up; it had hardened into a scaly lump that Grossman could feel as he lay down. He tried to roll as far from it as he could, but a sudden shove from the inmate on that side told him in the darkness that space was limited and not to be lightly infringed upon.

The total unfairness of it struck him. What was he doing here along with these stinking animals, lying on hardened vomit, faint with hunger, shaking from weariness? He was still a Junker, still an SS officer! This was ridiculous! In the morning he would go to the camp command and explain the situation. Schlossberg would back up his story, if it needed any backing up.

That was it! He would go to the command barrack in the morning, and there he would tell the whole story. If the guard or the Kapo wanted to know the reason for the visit to the command post, he would say there was a troublemaker in the barrack. That always got attention. And when he finally faced the proper authority he would tell his story. They might laugh behind his back, but they would never laugh to his face. Not to a colonel of the SS! And whether they laughed or not, the horrible nightmare would be over. He would take his chances of eventually getting to Switzerland without the Strasbourg Group if he had to. He'd even take his chances of being picked up and tried as a war criminal. He would take
any
chance! But he could no longer tolerate the monstrous life a concentration camp dealt out. Life in a camp was meant for animals, not for him. First thing in the morning …

It was a comforting thought, one that made him a trifle less wretched on the hard bed and eventually allowed him to drift off into a restless sleep.

He woke in the dark, just as the first strands of dawn were beginning to break through the air vents above the top tier, and he knew at once that the night before he had merely been deluding himself. Idiot! Go to the command post barrack and say he was an SS officer who had changed his identity? Who would believe a story as outlandish as that? And even if Schlossberg were so foolish as to back up the story, all that would happen would be they would both be in trouble. And if they believed him—an SS officer who avoided his duty by changing his appearance? And to that of a
Jew
? Let us not even think of the penalty for that!

Or—suddenly—far worse thought!

Suppose they really did pay enough attention to his story to check back? And they then discovered he had gone to Schlossberg
right after it was known there had been an attempt on Hitler's life
? A quick trip to the strangling post, wire cutting through his fingers as he tried to interpose them, but to no avail. A horrible death! No. He had doomed himself. There was no escape.

He rolled over to find Max Brodsky studying him with those deepset gray eyes. On the other side of Brodsky, Wolf snored peacefully. Max smiled at him.

“What's your name?”

My God, Grossman thought, hadn't he told the large man his name? In all those seeming weeks they had known each other, in all those seeming months since yesterday?

“Grossman,” he said quietly. “Benjamin Grossman.”

“From where?”

“Buchenwald.” He suddenly understood. “Oh. Hamburg, originally. Hohelft, to be exact.”

The deep voice was sympathetic. “Did you have anyone there—?”

He meant the bombing, of course, that had leveled Hamburg.

“An aunt. The others—” He had been about to say his father had died at Dachau and his mother at Ravensbrook, but he bit back the words. Why invent something he might not remember? Silence would give as good an answer. Actually, it was stupid to have mentioned his aunt, though it was true. How many Jewish women could still have been alive in Hamburg at the time of the bombing in August of 1943? He would have to be careful. “We called her aunt,” he added quickly. “She wasn't a Jew.”

Brodsky nodded. “I suppose in a way I was lucky—”

“Lucky?”

“If you want to call it luck. My people all died peacefully before the war.”

“Where are you from?” To his surprise, Grossman found himself honestly curious.

“Originally? Lublin. A suburb of Lublin, actually. Maidanek. Do you know it?” A chill ran through Grossman but Brodsky did not notice. “I suppose not. It's a small place. I wonder what it's like now?”