Voices of the dead

“All of them were smoking it.” Harry paused. “They listened to the lunatic, believed him. Hitler thought Jewish men purposely seduced German girls to pollute the Aryan race.”

“What would he’d a thought about brothers doin’ the frauleins?”

A few minutes later they were cruising along the northern perimeter of Dachau concentration camp. “When I was here there were thirty-four barracks. There’s only one left.”

“When was that?”

“Got here in November 1941, escaped in April 1942.” He pulled the BMW over on the side of the road, looking past Cordell at the entrance gate. “There’s the guardhouse, and that brick building with the chimney is the crematorium.”

“Hold on, Harry, rewind.”

“It was the beginning of November. The Nazis came to our house, ten armed men, banging on the door, seven in the morning. I got out of bed, looked out the window and saw them in front of the house. An SS sergeant told us to get dressed and come downstairs, bring what we could carry but no food.

“We started walking through Altstadt, joined now by other families, friends and neighbors forced out of their homes. Fifty of us, I counted. People were stumbling along, weighted down by layers of clothing, carrying suitcases and duffel bags. We walked through town and then we were outside of the city. I was thirteen, no idea what was happening. None of us did. They marched us sixteen kilometers to Dachau. I knew we were in trouble when I saw the walls and towers of the camp.”

“What’s that mean: Arbeit Macht Frei,” Cordell said, trying to pronounce it, pointing to the words on the gate.

“Work makes you free. That was the irony,” Harry said. “The harder you worked the weaker you got. Only way to be free was to die.”

“What you do, they put you in here?”

Harry turned his head, held Cordell in his gaze. “I was a Jew.”

“You got a tat?”

“They didn’t do that here. They put your number on your uniform.” He paused. “Morning roll call was four a.m. in the summer and five thirty in the winter. After going to the bathroom we were given a cup of black coffee, then marched to the assembly area for roll call. After roll call the work commander, a prisoner, called out names for work details. If your name was called you were given a slice of bread and maybe a little piece of sausage. We worked, usually in the Plantage, farmland near the camp until eleven thirty. Marched back to the barracks for dinner, a small serving of cabbage or carrots and a small piece of potato. At twelve thirty we marched back to work until six, then back to camp for roll call, and back to the barracks for supper: watery soup, sometimes a bit of cheese.

“I saw a man beaten to death by a guard for stealing potato peelings, stuffing them in his pockets ’cause he was starving. I remember bodies that looked like skeletons stacked on top of each other outside the crematorium.

“Waking to the sounds of rifle shots, firing squads shooting prisoners who had broken the rules. I remember naked prisoners sprayed with a hose in January and left to die.”

“Why we here? This some kind of cathartic experience, got to purge this from your soul?”

“I’m getting my bearings.”

“Your bearings? What’s that mean?”

Harry told him about the mass execution, the mass grave, digging his way out and going to the farmhouse and being helped by the woman.

“Harry, you got some dark secrets. But I got to ask, you really think you gonna find this grave in the woods after all this time?”

“I don’t know.” Harry checked the side mirror, shifted into first gear and got back on the road, thinking about that day almost thirty years ago. “We went right out of the gate and got on the two-lane road heading to Munich, just like we’re doing now. I could see SS guards, eight men in two kubelwagens driving close behind the truck. I remember looking through the slit in the tarp, seeing forest, walls of trees on both sides of the road. Prisoners packed together, the heat from the bodies. The Nazis called it sardinpackung, packed like sardines. I remember seeing a concrete marker: Dachau 4 km, on the other side of the road. And then the truck slowing and turning into the woods, the back end bucking, going through the trees, and then panic because all at once we knew we weren’t being transferred to a sub-camp.”

“What’d you think?”

“I knew.”

They rode in silence for a few minutes, Harry clocking four kilometers on the odometer. They passed stands of trees, and a couple factories, and houses built in the green hills to the east. Everything looked different. The road was wider and there were billboards now, advertising beer and lodging, the 1972 Olympics coming to Munich. He drove a little farther-it was just by feel now, pulled over next to a wooded area, glanced at Cordell.

“This the place, Harry?”