by Kate Hewitt
“So you were saving me?” Tom had sounded disbelieving. He’d glanced away, a closed look coming over his face. “You could still tell them, if you wanted. You’ve never liked me, anyway. Maybe this is what you’ve hoped for all along.”
Matthew had shifted where he stood. Outside, the sky was slate gray, intermittently offering an icy, unforgiving drizzle. His boots were constantly wet, and he couldn’t remember what it felt like to be either full or warm. “I don’t hate you,” he’d said after a moment.
Tom had turned back to him with a huff of laughter. “That’s something, I guess. I don’t hate you, either, for what it’s worth.”
“I’m glad,” Matthew had answered, deciding he meant it. Tom gave a small smile, and he’d smiled back. It seemed absurd that they might find some point of sympathy in this after everything, and yet perhaps they had.
After a second, Tom’s smile had faded and he’d looked away. “I thought we were all going to die, you know.” Color had suffused his face as he kept his gaze averted. “Those SS guys were crazy… crazy. Shouting the way they did, and how they just kept running at us… they would have killed us all, Lawson. Did you see them?”
“I did.”
“It looked completely hopeless,” Tom had said in a low voice. “You know it did. They would have mowed us down.”
Matthew had said nothing. What could he say? How could he possibly offer Tom the absolution he seemed to crave? The sergeant who’d been next to him had taken a bullet in the head. Three others had been critically wounded, not including Tom. And yet they’d held the position.
“I wasn’t thinking straight,” Tom had confessed. “I wasn’t thinking at all. I couldn’t…” He’d lapsed into silence, shaking his head. “Why did you shoot me?” he’d finally asked. “You could have just let me go. Let me face the consequences, be imprisoned or worse. Maybe they would have had me shot. Maybe they still will.”
“You don’t deserve that, after everything you’ve been through.” It might have been an act of mercy to have shot Tom in the leg, but Matthew knew he could have easily missed. What if he’d killed him, or wounded him terribly? What had he been thinking in that moment? Matthew wasn’t sure he could even remember. He recalled standing in the snow, and how cold he’d felt inside, as if something hard and elemental was taking over his soul.
He didn’t want it to, he fought against it, but with every passing day he remained in this war, every sneering SS officer he looked in the face, every corpse he gazed at, unmoved, by the side of the road, he felt it close another inch over him. He wanted to have something left to offer Lily, but some days he didn’t know if he would.
Looking at Tom, his leg swathed in thick bandages, his expression close to despairing, Matthew had felt no compassion at all, not so much as a flicker of pity, even though he knew he should. “I won’t say anything,” he’d said, because that was what he suspected Tom wanted to hear, and he knew he could promise at least that much.
“Well, the war’s over for me.” There was no disguising the relief in Tom’s voice. The push into Germany would continue, taking months and many lives, and yet Tom would not fight again, and he was glad. Perhaps, if Matthew were in the same position, he would feel likewise. He knew there was nothing more to say but goodbye. He’d walked out of the field hospital without looking back.
Now, as April turned to May, the end of the war was perhaps only days away, here in the pretty town of Ludwigslust, fifty miles east of the Elbe. On Eisenhower’s orders, the 82nd Airborne had been told to push forward as fast as possible, to keep the Soviets from gaining any more territory than they had to. The war was changing shape, the German army collapsing, to be replaced by another, more insidious enemy, yet that battle was one Matthew had no wish to fight.
He wanted to go home, even though he no longer knew where that was. He wanted to find his family, even though he wasn’t sure he could. Both prospects filled him with despair, and so he tried not to think at all, and welcomed that cold hardness even as he fought against it, for Lily’s sake. Always for Lily.
While the other GIs were daydreaming about huge steaks and grateful girls back in America, Matthew’s future felt like a disturbing blankness, a yawning emptiness of uncertainty. He’d had no letters from Lily in over a month, and he hadn’t written any, either, since he’d been dropped into the Netherlands. It hurt to think of her at all, even as he tried to cling to some shred of hope that there could be a future for them, somehow. Somewhere. When this was finally, really over, when he could see a future emerging from the dust and death of war.
In the stately palace in Ludwigslust, General Gavin was poised to accept the surrender of a hundred and fifty thousand men. Hitler had killed himself, the government was collapsing. There was nothing left to fight for. Finally, finally the fight could truly end.
Matthew worked on the translation of the surrender documents, feeling strangely distant from it all as he watched the largest ever surrender of soldiers, artillery, and equipment completed in the formal drawing room of the palace.
Afterwards, he walked outside into the bright spring sunlight and tried to summon some emotion—satisfaction, if not joy, or at least relief. He felt nothing. He didn’t know when he’d stopped feeling, when that part of him that wept and laughed, wondered and hoped, had become so deadened he could not remember when it—or he—had been alive. He prayed there was still a flicker left, buried deep, waiting to be breathed back to life.
A jeep pulled up in front of the palace, kicking up clouds of dust. Matthew watched silently as an intelligence officer he knew by name—Jamison—jumped out, his expression tense.
“We’ve had reports of a camp about three miles away,” he stated starkly. “Wobbelin. We might need you for your German. Depending…” He stopped, but Matthew could fill it in himself. Depending on what they found.
Matthew dropped the cigarette he’d barely smoked and ground it under his heel. “I’ll come.”
As he climbed into the jeep next to another officer, he realized he had no idea what to expect. They’d all heard, vaguely, about the camps that had been discovered as the Allies pushed east. Other units had liberated a few, but details hadn’t been forthcoming. In any case, he’d known about such camps before the war, political prisons like Dachau. Someone in Fraustadt, a suspected Communist, had been taken there. He’d emerged four months later quiet and haggard, and no one had asked him any questions.
Matthew was prepared for the conditions to be brutal, food and water and decent clothing all sparing, but something in Jamison’s face made him wonder if it might be worse. Yet how much worse could it be, than beating and starvation and unjust imprisonment? What else could they possibly find?
As they took the narrow road out of Ludwigslust towards Wobbelin, the smell accosted them first. It rolled over them on a warm spring breeze, and it was like nothing Matthew had ever breathed in before. It smelled of something dreadfully dead, and yet also horribly alive. It held the sickly-sweetish tinge of decay, along with the terrible odor of sweat and feces, and another, charred smell he couldn’t and didn’t want to identify. It stung his nostrils and coated the back of his throat, and as they continued down the track, he fought the urge to gag, his stomach roiling.
At one point, Jamison cut the engine, squinting through the trees as he covered his mouth and nose with his handkerchief. “My God,” he said, his voice muffled. “What the hell is causing that stench?”
They found out just a few minutes later, when the zigzag of the high razor-topped fences surrounding the camp came into view above the trees, sunlight glinting off wire.
The gates were already opened, and another army jeep was parked in front. The smell was so thick, Matthew fought the urge to be sick; it felt like a miasma, palpable, visible, blanketing them with its utter awfulness.
He blinked in the bright spring sunlight as he gazed at the entrance of the camp, trying to take in what he was seeing and yet unable to. It was as if his brain had ceased to
function, the images in front of him impossible to translate into fact or reason.
“My God,” Jamison said again, softly. All three of them stared in mute, shocked horror at the devastation that lay before them. They had no other words.
The camp was made of a dozen or so long, low buildings, little more than cattle sheds, and stacked outside of them were bodies. At first, Matthew could not believe they were real, actual human beings stacked like lumber, arms and legs poking out like matchsticks. Some already snapped off and littered the ground like broken twigs.
He’d seen dead bodies before, of course, many times. After Ardennes, he’d crept from corpse to corpse, searching for any information hidden in dead soldiers’ pockets. He’d thought he was used to the look of a dead man—the glassy-eyed stare, the slack limbs, the bluish tinge, the inevitable stiffening. Even the unavoidable gore—gaping wounds, body parts blown off, heads no longer whole. He thought he’d seen it all.
Yet he’d never seen this.
Slowly, dazed as if in a horrible dream, he climbed out of the jeep. Jamison and the other officer followed, each one walking slowly, mouths agape, arms futilely covering their faces to ward off the terrible smell.
As they approached the gates of the camp, a few wraithlike figures stumbled towards them, arms outstretched, skin stretched so tightly over their bones they looked like living skeletons, like something out of a horror film with Boris Karloff, the kind you’d laugh at for being so ridiculous, and yet Matthew had never, ever been as far from laughing as he was now.
He was filled with a mute, overwhelming horror, a terrible incredulity that kept his mind frozen in place, his body too as the figures stumbled towards him. They wore striped uniforms, ragged and dirty; on each was a Star of David. As he stared at them, he realized they were speaking, their voices so hoarse he was barely able to hear them.
“Essen… essen… hast du etwas zu essen?”
Food. They were asking for food.
Matthew fumbled through his pockets, desperate to give them something, but he didn’t have so much as a stick of gum. Then one of the poor wretches saw his pack of cigarettes and motioned to it with a clawlike hand. Matthew thrust the pack at the man, heedless, only to watch in shock as he unrolled the paper and began stuffing the tobacco straight into his mouth.
“What…” The word exhaled from Jamison as he shook his head slowly. He’d found a dry piece of ration biscuit in his pocket and he handed it to one of the prisoners, who began to gulp it so fast he choked. All three of them watched, horrified, as the man began clutching his throat before falling to the ground, twitching and moaning. “I only gave him a biscuit,” Jamison cried, falling to his knees in front of the man. “Please…”
“Don’t give them food.” A hassled-looking medic came running towards them, snatching the half of a Hershey bar the other officer had been about to offer. “It will kill them. Their bodies won’t be able to take anything solid.”
“My God.” Jamison covered his mouth with one hand. “I’m so sorry.”
“You weren’t to know. How could you know?”
For a second they were all silent as they contemplated the depth of the horror around them, and the evil that had caused it.
Matthew looked around at the starved beings who were utterly desperate for food they were unable to eat, one further injustice that had been wreaked upon them. They were human beings, people who had once loved and laughed and lived, and yet they seemed like ghosts now, barely alive, their humanity stolen from them. He could not take it in.
“What…” He cleared his throat, the words rasping it raw. “What happened here?”
“They’ve been liquidating the camps,” the medic said. “Sending them all here, to get rid of the evidence. Trying to kill them all, by the looks of it.”
“Camps?” Matthew stared at him in blank shock. Somehow he had made himself assume this was an anomaly, the only one, a horror only they had stumbled upon. Surely it had to be, and yet of course it wasn’t. “You mean… there are more like this?”
The medic nodded somberly. “Dozens, at least, some much bigger than this one. Much worse.”
“Worse…” How could anything be worse than this? “They were for political prisoners,” he whispered to himself, as if even now he could convince himself of a truth. “Before the war. The camps… they weren’t like this.” He thought of what he’d been imagining—beatings, hunger, yes, yes, of course, but this was something else entirely. Something he could not conceive of, even as he looked at it, as he made himself take it all in.
He half-walked, half-stumbled away from the others, needing to see it all for himself, although already everything was emblazoned on his brain. He would never forget. He would never be able to.
He walked slowly through the camp, staring in mute, dazed incredulity at the bodies lying discarded in piles; he realized some of those stacked so carelessly were actually alive, yet too weak to move. Hoarsely, he called for a medic to help, and together they gently moved a man from a pile of corpses to a ragged blanket on the ground. His body felt like a bundle of brittle twigs, and his eyes were glassy and unseeing even as his chest rose and fell in barely visible breaths.
Near another building, Matthew saw a pool of quicklime that he didn’t want to think about; he turned his head away from several inmates who crouched around a dead horse, eating its raw innards in frenzied desperation.
How could this be? How could anyone have allowed this, caused it—exulted in it? The questions raced through Matthew’s mind with no answers, and despite all he saw, he still found he could feel no emotion. It was all too big to contemplate, too horrific to possibly comprehend. The flicker of humanity he’d been holding onto, for Lily’s sake, blew out. There was nothing left. He felt as if he were suspended in space, as if he no longer walked the earth like a normal man, and never would again.
A man came stumbling towards him, his face covered in sores, his stubbled head crawling with lice. He could have been twenty or eighty; it was impossible to tell. He held his arms out towards Matthew, his liberator, as he wept.
“Danke,” he said as he fell into his arms. Matthew embraced him, heedless of his filth and stench. “Danke,” the man said as he rested his head on Matthew’s shoulder. “Danke, danke.”
Matthew patted his back gently, uselessly. He had no words, no thoughts, nothing. “I am a Jew,” he heard himself saying, the words coming as if from outside himself, a fact he had to reveal and claim, now more than ever. “Ich bin ein Jude.” He could have been here. He could be this man he held in his arms, and, far more frighteningly, his brothers could. His mother. Gertie…
The man looked up at him; he had no teeth, and his breath was foul, everything about him unbearably repulsive and pitiable. Once he might have been a man of standing—an accountant like Matthew’s father, a lawyer, a doctor, a violinist. Once he might have lived in Warsaw, or Berlin, or Vienna, or Fraustadt, in an apartment with velvet curtains and hardwood floors, Mozart on the gramophone. Now he was little more than a wraith, a skeleton, barely alive. How could this be?
“Danke, Jude,” the man said as he wept on Matthew’s shoulder, two men joined in this moment, this tragedy. “Danke, Jude.”
Chapter Twenty-Five
ABBY
Abby looked down at Simon’s fingers laced with hers. Where to begin? How to start? Simon squeezed her fingers, an encouragement as well as a comfort, and she took a steadying breath.
“This feels a bit melodramatic,” she said, “considering we’ve just heard the most harrowing story about war, and concentration camps, and all the rest.” She trailed off, shaking her head. Her own small, sad story felt so pathetic in comparison, unworthy of such an emotional confession. Compared to Matthew Weiss, she had nothing to complain about.
“You’re hardly being melodramatic,” Simon told her gently. “Just honest, I think?” His hand remained warm wrapped around hers. “Are you going to tell me about your mother and brother’s accident?”
Her lips trembled as she forced them upwards. “How did you know?”
He offered her a sad smile. “What else could it be?”
“It’s that obvious, huh?” She meant to sound joking, but already she felt near tears, every emotion skating so precariously close to the surface. She didn’t want to cry. Not yet, before she’d even said anything. Maybe not ever.
“I wouldn’t say it’s obvious. But I think—I hope—I’ve come to know you, and this is the big thing in your life you don’t like to talk about.”
She sighed, a raggedy sound. “Yes. Does everyone have a big thing, do you think?”
“Maybe not as big, but then it’s not a competition, is it? There are no medals for who’s experienced the worst tragedy, none that anyone would want. And this… this is your story, Abby. If you want to tell it to me.”
“The thing is,” Abby said slowly, staring down at their joined hands, “I already know what you’re going to say. You’re going to tell me it wasn’t my fault, that I need to forgive myself, that I need to let the past go and move on. And I know all that.” She looked up, managing a watery smile. “I had therapy, you know. Not a lot, but some. I’ve tried to work through my feelings of guilt Sort of, anyway.”
“I believe you.”
“Do you?” Abby withdrew her hand from Simon’s and wrapped her arms around her tucked-up knees, holding herself together. “Because I’m not sure I believe myself.”
He remained silent, sympathetic, waiting.
“Okay,” Abby said after a few moments. “This is how it happened. My brother had a piano lesson on Saturday mornings. It was a ten-minute drive away. Luke loved piano… he played all the time. Anyway…” She blew out a breath as the image of Luke sitting at the old piano, shaggy head bent towards the keys as he let his fingers ripple over them, filling the house with music, flitted through her mind. “That morning—it was April of my senior year—my mom wasn’t feeling well. She had some kind of flu, headache, stuffy nose, maybe a fever. She usually drove him, but I was seventeen, I had my license. Sometimes I did it, if I was needed.” She stopped then, and Simon nodded, encouraging.