Scott Nicholson - Ashes

It was July 12, 1942, and the sky over Jozefow had broken with high clouds under a sun the color of a blood blister.

First Lieutenant Heinz Wolfram exited the train at Sternschanze station as the cattle doors wheeled open with a dozen rusty shrieks, allowing the reserve policemen to exit from the same stinking cars that had transported Jews to Berkinau and Belzec. The effort to make Lublin judenfrei had taken over a month and had sapped the energy of Reserve Police Battalion 101. His men of Third Company were haggard, tired, and their bellies probably grumbling like his. Officers might have slightly better rations, but barely two years into the war, shortages were a staple of every rank.

“ Herr Oberleutnant,” said a guard on the warped wooden platform, raising his arm with a brisk stamp of his boot heel.

Wolfram nodded to acknowledge the salute. Rear guards hadn’t yet lost the crispness of their routines. “Cigarette?”

The guard smiled and Wolfram shook one from the pouch in the breast pocket of his gray tunic. He lit the guard’s and then one for himself. The tobacco was Turkish, dark and sinister like the people who had cultivated it.

“ Shipping juden?” Wolfram asked.

The guard smiled from his pale moon face. “Two thousand, maybe. Three. What’s the difference? The trains are slow.”

“ Two trains per week. Globocnik’s orders.”

The guard looked around, comfortable in his post, the real war three hundred miles to the east. “Globocnik? I see no Globocnik.” He leaned close, conspiratorially, as if they were two friends in a beer hall. “I don’t even know if Globocnik is real, ja?”

Globocnik, an SS police leader, was rumored to have had personal correspondence with the Fuhrerhimself. Globocnik, who had career ambitions and sought a place on Himmler’s staff, had stepped up relocation efforts after a German officer had been killed during a police action against the Jews. The officer in question had died in a drunken motorcycle accident, but the German leadership had never troubled itself over accuracy when a larger purpose was served. Martyrs were cheap, Wolfram well knew.

“ So it’s quiet here?” Wolfram asked.

The guard shrugged. “I sleep. No one here has guns.”

“ Good.” Wolfram drew on his cigarette as the guard sauntered to the shade of the station’s long platform.

“ Rest for now,” Wolfram shouted at the policemen who had debarked the trains, busily wiping their brows and sipping from steel canteens. They were mostly older men, those not fit for combat but who had been pressed into some sort of duty for the Reich. Though unfit for combat, Wolfram’s platoon was organized, obedient, and well-trained.

Some, like Scherr there, the fat one, were all joviality and bluster, full of the nonsense that came from believing happy lies. Kleinschmidt, a sausage maker, complained bitterly about his boots and the poor quality of the field kitchen’s pork. Wassen had been a journalist and spent his evenings writing letters to his family. Few of the men in Wolfram’s First Company platoon thought beyond the immediate soldier’s concerns of a soft bunk and dry socks.

At age 32, Wolfram had no career ambitions himself; he thought only of his wife, Frieda, in the Hamburg apartment with their four-year-old son Karl. Wolfram had headed a small family lumber business and benefited from the initial lead-up to war. When certain high-level officers began hinting that a man like Wolfram was needed by the Fatherland, he enlisted in the Reserve Police.

During 1941, Reserve Police Battalion 101 had been largely concerned with stamping out partisan uprisings and rounding up communist Russians in Czechoslovakia. Later in the year, Jews were targeted as well. Wolfram had heard reports of entire Jewish sections of cities being burned to the ground, and truckloads of Jews occasionally disappeared. But such reports were like the wind, and Wolfram had filed enough of them to know that only a fool or a zealot dared speak the truth.

Scherr, his First Sergeant, approached Wolfram as the train engine let out a long sigh of steam. The smell of coal smoke briefly obliterated the cloying animal stench that came from the cattle cars.

“ Shall I issue the orders?” Scherr said all too eagerly.

“ Gather the men,” Wolfram said.

Scherr obeyed, no doubt promising the men a night in the barracks and the eventual arrival of rations. As the forty reservists gathered around, Wolfram looked into their faces. He was younger than most, and a good deal healthier. Less than a third were Nazi Party members, and most were from the lower orders of society: laborers, clerks, and street merchants. Some were as old as Wolfram’s father, and one, Drukker, reminded Wolfram of his own youth as he looked into the hard blue eyes.

“ We have been selected for an unpleasant task,” Wolfram began, attempting to mimic the words of Captain Herrmansbiel, his immediate superior. “The Jews here have been involved with the partisans. Further, their discontent has led to the Amerikanner boycott of Germany’s goods and services. There’s even talk”-Wolfram wasn’t sure how to add the next part without risking damage to morale-“that the Americans will join England and Russia as allies.”

“ Mein gott,” came a voice from the rear ranks. “ Fick der juden.”

“ The Jews are confined to the ghetto, and per standing orders, any attempting to escape will be shot. We are to round up all the Jews and gather them in the marketplace for processing. Healthy males of working age are to be loaded onto trucks and transported to Lublin. Those who resist or are too frail to march will be summarily executed.”

Scherr licked his lips. He’d already shown an appetite for killing Jews and was always quick to volunteer when there was the possibility of an organized firing squad. Wolfram found him distasteful, but such men made the entire operation easier to manage, and also required less of Wolfram’s presence during the most brutal actions.

“ This duty is necessary, and we must be strong,” Wolfram said. “I don’t want to see any cowards. However, any man who doesn’t feel up to the task may step forward now and be reassigned.”

Some of the men exchanged glances while others stared at the ground. Someone coughed. The train engine clanged. After a moment, Drukker stepped forward, shoulders sagging.

“ Anyone else?” Wolfram asked. Only Drukker met his gaze.

“ Very well,” Wolfram said. “Drukker, you will help guard the train. The rest of you men, proceed to the marketplace in the center of town. Scherr, give them their orders there.”

Scherr grinned, saluted, called the men to attention and led the platoon away. Wolfram lit another cigarette. “Drukker, you will be happy later on. You might be the only one. Before this Jewish business is over, the German nation will be shamed in the eyes of God.”

“ Yes, sir,” Drukker said, subordinate despite being nearly twenty years older than his lieutenant.

Wolfram knew, as an officer, he shouldn’t speak on equal terms with the men, especially on matters of philosophy. After all, the truth could be construed as treason. “Resettlement is a question of military efficiency, Drukker.”

“ Yes, sir.”

Wolfram tossed his cigarette off the platform and checked his watch. He glanced at the forest that covered the rise of land above the village. “We will be efficient.”

He walked into Jozefow. The village was quiet, many of the Poles still sleeping under the thatched straw roofs. Curling pillars of sleepy smoke rose from a few chimneys. The men of Second Company had already fanned out to surround the village, as per Hermmansbiels’s orders.

Already the shouts and cries could be heard inside the narrow white houses of the Jewish section. Scherr had posted four guards in the market square, where the Jews were to be collected. The other men conducted door-to-door searches, and from a small stone house came a woman carrying an infant. Hermmansbiel specifically stipulated that the infants were to be shot along with the elderly. Gunfire erupted along the next block, sending more cries into the morning sky.