Scott Turow - Ordinary Heroes

From outside, the camp at Balingen was unremarkable, a sizable former military post at the margin of town, set on a high knoll amid the larches and pines of the Black Forest. The entire site was encompassed by a tall barbed-wire fence topped by brown electrification nodes, with the yellow-brick administration buildings standing in sight of the entrance. There the swinging gate was open and a lone apple tree was in bloom beside a young soldier, probably an SS guard, who lay dead, facedown, beneath a wooden sign reading ARBEIT MACHT FREI. Work makes freedom. Our troops had simply driven around the corpse-we could see the tanks and half-tracks within-and we followed.

We had not traveled far when my driver tromped on the brake, suddenly overpowered by the stench-excrement, quicklime, decaying flesh. It was crippling, and only grew worse when we finally drove on. That smell still revisits me without warning, usually propelled by a shock of some kind. At those instants, I imagine that the odor was so potent it somehow burned itself permanently into my olfactory nerves.

The first soldiers to enter the camp yesterday had come from the moth Infantry Division, the same outfit whose reserve regiments had briefly seized Martin at Pforzheim. There were a few officers from divisional G-3 present now, but most of the troops I saw were with associated armored cavalry units and, a day later, still seemed at a loss over the scene. They stood beside their vehicles while perhaps a dozen of the former inmates in their threadbare striped uniforms teetered around near them, frightful otherworldly creatures. Many were more emaciated than I'd believed human beings could become, veritable skeletons with skin, whose wrists and knuckles bulged hugely within their hands, and whose eyes were sunk so far into their skulls they looked sightless. Several were barefoot, and a number had large spots of feces and urine on their clothing. All of them moved with almost inanimate slowness, staggering inches at a time, with no apparent destination. One of them, a man with arms like mop handles, turned to me as soon as I alighted from the jeep and lifted both hands in a shameless plea.

I still do not know what he wanted, food or just understanding, but I froze there, shocked again to my battered core, and gripped by revulsion. This man, and those around like him, frightened me more fundamentally than the dead on the battlefield, because I recognized them instantly as unmistakable tokens of the limitless degradation a human would endure in order to live.

It was some time before I noticed a lieutenant who'd ventured forward to greet me. A tall, sandy-haired young man from divisional G-3, he gave his name as Grove and told me he had received a signal I was on the way. He motioned where I was looking.

"These are the lucky ones," he said. "Still on their feet."

"Who are they?" I asked.

"Jews," he answered. "Most of them. There are some Polish and French slave workers in one sub-camp. And a few of the Germans Hitler hated in another, mostly Gypsies and queers. But the greatest number of the folks here seem to be Jews. We've hardly sorted them all out. There's so much typhus here, we're afraid to do much."

I gasped then, choked almost, because I'd suddenly recognized the nature of a pearly mound a hundred yards behind the Lieutenant. It was made up of corpses, a nest of naked starved bodies, wracked and twisted in death. Instinctively, I moved a few steps that way. Grove caught my sleeve.

"You'll see a lot of that, if you care to."

Did I?

"I'd take a look," Grove said. "You'll want to tell people about this."

We began walking. Grove said there were probably 20,000 people held here now, many of them having arrived in the last few days. Some had been marched on foot from other concentration camps, with thousands dying along the way. Others, especially the sick, had been dumped here by the trainload. All had been crowded into makeshift wooden barracks, each about 150 feet long, in which there were only empty holes where the doors and windows were intended to be. I could not imagine what the savage winter had been like for the people already here, most of whom had had no more than their thin uniforms to protect them from the cold.

Outside the huts, there were open latrines, all overflowing with human waste because they were plugged intermittently by corpses. American bombing of a pumping station a few weeks ago had put an end to running water, and the prisoners had not been fed with any regularity since early March, when the German commandant had cut off most meals as a cruel means of controlling the plagues of dysentery and typhus that had broken out. For the last week, while the camp was surrounded, those interned here had received nothing at all. Some of those we passed, with their scraps of clothing and impossibly vacant looks, begged for crumbs. Grove warned me not to oblige them. The troops who arrived yesterday had given candy and tinned rations to the first inmates they saw. Rioting had broken out and then several of the prisoners who'd won the grim struggle that ensued had died when their intestinal systems revolted as a result of their gorging.

The huts that had housed these people were miserable, dark and reeking. Piles of feces stood here and there on the straw-covered floors, and in the wood bunks, stacked like shelving, the sick and starving lay side by side with the dead. You could tell the living only by their occasional moans and because the lice were so numerous on the deceased that the bugs appeared to be a moving wave. Hundreds of inmates had died since yesterday, Grove said. The division's docs had arrived this morning but were at a loss for a treatment plan that had any chance of success for those already so sick or that would afford a sanitary means to avoid spreading the typhus, especially to American troops.

As a result, Grove said, we really had only marginal control of the situation. As a case in point, we came upon the remains of a female guard Grove had seen killed earlier this morning. A group of female internees had found her hiding under one of the buildings and had pulled her out by the hair. The guard had screamed and called the prisoners filthy names, while they stomped and spat upon her. Ultimately, several men arrived with discarded pieces of wood to beat her to death. The killings of the kapos-most of them thugs sent here from German penitentiaries-and the Wehrmacht guards the SS had deserted had been going on for a day now, Grove said. A water tower had been converted to a makeshift gallows yesterday, and several of our troops had volunteered and helped with the hangings.

Back near the yellow-brick administrative cluster, out of sight of the huts, was a square building that contained an enormous brick furnace at its center. Using two hands, Grove pried open the giant cast-iron doors, revealing two half-burned bodies. The eyeholes in one skull faced straight my way, and I flinched at the sight. In front of the oven was a huge butcher block, which some of the interrogated guards had admitted was used to crush the gold fillings from the teeth of the dead.

But death had come too swiftly of late for far too many in Balingen to dispose of them in one furnace. Everywhere-between the huts, along the camp's roads, around every corner we turned-were the bodies, ghastly grayish-white mounds of dead human beings in various states of decomposition, every body stripped naked and pitted by the appetites of vermin. The piles here were nothing, Grove said. At the edge of the camp, there was a giant pit full of human remains that the inmates still standing had been forced to drag there in the last few days. Someone from G-3, trying to find a way to communicate the scene to superiors, had begun counting the corpses heaped about the camp and had quit after reaching 8,000. For me, again and again, as I stared at these hills of human beings, so pathetic in their nudity, with their stick-figure limbs and exposed genitalia, I experienced the same panic, because I could not tell where one person began and ended in the pile.