Chris Bohjalian - Skeletons at the Feast

Now, of course, he was on this nightmarish sinking ship with them, though if he had to wager he would bet he would figure a way off. Find yet one more lifeboat. He was, apparently, unkillable. But how much would it really help him to become a Jew again now? It wasn't as if the Russians had such great love for his people either. The Lithuanians were stringing the Jews up back in '41 while the Nazis were still en route; the Ukrainians and the Latvians had been all too happy to handle the heavy lifting when it came to machine-gunning the Jews in the early days. They had practically volunteered for the opportunity!

No, he should have started to work his way west months ago, as soon as it was clear that the western Allies had no intention of being pushed back into the English Channel.

“Manfred?”

In the midst of the turmoil and the noise, for a moment Uri had forgotten that he had renamed himself Manfred. It was the most Teutonic alias he had been able to come up with when he'd realized what was expected of him as reservist Henrik Schreiner with Police Battalion 101, and so in the chaos of the retreat from Auków he had commandeered this uniform from a Wehrmacht soldier who had been shot cleanly in the back of the head. Before that, since jumping off the train almost two years ago now, he had been Hartmut, Adler, Jurgen, and Franz. Sometimes he had found the dead soldier's name in the papers in the uniform pocket. Other times, there hadn't been any papers at all and he'd come up with a moniker such as Manfred (which, he'd realized in hindsight, was both Teutonic and the name of the doctrinaire Nazi pedant who'd lived in the town house beside his family back in Schweinfurt, before they had been forced to move).

He turned now to the one-armed captain beside him, a fellow roughly three or four years older than he was. Twenty-nine or thirty, Uri guessed. The officer had served in Poland and France and North Africa and Italy and Russia, a virtual travelogue of Nazi victories and defeats, with little more than the scratches and bruises that are inevitable with a life in the field. But no serious wounds. Then in October, while home on leave in Dortmund, his left arm was crushed when he was helping his grandmother down the stairs of her home during an air raid, and the house had sustained a direct hit. His grandmother had died pretty near instantly, he'd told Uri, but he'd thought his arm might have a chance. It hadn't. The good news to losing the wing? It meant that he had been relegated, for the moment anyway, to this sort of police action many kilometers behind the front.

Though, the captain had rued, those kilometers had collapsed exponentially since the Russians had begun this most recent offensive.

Uri wondered if years from now, if somehow they both survived, he and this captain might actually be friends. The fellow was unflappable, a trait Uri respected, and he seemed to see the misery that was marking the end of their world as more Chaplinesque than Wagnerian-which, most days, Uri did, too. But then he decided a postwar friendship was unlikely. Not because this Captain Hanke was anti-Semitic, though Uri supposed on some level he was. Rather, he had the sense that the two of them had been too lucky for too long, and it was absolutely inconceivable that they would both be alive when this steamroller was done lumbering over them. And if he, Uri, was indestructible, then the odds could not be especially good for this poor fellow beside him.

“The engineers are coming to destroy the ice now,” the captain was saying. Then he motioned toward the teenage boys in their Jungvolk uniforms who were helping to keep order. “Send the children across the Vistula.”

Uri nodded and approached the oldest of the group, one of the few who actually wasn't dwarfed by the rifle in his arms. “Son,” he said, “take your squad to safety on the other side of the river. They're going to blow up the ice.”

The boy saluted, and Uri had to restrain the reflexive urge to shake his head in bemusement.

“And then, sir?” the boy asked. He had almost periwinkle blue eyes and a movie star's aquiline nose. Perfect skin. Fifteen or sixteen years old now, Uri surmised. He could have modeled for those idiotic propaganda posters that so disturbed his mother and father when they were alive-he didn't know for a fact they were dead, but he had to presume that they were-and as early as the Olympics in '36 had made them scared for their son and their daughter.

“Wait for orders.”

The boy seemed to want to say something more, and so Uri told him, “Go, go. The captain and I will handle the people here.” We'll probably be run over, he thought, crushed in the last-ditch stampede that would occur the moment the engineers appeared with their satchels.

But still the boy stood there, his lips slightly parted. Little puffs of smoke with each exhalation.

“Yes?”

“My family, sir. They're in the line. Back there.”

He nodded. He was fairly confident that he knew what the boy was driving at, but he wanted to be sure. “You want to join them?” he asked. A lesser boy, he knew, or most of the middle-aged Nazis he had dealt with lately, would have been hinting about some scheme to get his family across the Vistula before it became nothing more than a river of ice shavings and splinters. But not this one.

“May I, sir?”

“Yes. But do yourself-and them-a favor. Find another place to cross. Under no circumstances stop moving west.”

Above them they heard the shriek of another approaching Soviet shell, and-as was frequently the case-it reminded Uri of the sound of a train whistle.

AND URI SINGER knew the sound of train whistles well. He had heard them often as a boy, when he and his parents and his little sister would travel from Schweinfurt to Dresden to visit his aunt and uncle, or to the Alps to go hiking. But it was only in March of 1943, when he was finally deported and spent nearly three days in a cattle car, that he began to appreciate (and loathe) the subtle differences in ululation. He'd been at work at the ball-bearing factory, wondering in a vague sort of way how he and his family would be degraded next, when the SA came for him. He was twenty-four years old, and his life could not have been more different from the one he had anticipated a decade earlier. At fourteen, even in the first months after Hitler had come to power, he had still assumed he would start and finish at the university, and he would be a journalist by now. Perhaps he might even be writing a book. He ended up getting to spend a single year at the college before it was closed to the Jews.

It was midmorning when the SA had arrived at the factory. The two thugs in their greatcoats told him he would meet his parents and his sister at the train station. He didn't. He never saw them again, though God knew he had tried to find his sister. Nor had he ever been back to Schweinfurt. He had heard that first the RAF and then the Americans had started pummeling the city four months after he was taken away, and most of the place now was rubble.

Except, of course, for the factory where he had worked. It was damaged, people said, but still operating. That, he guessed, was pretty typical. The apartments and town houses and butcher shops that had been laid waste were rarely rebuilt, but the Nazis would try to find the resources to repair the factories. And so the war effort went on. Even the killing in the concentration camps. And the evacuations from the concentration camps. The Russians, last he'd heard, were approaching Auschwitz. And while there were rumors that most of the prisoners were being walked to the west, he understood that some were being wedged back into the boxcars. Imagine: While the enemies of the (and he heard these two words mordantly in his mind) Greater Reich were at the Rhine and the Vistula, someone somehow was still finding the rolling stock to expend upon the plan to exterminate the Jews. Rather than move troops or tanks or boxcars full of panzerfausts, they were moving the Jews. Just so they could kill them in Germany instead of Poland.