There were men, women, and children of all ages in the car. Some appeared to have suffered bullet wounds, while others simply looked too emaciated to live, whether from malnutrition or disease, I couldn’t say. None seemed to have been dead more than a couple of days. If we’d reached the camp that much sooner, they might have lived. I began to count the bodies as best I could, given how they were piled on one another. If the other cars were as full as this one, there were over two thousand dead on the train alone.
“Anything conclusive?” Major Dawes asked as I descended from the train.
I shook my head. “Nothing beyond what you can surmise with your own eyes. I’d need a proper lab to determine if any of the ones who weren’t shot died from disease.”
“Typhus,” Captain Richardson called out from across the crowd. “The camp is lousy with it.”
We explored the area, unable to take in a full breath, wondering what other horrors awaited us. It wasn’t long before we discovered a horde of people staring at us from behind barbed wire fences. They looked frightened, like antelope that had just spotted a lion lying in wait. They had been trained to act like prey animals—that’s all they had been to the SS guards that penned them in.
We set to work isolating the ill prisoners from those yet to be infected. There wasn’t an inch of camp that was clean enough to be fit for providing medical attention, but we would have to improvise to save the people we could.
We’d heard the news of these death camps. The Russians had liberated several in the east. There was nothing they could have said to prepare us for the grime, the stench, the utter horror of it all. I suspected the poor souls on the train were bound for another camp farther from the advancing Allies. The Germans didn’t want a single one of their prisoners liberated by us. Given enough time, no doubt they would have executed them all.
A boy, no older than fourteen, was burning up with fever. Uncomfortably hot to the touch and racked with shivers. He collapsed at my feet, but I had no bed or covers for him. I knelt by his side, reaching for my kit. I pulled out my stethoscope and listened to his chest. The crackling sound of fluid in his lungs was clear as church bells in my ears. That they were still taking in air was miraculous. Advanced pneumonia, likely as a result of the typhus that had swarmed the camp and laid waste to it like clouds of hungry locusts.
“What can we do for them?” Hansen, a junior medic fresh from basic training, asked.
“Nothing,” I told him. “Keep them separate from the others and pray it doesn’t spread further. This lot will either get well, or they won’t. There isn’t much else to be done.”
The young medic looked horrified at his own uselessness. He was maybe four years older than the boy who lay before me, probably having joined up with the delusions of becoming a hero in the last moments of the war.
“You can comfort them,” I said. “Be with the ones who aren’t going to make it. God only knows they could use a bit of compassion after the hell they lived.”
The medic knelt on the other side of the boy and began reciting the Lord’s Prayer. I looked into the face of the dying boy and recognized one of my own tribe. He needed the words of his people. Though I’d not said my prayers in many years, the words of the Mi Sheberach flowed back to my memory as clearly as the days when I’d learned them in Hebrew school.
May the one who blessed our ancestors, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel and Leah, bless and heal those who are ill . . .
There was no telling how many had been left in this squalid camp on the cusp of death, or the number who had spent their last terrified moments in its confines. Was this how my parents’ families were killed in Riga? Crammed together like animals, tortured, and left to die? The ones butchered in the streets were probably the lucky ones. I remembered the look on my mother’s face when she read the letter from her cousin. She had seen something of this evil before she’d left Latvia, and it was only this evil that had allowed her to give her blessing for me to take up arms.
I was too late for these people. Too late for my own family. But God help me, I’d not live to see this tragedy happen again in my lifetime.
“Captain Blumenthal, some of the prisoners are scattering from the camp. We fear they may be sick with typhus like the others.” It was one of the junior medics who had joined the company straight out of boot camp. The sort who complained about joining up after the “fun” was all over. They stopped saying that after a few days. “What do we do?”
“Let them go die in whatever way they see fit,” I said. “They weren’t given the opportunity to live as they pleased, so they can at least have the honor of dying on their own terms. A few lucky ones might pull through.”
“But what if the disease spreads to the villages?”
“They knew what was happening here, Lieutenant. They knew and did nothing to stop it. If the typhus claims a few souls, I won’t feel a mark on mine over it.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
VOWS AND IGNORANCE
JOHANNA
June 18, 1944
Berlin, Germany
Harald sat at the dinner table in pajamas and his dressing gown, as had become his custom. After he shucked his uniform at the door each night, I would collect the pieces and hang them in the coat closet, where he wouldn’t have to look at them for the scant hours he got to spend at home. Rather than soil fresh clothes, he took to wearing his nightclothes to the table and falling into bed almost immediately after his meal. It was an odd custom, and one that I feared didn’t sit well with Mama, but neither of us said anything to him.
“Louisa’s plan is not unique,” he said after I divulged the contents of the latest conversation Louisa and I had had on the subject. “More and more, the people in the highest ranks are looking at last-ditch efforts like these. They see that we’re losing, but Hitler and his closest cronies will hear nothing of it. They press forward as though our supplies and men are limitless.”
Louisa hadn’t succeeded in convincing our superiors of the merits of her idea, so my lukewarm promise not to speak against the scheme was no longer enough for her. She wanted my full and unconditional endorsement to help sway our commanders. Though I was a scientist and she a glorified stunt pilot, our sex mandated that we suffer comparison to each other. I’d always had the reputation of being less impulsive than Louisa, though occasionally more reckless behind the throttle. I would grant it to Louisa that she was never one to take unnecessary risks with her aircraft. A moment of showboating could cost her a record, which would do little for her reputation, or that of Germany’s aviation program. Because I was behind the curtain, I could test the limits of the equipment without risking more than my own neck.
“How would you have me move forward? I can’t bear to think of supporting this atrocity, but I’m not sure it would be wise to be seen opposing any plan the party thinks might stand a chance of working.” My honorary Aryan status had been approved, but it would take a mere flick of the right wrist to revoke it.
“You’re right on that, Johanna. You mustn’t make a fuss. Best to wait and see what’s decided before speaking your mind. If they ask you directly for your opinion, be as noncommittal as possible.”