April 1945
EVEN THE TREES SEEMED POISED TO ATTACK. AS THE CONVOY wound its way between the dark tree trunks, Dominic tried to swallow his fear. The old feeling of being on edge, the old instincts to shoot, overtook him.
Gunfire did not worry him. Returning to security detail on a wooded path through the German countryside, he’d already been in a few skirmishes and he was falling back into the old routine of hypervigilance; his shooting skills had not suffered during the few weeks of peace, and he was learning to not think. Just shoot, be ready to fight, and hide the pain and fear in the sketches he made by flickering candlelight when they were stalled, somewhere quiet.
Most of all, Dominic regretted being pulled away from the mission of recovering great art, of recovering hope for the future. To his astonishment, Dominic regretted having to leave Hancock and the other Monuments Men behind in Marburg. Recovering works of art was now where his heart lay, where he felt he could make a small but lasting contribution in a world that otherwise hardly made sense.
The only thing that kept him sane was running his eyes over Sally’s words, written out in her neat script. He kept her letter in his breast pocket, and in moments of quiet, he pulled it out and read it again. I love you, she had written. It was all that mattered, that, and a new healthy baby girl. Kathleen, after Sally’s mother.
According to their commanding officers, Dominic’s division was about to convene with convoys from another battalion before heading to Dachau. The men had been briefed about the large prison camp that lay within the area. The mother ship of the Nazi concentration camps, the officers had said. The intelligence reports painted a harrowing picture of the thousands of prisoners being forced to march to Dachau as it was one of the few camps left within Nazi-held territory that was still operational. Dominic was certain that many of the marching prisoners would not make it that far.
As the M151 rumbled on, Dominic hugged his rifle close to his chest, trying to comprehend the scope of the cruelty that would demand the murder of thousands. He kept his eyes on the curves of the road.
Around the next bend, the Jeep rattled out of the forest and into a clearing, and ahead, Dominic saw several dozen boxcars standing haphazardly beside the track, abandoned by fleeing Germans. On the horizon, the sunlight glinted off barbed wire and a gate tower: Dachau. They continued toward the camp, a curve of the road leading them toward the boxcars, and that was when the smell hit them.
Beside Dominic, Weaver uttered a strangled swearword. Dominic would not have had the breath to curse even if he wanted to. He grasped at the place where his Saint Christopher medal had hung and prayed inwardly, his stomach flipping. The stench was incomprehensible. Compared to this, the smell of the copper mines at Siegen was sweet perfume. Siegen had smelled of thousands of people living and sweating and urinating; this smelled like thousands of people dying. There were undertones of excrement, but far more distressing was the smell of decaying flesh. It was sweet and cloying and it choked Dominic’s nostrils.
Dominic felt as if he had been welded to the side of the Jeep. He stared fixedly ahead, his imagination running wild with what that smell had to mean. Then he heard the screaming. At first, he thought that there were living people on those boxcars, until he heard English words scattered in the yelling and realized that the voices were those of the American soldiers in the two-and-a-half-tons at the front. He had not thought that grown men could make sounds of that pitch, of that level of sheer horror. His hair stood on end, goose bumps bursting out across his body, and he still stared at the countryside, refusing to turn his head forward. Then, the Jeep slowed, and the entire convoy clanked to a disorganized, unplanned halt.
“No,” croaked Weaver beside him. The syllable, uttered in a tone of such inexpressible dread, yanked Dominic from his trance. He had to look. He had to see because it could not be what he was imagining.
It wasn’t. It was so much worse.
The boxcars were piled with dead bodies.
There must have been more than thirty cars, halted on the tracks. The bodies were stacked, none of them covered, just thrown naked and emaciated onto rotting heaps. Men and women. Children. Mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, their remains thrown down and forgotten, packed with less care than Dominic had stacked sacks of coal. People who somebody was grieving for, lying bloated in the sun with flies crawling on their slack faces, walking across the surfaces of misty eyes. Blood and excrement dripped slowly out of the bottom of the boxcars. Arms and legs, faces hung out of the windows. Cheeks pressed flat, eyes pressing against the glass of closed windows with the pressure of other corpses. It was a hellish panorama of death on a scale that Dominic could not comprehend. The image was seared onto his very soul. Overwhelmed by horror, the Allied convoy could go no farther.
“I’m gonna be sick,” croaked Weaver.
Dominic jumped out of the vehicle as if in a dream to make room for his comrade as he scrambled out and staggered into the trees. “We haven’t even reached the camp yet,” he said faintly to nobody in particular. “We haven’t even got there yet.”
He took a step back and his boot made a squelching noise. Looking down, he saw he was standing in a dark and sticky stain of rotting blood. Flies swarmed around his boots, and he could bear no more. The pressure of the war, all the horror of it came pouring onto him, pressing him down like a giant fist determined to pound him into the dirt.
He relived it, all of it, the landings at Normandy, the first time he saw a man torn limb from limb by a blast from an explosive shell, the first dying breath he’d ever heard, the pop of the guns, the terror of the whistling shells blowing past, the hundreds of miles rocking back and forth in a rattling Jeep waiting for the sounds of gunfire to come bursting over the hills, the shelling of Aachen, the miles between him and his family, the torn and destroyed works of art they hadn’t been able to save, the terror in Stephany’s face as he emerged from the ruined pulpit, the light fading from Paul’s eyes.
That was the worst: the pain he’d felt losing Paul, felt by family members of every last one of these hundreds of innocent dead dumped thoughtlessly in boxcars. The magnitude of the grief threatened to crush him. He threw down his rifle and bolted, hands clapped over his ears as if that could keep the memories out. He tripped and stumbled into a ditch, knees hitting mud, and the contents of his stomach came burning up into his throat.
61
Edith
Kressendorf House, outside Kraków, Poland
June 1944
“THREE FORKS ARE MISSING. AND A SERVING SPOON.” BRIGITTE Frank shot Edith an accusing glance.
Edith surveyed the silver service splayed out on the dining table before them. Teapots and trays, carving knives, spoons. Special forks for caviar, herring, and game. Edith and Ernst had counted them all before Brigitte and Hans Frank arrived at the newly furnished country house. Surely there was a mistake?
Ernst had been adamant that he and Edith oversee the operation of organizing the silver service themselves. Brigitte Frank, he told her, would make sure that each individual piece be cataloged and counted. Hans Frank’s wife had grown up destitute, Ernst had confided in Edith, and now, as queen of Poland, she coveted each precious belonging. And, Edith saw, Brigitte’s worst fear was that someone might take it all away from her.
“It is as I have already told you,” Brigitte said, looking down her nose at Edith. “They are too easy to tuck into a servant’s apron. Any one of those ungrateful Poles might try to take advantage of us,” she said loudly enough to be heard from the kitchen.