“Do we have the time to wash up?” Alma was struggling furiously into her dress.
“Only very quickly. We’re lucky there’s a latrine and running water just behind our barrack for our personal use. The others have to run to the communal latrines. You imagine what madness that is. I lived through it when I was in the regular block. Trust me, you won’t wish it on your worst enemy. After standing in line for half an hour, you have ten seconds to squat over that filthy hole and do your business. If you take longer than that, they will simply shove you off, finished or not. God help you if you have filth on your legs after that—the SS who stand outside will beat you and send you to the penal Kommando for being ‘a dirty pig.’ I need hardly add that there’s no toilet paper or even a scrap of newspaper in the vicinity. If you wish to organize some, you ought to trade your ration for it.” She released a mirthless chuckle. “Good times.” The sarcasm in her voice was audible. “Things I will be telling my grandchildren if I ever come out of here.”
A whirl of activity followed. With infinite patience, Sofia instructed Alma on the precise manner in which the blankets had to be tucked in. She clipped a couple of girls on their ears for dirty fingernails and sent them back to the latrine behind the block—“Do not return until you’ve scrubbed yourself pink!” Alma was still checking the last few girls’ footwear and Sofia was already holding the door open for the ones who’d been cleared, counted by Zippy and appointed to a day duty Kommando: “March, march, march! You have thirty minutes precisely to take these stools and music stands to the camp gate and return. If you’re late for the roll call…”
Sofia didn’t have to finish her threat. The girls burst out of the barrack, weighed down with their load, as though Satan himself was chasing them.
In the morning, the fog rolled in and shrouded the camp with gray. Shivering against the wet mist, the Music Block lined up in neat rows of five in front of their barrack. Someone in the back tried to suppress a sneeze, in vain. Sofia whipped around and gave the offender a glare full of magisterial wrath.
Rigid with fear and cold, they stood and waited.
The wardens made their appearance some twenty minutes later. They walked as though on a stroll, two elegant figures in warm woolen uniforms. The brunette had a dog leash wrapped around her gloved palm. Alma stared at the Alsatian and was suddenly overcome with the stinging sense of injustice at the very fact that this woman before her had a dog, whereas she, Alma, had to surrender hers to family friends before fleeing Austria.
“The brunette is Rapportführerin Drexler,” Sofia whispered to Alma almost without moving her lips. “When you give her your report, keep your eyes on the ground. She is known to shoot inmates who have the impertinence to stare at her. It offends her delicate Aryan senses.”
The blond—a glacial, impersonal beauty with rolls of platinum hair and porcelain skin—had a horsewhip in her hand. She was playing with it as some socialite would with a fan during a soiree.
“The goldilocks is Irma Grese, Drexler’s lieutenant,” Sofia supplied in the same manner. “She wants to be in the movies when the war is over. Too bad no one told her that the Germans won’t be the ones who shall win it.”
Alma was amazed that someone could chuckle so gleefully without moving a single facial muscle.
Rapportführerin Drexler received Alma’s report and took the list from her without once glancing into it. Now that she stood so near, Drexler’s Alsatian sniffed at Alma’s hand and suddenly nudged at it with his wet nose. Before she could stop herself, Alma discreetly caressed the silky, warm ear and all at once felt profoundly and ridiculously happy, even if it was only for a few short instants.
“Whatever did you do that for?!” Sofia was upon her as soon as the wardens dismissed them and cleared the Stubendienst girls—the block caretakers—to fetch the Music Block’s breakfast: the disgusting camp coffee. The orchestra were given precisely ten minutes to consume it before marching out to the gates, instruments in hand, to see off the outside gangs with a brassy German marching tune. “That dog could have taken a chunk out of your hand!”
“He wouldn’t. He’s a good dog.”
Gloomily, Alma studied the camp coffee in her hand. In her opinion, there was no such thing as a bad dog. All dogs were inherently good. She used to have one just like Drexler’s Alsatian, black with tan paws, back home, in Austria. Arno’s pitiful whines nearly tore her heart in half when she was saying her goodbyes to him, as though he understood that she wouldn’t be coming back. He nearly strangled himself on the leash, trying to get to Alma as she was walking further and further away and soon disappeared from his view as she stepped onto the train. Alma’s gentile friends, the family who gladly agreed to take him in, were holding him hard as they were seeing her off at the train station, but the dog still cried in such a pitiful manner, and Alma herself had begun to weep inside her compartment. Arno knew she wasn’t setting off for one of her scheduled tours. The breed was much too intelligent for its own good.
“I’ve seen that good dog maul people to death here,” Sofia said.
“Rot!” Alma looked at her savagely. The morning’s pent-up nerves had suddenly snapped.
“Rot?” Sofia appeared almost sympathetic, as though she had long grown used to such outbursts. “You’ll see it for yourself as soon as we march out.”
The words turned out to be prophetic. They were marching toward the main camp gates along the cinder road in the same military formation, instruments in hand. In the distance, the inmates were taking off the remains of the last night’s suicides from the stretch of the barbed wire. There were at least two dozen of them—stiff bodies with their black gums bared in silent screams and fingers twisted as though even in death they were trying to claw their way out of their emaciated shells.
“Stack them stiffs nice and neat, like firewood,” the SS warden was pointing at the side of the road in a businesslike manner. “If the clothes are still good, take them off. And make it snappy! The truck shall be here any minute to pick them up. If you aren’t done by then, I’ll put you into its back instead of these stinking carcasses.”
The mist shone on the faces of the dead, accumulating, rolling down their cheeks as though the dead were crying. Alma led her little troop past one of the growing mounds and looked straight ahead, straight ahead only.
Through the thickening fog, endless rows of barracks crept into sight. In front of them, a motionless army of rags and gray skulls. The mist curled and stole along the ground, distorting their features. Only an occasional gray uniform glided through the vaporous clouds, the collector of the souls. The entire camp was one boundless cemetery and it was only by some mistake that some of them arrived here still alive.
Alma felt moisture on her face and wiped it with her hand. It must have been the fog.
A slap echoed resoundingly around the compound.
“…Go on and fetch her then!” The mist carried far Rapportführerin Drexler’s voice. “You know the rules. All dead ought to be present during the roll call.”
Alma’s troop continued to march. An inmate trotted over in front of them, searching the barbed wire with wild eyes. Someone from the clearing Kommando told her that the electric current had been turned off—she could retrieve the dead from her block with her bare hands. Still, the inmate hesitated. Craning her long, thin neck but not quite approaching the heap of corpses, she was trying to recognize her bunkmate in one of them.