Yatom frowned—not because Shapira was questioning his judgment, but because he feared that the young lieutenant was right. Shapira’s equanimity about their situation allowed him to analyze the situation dispassionately—something that was impossible for Mofaz and that Yatom found difficult too.
“Beseder Lieutenant. Let’s see what happens. But under no circumstances shoot without an order from me.”
Yatom stalked back to his own team. The sun was higher in the sky, the air was hot and muggy, but the exercise encouraged him. By the time Yatom reached his little command post, set up by the resourceful Nir, he’d calmed down a little. He scanned the field with his binoculars. Feldhandler was still in his ditch lying by his weapon. Yatom was about to go back out and talk to Feldhandler again when Shapira came on the radio.
“Commander” said the lieutenant “there is a train approaching.”
Chapter 10
Abraham Jezek’s life had come down to this—guarding a square meter of space for himself and his family, in a baking, stinking freight car, already filling with the dead. They had been underway for nearly a day he reckoned, from a decrepit Polish ghetto. The ghetto was infinitely worse than Prague, from which his family had been forcibly removed a year before; the train, infinitely worse than the ghetto. Nothing could be worse than this, could it?
People had been pissing and shitting themselves for hours, the pair of buckets the Germans provided had overflowed long ago. There had been no food or water since they’d left the ghetto. Men and women had stripped to their underwear to escape the oppressive heat. Children went naked, barefoot in the filth. There wasn’t even room to sit. He stood miserably in the corner and allowed his wife, Ilse, and twelve year old son, Abner, to lean against him. Other hopeless people, strangers, leaned in turn on his small family. Under foot were those that could stand no further, trampled and covered in piss and shit, either dead or waiting to die.
Jezek was a Jew, like everybody else in the suffocating boxcar. He’d taught philosophy before the Nazi conquest. He wasn’t religious—in fact, if pressed, he’d admit to being an atheist. And the train was the final proof that he was right about God at least. Or maybe, he thought absently, Buddha was right, that desire was the source of all misery—in which case he was near nirvana. Jezek had abandoned all worldly desire, with the exception of water, and breath of clean air for himself and his small family. Too bad the train was filled with Jews instead of Buddhists.
Had Jezek been suffering on his own, with the knowledge that his family was safe and provided for, it might have been bearable. To see his young son and wife tormented while he remained powerless to help produced a sense of weakness and desolation he did not think possible. He couldn’t even bear to look at Abner, a shy and awkward boy, who hadn’t even reached his Bar Mitzvah. That he had been a soldier, a reserve officer in the Czech army before the country’s capitulation to the Nazis, made it worse. He would have preferred to die at his post in the Sudentenland in 1938 to enduring this hell—and yet neither he nor his countrymen had fired a shot. Jezek put his nose to a crack in the wooden cattle car and caught a few molecules of fresh air. He closed his eyes, and tried to pretend that he and his family were not dying.
On the same train, eight cars further down the line, Unterfeldwebel Hans Mueller passed the time in a second-class carriage playing cards with his deputy Obergefieiter Getz. They sipped on cold ersatz coffee and snacked on black bread and cheese. Mueller commanded the Ordnungs Polizei squad responsible for guarding the transport to Sobibor. Besides Getz and himself, Mueller had eight other policemen to guard over 2000 people and eighteen railcars. It was no easy task thought the sergeant. He’d be glad to dump his human cargo at the camp and get back to the battalion Kaserne outside Lubin.
This was a small transport—some trains pulled sixty cars and 6000 people—which is why Mueller had only his small squad to guard the cargo. Plus, they were proper German policemen—now incorporated into the SS—not semi-literate Lithuanian or Ukrainian guards. Mueller had made the run twice before. It was stressful but safe. There were a few partisan bands in the Polish countryside, but death camp transports were not a target. And the Jews did what you told them to do. A few German soldiers with rifles were enough to cow a multitude.
Mueller put down the cards and drained his coffee. On the return ride he’d break out the beer and schnapps. Mueller ran a tight ship on the outward bound journey, which is why he’d been given the duty more than once. Some train commanders allowed Jews to buy water or fruit—for outrageous prices—from Poles along the way, or even from the guards themselves. This led to theft, disorder in the boxcars, and trouble. Mueller locked up the Jews st the ghetto and left them.
He didn’t allow his men to steal or to extort money. They were soldiers, not peddlers. It was hard on the Jews, but it was hard on them no matter what. And they only suffered for a day or so—sometimes less if the train made good time. The German transport guards were not allowed into Sobibor, or any of the resettlement camps. They got off the train at the station and re-boarded after the transport was emptied within the camp. But Mueller knew what went on inside. As far as he was concerned it was more humane than what went on before.
He’d only been on one actual liquidation operation, and that had been hard. His police battalion had spent much of past year rounding up Jews from Polish towns and villages and shipping them to various ghettos, where they were warehoused to await their fate. But some ghettos became so overcrowded it wasn’t feasible to put in more people. When that happened the Jewish populations in some Polish villages were simply liquidated in place. Mueller’s battalion had taken care of the Polish town of Biala, not so far from Sobibor. Something like 1,500 Jews had lived there, but the Sobibor resettlement camp wasn’t ready yet, and it didn’t make sense to ship the Jews back to a ghetto, only to return them to the east later. So his unit was assigned to clean it up.
The battalion arrived in the town with lists of Jews mostly provided by the local area Jewish councils. These were supplemented by the town’s Poles who pointed out those Jews missing from the lists. Mueller’s company went down the roll carefully, calling the Jews from their homes and organizing them. Men were separated from the women and children, and the two separate groups were placed in holding areas. This took most of the morning.
After the roundup was completed his company received a briefing by the battalion doctor as to how they were to accomplish their next mission. The doctor traced an outline on the ground, shaped roughly like a person. The doctor then demonstrated how the policemen were to shoot the Jews. First the victims would be made to lie upon their stomachs, faces on the earth. The doctor told the policemen were to use their bayonets as a shooting guide, by placing the bayonet on the ground at the point where the victim’s neck and shoulder joined, so the muzzle of the rifle was pointed at the nape of the neck. This, the doctor assured them, would make for a quick and clean death.
Before this lecture the men had no idea that this would be their mission that day. They had assumed that the Jews would be shipped off as usual. But to the battalion’s credit no men shirked their duty, nobody stepped forward in protest or requested to be relieved of duty—at least at that point.
After the doctor’s briefing, Mueller’s company boarded trucks and rode out to a heavily wooded area a few miles from the town. After dropping off the policemen the trucks went back to the town for the Jews. Thirty minutes later the trucks returned, each with thirty to forty women and children. Mueller’s platoon was assigned a truck and each man in the platoon assigned a woman or child. Then Mueller and the other policemen walked into the woods with their victim to an area selected by the officers. Upon arrival the policemen ordered their companions to lay face down on the ground as the doctor had instructed.