On the first go-round Mueller was assigned a young woman, he guessed in her late teens, weeping begging for her life. Though he wasn’t happy about it, Mueller put his bayonet into the ground, lined up his rifle and shot her. After that, it got easier.
As a senior squad leader it was Mueller’s job not only to shoot his own Jews, but to ensure that each of his men did their duty. Most did.
But some found it too difficult, particularly those that were paired with the children. One of his men, Gefreiter Popel, found himself with boy of about six. The boy sobbed and cried for his mother. Popel made the boy lay down, put his bayonet in place, but couldn’t pull the trigger. After shooting a girl of about ten, his third victim, Mueller looked over at Popel still standing over the squirming boy, alive and uninjured, still weeping, but surrounded now by dead Jews, including in all likelihood, his mother and siblings. Mueller ordered Popel to do his duty, but the private begged to be excused. Disgusted, Mueller pushed Popel away and sent him back to the trucks, where several other men without the stomach for this work busied themselves with other tasks. Mueller placed his boot on the boy’s back to hold him down, aligned his bayonet, and fired.
Mueller shot twenty Jews that day by his own reckoning. By the end of the day his uniform was covered with blood and bits of bone and brain. Once or twice, as in Poppel’s case, he shot children as a favor, when this man or that had had enough. Mueller reckoned it was a good deed both to his own men and the children—he was more like an angel of mercy than a killer. After all, the child’s parents were dead, and there was no hope, only suffering, grief and fear. Mueller’s bullets ended that.
Mueller remained proud of himself and his men for their conduct that day. It had not been pleasant, not been easy, but they had done their duty. As for Popel, he wasn’t punished for his weakness that day, and still served in the unit; though Mueller made sure he got extra duty and the worst jobs. That was why the timid Gejreiter was riding shotgun outside between the railcars, instead of in the comfortable second-class transport car with most of the squad.
Anyway, thought Mueller, Sobibor was only about twenty kilometers distant, and whatever fate awaited the Jews there, it could not be worse than what had been meted out in Biali. He roused his men, and buckled on his pistol. Soon they’d be done with another successful transport. He’d have another feather in his cap, and perhaps a leg up on promotion to Oberfeldwebel. At least he would have a pleasant and drunken ride back to the barracks.
Chapter 11
Shapira noticed the train by a telltale smudge of smoke on the horizon. He raised his binoculars, looked again, and gasped. It was one thing to accept the possibility that they were nearly a century in the past. It was another to actually find proof of it. The big antique steam engine slowly making its way to his position was pretty convincing.
Yatom, despite himself, also felt a sense of wonder at Shapira’s report. A steam engine! Yatom had always liked trains, but had never actually seen a real steam engine outside of a museum. Yatom radioed Feldhandler, and told him the news, although the scientist had heard it too over the radio net. Yatom asked the scientist to let the train pass. Feldhandler said nothing.
In the ditch Feldhandler readied the RF detonator for the charges on the track, and checked and re-checked his Galil. He took weapon off safe and wiped sweat from his eyes. His helmet kept sliding down onto his face. He repositioned it irritably and waited for the train.
Mofaz came on the radio from his position to the east. “What are we going to do?” he asked Yatom anxiously.
“Stand by” said Yatom. Perchansky looked at Yatom but stayed silent.
The train came up slowly. In the heavy morning air the steam from the engine formed a vaporous cloud about the front of the train, slowly dissipating to the west. Using his binoculars, peering through the fog, Shapira got his first sense of the train’s size and configuration.
Behind the engine rolled a coal car and behind that a kind of old fashioned passenger carriage that looked like something from an old 1940s film. After the passenger carriage was a long line of wooden boxcars. Shapira counted eighteen. He reported all this to Yatom.
Feldhandler came onto the net, “Eighteen cars is a small train” Feldhandler told Yatom. “Probably 2000 people aboard, guarded by ten to fifteen men.”
“How do you know this?”
“History books.”
“Did you hear that, Ron?” asked Yatom. “Acknowledged” said Shapira.
“Lieutenant Shapira, please let me know when the end of the train has passed your position” said Feldhandler politely. Shapira said “Okay with that Colonel?”
“Yes” answered Yatom curtly.
Mofaz broke into the net to protest, but Yatom cut him off. “Stand by for orders Major.” In his position Mofaz gave Itzak a worried look, but the young lieutenant didn’t share Mofaz’s trepidation. He wanted some action. From what he could tell, so did Ilan and Roskovsky who crouched in the trees a few meters away.
Shapira and his men ducked into the brush as the train rolled slowly by team Gimmel. The old engine chugged on followed by the coal and second class passenger cars. Shapira noticed a soldier dressed in gray, carrying an old bolt action rifle, standing with between two of the box cars about half way down the train. It was a German soldier! Then Shapira saw the box cars up close. They were cattle cars, crammed with people. Small ventilation windows blocked with barbed wire were the only openings, and at each of these a few bloodied hands reached out in front of miserable pallid faces. From within the cars, over quiet rhythm of the passing train, the Shapira heard a cacophony of moans and cries. The stench came upon them more slowly, but was even more shocking, a squalid mixture of human sweat, feces, urine and fear. Shapira estimated that the train was at least several hundred meters long. The front of the train was already nearing the bomb by Feldhandler’s position, when the last boxcar passed by the bomb close to Shapira.
Feldhandler nervously watched the train approach. He knew that the train was relatively short, but it train looked immense. Like Shapira he noted only one guard in the open between the cars, but assumed that there was a second soldier on the other side of the train.
Feldhandler didn’t want to destroy or derail the train, just stop it. He planned to detonate the first bomb close enough to the engine that the engineer saw the danger, but sufficiently in ahead of the train to allow the engineer to stop.
Feldhandler’s radio crackled. “Shapira here. The train has passed.”
There was no point in waiting. Feldhandler detonated the first bomb. It exploded with a substantial flash and bang, enough to startle and terrify the two Polish engineers driving the locomotive. Chunks of rock, wood and dirt flew into the air, but as Feldhandler had calculated, the track itself remained intact. The engineers, unable to see the condition of the track through the smoke and debris of the explosion assumed the worst. They instantly applied the brakes to the locomotive.
The massive train shuddered and screamed as it ground to a halt less than twenty meters from where the bomb had exploded, quite near to Feldhandler’s hidden position.
Inside the hellishly overcrowded boxcars women screamed and children cried as the train shook and lurched to a halt. From his position between the cars Popel, and his mate on the other side of the train, Gefreiter Bieher were almost thrown to the ground. In the second class passenger car, Mueller stumbled and fell while the rest of his men grabbed at any available handhold.