I had only been in Munich an hour when Captain Taras informed me that the vanguard of the Seventh Army had just discovered another concentration camp near Linz in northern Austria, a place called Mauthausen.Taras insisted that I go at once; he had secured three seats on a military plane.He himself will join us in two or three days.I had many reasons to obey Georges Taras: he was a captain, I was only a lieutenant, he was a professor of international law at Harvard University, and I was employed by him until the summer of 1942; It was he who met me by chance in Paris and recruited me to the War Crimes Commission as one of his staff.As if that wasn't enough, I like him, even though he's in khakis and I can't easily recognize the sharp-tongued, often eloquent professor inside the ivy-covered walls of Harvard's campus.

There are three of us leaving Munich.With me were Sergeant Mike Rinaldi and photographer Roy Blackstock.I have nothing in common with any of them.Rinaldi is from Little Italy in New York City, and Blackstock is a native of Virginia.Although they were very different in appearance—the one was short and stocky with a sparse black mustache painted with cosmetic wax, the other was a two-meter-tall limp mass of expanding monsters—they looked the same. The look of not caring about anything, this lukewarm attitude is very impressive, and I think it is the expression of maturity and sophistication that I have not yet achieved.

It was May 5, 1945, and apart from the news that the Russians had captured Berlin three days earlier and that the full and formal capitulation of the Third Reich was imminent, I knew next to nothing about the war that was then ending in Europe.The war is almost over, I haven't killed a single person, and I haven't seen any fighting.I was four months shy of my twenty-second birthday, and at this moment I was like a young man stepping into a theater for the first time, and the curtain was falling on the stage.I returned to Europe for the first time in six years and saw my grandmother again in Paris.She didn't care a bit about the fact that I gave up my father's nationality to take my mother's nationality to become an American. She hardly reacted to the news, but kept describing to me Paris and her Pubevan. What became of Slovakia under the German occupation...

In Linz, Rinaldi managed to get us on a train to Vienna, where the Red Army had been there since April 13th.At two o'clock in the afternoon we crossed the Danube in Enns.Across the river, Rinaldi stopped a jeep and persuaded the driver—an Italian-American like himself—to let us ride in his car.We went first to the Mauthausen railway station, where we forced the driver to drive the remaining six kilometers to the camp by means that were not much different from outright blackmail. There, for the first time, my tracks intersected those of Reber Michel Klimrod. There are many clear images in my memory of that day, first of all the soft Austrian air: sunny, warm and pleasant, with the fragrance of spring that seems to be eternal in the world.

Only at that time came a foul stench. When we were two to three hundred meters away from the concentration camp, the stench rushed straight into my nose.The long queue of tarpaulin-covered trucks forced us to stop, and the driver, whom we Rav had pulled over, took the opportunity to announce emphatically that he would never go any further.We had to get out of the car and walk.The stench grew stronger; it formed one after another in great clouds of gas that hung motionless in the air. "It's the smell of the crematorium," said Blackstock in his Southern drawl.The gentle tone of voice and the speaker's regional accent itself seem to dilute the horror of the word.We enter through the open door.Some tanks had been there and then left, leaving fresh marks on the ground.They have been replaced by a steady stream of trucks, unloading supplies such as medicines and bandages for the health department, which is already at work.But as soon as this stream of traffic entered the gate, it immediately disappeared into a silent sea of ​​living corpses. There was almost no movement at all. It was strange, as if the tide suddenly froze.The tanks that had been there five or six hours ago might have shaken this sea of ​​living corpses for a while, showing a little life, but now that the fluctuations have stopped, the joy of freedom has dimmed, and their faces have turned into faces. Hard masks.The scene made them feel as if they had entered another state, only now realizing that a nightmare was really over.They looked at me, Rinaldi, and at Blackstock, who was using his height and horse to open the way; from the confused eyes of these people, I could see a strange indifference and a look of helplessness, but it could also be Seeing resentment and angry complaints: "Why didn't you come here sooner?"

"The stench comes from them," said Blackstock. "The stench from them is unbelievable." Rampage in the jungle. The American officer who took over the battalion wore the gold maple leaf collar badge of a major of infantry.He was a short, stout, red-haired man named Strohn.He told me that there are a lot of urgent tasks, and he can't be busy, and he can't care about helping us investigate war crimes.Right now he was trying to make sense of the indescribable darkness.He has set out to classify these former prisoners into three categories: irreparable, in need of rescue, and not in danger.Many of those lives are irretrievable. "Two or three thousand of them are going to die with me in the next few days, but at least they can take comfort in the fact that they died free," he said, looking straight at me with brown eyes. .

"What did you say your name was?" "David Setiniaz." "Jews?" "No." "What kind of surname is that? Where are the ancestors from?" "French." "Sounds like a Polish surname." He had turned to bark orders.Rinaldi is gesturing to me.We walked into a house that was formerly the headquarters of an SS detachment. "This one or that one?" Rinaldi asked.I took the first one, which had a small anteroom with three or four chairs attached.Blackstock had gone somewhere to take pictures.Rinaldi found a piece of cardboard and nailed it to the door.He wrote the words "War Crimes" on it, tracing each letter several times to make the strokes thicker and thicker.

I stood there, thousands of survivors still living in Mauthausen, overwhelmed by the stench and strange, trembling silence of the place, my shame and disappointment until thirty Five years later I can still recall that feeling of nausea and humiliation. I must get out of this state and go out for a walk immediately.I can still vividly remember the scene when I passed through the dense crowd, and they barely gave way in front of me.I went through a row of huts, and then another row of huts that no medical team had yet visited.It was shrouded in darkness, only a few places were covered with a golden layer of dusty spring light.There were many corpses that had been dead for two days lying together with the living corpses that hadn't died yet, and there were three to four corpses on each bunk.When I walked by, I saw the skeleton-like limbs, piles of rags and skeletons wriggling.The rancid smell is getting stronger.Someone touched me lightly, and someone pulled me hard, which made me run away in a hurry.I found myself out in the sun, but I couldn't help feeling chills.I came to a narrow clearing between two houses.I was alone there, or so I thought.I vomited for a while, until then, I felt a pair of eyes watching me, that feeling was like being burned by something...

The grave was just a few steps away.It is only two meters square, and the soil dug out from there is neatly piled into a triangular mound, and a shovel is stuck on top of it.Few handfuls of earth had been thrown indiscriminately into the pit, but the layer of quicklime that had been placed there had eroded the soil...and eroded the naked bodies of men the Nazis had hastily buried in the pit.You can easily guess how it all happened: a dozen naked corpses were thrown inside, rammed with rifle butts and trampled with boot heels to smooth the surface.Then sprinkle quicklime and cover with soil.But the dead are still arching upwards.I could see that many hands, belly, mouth, nostrils and genitals were blackened and eaten by calcium oxide, and in some places the bones were exposed and rotted.

Right in the middle of this messy and brutal scene, I saw a horribly distorted face covered with clotted and blackened blood, and a pair of light-colored eyes gleaming menacingly... Those eyes watched my every movement as I backed away from the wall my body was leaning against.I remember thinking at the time that the eyes should be dull when life suddenly stops.So I took a few steps closer to the grave.At this time, a voice rose from below, reciting Verlaine's poems in French with a slightly exotic accent: "My God, my God, life is there, simple and quiet..., What happened next was like something out of a dream.

"The quiet noise of peace comes from the town..." The line came to me naturally, and I probably read it. All I know is that I walked all the way to the edge of the grave, with my cat bent and one arm outstretched.My fingers touched the big bony hand of the seventeen-year-old boy—he is the man we will call "King" in the future.