Chapter 4 third chapter

Barrell.Jastrow, wearing a tattered Soviet overcoat, shuffled along a road in southwestern Poland, the snow getting to his ankles.The long procession of Russian prisoners of war meanders through the flat white fields of the region historians call Upper Silesia.SS men in green coats, armed with clubs or machine guns, watched over the procession.At the front and back of the line, two big rattling army trucks were loaded with more SS soldiers.The labor team, selected from among the strongest prisoners in the Remsdorf prison camp, walked all the way.About a third of them died en route.The meal at ten o'clock every morning is a piece of black wood like bread, and a half-cold soup made of mushrooms, bad potatoes, rotten vegetable roots, and the like.Often even such rations were not available, and the men were disbanded and scavenged like goats in the fields for something to eat at the gunpoint of the SS.From twelve to fourteen hours a day, they have to keep up with the speed of the strong escort soldiers, and the escort soldiers alternately walk and ride every two hours.

Barrell.Jastrow's oak-like body was almost worn out.Around him, people fell as they walked, often without saying a word, sometimes with a groan or a cry.When clubs and kicks fail to revive the fallen man, a bullet is shot through the head.This was a routine precaution lest the guerrillas might revive him and absorb him.Calmly and carefully, the Germans shot every skull to pieces, leaving a large red mass at the collar of the Russian army overcoat huddled in the snow. Now, this team is walking from Krakow to Katowice; the new road sign is written in thick black German letters, it is called KATTOWITZ.Jastrow numbly guessed that the trek would soon be over, since Katowice was a center of industry and mining.He was so drained of vitality, too weary from cold, hunger, and overwhelming fatigue, to wonder why fate had brought him to these familiar places.He focused all his attention, which was getting worse and worse, on the man in front of him.His legs moved but his knees were stiff because he was afraid that if the joints let go they would bend and he would fall and his head would be knocked off.

This old road has not changed much in forty years.Ben Riel could predict every turn.He knew when another farmhouse or a wooden church would emerge through the thin, swirling dry snow.Is the task force heading for the Katowice mines?Fate is not bad!It is warmer in the mine than in the field in winter.Miners have to eat to work. In spite of all the hardships he went through on the walk, Ben Riel thanked God that he was in the labor line and finally out of the prison camp.Neither his experiences in the last war nor his life in the Warsaw ghetto could compare with what he had seen in Leimsdorf.This prisoner-of-war camp was not really a prisoner-of-war camp, there were no barracks, no buildings, no roll call, no governing body; no means of maintaining order except the fear of machine guns on watchtowers and the blinding searchlights at night.The entire facility is an open field surrounded by barbed wire, stretching out beyond the horizon, and enclosing 200,000 people who are dying of starvation.On the Eastern Front, the Geneva Conventions did not exist.The USSR never signed on to it.

The Germans are not prepared to carry such a large burden of prisoners of war anyway.Lack of food and water supplies.The principle of life in Leimsdorf was self-preservation. In the dirty and smelly environment, the prisoners of war quarreled and fought for something to eat, and no one asked if they were sick.Dead bodies fell in disorder on the dirt and snow.Every day outside the barbed wire, the dead are cremated in piles, using wood and waste oil as fuel.The flames of the cremation shone far at night.The camp stinks like a huge meat cannery nearby, like the animals are being processed there and the hair or mane is being charred.

Prisoners from the German attack on Moscow in November made up the labor contingent.Those dying at Leimsdorf were captured during the summer campaign.Now they have become walking skeletons, and there are people who fall at any time, no matter day or night, everywhere.Of all the horrors that Lamsdorf had, there was one that still terrified Jastrow to death.He saw with his own eyes, in the dark night outside the searchlights, small groups of prisoners of war, frantic with hunger, wandering around the frozen garbage dumps of the concentration camp, eating the soft internal organs of the newly fallen corpses.He had seen such mutilated corpses before in the daytime.As soon as the soldiers on the watchtower saw the cannibals, they shot at them. The other prisoners caught them and beat and kicked them, killing them.However, in these people, the ability to survive has surpassed human nature, so there is no longer fear.The cannibals are deranged sleepwalkers, idiots who just want to be fed, with enough wit left in their depleted brains to find something to eat at night and hide in the shadows like coyotes.Whatever the prospect in Katowice, Banrell.Jastrow knew it couldn't be worse than Remsdorf.

However, it appears the team is not headed for Katowice.The line ahead made a turn to the left.The contingent would then head south to Auschwitz, and Barrell understood that; but what was Auschwitz going to do with such a large workforce?It was there that the school he had attended as a boy was a small manufacturing town, all alone in the swamp where the Sora and Vistula confluence.It is primarily a railway junction station.There is no heavy work there.At the bend in the road, he saw a new arrow sign in black letters, nailed to the faded Auschwitz road sign.The Germans used the old name on it.Ben Riel remembered the name from his own youth, when Auschwitz was still part of Austria.Not only does it sound as harsh as German names usually sound, but it doesn't even sound like Auschwitz anymore.