“Well, the furnaces are only so large, and—”
The officer raised a gloved hand to silence the younger soldier. The Blockwart licked his lips and nearly shivered as a drop of water trailed down between his shoulder blades and came to rest near the top of his buttocks.
“Do you understand what disassembly means?”
The question caught the younger man off guard and he merely squinted in response. He had come to learn that when the Oberführer asked a question that should be known, it was pertinent not to answer.
“It means to disassemble. Do not shoot them one by one and feed them to the flames. Lock them inside and set the buildings on fire.”
The Blockwart blinked several times and then nodded. He began to turn away, but paused before he could take a step. “What should I do with the workers in the south paddock? It would be time-consuming to herd them across the compound.”
The officer stood silent, gazing past the young soldier into the unending gray sky. His fingers twitched in their gloves, as if they yearned to reach for something nearby. When he returned his eyes to the Blockwart’s face, the color had drained from the blue orbs, so that now they seemed to merely mirror the sleeting heaven above them.
“The ditch has been dug that was ordered yesterday?”
“Yes, Oberführer.”
“Bring them there.”
Without another utterance, the officer turned and walked away from the block leader through the soft mud of the camp, and into the sleeting day.
The men and women stood along the side of the shallow trench that stretched a hundred yards on the rim of the compound. On the far edge of the trench, ten feet of barbed wire rose up in horizontal slants and designated the western boundary of the camp. The people that stood at the edge of the trench wavered.
They wavered physically, their emaciated legs like stalks under meager torsos.
They wavered mentally; some seemed to consider running, their eyes flitting to the far side of the trench and the wire beyond. What was left of their minds calculated the height of the fence and the gaps between the hooked wires. Others only stared down at the trench before them and saw nothing, their minds already broken from months of endless labor, little rest, and almost no food. The rest looked longingly at the trench and their eyes welled up with tears, to know that they were close, so close.
And above all, they wavered in the eyes of the soldiers that stood at either end of the trench and several yards behind them. The people before them seemed to fade in and out of reality through the falling snow, as if they were already gone and their spirits had decided to reenact the events that were about to take place.
A young boy stood at the end of the line of people. His hand hung loosely in his mother’s withered grip, and he could feel the hard bones beneath her paper-thin skin. His brown eyes gazed at the trench, and he wondered the small thoughts of youth. He imagined the trench filled with water and a hundred toy boats floating there. He could see their brightly painted bows and their shining steam stacks. He imagined some were warships and their guns boomed loudly as they fired on their enemies. Some were sailboats and glided across the surface, like they were flying rather than floating and their sails were actually wings.
His mother squeezed his hand again. She had been doing this ever since the dark men had come and forced them from their corral. She would blink her tired eyes and try to smile at him, though the curve of her mouth never did seem happy. Then she would clutch his hand, as if they were on the lip of a much deeper precipice and he was too close to the edge. His father held his mother’s other hand, and he too was smiling down at him, his small, round glasses perched on his long nose.