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gaze of a young man down there, and oddly, I dropped it to my feet and stamped it out instead.

*     *     *

The next day I was actually down in the pit, spreading the dead out more evenly, as they tended to clump up where those above pitched them. At last I was relieved, picked my way not too delicately through the carpet of bodies and climbed up and out. Waiting there was my friend from the previous afternoon, the British officer. My earlier words did not dissuade him from offering me another cigarette.

I had no doubt he had sought me out specifically, and now I understood why. It amused me somewhat but I was careful not to show this. The man was a homosexual, as we liked to claim all British men were, in addition to their all being alcoholics. I knew this because I was very handsome then, my friend…yes, it is ironic now indeed. I had been told all my life how beautiful I was. Heroic, god-like, my admirers had gushed; but for my dark hair I was the Aryan ideal. Many times I had seen women act in this man’s manner…seeking me out after an initial meeting, trying to make it look accidental, casual, trying to seem aloof but churning inside with desire so that I felt the vibration of their lust in the air between us. Even now in this horrid air I felt it.

And maybe that was part of it. You know? Death has a strange glamour, even in its most hideous forms. Your beloved serial killers, as I say. I think it was subconscious with this individual. I’m certain that outwardly he truly was appalled at our crimes, and agonized at the loss of lives. I am not saying he condoned our actions. But I think he was drawn to the darkness he perceived in me. The allure of the dangerous hidden under the beautiful. No, don’t be naive, don’t protest. It goes beyond mere morbid fascination; it’s the seductiveness of evil. Look at the new Nazis you Americans have. Your Klan. Your obsession with us real Nazis in films for decades! You find us as beautiful, our uniforms as glamorous, as did the most devout of us! We love villains, criminals. Gangsters. Monsters. We all have that inside us, after all. Maybe it’s our way of accepting that side of us.

He appeared properly contemptuous, anyway, standing there in his neat, unstained uniform. “Now you need a shower, SS man. Now you stink. Now you have lice, no doubt.”

“And maybe typhus.”

“Good. How do you think the people in some of those barracks have felt? I went into one that I could only stand in for less than a minute, on account of its stench. The living people lay amongst the dead people and I couldn’t tell them apart. They were too weak to move, most of them. Many were in a coma. Just covering the floor. How do you think they have felt lying there?”

“I don’t think those individuals really feel much of anything any more. But they came here sick, most of them. Already sick, as I’ve told you.”

“Oh, how innocent you are. How could even one human being let this happen? Do you know that if we all had true empathy for one-another, could do something so simple as put ourselves in each other’s shoes, there would be no murder, no war, and no inhumanity?” He gestured with his cigarette into the vast grave. “Look there, my friend. You see that woman? She could be your wife. She could be your sister.”

I smiled. “I have neither.”

“Don’t be so bloody smug, you bastard. You know what I’m saying. She could be your mother, your daughter, she could be you.”

“But she isn’t. She’s a Jew. She’s a woman. She’s down there and I’m up here.”

“Your positions will some day he reversed.”

“On Judgment Day, eh?” I chuckled mockingly. I knew I shouldn’t provoke his anger, repulse him. Perhaps I could use his attraction to my advantage. My pride aside, I would rather have become his secret lover than hang. But I didn’t think he would ever chance an outright relationship with me. Still, I knew I should try to benefit myself from the situation, to flirt with him, beguile him, in the same way I had skillfully mesmerized women. After all, I had consciously enthralled ugly women, women I wouldn’t have slept with. In my vanity, I simply enjoyed the attention. The power. Looking back now, I wonder if my flirtation with the officer was motivated less by my attempt to better my situation than it was by this feeling of power. Maybe it made me feel superior to the man, less a prisoner. I was still a Nazi then, of course. I still believed in mastering others.

In any case, when the officer proffered another cigarette and lit it for me, I lightly cupped my hands around his. I felt a slight tremor flinch through him at this contact but he didn’t jerk his hands away. He was indeed smitten, and he was indeed afraid of me, which I think made him more smitten.

Both of us said nothing for several minutes as we watched others drop one emaciated being after another over the side, like mummies being reinterred, but without the finery. I flicked a louse off my arm; the officer had been right. Parasites. We had called the Jews parasites. Vermin to be exterminated with no more compassion than we would feel spraying insects, or killing rats.

These conversations, philosophical as they were, put me in mind of our motivations as Nazis, brought to mind the analogy of vermin. And seeing the interlaced arms and legs, the entwined skeletal bodies below, made my thoughts take another leap. But a very strange one, unsettling. I shuddered unaccountably; it was the first time staring into the pit, staring at the heaped corpses, actually brought out goose flesh on my arms.

“Have you ever heard,” I asked my new-found friend, “of Rat Kings?”

We looked at each other; he said, “No.”

“My grandmother told me about them. Of course, it’s always grandmothers who tell you such things. In any case, she told me that when rats were more plentiful amongst us than they are today, sometimes in a nest of rats a Rat King would be found. This was a group of say a dozen rats or more, whose tails had all tangled together so that they couldn’t pull apart, with their heads all facing outwards. Because they were stuck together like this they couldn’t move very far, and were often found pitifully starving or already dead. They seemed like many-headed monsters to those who found them, and that was why they were thought of as Rat Kings. Did you know there is a Rat King in The Nutcracker? But they call it a Mouse King.”

“Yes…that’s right. But all this about rats with their tails knotted up sounds like wives’ tales and nonsense.”

“Perhaps it is, though my grandmother swore to me that such things were truly discovered. As a child she herself had a neighbor who supposedly found one in their barn consisting of two dozen rats, which was why she told me about all this. It could be that huddling together in the winter, it was their own frozen urine that was linking their tails together. In any case, only the attic rat, as we Germans call them, have been found as Rat Kings. These are the black rats. They’re smaller and more rare than the brown rat…mostly because the bigger and stronger brown rats have preyed on them and diminished their numbers greatly. Nearly wiped them out. The brown rats are the more successful and superior species.”

“An interesting science lesson. But why would only the weaker black rats get bound up into these Rat Kings, then?”

I shrugged, smiled enigmatically. “One of the many mysteries of life, friend.”

The officer drew up closer to me, and thus nearer to the edge of the pit. He gazed down into it on today’s cairn of corpses, one hand cupped over his lower face as a filter. “Here’s a mystery of life for you. I just can not accept this. Look at these bodies. So wasted. Many of these men were once muscular and strong. Tanned. Many of these women were lovely, shapely, fussed over their hair. Now they all look the same. Horrid. Are you really looking at them? Look at that young girl. See? Look at her posture.”

I looked. Her arms flung, her legs spread. Her patch of pubic hair seemed too large for her skeletal frame. It was so bluntly exposed. Probably swarming with lice. Pubic hair and sunken eye sockets were the black areas that showed up most against all the masses of white torsos and limbs. There was something very disturbing, even I had to admit at that moment, in seeing so many naked figures so shamelessly exposing private parts that in life they would have shyly hidden. Had these same women been alive and healthy, seeing them naked and sprawled on a bed would have aroused me greatly. This motionless orgy of plaited cadavers, however, made me wonder how I would feel the next time a woman spread herself for me. Would memories of these images get in the way of my view? Would I fear that black nest of hair? Fear its smell of rot, and the lice hiding there in wait for me?

I grew irritated with myself. What effect was this delicate British fop having on me? Was I actually letting him stir feelings of guilt in me, with his admonishments?

My contempt for him at this moment gave me the perverse desire to exploit his interest in me further, to manipulate him as he was seeking to manipulate me. I reached out and picked a piece of lint from his jacket’s breast. He stepped back from me, a look of potential alarm in his eyes, but I showed him the lint before I blew it off my fingers. I then lightly patted the place on his breast where I had plucked the lint, as if dislodging some dust that