RAUS MIT
EUCH DRECKIGE
JUDEN!
I stopped, caught my breath, went on.
A jackbooted, peak-capped soldier, not more than nineteen or twenty, using tin snips to cut the beard of a terrified grandfather as other soldiers look on in glee.
The shattered and defaced storefronts of post-Kristallnacht Berlin. Swastikas. Posters in crude gothic lettering.
Gutted buildings. Shattered faces.
A triptych midway down the first wall made me stop even as Milo kept walking. A winter scene. Forest of monumental conifers atop gently rolling snow dunes. In the foreground a row of naked men and women huddled in front of trench graves; some still held shovels. Dozens of emaciated physiques, caved-in chests, shriveled genitals. Victims obscenely bare amid the frosty beauty of the Bavarian countryside. Behind the prisoners, a dozen SS men armed with carbines.
Next photo: the troopers raise weapons to shoulder. An officer holds a baton. Most of the diggers keep their backs turned, but one woman has shifted to face the soldiers, screaming, open-mouthed. A dark-eyed, black-haired woman, her breasts shrunken, her pubic thatch a dark wound in white flesh.
Then: bodies, heaps of them, filling the trenches, merging with the snow. One soldier bayonets a corpse.
I forced myself to move on.
Close-ups of barbed wire- iron fangs. A sign in German. A shred of something clinging to the fangs.
Snarling dogs.
A blowup of a document. Columns of numbers, straight margins, beautifully printed, neat as an accountant’s ledger. Opposite each column, hand-scripted words.
More snowy-white images: bleached bones. Piles of them. Femurs and tibias and finger bones white as piano keys. Pelvic cradles stripped raw. Yawning rib cages. Scraps and fragments rendered unidentifiable.
A mountain of bones sitting on a base of dust and grit.
An incomprehensible Everest of bones, landscaped with jawless skulls.
My stomach lurched.
Another enlarged document: multisyllabic German words. A translating caption: PROCESSING PROCEDURES. The final solution.
Compulsively detailed lists of those bound for the refuse heap:
Jews. Gypsies. Subversives. Homosexuals.
I looked over at Milo. He was across the room, his back to me. Hands in pockets, hunched and bulky and predatory as a bear out on a night forage.
I kept walking, looking.
A display case of Zyldon B poison-gas canisters. Another containing a shredded striped uniform of coarse cloth.
Little children in cloth caps and braids, herded onto trains. Bewildered, tear-streaked. Tiny hands reaching out for mother love. Faces pressed against a train window.
Another group of children, in spotless school uniforms, marching beneath a swastika banner, giving a straight- armed salute.
Black gallows against a cloudy sky. Bodies dangling from them, their feet barely touching the ground. A caption explaining that the scaffolding had been specially constructed with short drops, so that death, from slow strangulation, was prolonged.
Guard towers.
More barbed wire- spooling miles of it.
Brick ovens.
Pallets of charred, caked matter.
Fat complacent cats licking at a pile of it.
Tiled laboratories that resembled autopsy rooms. Sinks full of glassware. Humanoid things on tables.
A paragraph describing the science of the Third Reich. Ice-water experiments. Eye-color experiments. Artificial-insemination experiments. Cross-species breeding experiments. Benzine injections to harden the arteries. “Surgery” without anesthesia to study the limits of pain tolerance. Twin studies. Dwarf studies. Authoritative- looking men in white coats, bearing scalpels like weapons.
Rows of graves outside a “sanitarium.”
Milo and I had come face to face. When I saw the moisture in his eyes, I realized mine were wet too.
My throat felt as if it had been stuffed with dirt. I wanted to say something but the thought of speaking hurt my chest.
I turned away from him and dried my eyes.
The gallery door opened. A woman came in and said, “Hi, Milo. Sorry to keep you waiting.”
Cheer in her voice. It jolted me like an ice-water bath.
She was in her mid to late forties, tall and slim, with a long neck and a smallish oval face. Her hair was short, gray, and feathered. She had on a silk print dress in mauves and blues, and mauve suede shoes. Her badge said J. BAUMGARTNER, SENIOR RESEARCHER.
Milo shook her hand. “Thanks for seeing me on short notice, Judy.”
“For you, anything, Milo. If I look a wreck, it’s from sitting at O’Hare for four hours waiting to take off. Place is a zoo.”
She looked perfectly put together.
Milo said, “This is Alex Delaware. Alex, Judy Baumgartner.”
She smiled. “Good to meet you, Alex.”
Mile said, “He’s never been here before.”
“Well then, a special welcome. Any impressions?”
“I’m glad I saw it.”
My voice was strained. She nodded.
We left the gallery and followed her down the hall to a small room furnished with four gray metal desks arranged in a square. Three of them were occupied by young people- two females and a male of college age- poring over manuscripts and notating. She greeted them and they said hi and went back to work. The walls were filled with bookcases of the same gray metal. A cardboard box sat atop the unoccupied desk.
Judy Baumgartner said, “There’s a meeting going on in my office, so this will have to do.”
She sat behind the desk with the box. Milo and I pulled up chairs.
She pointed to the box. “Ike’s stuff. I had my secretary go into the library card catalogue and pull everything he’d checked out. This is it.”
“Thanks,” said Milo.
“I’ve got to tell you,” she said, “I’m still pretty shaken. When I got the message in Chicago that you needed to see me, I thought it was going to be something about hate crimes or maybe even some progress on Kaltenblud. Then when I got back and Janie told me what you wanted…”
She shook her head. “He was such a nice kid, Milo. Friendly, dependable-
Milo said, “He worked here?”
“Yes. Didn’t Janie tell you?”
“No. All I knew was he’d checked out books, done some research.”
“He did research for me, Milo. For over two months. Never missed a day- he was one of my steadiest ones. Really dedicated. His suddenly dropping out bothered me- it wasn’t like him. I asked the other volunteers if they
