“See it yourself,” Wolffson said. “Nobody can deny what you have seen with your own eyes.”
Then he closed his eyes.
“We talk later. I need some sleep, it is a long drive.”
Keegan sat against the wall with his knees pulled up and his chin resting on his arms. Here and there, streaks of light sneaked through the heavy drapes. In a minute or too Wolffson’s breathing grew deeper, more rhythmic, and he was asleep. Keegan watched as the shadows in the room grew longer. Finally he too dozed off.
They were a hundred yards away, hidden in the thick trees and heavy brush of the woods that hid the treacherous stockade from the main road. An area one hundred yards wide had been cleared of all foliage around the entire perimeter of the camp. Signs warned that this barren stretch was mined. A single-lane road led through the trees to the gate and beyond it, railroad tracks glistened in the morning sunlight, the tracks worn shiny from use.
The lenses of the binoculars swept slowly across the terrain, picking up first the gate, then the wire and finally the camp itself. It was a forlorn and desolate place, bleak, disheartening, oppressive; a place of long, drab wooden barracks painted gray, a place barren of foliage except for a failed attempt at a garden between two of the barracks, a sorrowful row of twisted, dead plants that hung from stakes or lay on the hard, brown earth. The earth itself was baked rock hard by the sun, earth so poor layers of it were churned to dust and swirled away by the slightest wisp of wind. The buildings were coated with the dead earth.
Then there was the wire.
Four rows of barbed wire three feet apart, humming with deadly electricity, followed by a ditch and a twelve- foot link fence, which was also electrified. Dogs snarled at the end of short leashes. Powerful searchlights were mounted on tall poles scattered about the sprawling enclosure. Gun towers loomed ominously at the corners of the compound.
As Keegan scanned the enclosure with the binoculars, he stopped suddenly. An old man in striped prison clothes dangled on his back across the inner wire; his arms, stiff in death, were outstretched. One foot barely touched the ground. His flesh was gray and had begun to rot. His white hair fluttered in the breeze.
Flies swarmed hungrily around the corpse. Fifty feet away, an elderly woman with a handkerchief pressed over her nose and mouth numbly watched the flies at work.
“Good God,” Keegan breathed.
“His name was Rosenberg. A banker from Linz. He was fifty-eight years old. That is his wife looking at him. His only crime was that he was a Jew. They took his money, his property, destroyed his family and then put them in the camp. They broke that gentle old man and he finally jumped on wire and ended it all. So they leave him there until he literally rots away. A warning to others.”
Keegan lowered the glasses and took several deep breaths.
“You wanted to see Dachau and I wanted you to see it, Keegan,” Wolffson whispered. “Now you can believe, now you can convince others that this is not just a foul rumor.”
“Oh, it’s foul all right,” Keegan groaned. “Foul beyond comprehension.”
A third man, whose name was Milton Golen, lay beside them with a camera wrapped in cloth to muffle the shutter click. The camera thunked quietly as he shot photo after photo of the ghoulish stockade. He stopped occasionally to jot down notes.
“We try to monitor the condition of the prisoners,” Golen whispered, raising the camera again. “Keep track of who has died, who is ill. It is not very effective but we do our best. Coming here is very risky as you can tell.’’
“We can’t stay but a minute,” Wolffson added. “They patrol these woods constantly with dogs.”
They had driven through the outskirts of Dachau just before dawn. It was forty minutes from 1unich, on the main road between it and Berlin. Wolffson had turned off the main road, driven through the village to Golen’s farm and parked the car in his barn. His wife had served them breakfast and strong coffee.
“Are you going to the woods today?” Wolffson had asked their host and Golen had nodded.
“Is it safe for the three of us to go?” Wolffson asked.
“As safe as for one. It is never safe. If we get caught, we will be inside, if they don’t shoot us.”
Wolffson had turned to Keegan.
“So,
He had outlined the ground rules. Follow orders. Speak only in whispers. Leave when ordered. They left just before dawn in a horse-drawn firewood cart with a hollow core, entering from underneath through a trap in the floor of the wagon. They had left the wagon a mile from the edge of the clearing in the forest and gone the rest of the way by first walking in a stream so they would not leave a scent for the dogs, then crossing beneath an open field through a sewer culvert. They had crawled the last fifty yards on the floor of the forest, dragging themselves through snarls of sticker bushes and bug-infested grass, then suddenly they were at the edge of the security clearing and the dreadful compound loomed before them.
Keegan’s mouth had gone dry at the first sight of it. He lay flat on his stomach, one hand holding back the grass, the other scanning the place with binoculars. He continued to scan the yard, hoping, praying for a glimpse of her, to know she was still alive.
The ultimate shock was the inmates themselves. Gaunt, bowed before their time, physically broken, they seemed almost hypnotized. Their eyes told the whole tale. Hope was burned out, replaced by terror and resignation. Like robots, they moved around the dirt yard surrounding the barracks, hardly speaking.
Near one of the corners, an old mars in a striped jacket and pants, his white beard brushing his chest, stood in one spot and stared without moving, across the wire and through the link fence. His eyes moved neither left nor right. He said nothing. He simply stared across the twenty or so feet of tangled wire, past the tall fence and the barren perimeter, toward freedom.
