Before going to sleep on Christmas Eve, Emil had decided not to join the burial detail and Corporal Gheorghe’s escape scheme. But the Romanian, using a flashlight, found his bunk and shook him awake at five o’clock.
“I’m the only one on detail,” he’d said. “Corporal Gheorghe needs Martel. And Martel needs Corporal Gheorghe.”
Seeing there was no quit in the man, Emil had gotten up and dressed before following him up the stairs and out into minus-twenty-degree air. Every joint and bone in his body ached from the impossible workday before, but he helped the Romanian load the frozen bodies, including Nikolas who had turned pale blue. Two Soviet guards watched and followed them as they led the pony and cart south, a different direction from the east-west marches he’d taken twice a day since arriving.
Emil had never been to the graveyard or even to this part of the ruined city before, so he looked around with interest, seeing large pieces of Poltava that were still snow-covered wastelands, no signs of human activity at all. But here and there, he’d catch sight of civilians scratching out a life in the frozen demolition zone. Several of the children were boys as young as his own, filthy, cold, and hollow-cheeked.
As they left the city with two Soviet soldiers trailing them, Gheorghe said, “The guards don’t speak German. Finish the story. The Nazi gives you the pistol, says shoot the three Jews. What did you do?”
Emil stopped the pony as they came to the edge of a large snow-covered field with dense forest on the far east and south sides. The sun was fully up now, reflecting off the snow, glary, almost blinding. He squinted, saw more drifts ahead, and bare ground and dead grass in places where the wind had scoured a high point.
“Stay in the grass. We’ll dig out drifts if we have to,” Corporal Gheorghe said as if reading his mind. “Tell me the story. He has a gun to your head?”
Emil took several deep breaths, trying to keep his head turned away from the Romanian and facing the bitter wind. But the raw gale, driving loose snow, forced him to turn toward the corporal and face the truth.
“I decided to kill them, Corporal. I told Haussmann I would do it. In my heart, it was already done. I walked right up and tried to aim at the teenage boy. I was squeezing the trigger.”
As they reached the middle of the field, Emil explained how a senior officer had intervened because of Himmler’s policy and how he was sent instead to shovel lime on the hundreds of Jews who had died the night before.
“I prayed to God not to be a part of killing Jews,” Emil said bitterly, “but I wasn’t heard. Instead, that gun was put in my hand, and I made a decision to kill those kids. I shoveled lime the entire night. There were so many men shooting and so many innocent people dying that I stopped believing in the common goodness of men. And I stopped believing in my own basic goodness because I had decided to kill those innocent people, children. As I shoveled, I knew I should have been praying over the bodies in the ravine, but I couldn’t because I no longer believed in God.”
The guards called a halt at midfield, said they would wait for them here.
“Where do we bury them?” Emil said.
“We don’t,” Corporal Gheorghe said. “The ground’s frozen. We’ll dump them at the back of the opening along the edge of the woods there. Crows and wolves will do the rest.”
“Really?” Emil said, disturbed.
“This is why Russian guards are so afraid of the place. They won’t go down there. In a good storm? We’ll go down there, take the pony off the cart, and we’ll escape and get a strong head start with the snow covering our tracks.”
Emil did not reply at first, still feeling like he needed to unburden himself.
“I hadn’t prayed again until yesterday, Corporal Gheorghe,” he said as he led the pony and the cart down the descending ridge where the snow was shallow. “And today I wish I hadn’t. I’m right back to believing that God does not answer, does not exist, and most men are not good by nature, including me.”
“Then what are most men by nature?”
“Beasts. They may act like they’re good. But it only takes a threat to their own life to lose that, to become a different creature like I did, not a human, a savage, an animal.”
The Romanian kept walking. The pony blew through its nose and kept plodding.
Emil could not stand the silence. He said, “Maybe I deserve this. Maybe I am here to be punished. Maybe I am not meant to be forgiven. Maybe I am meant to live out my days dragging dead, diseased bodies to the wolves and the crows. And maybe Nikolas was right. I was doomed the moment I took the gun and decided to kill those three kids.”
They reached the bottom of the hill and a part of the field where they were sheltered from much of the wind. The snow was deep and powdery. The pony was able to easily pull the cart and seemed to know the way toward a cove-shaped clearing along the wood line.
“I’m doomed,” Emil said, and shook his head. “Just like these men we’re dumping.”
As they entered the small clearing, Corporal Gheorghe said, “Doomed for what? You did not pull the trigger. You did not kill anyone.”
Emil looked at him angrily. “But I decided to kill them. In my mind, I’d already done it.”
“But you did not shoot.”
“Because of that SS colonel. If he had not been there, I would have shot them. I would have. I chose to kill those
