Black Cross

all traces of Soman from the chamber.

Major Schorner looked around expectantly. Ariel Weitz scurried up to him like an obedient terrier.

“The usual, Weitz.”

“Jawohl, Sturmbannfuhrer!”

Schorner seemed entranced by the sight of the little Jew hurrying down the steps that no other man would tread without a stutter in his heartbeat. When Weitz disappeared, the major hastened back toward the front of the camp.

The alley was empty.

The shoemaker listened to the fading engines. Impelled by morbid curiosity, he darted across the alley to the far side of the E-Block, crouched in the snow, and pressed his face to an observation porthole.

The sterility of the scene stunned him. There was no blood or feces, not even a speck of dirt. The steam had taken care of that. But the position of the dead revealed the madness of what had gone before. The twenty-eight Jewish men who died tonight had been packed inside the E-Block like tinned herrings. Most had died standing up. Their corpses were tangled in a general riot of limbs, their dead skin blistered pink by the high-pressure steam, their open eyes glazed and protruding horribly. One man’s head was jammed against the window from which Himmler had watched.

The shoemaker almost screamed when the corpses near the door began to move. Then he saw Ariel Weitz pushing his way in among the dead like a grave robber. The man was not even wearing a gas mask! Perhaps his guilty conscience had spawned a death wish. Weitz turned up his nose and sniffed the air like a Hausfrau checking her bathroom. Apparently satisfied, he reached into his pocket and withdrew a pair of precision pliers. Then he leaned over one of the fallen corpses. The shoemaker saw the face clearly, its pink mouth frozen in a rictus of pain and horror. It was the young Dutch lawyer, Jansen.

Weitz pulled a small torch from his back pocket and shined it into the oral cavity. His grisly effort was rewarded by the glint of gold. Carefully, he inserted the pliers into the corpse’s mouth, fitted the tongs around the tooth and yanked it free of the bone. Weitz brushed away skin that had sloughed onto his hand, then pocketed his prize and put the pliers back into the lawyer’s mouth.

The shoemaker felt his hands shaking. What kind of monster could plunder the corpses of his own tribe for its exterminators? He stared with murder in his eyes as Weitz fitted his pliers around yet another gold-crowned tooth. Then, as if suddenly aware that he was being watched, Ariel Weitz looked up — straight at the window from which the shoemaker watched.

The shoemaker froze. He met Weitz’s startled gaze for a few seconds, peered into the twin abysses of his eyes. Then he ran across the empty alley and along the wall of the hospital.

He forced himself to slow down as he neared the inmate showers. Running could draw gunfire from the watchtowers at any time. As he passed the Appellplatz, an image of the old Dutchman’s diamonds flashed into his brain. Was it worth the risk? The value of gems had been low throughout the war, in the camps at least. A treasured brooch might fetch four potatoes in a black market trade. But times were changing. As the Red Army offensive gained momentum, some SS had shown an interest in goods that would help them buy their way westward in the event of a Russian breakthrough.

He made five quick passes over the well-trodden snow where he and the Jansens had stood during the selection. Just as he decided that Sturm had defied Major Schorner and returned for the diamonds, he saw a flash on the ground to his right. He bent down, scooped up a handful of snow, then moved quickly toward the inmate blocks, sifting the snow as he walked. He counted four loose diamonds in his palm. Slipping the stones into his pocket, he silently scaled the wire fence and dropped to the other side.

“Bitte! Please do not shoot!”

The shoemaker clutched his chest in shock. Only when he recognized Rachel Jansen, the wife of the Dutch lawyer, did he begin to calm down. She was standing in the shadow of the Christian Women’s Block with her tiny boy and girl clinging to her legs. “What are you doing out here?” he asked furiously.

The Dutchwoman hesitated too long. “My children needed the toilet. They have loose bowels.”

“Don’t lie to me! You came to look for the diamonds, didn’t you?” He saw by her expression that he was right. Rachel Jansen either had courage or she was a fool. “The SS took the stones already,” he said in a gentler tone. “You must go back.”

She nodded hesitantly. “Can you tell me anything of my husband? The truth.”

The shoemaker felt a sudden and surprising rush of emotion. Against his better instincts, he took the young woman’s soft face between his hands. Very quietly, so that the children would not hear, he said, “You must be strong, Rachel. Your husband was a fine man, but he is dead. They are all dead.”

He expected a hysterical response, but after an initial shudder, a quick blinking of the eyelids, Rachel Jansen pulled away from him. Her right hand went to her forehead, then covered her eyes. “Oh dear God,” she whispered. “We are alone.”

The shoemaker caught up a child in each arm and began walking to the Jewish Women’s Block. Rachel followed. At the door he set the children down.

“Thank you,” she said. “You are de schoenmaker, yes? I’ve only just arrived, but . . . already I’ve heard of you. Some people . . . they say bad things.”

The shoemaker shrugged. He was thinking about Ariel Weitz.

“They say you collaborate with the Germans.”

He glanced anxiously toward the Jewish Men’s Block. He had no time for questions, but something about this young woman had struck him. Perhaps it was her children, or the brave husband she had lost, or her ability to sustain the blow of losing him and not shatter, as so many had. He reached into his pocket and closed his hand over the four diamonds. He started to pull out a single stone, then brought out two. He placed them carefully in her hand.

“That’s all I could find,” he told her. “Use them well.”

Before she could respond, he turned and hurried toward the Jewish Men’s Block.

As he passed under the faded yellow star over the door, the musty stew of caked sweat and mold and naphtha hit him, the smell of home. He lay on his hard bunk, stunned to find himself not sharing a blanket for the first time in many months. No shortage of bunks tonight. None of the eleven survivors of his block asked where he had been.

He wanted to sleep, but he could not get Ariel Weitz out of his mind. In the darkness above him hovered the image of the Jewish traitor, the golem, startled in the midst of his ghoulish work. What had shocked the shoemaker — what made him run — was not the fear of getting caught. It was the tears. As the little ferret looked up from the corpse, huge wet tears had been streaming down his face. That sight had shaken him to his core. Because if Ariel Weitz still possessed some secret well of compassion, some vestige of identity from the world of light, then could not the shoemaker as well?

He let his mind reel back through time, to his life before Hitler. The pungent stench of the block gave way to the warm colors and smells of his home. Bread cooking in the oven, good matzo, his wife working over the kitchen stove. And in the back of the apartment, his shop. There, shaping leather at the last, his son, only fourteen yet nearly as tall as his father. So quickly becoming a man. He heard his wife calling, “Avram? Avram! Come! There are men in the street! Brown Shirts!”

The shoemaker hugged himself and shivered in his bunk. That Nazi rally had marked the beginning of the end for him, the end of the time when he would be known by his given name. Soon after his wife and son fled Germany, Hilter’s thugs began rounding up Jewish combat veterans along with all the rest, just as his son had predicted. Avram was arrested with a truckload of other Jews from Rostock and taken to a distant camp. There he had become prisoner 6065, a number of prestige now in the hellish universe of the camps, where a low number indicated either survival skills or luck — both treasured commodities.

When all his comrades died, he was transferred north to help build another prison in the land of numbers — Totenhausen Camp, not fifty kilometers from Rostock, his home city. There — here — he had carved out a small place for himself, existing in darkness, moving through life in single steps, with each step hoping to avoid the god of the camps, which was Death. So far he had been lucky, if survival was luck. Some believed the dead were the lucky ones. Sometimes he believed that too. But tonight, in some nameless slice of time between seeing the tears staining Weitz’s ratlike face and giving the two diamonds to Rachel Jansen, the shoemaker had become Avram Stern again. And that terrified him.