Frameshift (2 page)

Pierre stepped into the shower, cleaning the blood from his arms and chest. The water running down the drain was tinged with red. Pierre scrubbed until his skin was raw. After toweling off, he crawled into bed next to Molly, and they held each other.

“Why would a neo-Nazi be after me?” said Pierre, into the darkness. He exhaled noisily. “Hell, why would anyone go to the trouble of trying to kill me? After all…” He trailed off, the English sentence already formed in his mind, but deciding not to give it voice.

But Molly could tell what he had been about to say, and she drew him closer to her, holding him tightly.

After all
, Pierre Tardivel had thought,
I’ll probably be dead soon anyway
.

The screams came like popcorn popping: at first there were only one or two, then there were hundreds overlapping, then, finally, the quantity diminished, and at last there were none left and you knew it was done.

Jubas Meyer tried not to think about it. Even most of the bastards in charge tried not to think about it. Only forty meters away, a band of Jewish musicians played at gunpoint, their songs meant to drown out the cries of the dying, the rumble of the diesel engine in the Maschinehaus insufficient to fully mask the sound.

Finally, while Jubas and the others stood ready, the two Ukrainian operators heaved the massive doors aside. Blue smoke rose from the opening.

As was often the case, the naked corpses were still standing. The people had been packed in so tightly — up to five hundred in the tiny chamber — that there was no room for them to fall down. But now that the doors were open, those closest to the exit toppled over, spilling out into the hot summer sun, their faces mottled and bloated by the carbon-monoxide poisoning. The stench of human sweat and urine and vomit filled the air.

Jubas and his partner, Shlomo Malamud, moved forward, carrying their wooden stretcher. With it, they could remove a single adult or two children in each load; they didn’t have the strength to carry more. Jubas could count his own ribs easily through his thin skin, and his scalp itched constantly from the lice.

Jubas and Shlomo started with a woman of about forty. Her left breast had a long gash in it. They carried her body off to the dental station. The man there, an emaciated fellow in his early thirties named Yehiel Reichman, tipped her head back and opened her mouth. He spotted a gold filling, reached in with blood-encrusted pliers, and extracted the tooth.

Shlomo and Jubas took the body off to the pit and dumped it in on top of the other corpses, trying to ignore the buzz of flies and the reek of diseased flesh and postmortem bowel discharges. They returned to the chamber, and—

No
—

No!

God, no.

Not Rachel—

But it was. Jubas’s own sister, lying there naked among the dead, her green eyes staring up at him, lifeless as emeralds.

He’d prayed that she’d gotten away, prayed that she was safe, prayed—

Jubas staggered back, tripped, fell to the ground, tears welling up and out of his eyes, the drops clearing channels in the filth that covered his face.

Shlomo moved to help his friend. “Quickly,” he whispered. “Quickly, before they come…”

But Jubas was wailing now, unable to control himself.

“It gets to us all,” said Shlomo soothingly.

Jubas shook his head. Shlomo didn’t understand. He gulped air, finally forced out the words. “It’s Rachel,” he said between shuddering sobs, gesturing at the corpse. Flies were crawling across her face now.

Shlomo placed a hand on Jubas’s shoulder. Shlomo had been separated from his own brother Saul, and the one thing that had kept him going all this time was the thought that somewhere Saul might be safe.

“Get up!” shouted a familiar voice. A tall, stocky Ukrainian wearing jackboots came closer. He was carrying a rifle with a bayonet attached — the same bayonet Jubas had often seen him honing with a whetstone to scalpel sharpness.

Jubas looked up. Even through his tears, he could make out the man’s features: a round face in its thirties, balding head, protruding ears, thin lips.

Shlomo moved over to the Ukrainian, risking everything. He could smell the cheap liquor on the man’s breath. “A moment, Ivan — for pity’s sake. It’s Jubas’s sister.”

Ivan’s wide mouth split in a terrible grin. He leaned in and used the bayonet to slice off Rachel’s right nipple. Then, with a flick of his index finger, he sent it flying off the blade into the air. It spun end over end before landing bloody side down in Jubas Meyer’s lap.

“Something to remember her by,” said Ivan.

He was a monster.

A devil.

Evil incarnate.

His first name was Ivan. His last name was unknown, and so the Jews dubbed him Ivan the Terrible. He had arrived at the camp a year before, in July 1942. There were some who said he’d been an educated man before the war; he used fancier words than the other guards did. A few even contended he must have been a doctor, since he sliced human flesh with such precision. But whatever he’d been in civilian life had been set aside.

Jubas Meyer had done the math, calculating how many corpses he and Shlomo had removed from the chambers each day, how many other pairs of Jews were being forced to do the same thing, how many trainloads had arrived to date.

The figures were staggering. Here, in this tiny camp, between ten and twelve thousand people were executed every day; on some days, the tally reached as high as fifteen thousand. So far, over half a million people had been exterminated. And there were rumors of other camps: one at Belzac, another at Sobibor, Perhaps others still.

There could be no doubt: the Nazis intended to kill every single Jew, to wipe them all off the face of the earth.

And here, at Treblinka, eighty kilometers northeast of Warsaw, Ivan the Terrible was the principal agent of that destruction. True, he had a partner named Nikolai who helped him operate the chambers, but it was Ivan who was sadistic beyond belief, raping women before gassing them, slicing their flesh — especially breasts — as they marched naked into the chambers, forcing Jews to copulate with corpses while he laughed a cold, throaty laugh and beat them with a lead pipe.

Ivan reveled in it all, his naturally nasty disposition only worsened by frequent drinking binges. As a Ukrainian, he’d likely started off a prisoner of war himself, but had volunteered for service as a
Wachmann
, and had demonstrated a remarkable technical facility, leading to him being put in charge of the gas chambers. He was now so trusted that the Germans often let him leave the camp. Jubas had once overheard Ivan bragging to Nikolai about the whore he frequented in the nearby town of Wolga Okralnik. “If you think the Jews scream loudly,” Ivan had said, “you should hear my Maria.”

A miracle happened.

Ivan and Nikolai pulled back the chamber doors, and—

—God, it was incredible—

—a little blond girl, perhaps twelve years old, barely pubescent, staggered naked out of the chamber, still alive.

Behind her, corpses began falling like dominoes.

But she was alive. The Jewish men and women had been packed in so tightly this time that their very bodies had formed a pocket of air for her, separated from the circulating carbon monoxide.

The girl, her eyes wide in terror, stood under the hot sun, gulping in oxygen. And when she at last had the breath to do so, she screamed, “
Ma-me! Ma-me!”

But her mother was among the dead.

Jubas Meyer and Shlomo Malamud set about removing the corpses, batting their arms to dispel the flies, breathing shallowly to avoid the smell. Ivan swaggered over to the girl, a whip in his hand. Jubas shot a reproachful glance at him. The Ukrainian must have seen that. He forgot the girl for a moment and came over to Jubas, lashing him repeatedly.

Jubas bit his own tongue until he tasted salty blood; he knew that screams would just prolong the torture.

When Ivan had had his fill, he stepped back, and looked at Jubas, hunched over in pain. “
Davay yebatsa!”
shouted.

Even the little girl knew those obscene words. She started to back away, but Ivan moved toward her, grabbing her naked shoulder roughly and pushing her to the ground.

“
Davay yebatsa!
” shouted Ivan at Jubas. He dragged the girl across the ground to where he’d left his rifle, leaning against the Machinehaus wall.

He aimed the weapon at Jubas. “
Davay yebatsa!
”

Jubas closed his eyes.

It was horrible news, devastating news.

The pace of the executions was slacking off.

It didn’t mean the Germans were changing their minds.

It didn’t mean they were giving up their insane plot.

It meant they were running out of Jews to kill.

Soon the camp would be of no further use. When they’d started, the Germans had ordered the dead buried. But recently they’d been using earthmoving equipment to exhume the bodies and cremate them. Human ash whirled constantly through the air now; the acrid smell of burning flesh stung the nostrils. The Nazis wanted no proof to exist of what had happened here.

And they’d also want no witnesses. Soon the corpse bearers themselves would be ordered into the gas chambers.

“We’ve got to escape,” said Jubas Meyer. “We’ve got to get out of here.”

Shlomo looked at his friend. “They’ll kill us if we try.”

“They’ll kill us anyway.”

The revolt was planned in whispers, one man passing word to the next.

Monday, August 2, 1943, would be the day. Not everyone would escape; they knew that. But some would… surely
some
would. They would carry word of what had happened here to the world.

The sun burned down fiercely, as if God Himself were helping the Nazis incinerate bodies. But of course God would not do such a thing; the heat turned to an advantage as the deputy camp commander took a group of Ukrainian guards for a cooling swim in the river Bug.

The Jews in the lower camp — the part where prisoners were unloaded and prepared — had gathered some makeshift weapons. One had filled large cans with gasoline. Another had stolen some wire cutters. A third had managed to hide an ax among garbage he’d been ordered to remove.

Even some guns had been captured.

A few had long ago hidden gold or money in holes in trees, or buried it in secret spots. Just as the bodies had been exhumed, so now were these treasures.

Everything was set to begin at 4:30 in the afternoon. Tensions were high; everyone was on edge. And then, at just before 4:00—

“Boy!” shouted Kuttner, a fat SS man.

The child, perhaps eleven years old, stopped dead in his tracks. He was shaking from head to toe. The SS officer moved closer, a riding crop in his hand. “Boy!” he said again. “What have you got in your pockets?”

Jubas Meyer and Shlomo Malamud were five meters away, carrying an exhumed corpse to the cremation site. They stopped to watch the scene unfold. The pockets on the youngster’s filthy and tattered overalls were bulging slightly.

The boy said nothing. His eyes were wide and his lips peeled back in fear, showing decaying teeth. Despite the pounding heat, he was shaking as if it were below zero. The guard stepped up to him and slapped the boy’s thigh with the riding crop. The unmistakable jangle of coins was heard. The German narrowed his eyes. “Empty your pockets, Jew.”

The boy half turned to face the man. His teeth were chattering. He tried to reach into his pocket, but his hand was shaking so badly he couldn’t get it into the pocket’s mouth. Kuttner whipped the boy’s shoulder with his crop, the sound startling birds into flight, their calls counterpointing the child’s scream. Kuttner then reached his own fat hand into the pocket and pulled out several German coins. He reached in a second time. The pocket was apparently empty now, but Jubas could see the German fondling the boy’s genitals through the fabric. “Where did you get the money?”

The boy shook his head, but pointed past the camouflage of trees and fencing to the upper camp, where the gas chambers and ovens were hidden from view.

The guard grabbed the youngster’s shoulder roughly. “Come with me, boy. Stangl will deal with you.”

The child wasn’t the only one with something concealed on his person.

Jubas Meyer had been entrusted with one of the six stolen pistols. If the boy were taken to commander Fratiz Stangl, he’d doubtless reveal the plans for the revolt, now only thirty minutes from its planned start.

Meyer couldn’t allow that to happen. He pulled the gun from the folds of his own overalls, took a bead on the fat German, and—

—it was like ejaculation, the release, the moment, the payback—

—squeezed the trigger, and saw the German’s eyes go wide, saw his mouth go round, saw his fat, ugly, hateful form slump to the ground.

The signal for the beginning of the revolt was to have been a grenade detonation, but Meyer’s gunshot startled everyone into action. Cries of “
Now
!” went up across the lower camp. The canisters of gas were set ablaze. There were 850 Jews in the camp that day; they all ran for the barbed-wire fences. Some brought blankets, throwing them over the cruel knots of metal; others had wire cutters and furiously snipped through the lines. Those with guns shot as many guards as they could. Fire and smoke were everywhere. The guards who had gone swimming quickly returned and mounted horses or clambered aboard armored cars. Three hundred and fifty Jews made it over the fences and into the surrounding forest.

Most were rounded up easily and shot dead, the echoes of overlapping gun reports and the cries of birds and wildlife the last sounds they ever heard.

Still, some did make good their escape. They ran out into the woods, and kept running for their lives. Jubas Meyer was among them. Shlomo Malamud got out, too, and began a lifelong search for his brother Saul.

And others Jubas had known or heard of made it to safety as well: Eliahu Rosenberg and Pinhas Epstein; Casimir Landowski and Zalmon Chudzik.

And David Solomon, too.

But they, and perhaps forty-five others, were all that survived Treblinka.