When they opened the door to set out Eli’s body on the cold muddy ground, the breath of frigid wintry air felt like the snap of a wet towel in his face. The odors of the concentration camp struck him, as did the briskness of the air. New snow had melted around the reactor building, dotting the ground with puddles trying to freeze.
Daniel and Saul, his helper, set the body down where other prisoners would come to retrieve him. The Nazi guards refused to go near the reactor building. Saul turned and shuffled back inside to the humid warmth. Daniel caught one last breath of the fresh air, then pulled the enormous doors shut behind him with a clatter on their metal tracks.
Inside, the cavernous reactor building felt unbearably hot and stifling. Steam filled every breath. The other prisoners remained silent, and the reactor itself made only humming and hissing noises from the coolant water being pumped through its pipes into the core. No mechanical sounds could be heard—the reactor worked by magic, it seemed. None of them knew what the thing did or what it was for.
They knew only that if they worked inside there for a week, they would earn their freedom. They had seen others walk out, carrying a few possessions and a new coat. Most of them did not survive their term of labor—but it was worth the risk. Any of them would have said so.
No one could understand what kind of sickness struck them down, why their bodies fell apart simply from being in the same room with the reactor. Occasionally, the Dachau doctors would remove one of the workers for inspection and analysis, and those workers never came back.
Daniel Waldstein kept ignorant of science. He had been a jeweler, a fine jeweler with his own shop in Berlin. He had not harmed anyone; he had simply made his jewelry, rings, pendants. Some of the finer pieces he wore himself—or had worn. Everything had been stripped from him on the day he arrived at Dachau.
He thought of those days sitting in the dimness of his shop, with light shining through the windows that he cleaned regularly. He could smell the precious metal as he worked on it; he could feel the smooth craftwork on his strong but delicate fingers—fingers that had long since been smashed and dulled by hard work here in the camp. Daniel remembered talking to his customers, Germans and Jews alike. He thought about going home at the end of the day and relaxing in his apartment, perhaps lighting the candle for a dinner with his wife Emmi.
They had shot Emmi within the first month here.
Now Daniel felt only a tiny candle of life burning in him, focusing existence on merely carrying his soul from one second to the next. He could not give up. He could not surrender. He had endured this, and it could not possibly get worse.
Already gaunt and nearly starved, half dead from exposure to the cold autumn and approaching winter, Daniel had grown much worse in the few days he had worked in the reactor building. In another day or two it would be his turn with the four others to disassemble the reactor, wearing scarred and burnt leather gloves to pull away the hot blocks of graphite, moving them aside to withdraw the glowing warm tubes of uranium, preparing them for shipment somewhere else. It was the day after disassembly that workers most often succumbed.
Daniel remembered his rush of excitement when the camp officials had picked his name for the duty. Tears had streaked his cheeks; he had fallen to his knees with gratitude toward the guard who had told him of his opportunity.
Now he knew he could not survive the length of his term of service, though only a few days remained. He could not keep his meals down. Sores covered his skin. Diarrhea had exhausted him, torn him apart. Retching, trembling, sweating, he could not last much longer. He would never leave Dachau alive.
Daniel had always feared he would die here. Somehow he had known it in the back of his mind. But the desperate need to survive refused to let him believe, though now it had become even worse: not only was he going to die, but he was going to die without knowing the reason, without knowing what this infernal device was for, how the Nazis would use it… to win the war? To destroy the world?
Saul looked at him before returning to his work, as if knowing what Daniel was thinking. Saul kept his voice low and bleak. “We are all dead men here. How many more days before they carry us out? Before you carry me, or I carry you?”
Daniel saw a flash of anger behind Saul’s eyes. The anger startled him, and he realized that his own anger had slept for too long. While he remained passive, had his own dignity been trampled beyond the hope of recovery? Why had he let them do everything to him? Was it just to survive? If survival cost that much, was it worth living?
Daniel looked at his hands, blackened from the carbon bricks and the ever-present graphite dust. These were the hands that had just carried a man, a human being, out into the mud, where he would be thrown into a trench and buried with the others.
Daniel took a step closer to Saul. He kept his voice low, as if afraid someone might hear him, though none of the Nazis would dare enter such a dangerous place. “You see what they are doing to us. Why are we helping them?” Saul’s face hung slack, as if the brief flash of anger had been all the emotion remaining within him. “We don’t even know what this does.”
Daniel remained silent, and then stared into Saul’s eyes. They were bloodshot, with dark pupils that looked blasted and shrunken from everything the other prisoner had seen and done.
“But I bet we could break it.”
Saul blinked and took a step backward. He looked down at his own hands, at the tattooed number on the inside of his forearm. “We don’t know how it works. It has no mechanical parts. I used to build and fix machines. This is not a machine.” It seemed an empty objection. “We could knock down the pile?”
Daniel shook his head. “No, they would shoot us and have someone else rebuild it in a day. We must cause more damage than that.”
He jerked a bony shoulder to indicate the cooling pipes where water rushed through the reactor, bursting into steam and pouring out the smokestacks above. Day after day, when not assigned to other work details, Daniel had watched the smokestacks, looked at the white steam, wondering what it was like inside the reactor building. He hoped and prayed that his name would be picked because that would give him a slim but definite possibility that he could escape this place and go back to his old world, to his jeweler’s shop, back to an imaginary life with Emmi.
He knew that would never happen. Emmi was gone. His shop was smashed, the windows broken out during the one frenzied night called Kristallnacht. He could not go back, but he could get out of here. Or so Daniel had thought. Now he knew otherwise.
“Saul, we cannot let it continue. Who knows what they are going to use this for? If we smash the cooling pipes, that is the only thing that could perhaps cause enough damage to stall them a little while. They will kill us for it, but we are dead anyway.”
Saul now looked as if he had second thoughts. “I do not want to die to serve no purpose. What if we do no good?”
“Does it not serve a purpose just to do something, just to strike a blow against them?”
Saul pondered this a moment. The other prisoners continued their aimless jobs, but some had stopped to listen.
“Yes,” Saul said. “It does.”
Daniel and Saul spoke to the other workers in the reactor detail. All agreed, except one man who hung so close to death he could barely keep himself moving.
“I heard that other Dachau prisoners sabotaged the construction work on showers that were to be used to gas Jews,” Daniel said. “We will do the same to this project, whatever it is. The Nazis will have no success from our labors.”