As he listened, Carrick waited for Reuven Weissberg’s voice to break, but it did not. He was told the story in a monotone. He wondered if passion, at this place, would have been disrespectful to those who had been herded off that platform.
He was not a Jew, and Carrick struggled to understand the enormity of the deaths of a quarter of a million people. They went down a path of raked sand, walked between new-planted pine trees, and it had been named the ‘Road to Heaven’. The system of killing worked, the quiet voice in his ear told him, because the victims in the last minutes of their lives had been ‘docile’ and had gone ‘like sheep’ where he now trod. There were stones laid between the new pines on to which had been bolted inscriptions: ‘In memory of my mother [a name], my father [a name], my grandmother [a name], my grandfather [a name], my grandmother [a name], my grandfather [a name]. May your souls be bound up in the bound of life.’ They came to a clearing, had come past a block of harsh stone, square and dominating, and a statue on a plinth of a twice-man-sized figure that held a child against a hip. It was ravaged by weather, and the sharpness of the sculptor’s chisel was blunted. In the clearing a huge circular shape, a mound, was covered with fine white chippings. The shape was where the ashes of a quarter of a million souls had been gathered, heaped.
Birds sang. The wind rippled the tops of the pines and rustled the birch leaves on the forest floor.
There were no fences, no barracks huts. The killing was described to him, but the chambers into which the gas had been powered were gone and no sign of them remained. He closed his eyes as the story was told of the deaths, of the engine’s rumble, of the geese squawking, of the final gasped notes of the anthem sung behind the sealed doors. After the silence and the switching off of the engine, he saw the doors of the chambers opened by emaciated worker ants who served to live another day, and the carrying away of the rigid bodies. And saw, also, a line of women at benches sorting the discarded clothes and suitcases of those who had come in ignorance or in terrified submission on the trains to Sobibor.
Carrick vomited. There was little food in his stomach but he retched bile and the cough scraped his throat. He saw the woman at the bench, Reuven Weissberg’s grandmother, and she handled clothes still warm from their contact with those now dead. The bile gleamed at his feet. When he was finished, when there was nothing left in his stomach to bring back, he felt ashamed of his weakness, and kicked dead leaves over the mess.
Here — at this camp alone, at Sobibor — there had been a revolt and a break-out. At no other camp, he was told, had that happened. Trees grew where the fences had been, where the mines had been spread and where the compound for the work-prisoners was sited. The watchtowers had long been taken down. He listened to the soft murmur of the wind in the trees, and heard the cheerfulness of the songbirds. He heard the name of Pechersky, the Russian officer, the Jew who was a leader, and in Carrick’s ears was the hammer of machine-guns, the rippling blast of detonated mines, the panic and screaming of those who ran towards the trees. Above everything, in his closed eyes and deafened ears, was the slowly summoned sight and sound of abject cruelty.
He thought that in his life nothing had prepared him for this place, and for the quiet telling of the story of those who had charged the wire. And climbed it. And gone through the mines to reach the trees. He thought he walked in a place of history. Words jumbled in his mind. They were courage and desperation and fear and hunger and exhaustion. It was made a place of history because here people had fought back against impossible odds. He was told then of more deceit, betrayal and a greater deception.
They were in the trees and the monuments of the camp, what scraps remained of it, were behind them. Carrick thought they followed a cotton thread laid long before as Reuven Weissberg recited without hesitation, as if it had often been told him.
We had spent the night in the forest. Always Samuel held my hand. He gripped it. I would have wanted, in that darkness, to lie down. I craved sleep. I had no strength, we had no food — I only realized when night came that what little food I had had from the morning had been in my coat pocket, which had ripped when we went over the wire. I had lost the food.
He would not permit me to lie down, to sleep. He kept moving, tugging me along. He was searching for Pechersky, for the Russian group of which he was a part. It could have been four or five hours that we had walked, stumbled, among the trees in the darkness and then we saw, both of us, that we had circled the camp and were back, almost, where we had started from. I could have wept, but he did not, so I stopped the tears. All of that strength had been wasted, but we began again.
I had told Samuel that I came from the town of Wlodawa, to the north, a few kilometres, but also confessed to him that I had never before been in this forest and had no knowledge of it. I could not help or guide him.
Sometimes we heard shots in the night, and then we would veer away. Twice we heard the voices of Germans and Ukrainians. We found people who were wounded; they had injuries from the mines or the machine-guns in the watchtowers. They had crawled on their stomachs into the trees. We came upon a man who had no leg, and another who was blinded by shrapnel. Both begged that we stop and help them — but we moved on. They cursed us. We heard their curses, growing fainter, as we left them. We were the living, and were whole, and it did not seem necessary to stay with them and help. What help could we have given them? The camp had taught us to help only ourselves.
Dawn came. Rain fell in the forest that early morning. Now we saw more who had achieved the break-out. Now, also, we saw through the upper branches of the trees that a small aircraft circled the forest and it was low enough for us to read the markings on the wings. Now shots came more often. The dawn light, of course, was from the east. To the east was the Bug river. It seemed right, the solution, to go east in the trees if we were to find Pechersky and Samuel’s friends. Each group we came upon — three or thirteen, and one of thirty persons — recognized Samuel and his Russian uniform, begged him to lead them, and each time he held my hand firmer and broke clear. He said to me that the bigger the group, the greater the danger of the Germans finding us. I didn’t argue. There were some we met in the forest whom I had known for weeks, even months — they had shown kindness to me, had shared with me, had comforted me, but I didn’t return, then, the kindness, the comfort. We were animals. We loved only our own lives.
I think we must have been near to the river, perhaps a kilometre from it, when we found the group led by Pechersky. With him and his Russians there were forty others, mostly Jews from Poland. Pechersky was the leader, it was obvious. There was a confusion of voices until he spoke. Then there was silence as he was listened to.
The word from Pechersky was that all the bridges over the Bug were guarded by detachments of Field Police, that more Germans were now sweeping through the forest, that units on horseback had arrived to make the search more efficient.
Most of the day we stayed in that place. More fugitives had come. At the sight of Pechersky their faces, every one, lost the lines of fear and were lit again with hope. Pechersky was the saviour. During the day, the group would have grown to about seventy. All of us knew we owed our lives to him.