Armageddon_ A Novel of Berlin - Leon Uris [36]
A few hundred yards past the cottages they broke into an immense clearing in what must have been dead center of the forest. A high, solid gate blocked them. It was flanked by two empty guard boxes, an archway over the gate. This, too, had a sign. It read: SCHWABENWALD CONCENTRATION CAMP. Below it were words of wisdom in Gothic print declaring that all who came here and performed honest labor would redeem their sins.
Once inside this outer gate they were on a street of administrative buildings and barracks of the SS Death’s Head Units. Captain Armour halted before the commandant’s building.
From the moment they had entered Schwabenwald Forest Sean and the others had been aware of a bad odor. They had smelled it before in places where corpses were left to rot. As they drove through the forest it persisted and strengthened. Now it was overwhelming.
From the terrible silence there was little doubt but that they had come to a place of awesome catastrophe. Colonel Dundee stood in the middle of a dozen of his officers and men. With not a single word of greeting he got into his jeep and led Sean’s party down the street to a place where a ten-foot wall of barbed wire ran off in either direction for half a mile. Beyond this wall was a path six feet wide and an inner wall of barbed wire. Conductors on the poles indicated it was electrified. At precisely every thirty yards stood a wooden guard tower with searchlights and machine guns.
They drove into the heart of Schwabenwald.
When the inspection was done they sat about limp and drained and Sean felt himself in the same nightmare as after Tim’s death. How could the human race have come to this?
Colonel Dundee was a man who charted death. Dr. Grimwood had lived with the pained. Blessing had known blood. They were all stunned and silent.
Dante Arosa and Bolinski retched outside the office; young O’Toole cried.
Maurice Duquesne, who had mingled sweat with the Germans, who was arrogant about his sophistication, broke the agonizing silence. “How in the name of God could they have done this!”
“Let us just hope,” Dundee said unevenly, “that this Commandant Klaus Stoll was a maniac. Let’s just hope to God there are no more places like this.”
“There couldn’t be! God almighty, there couldn’t be!”
And then the horrible silence fell on them again.
My brothers died for this! What fools ever claimed they knew the Germans! Make the sick well, General Hansen? Sure! Come have a look.
Geoffrey Grimwood rediscovered life first. “We must get on with the job,” he said. “I’ll need all the help I can get. Can you assign me some of your doctors and medics?”
Dundee said he could.
“I’ll have to ask for supplies and advice. I don’t know if anyone knows much about this. Is there any idea how many there are alive in there?”
“Maybe three or four thousand,” Captain Armour said.
“We’ll need a very large place to hold them.”
“How about the castle?”
“No. I’d best have them moved into Rombaden. We’ve got to utilize the facilities of the hospital and Medical College ...”
Sean heard the conversation only in blurs.
“We’d best sort them out and get the dead buried at once. Sean, do you have any objection to putting those captured SS brutes to work on the burial detail? I say, Sean ... we’ve got to bury the dead.”
“The dead will not be buried!” Sean cried.
“Come now, old man. We are all shaken up over this thing. They must be buried at once.”
“No! They will not be buried. Not until every goddamned son of a bitch in Rombaden walks over every inch of this camp.”
“It will take a lot of doing to force them,” Dundee said.
“No one ... no one will be issued a food-ration card until he goes through this camp.”
“It’s six miles to Rombaden. They’ve got a lot of old people and kids. You’re not going to make the kids look at this,” Dundee said.
“Like hell I’m not. They’ll walk like they made the slaves walk every day and every night