Arrival at the Camp

Back straight, boots polished to a gloss, he stood at the arrival gate and assessed the newest deposit of inmates brought by the morning train. It was so quiet he could hear their teeth chattering, their joints, robbed of their cartilage by malnutrition, creaking aloud with staccato spasms of muscle.

There were neither dwarves nor twins in this lot, and the doctor exhaled a long, exasperated plume of breath. As punctuation to this, he smacked his black leather gloves against the side of his woolen coat, which traced his slender frame in one long, meticulous line. At the noise, a small girl, who had stood in front, flinched and shrunk back among the legs, arms, and waists of the crowd. The officer stopped his contemplative pace and looked directly at her. He got down on his haunches and asked her, in an unthreatening and fatherly tone, to come to him.

How quickly the crowd offered her up, dragging her out and pushing her forward. Was she no one’s child here? No, she was their dupe, a decoy, a distraction they only too readily presented, whether out of self preservation or to avoid incensing the man who had been smoldering with unspoken menace as he inspected them.

But here he was now, down on one knee, touching the girl’s face, which was still plump with baby fat not yet dissolved by starvation. From the ghetto then, duckling?, he asked. She did not respond. No mother with you? The girl shook her head, unsmiling. Her hair, hanging in ragged ringlets, trembled in time with each movement.

A dozen or so widows, whose children were already dead but unburied, began to consider their mistake. One sobbed aloud, and caught herself. He looked up, smiling, and then put a hand on the child’s fat cheek. Such a pretty child, he said. The crowd remained silent, all of them had ceased breathing, waiting to see, but afraid to look. He reached into his pocket, and the crowd’s cringe, their collective recoil, was almost audible. One woman shielded her eyes. She could not help it.

What the officer produced was a sweet, wrapped confection that looked pink inside its wrapper. Still, the crowd did not exhale until he patted the girl on the head and sent her back into the fold with her treasure.

Perhaps... perhaps, the crowd thought, this was not what we imagined. Amid the frozen valley, the ground cracked, snow-covered, and crystalline, inside towering fences crowned with barbed wire, they thought they might have escaped the horrible ignominy of their relations. But we heard so much, so many bad things, and yet this... Their expressions seemed to melt, their clenched jaws relaxed, their muscles loosened. They all exhaled in one communal breath.

Who else? Who else hungers here? The officer called aloud. He was rummaging in his pocket once more.

A gray-haired crone pushed towards the front and said, “I do, sir. I do!”

The officer laughed good-naturedly, still rummaging in his woolen coat pocket. I thought so, he said. He then nodded to a soldier heading the rifle squad on his left, and, with a single, explosive blast, the old woman lay dead in the snow.

Anyone else?, shouted the officer again in the resonating stillness that followed. The calls of startled crows followed him with a crass echo of his words.

And then, when this died down, a saturated silence moved outward to absorb every noise in the valley.