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past the gallows in strict military formation, five abreast.
    Afterwards, when ‘The Rabbi’ kindled a memorial candle in the heart of our barrack, I heard him murmur: ‘ Bitterly weeps the night, her cheeks wet with tears .’

    Â 
    Â  Days of Reckoning  
    Spring. As if in a fairytale, a green pelerine was draped overnight across the shoulders of the stony mountains around us, and I wondered whether it was because these giants, conscripted by our enemy, now understood that it was time to assume a disguise. Look, I said to myself, how their pure snow-white caps stand like numb apostles concealing secret crimes. Their indifference struck me as malevolent, and un-pardonable.
    At the beginning of May, Ebensee, which had been built to house three thousand inmates, contained ten times that number. Haggard, worn-out, half-demented men, driven like herds of cattle across the land of Cain, arrived here daily. I asked one of them, a former citizen of my city of the waterless river, how long he had been on the road and from which camp he had come; perhaps he knew somebody I had once known. He looked at me with suspicion. ‘Silly questions,’ he said, ‘deserve silly answers, and idle curiosity brings men to grief.’
    By the end of April, one loaf of bread was being given each evening to six working men — or to nine, in the caseof those whose lives were clearly ebbing away. Hunger took scores of prisoners every day. One evening, in Block 26, the body of a young Hungarian Jew was found with the buttocks sliced away.
    When news of Hitler’s death reached the camp, Raymond remarked with grim satisfaction, ‘The monster died like a rat in a dark hole, as I predicted.’ Of course we rejoiced at his demise, but with a sense of sombreness. Levity had no place in the realm of tragedy, though perhaps we had simply forgotten how to celebrate.
    The Bouncer took flight before dawn broke, leaving an indecisive Wehrmacht detachment in charge. At the next roll-call our new chief custodian told us that a ferocious air-battle over the camp was imminent. ‘Men!’ he shouted passionately. ‘Avoid unnecessary casualties, save yourselves in our underground factories!’ But we had been tipped off. During the long night before he absconded, the Bouncer had wired the whole underground complex with dynamite. His last wish had been to blow us to smithereens and bury us there. A resounding ‘ NO! ’ rose from thirty thousand parched throats; it sent what was left of camp authority scurrying off like frightened mice.
    Over the next few days our fate hung in the balance.

    How bright was the morning of 8 May 1945. How peacefully the azure sky hung over our shaven heads. An early zephyr ruffled the resigned forest that had held us captive, and although we knew it was all over, nevertheless the years of pain and disenchantment, of hopes raised and repeatedly dashed, had taught us to hold our breath.
    The whole camp emerged into the main assembly area, where we had previously been counted and recounted daily. Then the mass of men suddenly parted and drifted and regrouped and rearranged itself, forming into clusters of separate nationalities: Frenchmen, Dutchmen, Greeks, Spaniards, Italians and Poles. Out of nowhere, various national flags appeared. Naturally, we Polish Jews wanted to stand beneath the proud flutter of the red-and-white, but they pushed us away. ‘Shove off, Jew,’ they said, ‘if you know what’s good for you!’
    So we, a few dozen of us, stood beside no flag, with no anthem to sing; we, the pariahs of Ebensee who did not belong. Although my generation of Jews was very much at home with Polish history, language and literature — Å» eromski, Słowacki, Mickiewicz, Sienkiewicz and Orzeszkowa were deeply embedded in our hearts – and though there were surely those among us who had proved, through the war years, to be far better Polish patriots