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hour, and the Sonderkommando will be hauling my corpse
around with hooks, looking for gold in my teeth and washing the
filth off my legs with a hose. But in order to be afraid one
needed some imaginative grasp, and suffering was a great killer of
the imagination. She could see herself dead, but the picture in her
brain seemed to be about nothing. She merely stumbled forward with
the others, dully aware that soon this would stop and something
else would begin.
    In the train, coming from Lodz, she had been
afraid. They had been packed tightly together in the darkness of
the cattle car, and she had huddled in her mother’s arms and wept
for fear. And when the doors had sprung open, and she had seen the
Germans with their machine guns lined up outside, she had been
afraid.
    “ Don’t worry,” her mother had said. “No one will hurt us.” And her father had stroked her hair.
After that day, she had never seen him again.
    It was a Saturday. The woman in front of her
in line turned around and smiled and whispered. “I hope they take
us today. It will be a blessing to die on the Sabbath.” The woman
looked in her sixties but probably wasn’t more than thirty-five.
The dirt was etched deep into the lines of her face and her teeth
were discolored and broken. She looked half mad.
    She’s going mad, Esther thought to
herself. She’s crazed with the fear of death. She put her
hand on the woman’s arm and murmured, “It’s all right—they won’t
hurt us.”
    And then the line had shuddered to a stop.
That meant that the pens were full and they would have to wait in
the freezing, ankle-deep mud. Here and there one could hear
sobbing, quiet and furtive, as if even grief here had to be
shabby.
    And while the women waited to die, a cluster
of German officers had walked around the corner of the building.
She heard their conversation—loud, confident voices such as no one
used at Chelmno. They seemed different creatures, really like a
separate race. Not human because not suffering.
    Their uniforms stood out in the drab,
colorless landscape. They were real and everything else—this camp,
this gray mud, these doomed women—were hardly as substantial as
smoke. For a moment they stopped. Someone was speaking. Here and
there a few of them lit cigarettes. That moment seemed to last
forever.
    One of them was looking at her. He was short
and fat, and the face above his stiff military collar was a mass of
creased flesh, pink as the sun. His eyes were lost in the shadow of
his cap bill.
    Smile at him , she told herself. What have you got to lose? Grasp any chance that offers itself.
To live is a moral duty. Smile.
    Finally he raised his arm and pointed to her.
His lips moved. He turned away and walked on.
    I will die, it seems , she thought. Why should I have thought it could be otherwise? What could
anyone want of me now?
    The next thing she knew, two soldiers in
light green uniforms had taken her by the arms and were dragging
her out of the line.
    “She stinks.” one of them said.
    “They all stink,” the other one answered.
    And for the first time, really, Esther was
seized with the terrible dread of death.
    . . . . .
    Today was her sentencing day. She lay in her
bed on the lowest tier of the bunk, listening to the boards over
her head creaking as the woman above moved in her sleep, wondering
what would happen. Vienna was all around them—sometimes, in the
exercise yard, she could hear the noise from the traffic
outside—but she was quite sure she would never return to Vienna.
This prison was like a separate world. There was a stone wall all
the way around the building, she had seen it for the first and last
time the day she had been brought here. The Russians had erected
another inside it, perhaps twenty feet higher, so that even from
the windows on the third floor, perhaps even from the roof, it was
impossible to see outside to the street. They meant one to forget
there was anywhere else.
    She was not guilty of a