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political
crime—except to the degree that these people regarded all crime as
political. She would be tried for smuggling. They had stopped her
at the checkpoint in the British Zone, had confiscated her
papers—in any case, those were forged—and had had her
strip-searched by a matron. She had been betrayed, of course. They
had found four hundred pounds worth of Russian rubles sewn into the
clothes around her waist. The trafficking in currency was a
profitable business, but dangerous. She was only a courier, of
course. She would have taken a small commission.
    The Russians were strict about their money.
They might decide to make an example of her. They might give her
five years.
    She would die if she had to stay in this
place for five years.
    No, she would not die. One does not die after
having learned that there were no limits to what one was prepared
to do to stay alive.
    . . . . .
    The Germans had hoisted her up into the back
of a half-empty truck, and she had curled up there under a pile of
empty sacking and listened as the truck lurched forward and started
bouncing along the dirt road that led out through the camp gates
and into the trees. She could see the trees through a narrow rent
in the canvas flap that closed off the back of the truck, but she
made no effort to discover where they were taking her. How would
she have known, anyway? One direction was the same as another, so
long as it was away from Chelmno.
    And before long she was too blinded by her
own tears to see at all. Relief and shame and a sickening fear of
death hardly left room in her chest for a breath of air. Already,
while she lay there, swaying back and forth as the truck stammered
along, the gas chambers were probably filling with carbon monoxide.
They had a big diesel engine that pumped the gas into four chambers
at a time, and sometimes it would start right away and sometimes
not. People could wait there, huddled together so tightly they
couldn’t even fall down, sometimes for an hour or two, waiting to
die.
    But she wasn’t going to die. Not today, not
yet.
    They drove on for two days, stopping to pull
off to the side of the road a few times every day to eat and rest.
They never drove at night—perhaps they were afraid to use their
headlights, afraid of becoming a target for the Allied bombers.
Perhaps they had some other reason. When they stopped, someone
would come, pick up the flap covering the back of the truck, and
give her something to eat. She was not allowed to come down from
the truck except to relieve herself, and then always under the eyes
of a guard, but what did she care? She wasn’t modest—one lost one’s
sense of shame very quickly at Chelmno—and the truck was world
enough for her. She would sit there, dangling her legs over the
edge of the bed, feeling the bright winter sun on her face,
listening to the scrape of the spoon against the tin dish as she
ate.
    She ate and ate during those two days; her
stomach was too shrunken to hold very much and a few times she
became sick. It didn’t matter. It was wonderful to have more to eat
than she could hold. What did she care how sick she made
herself?
    Finally, they arrived at Waldenburg.
    For the first several hours, the Germans
seemed to have forgotten her existence. She sat on the back of the
truck, watching them unload and wondering what was to become of
her. The problems of this world had narrowed themselves down to
just one: will I live today, or will they finally decide to kill
me? She looked around her, sick with dread.
    Because Waldenburg was another camp—she had
seen the barbed wire fences and the watchtowers as they drove up,
and although there didn’t seem to be any prisoners about, the
barracks and work sheds were clustered together on the other side
of a muddy ribbon of roadway.
    The camp was divided, like Chelmno. On one
side of the road there was grass and neat gravel walkways and
painted buildings, and on the other only mud and horror waiting to
be. Over there,