Read Online Skeletons at the Feast by Chris Bohjalian - Free Book Online

them down the street, past the houses with the windows shuttered--the local people always closed their curtains and windows--and you'd hear, Farewell, Edyta. Or, Good-bye, Roza. Or, Zofia, look after my cat--please!
    Occasionally, when you were waiting for the last of the Jews to be rounded up, you'd make the ones you had perform--badly, of course--circus stunts. A human pyramid. Walking the clothesline you'd string a few feet off the ground between half-tracks. Basic gymnastics. These little stunts were most fun if you happened to have the rabbi among the lot.
    And when the square was completely filled and the Jews were hot and thirsty and weak, then you herded them to a field outside of the town--often at the edge of the very woods where the Judenjagd had commenced. There the men would dig the graves. Sometimes, this talkative, stocky soldier named Joachim continued, taking another long swallow from the bottle of vodka he had commandeered--he was drunk, Uri thought, because no one would tell a person they had done such things if they were sober--you had them strip first so they were stark naked when they started to dig. Then, when the hole was roughly the size of the foundation for a modest house, you would order them to toss their shovels from the pit and lie facedown in the muck.
    And they would, they would, Joachim went on, his voice incredulous. They would, they all would, even though they knew they were about to be shot.
    And then any of the men who hadn't been ordered to strip and dig would be told to undress and walk into the grave, and they would, too! Occasionally, they'd be told to lie on top of the corpses below them. Facedown. And they walked just like sheep. The women were a little more resistant, especially when they had babes in their arms or toddlers squealing at their shins. They might beg for the lives of their children. But, eventually, they'd go, too.
    It wasn't easy work, he said, even though the Jews were never armed. And it was never pleasant. The locals hated the clatter of the machine guns so much that the women would blast the volume on their radios--nothing but static most of the time--so their children wouldn't have to hear the sound of their neighbors being executed. One time, Joachim continued, he had to walk into the pit himself with--dear God--the Ukrainian volunteers (absolute pigs, he said) and shoot the Jews whose bodies were continuing to twitch, and he discovered that he was ankle deep in their blood. There was so much blood, the bodies were actually starting to float.
    And so Uri asked him--and he phrased the sentence in a very few words--You did this yourself? They were sitting alone in the kitchen of a house on the outskirts of Lukow on a beautiful autumn evening in September, because their company commander was in the village itself, meeting with their major about the withdrawal that was about to begin from this corner of Poland. Not a retreat, exactly, because they weren't turning and running as fast as they could this time. Ostensibly, they were merely pulling back to a more defensible position.
    Still, this fellow soldier named Joachim had grabbed the vodka because he knew--they all knew--that eventually they would run out of more defensible positions and that maniac with the mustache in Berlin would tell them to stand and fight where they were. When Uri had first approached him, he had hoped to discover something more about the Jews shipped east from Schweinfurt because of the man's history with the Einsatzgruppen and the police battalions, and because he, too, was a Bavarian from the neighboring city of Wurzburg. Uri had already learned that many of the group had indeed gone to Auschwitz, but some veterans from the First World War and their families had been diverted elsewhere. Some to Theresienstadt in the west, and some to Cheimno in the east. Ostensibly, these other destinations were survivable. At least that was what people said. If his family had gone to Auschwitz, then