NEUMANN watched the car disappear around a bend in the road. After a few moments, even the sound of its engine receded to nothing. Neumann pushed at the papers in the brazier with the brass poker he’d brought out from the dining room – they curled and crackled as the flames consumed them. The heat was melting the snow, revealing dead wet grass. It was a depressing task, burning the papers, and futile, surely. It was impossible to cover up what had been done. What other explanation could there be for the missing people, the empty houses and deserted ghettoes than that they had been murdered by men like him?
At least the auxiliaries were off his hands. He was glad he no longer had any responsibility for them. Let the Commandant worry about them.
He poked at the fire once again and, satisfied, left the flames to do their work. He climbed the steps to the hut with heavy feet. Fear was tiring. Burying bodies was tiring. Burning papers, it turned out, was tiring as well.
Inside the hut, the only sound was the slow tick of the grandfather clock in the entrance hall – that and the creak of the floorboards underneath his weight. The emptiness was profound. He parted still air when he moved.
He remembered the times when the hut had been busy and the officers – the overseers and specialists necessary to their enterprise – had sat in these chairs and stood in these rooms. They’d all had different roles. The architects and engineers who’d overseen the construction of the buildings, the accountants who’d collected the loot and balanced the budgets, the medical men who had chosen who could work and who should die, the transport officers who’d scheduled the trains and trucks that had brought people and materials to that small town further down the river where they’d built the camp. And then arranged to have the clothes, shoes, money, suitcases, spectacles and even the very hair from the heads of the murdered taken away in their turn.
It had been a production line. Perhaps the technical nature of many of their tasks had allowed those overseeing its smooth running to ignore the horror of it. Each role was insignificant in itself yet each was vital to the whole. The men who counted the foreign currency were just as guilty as the men who operated the gas chambers. And so, for that matter, was he.
He could argue, perhaps, that he was not as guilty as others. But, when it came to the crimes that had been committed, did being less guilty make a difference? He didn’t think it would matter to the Russians. It didn’t matter to him. And anyway, all he had to do was remember the way his bayonet had scraped against the spine of the old man. For that alone, he deserved his fate.
Neumann crossed to the window, looking out at the snow-crusted buildings, the humped back of the bunker, the guard tower, the fence. He was close enough to mist the glass, obscuring some of his reflection. Dark, tired eyes returned his gaze. He looked older than he remembered.