“Move!” The SS soldier pushed Irena forward with the butt of his rifle as thunder rumbled in the distance. “Everyone into the town square! Move!”
Irena had gone to the farmer’s market in the alleyways off the square to buy vegetables and a roasting chicken. The rain had just started as she left the villa, turning the dirt road to mud by the time she’d reached the square. Then she heard the familiar sounds of trucks, their rear gates crashing open, hobnails on cobblestones, dogs barking. SS soldiers, wet in their great coats, jogged down the alleyway, not clearing the streets this time, but herding children, women, and old men from the marketplace back toward the square.
“What’s this all about?” Irena demanded.
“You’ll see soon enough, Fräulein,” answered the SS sergeant, his helmet wet and shiny in the rain. “Keep moving!”
“But I’m Major Rugemer’s housekeeper!” she said indignantly. “Here! You can see my work permit.” She held out the printed form with Rugemer’s signature at the bottom, careful not to let it get wet in the rain.
“Keep it,” he said, pushing her and the others forward. “No exceptions! Now move! All of you! Into the square!”
Irena had entered the market skirting along the dirt lane from the villa past the woods, past the mound where she’d seen the open pit devouring corpses. The rains had come hard and early that year, stripping leaves off the birch and maple trees, now shiny and black in the rain, muddying the road, slicking the cobblestones in the square. Her leather-soled shoes slipped as the soldier pushed her. Irena felt her feet go out from under her as she tumbled to the cobblestoned street. The arms of strangers lifted her up. Her knee was bleeding, cut through the stocking. She steadied herself, looked up, and saw the red banners hanging from the roof of the City Hall. Blood red, and in their centers, black swastikas encircled in white, they flanked a delicate balcony.
Then Irena saw the gallows.
They were freshly built of green wood; a platform with three posts supporting a crossbeam no more than ten feet high, but just high enough from which to hang the two families now standing on the low wooden benches beneath. Nooses had already been tightly cinched around their necks, looped onto hooks screwed into the beam, like butcher’s hooks in a slaughterhouse.
On one bench stood a man and woman on either side of their two children: a boy of five and a girl perhaps three years older. Their hands were tied behind their backs, their feet bound together. Cardboard signs hand-lettered, hung about their necks, inscribed with one word: “Zhyd.” Jew.
A second doomed family perching on the low wooden bench next to theirs had two daughters, and their signs read “Milosnik Zydow.” Jew Lover.
Sturbahnfuhrer Rokita sat in an open command car parked in front of the scaffold. An SS private held an umbrella above him, shielding him from the rain.
“Attention!” Rokita said into a microphone, once all those in the alleyways were herded into the square. “You have been brought here today to witness punishment.”
Irena saw that the boy with the “Jew” sign around his neck was shivering in the rain. It slicked his hair to the sides of his face, lips blue trembling in the wet cold. The boy’s mother was saying something to him. She appeared calm, all her attention focused on her children. What could she be saying to comfort them?
Irena, knees buckling, felt bile in her stomach rising, choking her, as two SS soldiers mounted the scaffold. One was a huge man, the other of average size. They slung their rifles across their shoulders, freeing their hands.
“Europe is going to be Jew-free!” said Rokita, his voice booming through the loudspeakers set up in the square. He raised his hand high. His voice echoed against the yellow- and cream-colored buildings of the square. There was the sound of the rain falling, rivulets streaming off drainpipes and tiled roofs onto the cobblestones. A child was crying, burying his face in his mother’s apron, and another toddler laughed while playing jacks, wet in the rain, splashing his hand into a puddle.
Rokita continued, “And Europe will be free of Jew lovers as well!” He dropped his hand, and the SS soldiers on the scaffolding kicked their feet into the low wooden benches. The huge soldier kicked only once, and the bench flew out from beneath the feet of the family on the right.
There was just enough slack in the two young girls’ ropes so that the short drop broke their necks. They quickly died.
The ropes around their parents’ necks, however, were taut. Their necks did not break. They got to witness their daughters die before them. Their bound legs kicked. Their faces contorted. They struggled against the ropes slowly choking them to death.
At the same time, the smaller of the two SS soldiers kicked at his bench with negligible effect. He lacked the brute strength to kick the Jewish family off their perch.
The larger soldier came to his side. He counted out, “One, two, three,” and the two men kicked the bench together.
The family of Jews hung there in the air, barely dropping at all. Rokita had made sure that all their ropes were taut. None of their deaths were quick.