It was almost dusk. He drove her to the Nordbahnhof himself, without escort. The only sign that she was under arrest was the unbuttoned flap on the holster that held his Luger.
Inside the station an engine was backing a line of boxcars, all with Italian markings, down the track to be coupled to an ancient Imperial Austrian State Railways third-class corridor passenger carriage. A broken boxcar with a shattered axle lay on its side where the Germans had tipped it. She could only think that they’d raided a museum to find its replacement.
Down the platform a hundred odd people cowered behind a cordon of soldiers with fixed bayonets—in the dimness of the blacked-out railway station at dusk the yellow stars on their coats seemed almost luminous.
“Get on before the Italians. They’ve been thirty-two hours in cattle wagons from Florence, Lucca, Pisa . . . God knows where . . . they’re tired, hungry, and frightened and they’ll still fight you for an arseworth of space on a bench with no cushions and no upholstery.”
Half a dozen carpenters appeared with planks and nails and began to board up the windows. She got on to the train, stood in the corridor, looking back at the Hauptsturmführer as he was looking back at her. He looked to his left at the crowd of Jews, casually pressed the stud shut on the flap of his holster.
As he turned to leave she said loudly, “Where am I going?”
He turned back, took half a dozen paces closer to her.
Not raising his voice to the level of hers, but audible in the noise of the station, still the friendly tone, still sharing a confidence, “Auschwitz.”
Was this the Osswichim, or Auswiczin she’d heard about?
“The town of the Jews? But I am not Jewish!”
“Then you might well survive.”
“My father,” she said. “My father . . .”
But the carpenters had reached her window. He could not hear her for the banging of hammers, and a few seconds later all she could see through the gap in the boards was his back in the field-grey greatcoat moving away from her.