Fatherland

from France."
    I reckon the length of the train to be some 60 freight cars, with high wooden sides. The troops and special prisoners crowd around. The doors are unbolted and slid open. All along the train the same words are shouted: "Everyone get out! Bring your hand baggage with you! Leave all heavy baggage in the cars!" The men come out first, dazed by the light, and jump to the ground— 1.5 meters—then turn to help their women and children and the elderly, and to receive their luggage.
    The deportees' state: pitiful—filthy, dusty, holding out bowls and cups, gesturing to their mouths, crying with thirst. Behind them in the trucks lie the dead and those too sick to move— Weidemann says their journey began four nights ago. SS guards force those able to walk into two lines. As families separate, they shout to one another. With many gestures and calls the columns march off in different directions. The able-bodied men go toward the work camp. The rest head toward the screen of trees, with Weidemann and myself following. As I look back, I see the prisoners in their striped clothing clambering into the freight cars, dragging out the baggage and the bodies.
    8:30 a.m.: Weidemann puts the size of the column at nearly 2,000: women carrying babies, children at their skirts; old men and women; adolescents; sick people; mad people. They walk five abreast down a cinder path for 300 meters, through a courtyard, along another path, at the end of which twelve concrete steps lead down to an immense underground chamber 100 meters long. A sign proclaims in several languages (German, French, Greek, Hungarian): "Baths and Disinfecting Room." It is well lit, with scores of benches, hundreds of numbered pegs.
    The guards shout, "Everyone undress! You have ten minutes!" People hesitate, look at one another. The order is repeated more harshly, and this time, hesitantly but calmly, they comply. "Remember your peg number, so you can recover your clothes!" The camp trustees move among them, whispering encouragement, helping the feeble-bodied and the feebleminded to strip. Some mothers try to hide their babies in the piles of discarded clothing, but the infants are quickly discovered.
    9:05 a.m.: Naked, the crowd shuffles through large oak doors flanked by troops into a second room, as large as the first but utterly bare, apart from four thick, square columns supporting the ceiling at twenty-meter intervals. At the bottom of each column is a metal grille. The chamber fills, the doors swing shut. Weidemann gestures. I follow him out through the empty changing room, up the concrete steps, into the air. I can hear the sound of an automobile engine.
    Across the grass that covers the roof of the installation bounces a small van with Red Cross markings. It stops. An SS officer and a doctor emerge wearing gas masks and carrying four metal canisters. Four squat concrete pipes jut from the grass, twenty meters apart. The doctor and SS man lift the lids of the pipes and pour in a mauve granulated substance. They remove the masks, light cigarettes in the sunshine.
    9:09 a.m.: Weidemann conducts me back downstairs. Only sound is a muffled drumming coming from the far end of the room, from beyond the suitcases and the piles of still-warm clothes. A small glass panel is set into the oak doors. I put my eye to it. A man's palm beats against the aperture and I jerk my head away.
    Says one guard, "The water in the shower rooms must be very hot today, since they shout so loudly."
    Outside, Weidemann says: now we must wait twenty minutes. Would I care to visit Canada? I say: What? He laughs: "Canada"—a section of the camp. Why Canada? He shrugs: nobody knows.
    Canada. 1 km. north of gas chamber. Huge rectangular yard, watchtower in each corner and surrounded by barbed wire. Mountains of belongings—trunks, rucksacks, cases, kitbags, parcels; blankets; prams, wheelchairs, false limbs; brushes, combs. Weidemann: figures prepared for RF-SS on property recently sent to Reich—men's shirts: 132,000; women's coats: 155,000; women's hair: 3,000 kg. ("a freight car"); boys' jackets: 15,000; girls' dresses: 9,000; handkerchiefs: 135,000.1 get doctor's bag, beautifully made, as souvenir—Weidemann insists.
    9:31 a.m.: Return to underground installation. Loud electric humming fills the air—the patented "Exhator" system, for evacuation of gas. Doors open. The bodies are piled up at one end [illegible] legs smeared with excrement, menstrual blood; bite and claw