Free Skeletons at the Feast by Chris Bohjalian

woman must have ventured into the village this morning while he slept, and either ratted him out on purpose or inadvertently said something to someone that sounded suspicious. An engineer with Organisation Todt? Him? After three days in a cattle car and a night in the woods? Plausible if you're seven years old, maybe.
    Now one of them was rapping on the door and calling inside. His voice was crisp, businesslike, brutal. And then he heard the word: Judenschwein. They were calling inside for the . . . Jewish pig. Telling him they knew he was there. They called a second time. Then the door was sliding open--it couldn't swing precisely because of the way it rubbed against the coarse wooden boards that served as the floor--and there was absolutely no place where he could hide, no place where he could run. No train from which he could jump.
    And so, unsure what he really was going to do with it, he grabbed the poker that was leaning against the fireplace, the only item he saw with which he might defend himself, and he swung it like an ax into the first of the two men to come through the door, not aiming, just twirling, a dervish with a baton, the wrought iron slamming into the soldier's chest, breaking bones in his rib cage and knocking the wind from him, as it sent him spiraling back into his partner. Uri saw the second man, a corporal, reaching for the handle of the Luger in his holster, but the fellow never had the time to withdraw it. The next half-minute was a blur in which Uri would recall what he had done with only the vaguest outlines: Raising the poker over his head and repeatedly clubbing each of the soldiers in the skull until he had broken through bone and begun to mash the steaming gray and white tissue beneath it into pudding. Using the pointed tip of the instrument to spear the soldier who continued to groan through the abdomen, the metal poking a hole through his uniform jacket and shirt and impaling him against one of the floorboards in a geyser of peritoneal fluid and blood. Kicking--one final repayment for the deaths he had witnessed in the cattle car and the myriad afflictions and indignities he had endured for about as long as he could remember--both corpses so violently that they bounced on the wood.
    When he was finished he stood back, shaking, on the verge of hyperventilation. He heard the noise of his rapid, labored breathing, the clucking of the chickens in the yard, and what he thought for a second was the sound of water dripping. He wondered briefly if the old woman indeed had a pump somewhere that he had missed. Then he understood: A thin rivulet the color of claret was trickling out from beneath the soldier pinned to the floor with the poker and dripping off a warped, sloping timber near the front entrance.
    The magnitude of what he had done slowly set in. He had killed someone. He had killed two someones. And while he had to presume that they would have killed him first if he'd given them half a chance--or shipped him off to a camp that would have done the dirty work for them--a small part of him couldn't help but wonder about their lives when they weren't wearing those black uniforms and polished black boots. For all he knew, they had wives or girlfriends; they may have had small children waiting for them somewhere beautiful. Dresden, maybe. Or some lovely village on the Rhine. And while it was merely conceivable that he had just killed somebody's husband or lover or father, it was absolutely certain that he had just killed somebody's son. He had just killed two somebodies' sons. In addition to snuffing out the lives of these men, he had brought sadness and despair to their mothers. He leaned over the corpses and stared at the mangled remains of their faces, at the pitch of their noses and the clefts in their chins. One had a receding hairline, evident despite the great gaping gouge marks in his skull, which seemed to make him even more human to Uri. The other, his ear dangling by a thin tendril of