Free Trusting Calvin by Sharon Peters

late-morning sunlight, they noticed a queer, heavy odor they had never smelled, but which they identified instantly. It was the stench they had heard of in recent months, the stink of recently burned human flesh, and it glued itself to their skin and nostrils, so leaden and cloying they could almost taste it. This, they realized, almost as one, was one of the storied camps where people died or were killed in such numbers that a burial ditch wasn’t sufficient, so the Nazis had built a crematorium to turn humans to powdery ash.
    The thought, once registered, slid off, their brains unable to process anything more complicated than the raw, aching hunger gripping their guts and the billowy depletion from standing and swaying for the last three days. Weak and flaccid as fish washed ashore, they moved with as much speed as they could manage toward a makeshift corral, some of them collapsing along the way. There on the baked earth they were stripped of their clothes, no shade or shelter from the fiery sun, left to consider the evidence that pointed to only one outcome: They were destined for the crematorium.
    When night fell and the mountain temperatures plummeted, they huddled together for warmth under the eerie silver moon, piles of pale naked bones, shivering, barely human. At daybreak, they were rousted to their feet and ordered to march forward, headed for, they all supposed, whatever instrument of death would be used. Moshe could see almost nothing, just a little shaft of light and vague forms, but he could feel the resignation in the men who surrounded him, and it matched his own.
    When they were brought to a halt it was in front of a line of men wearing not military or guard uniforms but prisoner uniforms.
    â€œThey have no guns,” Zalmen whispered to Moshe.
    â€œMy God, they have razors. They intend to shave us. We are not to be killed.”
    Barbers—“inmate specialists”—shaved every hair from their bodies, head, chest, and groin. Disinfectant to combat the lice that remained was smeared on their armpits and groins. The Nazis wouldn’t go to all this trouble, they knew, merely to push them into the ovens.
    They were laborers again.
    They were finally allowed to dress—in pajama-like uniforms, striped, blue and black. A white strip on the chest indicated the prisoner’s number. Moshe Edelman was 14426.
    â€œMemorize it, remember it,” Zalmen told him. “It’s important.”
    Next to the number, a yellow triangle indicated that he was a Jew.
    Formalities completed, they were assigned to barracks, Moshe, Zalmen, and Yankel to Barrack No. 4, one of sixteen identical structures rising up in determined rows.
    They were in Flossenbürg, they eventually learned, built by the SS in 1938 for political prisoners. It had a kitchen, laundry building, and the requisite watchtowers and lights perched high to prevent after-dark escapes. The Nazi enchantment with slogans, so often bizarrely incongruous, was in evidence here, emblazoned on the gatepost: Arbeit macht frei. Work shall set you free.
    The facility had been designed to hold eight thousand inmates. By 1944–45 it held more than twenty thousand, most of them political prisoners from the nations of Europe that the Nazis had occupied, as well as German criminals, prisoners of war, homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Gypsies, and, finally, Jews, who made up only about 12 percent of the population. The overcrowding meant they had to sleep four to a bunk and stand in line much longer than in the past for soup and bread. The Jewish minority in the population meant there was a great deal of anti-Semitic behavior from fellow prisoners.
    The food was minimal, the barracks broiling in the summer, frigid in winter, and the guards skilled in acts of cruelty, just as in the other camps. But some aspects of this camp were very different from their earlier experiences.
    A torture chamber, which the prisoners called the torment