Free Trusting Calvin by Sharon Peters Page A

bunker, sat behind a brick fence. The prisoners couldn’t see what went on there, but the people in the bunker—political prisoners and prisoners of war—were given food during the days or weeks they were kept alive for interrogation, and the men who carried it to them shared with others what they heard inside.
    Flossenbürg housed some of the most important prisoners of World War II: seven spies who had dropped into Germany and were captured, German Resistance leader Wilhelm Franz Canaris, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a revered anti-Nazi Lutheran minister who had helped many Jews escape. Also sent to Flossenbürg for special SS treatment were the six men thought to have been involved in the plot to assassinate Hitler, and famed French Resistance worker Simone Michel-Lévy. Moshe and his brothers were ordered to attend many public hangings in Flossenbürg, events presented with great bluster and milked for dramatic impact.
    The crematorium was also an unnerving presence the Edelman brothers had never before had to contend with. A smallish brick oven in a nondescript concrete building with a chimney taller than the building itself, it lay a few hundred yards downhill from the camp’s perimeter. Some of the people cremated there had died of starvation or disease, some had been shot or hanged, many had been gassed.
    The gas chamber at Flossenbürg wasn’t specially designed or attentively constructed like those at the sites that served as extermination camps: Auschwitz-Birkenau, Belzec, Chelmno, Majdanek, Sobibor, and Treblinka. The Flossenbürg “gas chamber” consisted of a big military truck retrofitted to do the job. When it was time to gas several people, the guards herded them into the back of the truck, turned on the engine, and the exhaust slid through hoses to the back where the people stood. They died more slowly in the truck than in the custom-built gas chambers at other camps, but eventually they stopped screaming and breathing.
    The prisoners hoisted into the truck, at least in the first few weeks after the Edelmans arrived, generally came from the barrack that housed the sick and ailing, men who didn’t recover quickly enough from illness or injury. Later, infractions that previously resulted in being shot—breaking camp rules or not working fast enough—led to gassing. The Germans were trying to preserve as much ammunition as possible for fighting the war.
    As time went on, the death rate at Flossenbürg escalated, and the crematorium operated around the clock. Sometimes even that wasn’t sufficient, and corpses were piled up like cords of wood, doused with gasoline, and set afire.
    The work days were, as always, long and grueling. Some of the prisoners worked at the recently opened Messerschmitt factory, about an hour’s walk from the camp, where they built parts for German fighter planes. Others worked at a stone quarry near the camp, an assignment that amounted to most as a slightly delayed death sentence. Hundreds were crushed by falling slabs, plummeted to their deaths after an exhausted misstep, or were ground to lifelessness by the punishing process. As in Budzyn, whenever too many deaths or killings caused a shortage of manpower, another trainload of men from another camp resolved the problem in a day or two.
    The aircraft manufacturing factory had been established here in 1943 after the main plant was bombed, and that was why so many of the Budzyn prisoners had been sent here. They knew how to assemble airplane parts and how to work in an assembly team. Here they did the same—producing parts for the Me-109, the backbone of the Luftwaffe, used as fighter-bombers, bomber escorts, and reconnaissance aircraft.
    Zalmen and Yankel made sure they were on the same team as Moshe so they could cover for his slowness and mistakes. Moshe positioned himself at his six-person station, felt out the parts, and kept his hands moving. When a guard approached,