others to help you. You start tomorrow morning. I'll assign two SS men to escort you.'' I make a note: she has a green triangle on her uniform, she is a murderer.
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I ask for volunteers for this leichenkommando. Danka and Dina volunteer, as well as seven other girls. Covering our noses, we take the cart out to the mound of bodies. "We don't have gloves, so we must be careful," I warn the girls. "Only touch the arms and legs, and be very careful of any open wounds. We can't wash our hands before we eat, so we must be very careful so that we don't get sick." I take the arms while another girl takes the legs, and we swing a corpse onto the cart. It sighs as the last air is expelled from its lungs.
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We falter. "Come on,
schnell!
" The guards yell. We load the cart as quickly as possible, about fifteen bodies. Then we begin our march to the burial place. Across the road is a men's camp of Italian political prisoners.
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"Not much longer! Not much longer!" they shout as we walk by. We do not have a radio in camp; the news of the world has been cut off from us. We stare at these wild-eyed men; they do not look crazy, just desperate for freedom. "Not much longer! Not much longer!" Can they be right? How far away is not much longer?
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The SS take us up a hill. The cart is heavy and we strain our muscles to keep it moving. It figures they would choose a burial site that is difficult to reach.
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"You will bury them here." The guards stop, pointing to the area where we should dig, then they move away to rest on their rifles.
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I thrust my shovel into the soil. It's rock-hard. We try to dig deep, as we're supposed to, but it is impossible. I get in the hole to dig out the bottom. The soil is so unforgiving that it takes hours to dig the graves, though. Thoughts run through my head while I'm in the hole trying to dig a little deeper; the SS could just shoot us and we'd fall in having dug our own graves.
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