Purple Hearts

by Michael Grant

  They pass another body, also no more than bones in rags.

  And then, a barbed wire fence and a gate that stands open. A guardhouse is unoccupied. Beyond that gate men in rags, men with sunken cheeks, with every bone visible, men so emaciated they surely must be the fantasies of sick minds.

  “What is this place?” Jenou asks in a voice Rio has never heard before, the voice of a frightened child, an angry, disbelieving child.

  No one answers.

  They drive into the camp and the specters, the human wreckage, stagger and drift toward them, ghosts of men on toothpick legs, men with flesh scarred by sores and wounds, men trying to speak and unable to raise their voices above a whisper.

  Rainy, her voice unreal, like it’s someone else using her mouth, says, “Chester, go back to company. We need food and medics. Go.” Chester does not argue or delay. He drives off in a cloud of dust.

  “We will bring doctors and food,” Rainy says, raising her voice, and speaking Yiddish. Not all the men speak Yiddish, not all are Jews. Some are Poles, Russians, Hungarians, Belgians, French . . . The Jews translate for some of the others.

  “Germans?” Rainy asks.

  One of the men, marginally less starved than some, says in accented English, “All gone. They are run away. Will you look?”

  “Look?”

  He raises a hand and points. The mere effort of raising his hand seems to exhaust him. But he wobbles on, leading them as more walking skeletons come wandering to join them.

  The camp is wooden huts in a row. Rainy now walks in front with their guide as Rio and Jenou refuse to look at each other and find their trigger fingers tightening.

  They are shown the first hut. The reek inside is overpowering. Men lie naked or nearly naked on crude wooden shelves. Some are dead. Some are alive. Some who are alive will soon be dead.

  Rainy speaks to them. We are Americans. We will not let the Nazis come back. We will feed you. We will care for you.

  We are Americans.

  We will not hurt you.

  We are Americans.

  “And I am a Jew,” Rainy says.

  They reach out for her, bony fingers at the end of fleshless arms, they reach out to touch her, needing to believe that she is real.

  Their fingers are parchment. Their touch infinitely gentle.

  The dead are everywhere. Stacks of dead bodies by the side of the path, lines of dead laid out, all emaciated, all in the final stages of starvation and disease. All with bullet holes in the backs of their heads, or in their chests, or in their faces. Some have not been shot but bludgeoned, beaten to death with sticks or rifle butts until jaws crumpled and skulls collapsed like dropped eggs.

  “Come and see,” their guide whispers, and they follow him, with dread poisoning their muscles, dragging at them, warning them no, no, no more.

  Don’t look.

  Don’t see.

  They come to a shed not much bigger than the outbuilding behind Rio’s barn back in Gedwell Falls. The door is open.

  No, don’t look, a voice in Rio’s mind begs.

  Don’t look!

  Don’t see!

  But one by one, Rainy first, then Rio, then Jenou, they look inside. The dead are crammed in, stacks of them, tumbled piles of men with sunken eyes. All are naked and have had lime scattered over them. For the smell. It does not work. The smell is indescribable, and each of the women knows that this smell will never leave them. A million showers will not rid them of this smell.

  Their guide leads on, shuffling on bare feet, and they follow, a new smell coming to them now, the smell of cooked meat.

  The guide stops and inclines his head slightly. He does not need to point. They cannot help but see.

  A wide trench has been scraped from the soil. Segments of steel train tracks have been laid out in a crude grid over charred wood. A barbecue pit.

  Bodies, half-burned, lie stacked atop the grill. Heat still comes from it. Accusing faces stare up at them.

  “What is this place?” Jenou asks, her voice strained, stretched to breaking. Her eyes swim with tears, and only upon seeing her friend does Rio realize that tears are falling freely down her own cheeks as well.

  “One of the outer camps of a larger camp complex, called Buchenwald,” Rainy says. “It’s a slave labor camp where Jews are worked and tortured and starved to death. There are more. Many more, all across Germany and we think in Nazi-occupied Poland as well.”

  “But . . .” Jenou looks pleadingly at Rainy. “It doesn’t even make sense. It’s insane. It’s madness!”

  “No,” Rainy says quietly. “It’s evil.”

  32

  FRANGIE MARR—DACHAU CONCENTRATION CAMP, NEAR MUNICH, GERMANY

  “Walter! I mean, Sergeant Green!”

  “Miss Frangie?” Walter Green grins hugely. It almost seems for a moment that he will run to her and give her a hug. Almost. They are both part of a column moving through southern Germany, but because it’s a column of more than one unit and quite long, neither knew the other was in it.

  The column is stalled—as it often is—by things sinister like mines or snipers, or by more mundane obstacles, often cattle or sheep, or mechanical breakdown. And often for refugees, whose children beg food and cigarettes from the GIs, who with few exceptions give all they have.

  When the column stops soldiers pile off their trucks and tanks and pee in the woods or ditches, hurriedly brew up coffee, or try to write letters. You can write a letter while perched on the back of a Sherman, but, as Frangie has learned, the results will not be legible. Exhibit A: the ripped, pierced, scribbled-upon piece of paper in her hand.

  She shoves the mangled letter into her pocket and straightens her uniform. She resists the mad urge to smell her armpits to see whether she is merely offensive or extremely offensive, then reminds herself that she had a shower just three days ago, and she has a moderately fresh uniform without major parasitic infestation, so . . . So she probably looks about as good as a tiny black woman wearing a green uniform and a helmet is capable of looking.

  Walter for his part looks quite . . . and Frangie stops herself right there, because it is in no way proper for a good Christian woman to be thinking the thought that slips into her head upon seeing him. Especially since her reaction had been rather less thought and rather more physical. In fact, her specific first thought was that she’d like to kiss him, to kiss him from the sheer joy of seeing him alive and well.

  And also, would he take his glasses off if he kissed her?

  What if she took them off for him?

  Well, that would be wrong. That would be forward to the point of . . . of . . . well, not being the sort of thing a decent woman would do.

  He stands before her, grinning, and she grins back. They each perform a surreptitious glance around to see who is watching—no one—before he takes her hand and squeezes it.

  And she squeezes back.

  And then they each let go, but very slowly, with fingertips trailing fingertips.

  “I didn’t know you were in this column,” Frangie says.

  “No. Me neither. About you, I mean. Do you even have a unit, or do you just sort of wander around Germany healing the sick?”

  She laughs. “I have a unit and a captain and everything. Now, if you were to ask me what we are doing here, that I couldn’t say.”

  They hear the sounds of engines firing up again. The column will be moving shortly.

  “You have a jeep?” Walter asks.

  “Nope, I am hitching a ride with Sergeant Moore.” She cranks a thumb toward the nearest Sherman, and Moore, who sits astride his big cannon smoking.

  “I have a jeep,” Walter says. “And we’re going the same direction . . .”

  “Is this a date?” Frangie asks, then gasps in horror at her own forwardness.

  Walter, however, seems charmed. “Miss Frangie Marr, would you do me the honor of accompanying me on a ride in the German countryside? We can make a picnic.”

  “C rations
and canteen water?”

  “Nothing but the best for you,” Walter says.

  They walk forward up the line of vehicles and find the jeep. Walter yells for his corporal, who comes running from the woods, pulling his trousers up as he runs.

  “I’m afraid Corporal Penn has the trots,” Walter says. “We may have to make frequent stops.”

  Frangie climbs into the backseat as the driver slides behind the wheel. Walter seems momentarily frozen—he would ordinarily ride shotgun. But then it will be much harder to talk with Frangie. On the other hand, sitting with her in the back will be obvious. His people will look and will know that their sergeant has a personal interest in the medic. They may even decide that Sergeant Walter “Professor” Green—known affectionately by his troops as “Shucks” for his most extreme curse word, and in less affectionate moments as “Sergeant YMCA” for his insistence on physical fitness—is actually human.

  “We’re not even in the same unit,” Walter mutters before climbing into the back. It’s hard to read much emotion from the back of a person’s head, but Frangie is pretty sure that Corporal Penn is simultaneously amazed and appalled.

  They set off down a road that was probably very nice before being torn up by the tanks of two armies, but is still smoother than the forest tracks Frangie has been accustomed to.

  They chat in voices meant not to be overheard by Corporal Penn, who will dutifully report every last word to the rest of Green’s platoon.

  Walter lives in a town called Davenport.

  “Like a sofa?”

  “Well . . . yes.” He frowns. “It’s a nice little city, actually, right on the river.”

  “The river?”

  “The Mississippi.” He smiles wistfully. “Yes, I think after this war Davenport will really take off. It’s right across the river from Rock Island, and they have a college over there. Lutherans. I don’t suppose you’re . . .” He trails off.

  “No,” she says. “I’m not Lutheran.”

  “But they take everyone. They don’t just . . . and there’s a seminary, but mostly it’s a college. Where anyone. Could. Um. Get a . . .” Walter is having a hard time finishing his thought, because he’s only just realized that he is essentially talking as if Frangie might be living in Davenport, Iowa. “So, um . . . Anyway, I hear it’s a good school. For. College.”

  “Is that where you went to college, Walter?”

  “No, I went to Iowa State, over in Ames.”

  He’s staring fixedly ahead, and Frangie is both enjoying his embarrassment and feeling a giddy, stomach-churning, blood-pumping sort of . . . what? Anticipation?

  “You think I should go to college?”

  He turns to her, brow furrowed. “Well, you have to if you want to go on to medical school.”

  “And you think I should . . .”

  “Well, you said you . . .”

  “Not all men think women should do things like that.”

  “Who wouldn’t want to be married to a doctor?” At which point Sergeant Walter Green emits a sound a bit like a startled goat. His eyes widen behind his spectacles. “I . . . I didn’t . . . Just that . . .” He takes off his glasses and runs his hand over his face then back over his head. It’s quite chilly, springtime chilly, but beads of sweat appear on his forehead.

  He has asked nothing. And his current state of mental collapse leaves Frangie wondering if he might have a stroke if he ever does get around to asking.

  But she is not one to talk because her own brain feels like a milkshake machine on the highest setting. And she is acutely aware that the back of Corporal Penn’s head is straining every nerve to anticipate her reaction. Her reaction is what set off the milkshake machine, because her immediate, instinctive reaction had come in the form of a single unspoken word.

  Yes.

  She must choose her next words carefully. “Davenport, Iowa, sounds very nice. Perhaps I will get a chance to see it someday.”

  The back of Corporal Penn’s head likes that. And Walter Green appears to have suffered the stroke she’d worried about.

  The column passes an intersection where they come across a smaller detachment of troops, a deuce-and-a-half, an ambulance, and a jeep. The smaller detachment waits, soldiers standing around, smoking. A woman captain stands a little apart.

  “I know her!” Frangie says. “Can you pull over?”

  Captain Rainy Schulterman does not smile as Frangie climbs out of the jeep, and for a moment Frangie wonders if she is committing some grave act of military discourtesy. She salutes, and Rainy returns the gesture automatically.

  “Good,” Rainy says. “We could use another medic.”

  “Captain?”

  “You’re coming with me,” Rainy says. “Grab your gear. Sergeant Green? Would you pass word to Sergeant Marr’s CO that I am authorized to take whatever resources I need on direct orders from General Patton, and I am taking Marr.”

  Rainy’s eyes are inhuman, cold, and her voice is impersonal. She strikes Frangie as a person straining to control herself.

  “What’s going on? Where are we going, Captain Schulterman?”

  “I don’t know yet. We’re on our way to a camp. We found one a couple weeks ago, and Generals Patton and Bradley and Ike himself toured it. Now I’ve been assigned full-time to the job of locating them.”

  All of it said as if Rainy is an automaton. She seems to be vibrating with repressed energy. Her face is carefully blank, but when Frangie looks down she sees that Rainy’s right hand is clenched in a fist.

  She says good-bye to Walter with a handshake that goes on longer than such things usually do and climbs into Rainy’s jeep, sitting behind her.

  They drive off.

  After less than a mile they come to a train.

  The train is stopped on the tracks. It is a long line of run-down railroad cars, some enclosed, some with only sides and no roof.

  They are not the first Americans on the scene. GIs, some white, some colored, stand staring, or walk away with ashen faces. Frangie sees more than one GI crying.

  A terrible smell is carried on the breeze.

  The jeep stops, and Rainy and Frangie climb out. They walk toward the train, toward the smell, past GIs with faces twisted into masks of grief and horror.

  And rage.

  Some of the doors have been opened and inside the cars Frangie sees what at first she takes for dead livestock. But no, there are rags.

  And that is a human foot sticking out.

  And a hand.

  A shaved head.

  A leg so starved that she can name each of the bones visible through papery skin.

  “Those are people,” Frangie says. “Oh my God, Rainy, those are people!”

  Frangie breaks into a run, toward the nearest car. Its door is wide open. The dead are stacked inside. Stacked so that some fell out when the door opened. Starved, sick, tortured bodies, and . . .

  Oh, Jesus, some are alive!

  She sees feeble movement here and there, a pitiful few still living, men and women buried beneath the dead, human beings trying to crawl like worms out of a pile of corpses.

  Frangie stares in horror and sees a skull open its eyes. She goes to her, holds out a trembling hand, not knowing what to . . . there’s nothing in her training to explain what she should do when she finds a teenage girl buried beneath a pile of dead.

  The living skull tries to speak but cannot, so she simply looks with imploring eyes at Frangie. Frangie takes out her canteen and trickles water into the girl’s mouth. Another medic, a white man, appears beside her. She sees the caduceus on his uniform, a doctor.

  “Just a little,” he says. “Too much and it kills them.”

  His words are cool and calm and dispassionate. His face is not. Tears run down his cheeks.

  He helps Frangie to move the bodies, the pathetically light bodies, the beaten, starved, and finally shot bodies. They lift the girl down with infinite care and lay her on Frangie’s jacket on the ground.

 
“What is . . . why are they . . . ?”

  Rainy, standing over them, says, “It’s happening all over Germany and Poland. The SS know we’re coming. They try to hide it. They move the people out of the camps and send them to camps farther from the line. Covering up. Hiding their handiwork.”

  There is an eerie singsong in Rainy’s voice, an unworldly sound.

  Frangie looks up at her. “But why? Who are these people?”

  Rainy looks back at her from a million miles away. “Jews.”

  Rainy leaves Frangie to care for the few who still live. They would almost certainly die within days. Tuberculosis and starvation and beatings and unending terror are not easily cured with fresh water and C rations.

  Ahead, down the length of the train, Rainy sees a commotion. A group of GIs has found some Germans.

  The GIs, all enlisted, turn hard, solemn faces to Rainy. One, a staff sergeant, says, “Nazi bastards want to surrender.”

  They have four Germans, three enlisted men, one an officer, though he has evidently torn off his insignia of rank, as well as the twin lightning flashes of the SS, from his uniform.

  “Get them into the woods,” Rainy says.

  The sergeant nods. “You heard the captain.”

  The GIs march the prisoners into the woods, being none too gentle as they encourage speed with kicks and blows from the butts of their M1s.

  “This will do,” Rainy says. “Line them up. I’m going to question them.”

  The four Germans are shoved into a line. Some are terrified, others belligerent. They are all men, and all SS. Rainy passes around cigarettes for them. She speaks to them in German.

  “I have some questions,” she says.

  “We do not answer—” a belligerent, pig-eyed sergeant says.

  BANG!

  The Walther in Rainy’s hand bucks. The bullet goes through the man’s left eye, and he drops.

  She goes to the next man, who has stained his trousers. “Where are you based?”

  “Konzentrationslager Dachau,” he says. Concentration Camp Dachau.