“I must finish!”
Schörner’s hand closed around Sturm’s thick wrist. “Hauptscharführer, I order you to open your hand.”
“Zu befehl, Sturmbannführer!” Sturm’s voice was tight with fear and anger. As the roar of engines drew nearer, he opened his hand.
It was empty.
Major Schörner stared into the hand for a moment, then said, “Remain at attention, Hauptscharführer.”
Without hesitation Schörner reached into Sturm’s trouser pocket. A pained expression came over his face. He dug in the pocket, then removed his hand and opened it inches from the sergeant’s face.
The diamonds glittered like blue fire.
“I thought we had settled this issue,” Schörner said quietly.
Sturm lowered his eyes. “We did, Sturmbannführer.”
“Then would you like to explain these diamonds to the Reichsführer?”
Sturm paled. Himmler’s edict against looting Jews for personal gain was quite explicit: the penalty was death. “Nein, Sturmbannführer.”
Schörner grabbed Sturm’s left hand and forced the diamonds into it. “Then get rid of them.”
“Get rid of them? How?”
“Schnell!”
The shoemaker watched in amazement as Sergeant Sturm flung the diamonds across the snow like a man feeding chickens.
“Now,” Schörner said in an even voice. “Finish the selection.”
He turned and marched off toward the front gate, his knee boots gleaming under the lights.
Sturm stared down at Ben Jansen in silent rage. Then he holstered his Luger and kicked Marcus Jansen toward the condemned men. “All male Jews aged sixteen to fifty step out of the ranks!” he shouted. “If anyone in that category is left in line one minute from now, every second woman in line will be shot!”
The shoemaker felt the terrible, wonderful flood of relief he experienced every time he survived a selection. Out of a total of thirty-nine adult male Jews, twenty-eight had fallen into the condemned category. As the remainder of these stepped from the line, a convoy of gray field cars and one heavy troop transport truck roared across the Appellplatz toward the rear of the camp. A square flag showing two triangles and a Nazi eagle flew from the left mudwing of the longest car.
So it’s true, thought the shoemaker. Heinrich Himmler has finally come to observe his handiwork.
Sergeant Sturm’s troops clubbed the condemned men toward the rear of the camp with rifle butts and truncheons, while the balance of the prisoners remained standing in the snow. Rachel Jansen remained on her knees, hugging her children. Her father-in-law had not yet regained his senses. The shoemaker swept his eyes over the decimated Jewish section, looking for his few remaining friends. Nothing but gray heads now.
“All prisoners return to blocks!”
The shoemaker drifted to the edge of the pack as the dazed crowd broke into small groups and moved toward the six inmate barracks. He knew he should follow, but something held him back. The emotions surging through him were so powerful that he hesitated to face them. Not for a year had he visited the rearmost area of the camp, and for good reason. Behind the hospital, half-buried in the earth, stood a small airtight chamber designated the Experimental Block, but called simply the “E-Block” by the camp population—when it was mentioned at all.
Only once had the shoemaker observed one of the “special actions” that occurred at the E-Block—and he had observed it from the inside. He had been wearing a heavy rubber body suit at the time, with a sealed gas mask connected to a cylinder of oxygen. The other man in the chamber—a Russian POW chained to the steel wall and designated a “control” by Klaus Brandt—had been stark naked. What the shoemaker saw happen to the Russian when the invisible gas hissed into the chamber had driven him nearly to suicide. And tonight, Heinrich Himmler had come to see a similar spectacle for himself.
Without further reflection the shoemaker broke away from the crowd of survivors and walked purposefully toward the rear of the camp. The risk was great, but less for him than for other inmates. His leatherworking skills were legendary in Totenhausen, and all SS knew him by sight. He had done at least one repair job for every soldier in camp. A boot here, a shoulder strap there. A pair of slippers for a mistress somewhere. Such was the currency of his survival. If someone stopped him, he would claim he had been called to examine a pair of shoes in the hospital.
Ignoring the searchlights, he entered the shadow of the hospital, hurried forward and peered around the corner of the three-story structure. The troop transport truck had been parked in the mouth of the alley, so that it blocked his vision. He squeezed between the truck and the hospital wall and edged forward until he could see.
Sergeant Sturm had halted the prisoners half-way up the alley. At the other end stood the gray field cars of the convoy, motors running. Two dozen SS soldiers of the Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler had already surrounded the autos. Several doors opened as one. Men wearing pale gray uniforms stepped into the icy night. The shoemaker’s eyes settled on a smallish officer who had just removed a pair of pince-nez glasses. The glasses must have fogged as he stepped from the heated car, for he passed them to an adjutant, who wiped them clear with a handkerchief and then returned them. When the man put the pince-nez glasses back on, the shoemaker felt his hands begin to shake. He was standing less then forty meters away from SS Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler.
Himmler listened patiently while Doctor Brandt explained some arcane detail of the presentation he was about to witness. As they moved toward the E-Block, the shoemaker saw that one side of the alley was lined with thirty or so technicians and chemists from Totenhausen’s poison gas plant. In their white lab coats they had been almost invisible in the snow. Himmler nodded affably as he passed them. Brandt motioned toward the E-Block, then turned to speak and saw that the Reichsführer was no longer beside him.
Himmler had stopped to address one of Totenhausen’s six civilian nurses. Four of the women were old battlewagons, but two—Greta Müller and Anna Kaas—were blonde and single and barely thirty. The shoemaker had mistaken them for lab technicians. Himmler seemed quite taken with Fraulein Kaas, and no wonder: he was middle-aged, pudgy, and chinless, while she could have posed for one of Goebbels’ posters celebrating the Aryan female ideal. Brandt stood by impatiently; he’d intended for the nurses to be scenery, not full-scale diversions. At last Himmler gave a little bow and moved away from Anna Kaas. Brandt led him quickly to the hospital’s rear steps, from whence he could observe the entrance to the E-Block, just across the alley.
Two camp spotlights had been pressed into service to focus on the chamber’s sunken entrance. Himmler’s guards craned their necks in curiosity. A muffled bang startled several of them, causing a ripple of suppressed laughter among the Totenhausen SS. It was only a corpse, they knew, swelling and bursting as it settled into the shallow grave pit beyond the electrified rear fence.
The condemned men crowded together like a herd of antelope sensing predators drawing around. The shoemaker could clearly see the young Dutch lawyer who had so stoically accepted his fate. Sergeant Sturm barked an order for
