Who would believe what happened here?

The quarry with its one hundred and eighty-six “stairs of death,” up which prisoners carried blocks of granite from dawn to dark. Sometimes they were made to race each other up the flight. The winner got to live.

The quarry had a cliff edge known as “The Parachutist’s Wall,” where at gunpoint, prisoners had a choice of being shot or pushing one of their comrades over the precipice. A few of those pushed miraculously survived. Their reward: another turn at the edge.

Before deserting the camp, Nazi guards led a few hundred inmates to a cave rigged with dynamite. Trying to destroy the evidence. The dynamite didn’t go off and the American soldiers rescued the prisoners.

The scene in the camp struck Kennet as an obscene, macabre reversal of the North Platte canteen: the soldiers were the ones attending to needs of the stomach and soul, while the prisoners swarmed them, hugging, weeping, patting. Blessing them, clutching them, kissing their hands, their boots, their guns.

“Fish,” Fisha called, turning the short I to a long E. “Captain Feesh.”

The boy was thin as water. Barefoot, scratched and bruised, his head sloppily shaved to the scalp. Yet his movements were spry, full of a hard, brutal confidence. Kennet soon learned the Russian communist prisoners were better organized than the Jews, and were able to take marginally better care of the children they had with them.

A margin you needed a microscope to view, but a margin all the same.

Fisha was a natural leader, although he seemed to belong to no one.

“Where is your mother?” Kennet said.

Fisha looked back, chin tilted. Smiling.

These children smiled. How could they?

“Mother,” Kennet said. “Mommy. Mama.”

Fisha exclaimed something in Russian.

Maslov translated: “She went up the chimney.”

Fisha’s finger made swirls in the air. His arms stretched wide and dropped on the shoulders of the boys nearest him. Dirty, ragged boys. Shaved heads, knobby knees, open sores. Motherless. Fatherless. All they knew of love went up in smoke.

And yet they were smiling. Chins and hands out, reaching for American breast pockets and the treats they now knew were within.

“Feed ’em slow.” The harried medics begged, pleaded the distraught troops not to inundate the prisoners with food. Already dozens of starving people had gorged themselves on C-rations and died of shock.

Kennet broke his chocolate into small pieces and tried to pass them out, but Fisha shouldered in and exerted his authority. Kennet must hand the pieces to him and he would distribute to his mates.

All over the camp, boys attached themselves to GIs, appointing themselves sidekicks, aides-de-camp and lieutenants. Gleaning candy, cigarettes and words in English.

“Fuck Hitler,” they quickly learned to say. Within hours, they all used it like a password, testing loyalty.

Stop. Are you one of us? Speak the code.

“Fuck Hitler.”

You may enter.

You may live.