While the medics tried to keep soldiers from inadvertently killing prisoners with kindness, the officers desperately tried to keep the prisoners from killing the handful of SS guards left in the camp. The brass wanted these men alive, so they could be interrogated at least, prosecuted at most.

Some troops wanted to shoot them all and be done with it.

Others thought shooting too good for these sons of bitches.

“Calling these German fuckers sons of bitches is an insult to bitches,” Ingle muttered.

“And fuckers,” O’Hara said.

The Nazis were kept isolated and guarded, away from the now-liberated prisoners, who instead turned their vigilante justice on the kapos and the Volkssturm.

“They’re hanging a guy in there,” O’Hara said, jerking his head toward one of the barracks.

Such things would have shocked Kennet once. No more.

He followed O’Hara. Fisha followed Kennet.

Some boys were shadows—they followed their chosen GI at a distance.

Some boys were burrs. They stuck close. Devoted manservants.

Fisha was a burr.

In the barracks, Kennet watched murder disguised as assisted suicide. A kapo encouraged to push a table into place beneath a beam. Given a suggestion to tie a noose with the rope nobody else touched. Instructed to put his head through unaided. Nobody lifted a finger in complicity. Nobody would leave until the job was done properly. Judge, jury and executioner dressed in striped pajamas. They attended with narrow-eyed, dangerous patience until the kapo stepped off the table.

Kennet and O’Hara left, followed by Fisha.

The GIs sat in the foul sunshine, cleaned their guns and tried to talk about anything else.

The children conducted trade with chocolate and cigarettes. They pulled up their ragged clothes and compared scars. They laughed and snarled with a disturbing one-upmanship as they displayed infected wounds from accidents and fights and disease.

Many of their backs were striped with welts.

Maslov translated: the boys were made to flog each other.

“How do they act as if it all didn’t happen?” Ingle said.

“They don’t act,” Kennet said.

“It’s all they’ve known,” Maslov said.

“Where are their mothers?”

Nobody answered. Stories coming out of the women’s camp were too heinous to grasp. The minds and spirits of the soldiers were overloaded with the stench and the spectacles and the stripes. Taking in the horrors of sexual violence sent many into a frenzied rage.

When the wind shifted, Kennet didn’t turn his face away. He couldn’t smell anything. In a few days, it would occur to him he couldn’t taste anything either, but in the nightmare of now, food was the farthest thing from his mind.

The whole world was far from his mind.

He felt nothing. And that was good. It meant his armor was holding.