Some of us boarded a train that took us to Brno in Czechoslovakia, where at last we were given some bread and water; and then we boarded another train headed southeast. As the train left Brno we caught sight of the city’s famous St. Peter and Paul Cathedral, and for many men this was almost as good as seeing a priest. Even those who didn’t believe took the opportunity to pray. The next time we stopped we got out of the cattle cars, and finally we were given some hot soup. It was the thirtieth of April, 1945. Twenty days after our surrender. I know this because the Russians made a point of telling us the news that Hitler was dead. I don’t know who was more pleased to hear this, them or us. Some of us cheered. A few of us wept. It was the end of one hell, no doubt. But for Germany and us in particular, it was the beginning of another—hell as it really is, perhaps, being a timeless place of punishment and suffering and run by devils who enjoy inflicting cruelty. Certainly, we were judged by the book that was open, and that book was Mein Kampf, and for what was written in that book we were all going to suffer. Some more than others.

From that transit camp in Romania—someone claimed it was a place called Secureni, from where Bessarabian Jews had been sent to Auschwitz—there was another train traveling northeast, right through the Ukraine, a country I had hoped never to see again, to a stop in the middle of nowhere where MVD guards drove us from the cattle cars with whips and curses. Standing there, faint from lack of food and water, blinking in the spring sunshine like unwanted dogs, we awaited our orders. Finally, after almost an hour, we were marched along a dirt road between two infinite horizons.

“Bistra!” shouted the guards. “Hurry up!”

But to where? To what? Would any of us ever see home again? Out there, so far away from any sign of human habitation, it seemed unlikely; even more so when those who had only just survived the journey found they could walk no farther and were shot where they fell at the side of the road by mounted MVD. Four or five men were shot in this way like horses that had outlived their usefulness. No man was allowed to carry another, and in this way only the strongest of us were permitted to survive, as if Prince Kropotkin had been in charge of our exhausted company.