I peered through an airhole in the wall of the cattle car. It was impossible to see where the sun was. The sky was a blank sheet of gray that was soon black with night and salted with snow. At the other end of the wagon, a man was crying. The sound was tearing us all apart.

“Someone say something to that fellow, for God’s sake,” I muttered loudly.

“Like what?” said the man next to me.

“I dunno, but I’d rather not listen to that sound unless I have to.”

“Hey, Fritz,” said a voice. “Stop that crying, will you? You’re spoiling the party for some fellow at the other end of the carriage. This is supposed to be a picnic, see? Not a funeral cortege.”

“That’s what you think.” This accent was unmistakably Berlin. “Take a look out of this airhole. You can see the Kirchhof Cemetery.”

I moved toward the Berliner and got talking to him, and soon afterward we discovered that everyone in the wagon had been tried in the same court on some trumped-up charge, found guilty, and sentenced to a long term of hard labor. I seemed to be about the only man who had committed a real offense.

The Berliner’s name was Walter Bingel, and before the war he’d been a park keeper in the gardens of the Sansouci Palace in Potsdam.

“I was at a camp next to the Zaritsa Gorge, near Rostov,” he explained. “I was sad to leave, as a matter of fact. The potatoes I planted were about ready to pull up. But I managed to bring some seeds with me, so maybe we won’t go hungry at wherever it is we’re going.”

There was much speculation about where this might be. One man said we were going to a coal-mining camp at Vorkuta, north of the Arctic Circle. Then another mentioned the name of Sakhalin, and that silenced everyone, including myself.

“What’s Sakhalin?” asked Bingel.

“It’s a camp in the easternmost part of Russia,” I said.

“A death camp,” said someone else. “They sent a lot of SS there after Stalingrad. Sakhalin means ‘black’ in one of those sub-human languages they use out there. I met a man who claimed he’d been there. An Ivan prisoner.”

“No one really knows if it exists or not,” I added.

“Oh, it exists all right. Full of Nips, it is. The place is so far east, it’s not even attached to the fucking mainland. They don’t bother with a barbed-wire fence at Sakhalin. Why would they? There’s nowhere else to go.”