There were about 150 men gathered in the darkness under the invisible pine trees, which whispered their presence in an early-morning breeze. The monument itself was supposed to be a stylized tree crowned by a cross from which a shield was hanging. It probably meant something to someone who had a taste for unsightly religious monuments. To me it looked like a lamppost without a much-needed lamp. Or, perhaps, a stone stake for burning city architects. That would have been a worthwhile monument. Especially in Berlin.

I walked around this economy-sized obelisk, eavesdropping on a few conversations. Mostly they were to do with how many days each man had worked in the recent past. Or not worked, as seemed rather more common.

“I got one day last week,” said a man. “And two the week before. I need to work today, or my family won’t eat.”

Another started to excoriate Goerz but was quickly silenced by someone else.

“Blame the Nazis, not Goerz. But for him none of us would work. He’s risking as much as us. Maybe more.”

“If you ask me, he gets well paid for the risk.”

“It’s my first time,” I told the man standing next to me. “How do you get yourself picked?”

I offered him a cigarette, and he looked at me and my cigarettes strangely, as if suspecting that no one who really needed to work had money for such sensuous and expensive luxuries. He took it anyway and put it behind his ear.

“There’s no method in it,” he said. “I’ve been coming here for six months, and still it seems arbitrary. There are some days when he likes your face, and others when he doesn’t even meet your eye.”

“Maybe he’s just trying to spread the work around,” I said. “For the sake of fairness.”

“Fairness?” The man snorted his derision. “Fairness has absolutely nothing to do with it. One day he’ll take a hundred men. Another day he’ll take seventy-five. It’s a kind of fascism, I think. Goerz reminding us all of the power he wields.”

Shorter than me by a head, the man was red-haired and sharply featured, with a face like a heavily rusted hatchet. He wore a thick pea jacket and a worker’s cap, and around his neck was tied a bright green handkerchief that matched the color of the eyes behind his wire-framed glasses. Jutting out of his coat pocket was a book by Dostoevsky, and it was almost as if this young and studious-looking Jew had emerged, fully formed, from a space between the pages: neurotic, poor, undernourished, desperate. His name was Solomon Feigenbaum, which, to my mostly Aryan ears, was about as Jewish as a ghetto full of tailors.

“Anyway, if it’s your first time, you almost always get picked,” said Feigenbaum. “Goerz likes to give the new man a day, so that they get the taste.”

“That’s a relief.”