The track ended where the train had been standing, against an embankment of logs. On the far side of the rails, on the edge of the bubbling stream, there was a large three-tiered building. It must have been a mill, because a water wheel was turning and turning. Lipiczany could see the top third of it, the black, wet buckets rising out of and dipping below the shingled roof. This was the noise, the creak and the rumble, he had heard during the night. It had not been the slim trees.

It was dangerous to look any longer. The Blond Beast was everywhere. One group was standing between the train tracks and the building. Two sentries remained at attention on either side of the millhouse door. A Warrior walked down an exterior staircase, pulling on a pair of gloves. Nisel lay flat on his belly. The whole sky was full of dark, low clouds, like sacks about to burst. Why were the windows of the mill boarded up? What was it grinding?

Then, as if in response to these questions, the heavy doors opened inward and thirty Jews emerged, carrying bundles. There were men and women. They still had the stars on their chests. Though this was not even a half-carriage load of people, the doors were already shutting behind them. No others came out. The little crowd stepped over the tracks, toward where Nisel was hiding, then turned to their right, his left, and began to walk around the foot of the wooded bluff. Nisel ran diagonally across the top of the ridge, to where he thought he could head them off. At the sharp edge of the slope he looked down again. The Jews were just coming around, in their black coats and hats. Awaiting them were a small number of Death’s-Headers and an old, yellow, hand-starting bus.

The front of this vehicle was pointed toward Nisel’s cliff, or rather toward a kind of flat gully, a dry riverbed, a bit farther to his left. He could see its old-fashioned round headlights, one cracked, the other without a lens. The double-winged hood was lifted and a Warrior in uniform was lying across the bulging fender, at work on the engine inside. The yellow rooftop was battered, dented, as if it had been stoned. A layer of dust covered the windshields. At this distance, through the hundreds of trees, Nisel barely heard the mill’s grindstone, the mill wheel’s creak.

The Jews came to a halt near the rear of the bus. They were Baluters. Lipiczany recognized four or five of the crowd: Palfinger, a jeweler; one of the Fiebig sons; the Widow Tort who had also been the Widow Greenkraut; and, with her black hair in a bun, holding a small, white, neatly tied bundle, Madame Dickstein, a survivor of the Koscielny Place blaze. They all stood quietly, looking down. Then one of the Lords and Masters walked over to the Jews and said something to them. Right away the deportees put down their sacks and valises and began to take off their clothes. They took all their things off, in spite of the winter’s cold. The men and the women tied their shoes together by the laces. Then they stood up, approximately in a line.